Session: 123456789101112131415161718192021222324         Page 250251252253254255256257258259260261262263264265266267268269270271272273274275276277 of 592

I remember Andy speaking at a rally, “So we're going to boycott the stores, so you hold on to that dollar bill. You squeeze it until the eagle grins.” Typical Andy kind of thing. “You squeeze that dollar.”

The upshot was that the HEW thing, with everything else coming together, was the critical factor, and then there's a letter from HEW on the rehiring of the twelve, and the HEW staff comes to Charleston for a meeting with the twelve at our attorney's office, at our attorney's office.

They ask me to accompany them to the airport, to meet them at the airport as they come in, and they would privately inform me of the letter that they're sending to the hospital, in which they say that the rehiring of the twelve is a condition for continuing the funding of the HEW grant. They say that their boss is standing firm in Washington.

Meanwhile, we learn from a chapter in the book by a guy, Leon Panetta, a congressman in California now, replaced Ruby Martin as the head of the Office of Civil Rights. His press aide, Peter Gall, now on the staff of Business Week, he and I would talk about demands we were making and he was trying to fish with me for information and I was fishing from him. Panetta wrote a book after he left the administration about his break with Nixon on civil rights. There's a chapter on Charleston, which tells the story of the Charleston strike. Finch was the HEW secretary. But most importantly, it talks about a meeting in the office of [John] Ehrlichman. We are discussing this whole HEW thing, this crackdown. Ehrlichman says, “But the blacks are not where our votes are,” and that was the kibosh on the thing. Earlier it could have happened, but then it happened again.

Then when it happened, we were ready to celebrate. We sensed that it was going to end. It wasn't public yet, but we saw the direction it was coming to. I remember Moore, the attorney, black attorney, came to the hotel room and Andy, Elliot, Nick, Stoney, and I went in a car, or two cars, and Moore said, “I'm now going to show you the city.” You know, we'd never seen what was there. So he drove us around to the coast and then said, “I'm going to take you to a great restaurant. We're going to really have a great time.” We had a wonderful evening.

We come back to the hotel, it must be like eleven o'clock. There's a message under the door from Bill Saunders, “It's off.” What had happened is that Strom Thurmond and Mendel Rivers, together with the Charleston press, had put the heat on and said that they're not going to let this thing go through. The state GOP head, a guy named Harris, had threatened mayhem against McNair if the twelve were