Word: califano
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More confusion centered on Carter's plans for welfare reform. As a candidate, Carter flatly promised to improve the cumbersome system during his first year in office. Yet Joseph Califano, who is in line to become HEW Secretary, told correspondents that "it may be a while" before the changes could be achieved, and that they may depend upon the economy reviving enough to produce the taxes to finance the restructuring. Other developments...
...graduate of Holy Cross and Harvard Law, Califano grew "bored with practicing law and splitting stocks." He fired off a job application to the then general counsel for the Department of Defense, Cyrus Vance, in 1961 and was hired four days after being interviewed. Three years later he emerged as special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and a year after that held the same post under Johnson as assistant in charge of domestic programs...
...Califano helped to dream up such Johnsonian innovations as the Model Cities program and the Office of Economic Opportunity. He also ran interference for Johnson in the 1966 creation of the Department of Transportation, a mammoth reorganization achieved in only eight months. One colleague recalls him, not entirely kindly, as "an empire builder who had a kind of abstract concern for the disadvantaged...
...partner in Edward Bennett Williams' Washington law firm, Califano is married and the father of three. He plays tennis and religiously attends Washington Redskins football games. But most of his prodigious energy goes into his work. He will need all that energy when Jimmy Carter's promised Government reorganization gets around to his sprawling department, variously described as a "snake pit" and a "lovely pit of quicksand...
Typically, Califano sounds unintimidated. "We are looking at a variety of reorganization programs," says he. "There were a whole raft of programs in the '60s followed by eight years when there was no attempt to work with any degree of compassion. We'll take the best of those programs and discard the worst." Making those choices should keep Califano busy for quite some time...