It is the hour of power breakfasts, and with his aluminum cane in hand the old man moves in small, careful steps toward his favorite spot under the large windows that fill the hotel dining room with morning light.
All the presidential commissions on which he served are history. Now Arthur Sherwood Flemming, himself a window on the last half-century of political history, presides over a table for two.
Long after his colleagues have gone back to their states, to their retirement homes or to their graves, Flemming, 88, still moves with measured pace through the federal city, testifying at congressional hearings on age discrimination or lending his gray-haired grace to White House functions on health care.
He represents an enduring culture of Washington, a member of a vast group of people whose experience and wisdom form a class that serves up and ratifies policy at the president’s pleasure.
Flemming has been a member of every presidential administration, save the current one, since Franklin Roosevelt. He served on the National Security Council and as secretary of health, education and welfare under Dwight Eisenhower. He headed the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under four presidents.
Flemming entered government service when people believed it was a force for good and not just a machine to waste tax dollars. He took it to heart when Roosevelt proposed 10 programs under the general notion of social security, and he listened as the president told the people that they needed to pool their resources to save each other from the hazards and vicissitudes of life.
In conventional politics, he is among the rarest of birds, a liberal Republican. More than that, he is known as an optimist in a city of cynics. Even more than that, the man has attitude.
“Actually, the success of our society depends on our ability to get the public and private sectors to work together,” he says, his brown eyes searching the face of his listener to check comprehension. “The far Right always tends to say the public sector is the devil and we must cut it down to size. They put all their eggs in the private basket.” The government is too important to him to accept that. No wonder. Flemming began his government career as a member of the Civil Service Commission and found his stride quickly during World War II. His public service was formed at the same time the modern government was being created. Government was the answer, not the problem, and there was a vibrance, a mission.
Years later, his political nemesis, Ronald Reagan, would speak of his vision of a shining city on a hill, but Flemming-whom Reagan fired as chairman of the Civil Rights Commission-had been laboring for decades to build a better society.
Flemming is in a sense the best that Washington offers, a high form of government, touched but not diverted by partisan politics. When he was named to Eisenhower’s Cabinet in 1958, a newspaper profile described him as “well-known in Washington as a bright young man who never grew dim.”
Same old arguments
Even now, as Vice President Al Gore tries to implement his own government reorganization plan, Flemming says that Gore must deal with the same fights and arguments he encountered in 1939.
“The issues I’ve been dealing with over the years are how the national community should assume responsibility,” Flemming said. The goals, he said, were not short-term but aimed at building a better society. “When all this started, Roosevelt was not proposing organizations just for the Depression.”
Ideological wrangling is part of the business of Washington, and much of it is conducted in rooms such as this, where sunlight warms the linen napkins and waiters leave tall silver coffee pots on the table.
It is Flemming’s milieu, and for it he is suited up in the old-school uniform of Washington: plain blue suit, white cotton shirt and quiet blue tie.
Flemming came to Washington in 1927 after graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University. He worked as a reporter and editor for five years, then taught public affairs at American University. He received a law degree from George Washington University.
Over the next several decades, he would serve as president of three colleges: the University of Oregon, his Ohio alma mater and Macalester College in St. Paul.
His early government expertise, however, was dealing with personnel issues, and once the U.S. entered World War II, he was assigned to trouble-shoot negotiations between labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and George Meany and their management counterparts. He also represented the U.S. government as an employer on the War Manpower Commission.
The cranberry scare
After the war, President Harry Truman appointed him to the government reorganization commission headed by former President Herbert Hoover, and he advised the Atomic Energy Commission and the first United Nations secretary general on personnel.
When Eisenhower was elected president, Flemming joined Nelson Rockefeller and the president’s brother Milton on a three-member commission on government organization that often met with the president over breakfast. He was a member of the National Security Council and director of the Office of Defense Mobilization.
During Ike’s second term, he appointed Flemming to head the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the key domestic agency of the government. In that post he opposed the idea of students taking loyalty oaths to qualify for federal aid.
But his most public stand came when he singlehandedly caused the great cranberry scare just before Thanksgiving 1959 by warning that cranberry bogs had been exposed to a pesticide that caused cancer in laboratory animals.
Not many political appointees make the transition between administrations, but Flemming was asked again to serve under the Democrats. He recalls walking out of the Oval Office as President John Kennedy continued to talk about his frustration in not getting a Medicare bill through the Senate. That was in 1963, a week before the president’s fatal trip to Dallas. Later, President Lyndon Johnson would also seek his counsel on social issues.
But as a Republican, Flemming supported Nixon in 1968, and the new president asked him to stay as his chairman of the White House Commission on Aging.
Later, when Flemming was named to head the Civil Rights Commission, an appointment he would have under four presidents, he took on the job with ardor, criticizing even those who appointed him when they seemed uninterested.
Court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation was only a partial solution to a wider problem, he believed, but Flemming supported it then and still sees it as helpful. He also talks of affirmative action as creating a positive attitude among employers.
But within a year of Reagan’s taking office, Flemming was criticizing the administration for its retreat on affirmative-action programs, and Reagan quite publicly fired Flemming. Harold Washington, then a member of the Illinois congressional delegation and later Chicago’s mayor, said Flemming “was dismissed for doing his job too well.” He returned to government under President Bush as a member of a commission on supplemental security income.
“On civil rights we definitely moved backward during the Reagan and Bush years,” Flemming says now. “On desegregation and civil rights, you either move forward or you end up moving backward-there’s no standing still.”
He is still a member of the private Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, funded by the Ford Foundation. “I’m disappointed we’ve had a setback in civil rights, but it’s temporary and it will go forward.
Lifelong activist
“I think I’m going to see it before the end of my share of years,” he said over oatmeal. “Maybe I’m too optimistic. Some people have said I’m unrealistic, but over my lifetime I’ve seen a great deal of forward progress.”
His broad shoulders have narrowed and his 6-foot frame is stooped, but there is no frailty in his attitude: Flemming talks about controlling violence and other social issues of the day with all the enthusiasm of an idealistic White House aide, some of whom today are only a quarter his age.
Government work is public service, Flemming believes, and careers should be aimed moving the nation forward or at least protecting the public from harm, whether it comes from carcinogens or 9 mm MAC-10 semi-automatic pistols.
All his life, Flemming has been an activist, whether pushing for civil rights in Washington, student rights in Oregon or fair housing in Minnesota.
That optimism is sustained by a faith learned as a child, and every time he was appointed to a new post, newspaper articles noted that he does not and never did drink, smoke or play cards. He was the only son of Harry Hardwicke Flemming, a Kingston, N.Y., attorney and judge. Like his father, Flemming became a lay leader in the Methodist church. He married and had five children, one of whom he has outlived.
But the son also had a contrary streak and, as chairman of the National Council of Churches in 1965, he was one of the drafters of the council’s message to stop the bombing of North Vietnam. For decades he has been a member of Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, where Hillary Rodham Clinton became a member and the First Family often attends Sunday services together.
“At the center of the Judeo-Christian tradition are the words, `Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ ” he says without a trace of embarrassment.
“There’s a lot who really believe in that commandment. Unless that governs the foundation of life, they will not have any security. And to say as you love yourself, well, that sets a pretty high standard. My feeling is we’re here to help one another through the journey of life.”
No time for memoirs
He never considered retiring more than 20 years ago, and dismissed the retirement age as a stupid and arbitrary deadline. He fought mandatory retirement ages in committee hearings on Capitol Hill and, at the moment, works as an advocate for a coalition of interest groups calling itself Save Our Security, or SOS.
Eager to deal with major topics, he has taken President Clinton’s health-care proposal as a logical extension of Social Security programs that he supported early in his career.
“Let’s stop talking about it. We have to learn by doing instead of talking. We should put a plan on the books and learn which part is effective and which is not.”
Flemming rejects the idea of sitting at home to work on memoirs, and he’s not much impressed by insider talk.
“When you get to be 88, you don’t worry too much about those things. Right now I volunteer as an advocate for the causes that I worked on in the government. I do a good deal of testifying on the Hill and speaking.”
Indeed, he has testified at least three times this year before congressional committees or subcommittees and traveled around the country giving speeches and helped frame the health-care debate.
He was at the White House for the signing of the Older Americans Act proclamation and then again with a group promoting the president’s health-care legislation.
But Flemming doesn’t intend to be sitting around reading the newspaper until health care finally passes. “I don’t want to retire . . . . When I wake up in the morning, I never want to reminisce for more than five minutes a day. I’m interested in current issues and things that move the nation forward.”
Pushing back his breakfast plate, Flemming is ready to get back to his office and begin more letter writing and calling. He’s ready to help, he says, because “I see the opportunity for the government to do so much good.”
