Word: mardian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Political Persecution. Mardian's attitudes are deeply rooted. His father, Samuel, because of his ardent Armenian nationalism, spent four years in a Turkish dungeon. Once he was granted political asylum in the U.S., Samuel started a construction business in Pasadena. Three sons, Aaron, Dan and Samuel, eventually moved to Phoenix, where the construction firm prospered, and they became close friends and supporters of Barry Goldwater...
Young Robert Mardian stayed in California, studied political science at Santa Barbara State College, joined the Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor, and spent two years as an ensign on a sub chaser in the Aleutians. In 1949, he graduated from the University of Southern California Law School, where he compiled the highest first-year grade average in the school's history to that time...
While becoming a respected corporation lawyer in Pasadena, Mardian entered local politics as a member of the city's school board. In 1960, he met his chief political benefactor, Richard Kleindienst, who engineered Mardian's appointment as Barry Goldwater's Western field representative in 1964 and his similar job for Richard Nixon in 1968. Finally, Kleindienst, with Attorney General John Mitchell, got Mardian appointed general counsel under Secretary Robert Finch in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
Payoff Strategy. At HEW, Mardian earned a reputation as the conservative heavy in a cast of liberal attorneys intent on enforcing the spirit as well as the letter of federal civil rights laws. One former HEW lawyer says that Mardian "consistently tried to scuttle school desegregation guidelines." Defending his go-slow position, Mardian candidly explained, "Look, you might as well recognize that you're in politics." He told his colleagues: "There are two kinds of people in the world-winners and losers. I knew a loser once and he was a queer." ("That's a joke," he added...
...Mardian helped draft the Nixon Administration's famous 1969 memo that effectively relaxed desegregation dead lines in Southern states. He is convinced that his Southern strategy avoided violence and white flight to the suburbs. The payoff, he argues, is that 92% of the region's black pupils are in desegregated school systems, compared with 6% two years before...