Word: goldwin
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Window Dressing. On trips round the country, Goldwin collects a variety of scholarly papers on domestic issues and passes many of them along to the council for consideration. A man of remarkable energy, Goldwin also serves Ford as a talent scout and sometime speech writer, helps the Office of Public Liaison set up its "field conferences" with the public, and acts as one White House link with Jewish organizations. He also represents the interests of the arts and humanities to the President; he recently arranged a White House meeting for spokesmen for higher education who were eager to make their...
...Goldwin goes about this is to arrange small White House lunches and dinners during which Ford and his top aides can drink in the views of eminent intellectuals (TIME, Dec. 23). At the third such session last Saturday, Ford conferred informally with four people of diverse interests: Thomas Sowell, a black U.C.L.A. economist, author of a forthcoming book on race and economics; Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor of history at the City University of New York; Edward Banfield, a specialist in urban affairs who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and wrote the iconoclastic The Unheavenly City; and Herbert Storing, a University...
...Goldwin screens his potential guest stars as carefully as a pro football scout checks out college gridiron talent. Be fore each meeting he painstakingly explores possible avenues of conversation with each participant, managing in the end to ensure that thinkers with various viewpoints will speak to the same issue. Goldwin puts a premium on spontaneity but sometimes fears that the academics will waste the President's time with trivia. In preparation for the first dinner-seminar he held, he spent at least five hours with each guest and bluntly informed them that he considered some of their ideas peripheral...
...meetings and guest list are usually not advertised, the better to promote frank exchanges. But Goldwin has more practical objectives than simply fostering sprightly or even inspiring talk. He sifts each discussion, hoping to find grist for policy proposals. The morning after the December dinner, he sent some of the guests' observations on crime to the Domestic Council. Two weeks later Ford agreed to use several of the ideas in a forthcoming message to Congress. "A lot of those ideas were generated by Goldwin's planning," says James Cavanaugh, deputy director of the Domestic Council's staff...
...Goldwin abhors the term intellectual-in-residence and with good reason: the scholars burdened in the past by that cumbersome mantle had frequently found themselves useless window dressing for the White House staff. Lyndon Johnson, for example, had little respect for his resident sage Eric Goldman, commenting on several occasions that the Princeton historian was only around "to please the intellectuals...