Affirmative Action: Nixon’s Brainchild

Affirmative Action: Nixon’s Brainchild

More from Webster Tarpley Barrack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography

There are a lot of misconceptions about the origin of affirmative action policies that require employers to hire and schools and universities to enroll a minimum percentage of women and minorities. Fox News would have you believe these policies came out of a vast left liberal conspiracy. The truth is that affirmative action and racial quotas and set asides were first rolled out by a Republican president – Richard M. Nixon – and his Secretary of Labor George Shultz – in collaboration with McGeorge Bundy and the Ford Foundation. This is another fascinating aspect of the hidden history of foundations that Webster Tarpley explores in his unauthorized biography of Obama.

It’s obvious from their own public commentary that the motives of these three men were anything but altruistic. Their intent in launching these programs was not to promote the interests of women and minorities – but to splinter and suppress a progressive voice in the Democratic Party that was becoming a threat to business interests. In meetings with Republican Congressional leaders, Nixon himself stressed the importance of exploiting the controversial Philadelphia Plan (a hiring mandate incorporating quotas in the largely white construction industry) to “drive a wedge between civil rights groups and organized labor.”

Who Was McGeorge Bundy?

Tarpley’s review of Bundy’s public life reveals his role in all this was pivotal. An army intelligence officer during World War II, he became National Security Advisor to both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and was largely responsible for the cynical “strategic hamlets” policy in Vietnam. Bundy left government in 1966 to head of the Ford Foundation (until 1979), where he totally revamped the foundation’s agenda to focus on the oppression of African Americans and other minorities. This was accompanied by a simultaneous shift away from funding broad economic needs, such as housing, education, mass transit and health care – to more divisive political and cultural programs that specifically targeted white blue collar racism as the cause of minority disadvantage.

The Old Divide and Conquer Strategy

At the time Bundy, as a member of both Skull and Bones and the Foreign Relations Council, clearly identified with the Wall Street elite. It was his view that the efforts of Martin Luther King (who opposed racial quotas because of their inherent divisiveness) and the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee to merge the struggle of the black community with the labor and antiwar movement posed a serious threat to the business interests he represented. His strategic response was to target white blue collar workers as the main barrier to black self determination – and to pour millions of dollars of Ford Foundation funding into the work of race baiting black separatists and nationalists, affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality. Tarpley specifically links the 1968 inner city riots (from which many African American communities have never fully recovered) to the propaganda activities of Ford funded community programs. Bundy was clearly guilty of incitement to riot, and Tarpley laments he was never prosecuted for it.

Another of Bundy’s strategic moves was to break up the traditional black-Jewish coalition in New York City. He did so by funding minority community coalitions to churn out rabidly anti-Semitic propaganda directed at leftist Jewish teachers and administrators, many of whom had radical New Deal backgrounds. The demand posed by these community groups (backed by $1.4 million from the Ford Foundation) for the right to arbitrarily hire and fire teachers was a blatant violation of their union contract and an important precipitant of the disastrous 1968 teacher’s strike.

Following Nixon’s election in 1968, he, Nixon and Shultz collaborated in pushing affirmative action legislation through Congress, which included a revival of the Philadelphia Plan (first trialed and abandoned under Lyndon Johnson) and the creation of the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission.

To be continued (with a fast forward to the foundations Obama worked for in Chicago)