Transcription of Harold Pachios for the show Political Perspectives #276
Lisa Belisle: My next guest is an individual who is very well known on the Maine scene. This is Harold Pachios, who is one of the founding partners of the law firm Preti Flaherty. Prior to practicing law, he had a career in government and politics. He served as an associate White House press secretary under President Johnson, was nominated by President Clinton to the U.S. Commission on Public Diplomacy, and was appointed by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the State Department’s Special Advisory Group on the Arab and Muslim world. He now lives in Cape Elizabeth. Thanks for coming in today.
Harold Pachios: My pleasure.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been around a long time doing this work.
Harold Pachios: I’m old. I’ve been around a long time. Yeah. I’ve done a lot of different things simply because I’ve survived.
Lisa Belisle: Well, it’s interesting to think back to President Johnson, press secretary under President Johnson. How did you even get that gig?
Harold Pachios: Oh, that was a different era. I was in the United States Navy after college. I got a commission when I graduated and went aboard a ship two weeks later in the North Atlantic. The campaign of 1960, on election day 1960, I came off watch, and I went to the radio room, we’re out on the North Atlantic, and I began pulling sheets off the AP and UPI tickers on reports from various states. I kind of got hooked. The next morning became apparent that Kennedy had won, and I thought to myself, “I want to go try to be part of what Kennedy’s doing.” I got very excited about John F. Kennedy.
I applied to Georgetown Law School, and you had a choice between day school and night school. I took the night school. I showed up there in mid August of 1961. Kennedy had been president for five months. I got a job, I didn’t know a soul in Washington. Got a job in a restaurant as a waiter. After ten days in school, one night at a contracts class the guy sitting behind me in a striped suit, tie, and I’m in my coffee-stained khakis said to me at the break, “Where did you go to school?” I said, “I went to Princeton.” He said, “So did I. What do you do?” I said, “I’m a waiter.” He frowned at that, and it really upset me, and I said, “What do you do?” He said, “I work for the president’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver. We’re starting a new agency called the Peace Corps. Do you want a job?”
This is no kidding now. A day later, I went there before school. A young man came out to interview me from this Peace Corps study group. His name was Bill Moyers. Nobody had ever heard of him. I had never heard of him. Moyers said, “Dick Nelson told us you want a job. We’ll give you a job.” Just like that. I’m just telling you, that’s the way it happened. I became associated with Bill Moyers at a very young age, and he was very young. He was in his twenties. I worked with him at the Peace Corps headquarters. All of the most interesting people that came to Washington because of John Kennedy worked in the Peace Corps.
It was a very small staff. We got to know each other well. Moyers was one of them. Moyers was a good friend of the vice president’s, Lyndon Johnson. He was from Texas. When Kennedy was assassinated, Moyers was in Texas, came back on the airplane with Johnson, and didn’t leave his side really for the next two to three years. In the campaign of ’64, Moyers got me to come on the staff and work in a campaign, and then I went full-time in the White House following the campaign when Moyers became the press secretary, and I became his deputy. That’s it in a nutshell.
Lisa Belisle: If this was a different time that you’re describing and the way that one gets involved in politics was slightly different back then, do you think that that has translated into what’s going on in the modern day, do you think that that’s translated into a different way of approaching politics?
Harold Pachios: How I got involved is instructive in how other young people can get involved. I always tell young people, college students, who say, “Gee, I’d like to get a job in a congressman’s office or in politics.” I always tell them, “Proximity is the key to everything in this world.” Proximity. Whatever it is, think proximity. If you’re interested and there’s a campaign coming up, go volunteer in a campaign. When you volunteer, make sure that you become indispensable because if you’re an indispensable volunteer, you’re shortly going to get a paid job. They don’t want to lose you. That’s the key to make yourself indispensable while you’re a volunteer, and then they give you a job and then it’s proximity, and candidates know you, people running for Congress, Senate, they know who you are.
The best thing is to be the car driver, to drive them around. Nixon had two top assistants, one of them went to jail, Ehrlichman, the other one was Haldeman, they have very bad reputations, but they ran the Nixon White House, and how did they start? Driving Richard Nixon around when he ran for Senate in the 1950s. They were his car drivers. I can tell you about a lot of car drivers in campaigns who became very important aides to top politicians. Proximity, that’s what I would say.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that this is one of the issues that we have these days is that we’re very connected but we’re not as connected where we can be connected socially on social networks but not as much face to face?
Harold Pachios: Absolutely, but also, another difference is, the amount of media, the number of sources of information. When we had just three television networks, just three, they had to play to wide audiences, broad audiences, so they couldn’t be very partisan. They had to be as objective as possible because in order to make money, if you were one of the three, you had to have very broad audiences. Now, MSNBC, FOX, they don’t need a very broad audience. They don’t need a lot of people to make a lot of money. They cater to just a sliver of the electorate, and that’s enough for them to make a lot of money. Just like talk radio. These people on talk radio make a fortune because they get a narrow group of people fired up. Those people can’t wait to listen to that talk radio show, whether it’s Limbaugh, whoever, and they get rich doing it.
No one has to talk to the middle anymore. That’s why rank-choice voting is so important because it requires politicians to think about the broad middle rather than just a sliver of the left or the right. That’s the biggest difference, and we can tune in now to… You can listen to whatever we want in terms of what we agree with. I have a mother-in-law that listens only to FOX. There are many people that listen only to FOX. Many. Well, you couldn’t do that in the old days. You had to listen to ABC, NBC, or CBS. Totally different.
I don’t know where we’re going now. We have this… Not for the first time in American history, we have this very strong populist movement, which Donald Trump has tapped into. It’s anti-immigrant, it’s give me back the old job I had, technology has now made me obsolete. We’ve that before. We’ve had it in the Industrial Revolution. This is not anything new. When society is disrupted as we have been by globalization… It’s here to stay, but it’s disruptive, and when people are disrupted, they look for any port in a storm, and somebody promising them the old days is going to be somebody they follow. Some dangerous politicians have done that and been successful for a time.
Lisa Belisle: Didn’t Hitler do that?
Harold Pachios: Hitler did it. It began as a populist movement. The Nazi party began as a populist movement. After World War I, Germany had been defeated. The German economy was in tatters. Twelve years later, there was a global depression. People did follow that and people elected… You know, the Nazi party was elected. It didn’t just take over, it wasn’t a coup. Millions of Germans voted for the Nazi party because they thought it was a solution to their problems. They later regretted it. I’m reminded, I was reading a book about World War II, I read a lot of World War II books, and when the U.S. Army was going into Munich in April, the end of April 1945, Munich was falling to the Allies, and there was a big white sign in the downtown side of a bridge that the U.S. Army went across, and the sign said, “I’m ashamed to be a German.”
Since that time, the Germans collectively have been very introspective. Why did we do this? Why did we as a country elect Adolf Hitler and put the Nazis in power? We don’t have anybody being introspective right now. We have a lot of columnists that are warning us, but we don’t really have a lot of individuals being introspective about what’s going on in this country.
Lisa Belisle: Is it also problematic that we don’t have a lot of time for reflection where the news is so immediate and it’s being reported in such an immediate way that there’s no greater contextual analysis?
Harold Pachios: You are correct. That is the biggest problem. No context. Because there’s no context, people go on the Internet and get untruths. Everybody is producing information now. I can sit in my house tonight and produce information and send it to a thousand people if I had their email addresses. A thousand people or more. I produce the information. Doesn’t have to be truthful, doesn’t have to be factual, but I can produce it knowing that my audience, the thousand people I’m sending it to, they would love to believe what I’m saying and they accept it, and you are correct. They give it no context. Most people aren’t interested in history. We devalue history now. We have people saying, “Why should I study history in college? What good will that do me? I want to go in the insurance business. What good will history be to me?” History allows us to put things, as you just said, in context.
Lisa Belisle: I read two books while I was on vacation. One was about the sinking of the Lusitania and the other one was about Pat Tillman, who was the NFL player who was killed….
Harold Pachios: In Afghanistan.
Lisa Belisle: In Afghanistan, and he was a victim of friendly fire. Both of them were so very interesting because it really spoke to how information comes out, sort of the timeline, and also who interprets it and why.
Harold Pachios: I’m glad you raised that point because I think that is critical for everybody to think about. You read those books, and it helps you with discernment. There’s very little discernment among the American public today. One of the problems and I’m going to get in trouble for saying this but I don’t care, what are they going to do to me, one of the problems is not enough education. We need to really push to educate people beyond high school. If you look at polls now of who people support and why, there’s huge divisions. It has nothing to do with who the candidates are, it’s what they’re selling, it’s what they’re promoting. There are huge divisions based on level of education. What does that tell us? Why should education be such a distinguisher among people as to how they vote? Why should education be the line, but it is, look at the polls. There was one in the Portland newspapers a couple of days ago showing, you know… the views of those with only a high school education and the views of those who have been educated beyond high school. Now in a populist movement like we have now, what people say in response to me is, “You’re an elitist. You’re an elitist, and that’s wrong, and we have to bring you down.” It’s too late to bring me down. I’ve gone along too long.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been with Preti Flaherty since the beginning.
Harold Pachios: Kind of the beginning. I’ve been with Preti Flaherty since that firm began. I was with another firm briefly for a while called Berman, Berman, Wernick, and Flaherty. That’s where the Flaherty came from. I came to practice in Portland in 1969. I was born in 1936, so that’s a long time ago. I’m 80 years old now, and I’ve been practicing law let’s say 69… almost 50 years. A couple years short of 50 years at Preti Flaherty.
Lisa Belisle: What keeps you doing this? What keeps you showing up every day and being part of this?
Harold Pachios: I have other things to do, but the things I do relate to my profession in law and relate to making things happen, solving problems, and I like to read, but I wouldn’t want to be home all day reading. I just don’t want to do that. I like to do things. I see things all the time that, I’m a bit of a gadfly, that irritate me, and I try to do something about it. Most often I fail. Around town in Portland, if I see graffiti on buildings, I want to do something about it. I want to go talk to somebody about it. I want to call the city manager or whatever. It’s just my nature.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that that’s unusual in this day and age?
Harold Pachios: I don’t know. It depends on the person. Look at George Mitchell. George Mitchell is three years older than I am, and he is the chairman of his law firm, which is the largest law firm in the world. He travels all over the globe. He is a problem solver, people call him up. He is the best, biggest business getter in the largest law firm in the world. He is a very busy guy. He spends an enormous time in Maine because of his Mitchell Institute. He reads all the time. He writes all the time. He writes books, he writes speeches. He’s a dynamo. I’m not saying that just because he’s my friend. He’s a dynamo. He’s 83. You do it I think as long as you can, and then when either God thinks it’s time for you to check out and end it or you get impaired in some way and you can’t do it anymore, but why not do it while you can?
Lisa Belisle: My father is still practicing medicine, he’s 70.
Harold Pachios: He is?
Lisa Belisle: He’s still got ten good years ahead of him according to your schedule, I guess.
Harold Pachios: Where does your father live?
Lisa Belisle: He lives in Yarmouth and he practices…. Actually, my mom’s still teaching, she’s 70. They both do it because they love what they do.
Harold Pachios: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: They both, you know, right in this Portland Area.
Harold Pachios: It keeps them going and vital. They’re not just sitting around. They’re doing something that they like. They’re making a contribution and they’re helping themselves.
Lisa Belisle: Is that why you keep doing this?
Harold Pachios: I keep doing it because I’m interested. I don’t say, “Okay, I’m going to keep doing all this because it keeps me healthy or alert. It keeps away dementia or whatever.” I do it because I see things that I think are wrong, I’m not always right, and I want to correct them. When I worked for Sargent Shriver, who was President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, who is incidentally the most incredible man I’ve ever met in all my years, Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law. The Kennedys didn’t think he was the most incredible guy, but many others who worked with him did. He invented the Peace Corps actually. Every detail of it. He invented it. Shriver was always fond of the quote by Edward Everett Horton, “I’m only one, but I’m still one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something.” I think that’s right. That isn’t all for good either. I am not saying that I’m altruistic. I’m saying that I like to make things happen. I’ll confess, at my age, it’s harder to make it happen.
Lisa Belisle: I wonder if one of the things that you just said is more wise than you realize and that’s, “I’m going to say this, it may not make a popular person, people may disagree with me, but I’m going to say it anyway.” I wonder if one of the things that is happening is that in this era of political correctness, people feel like they can’t say anything for fear of being criticized or ostracized, and so they just don’t speak.
Harold Pachios: Political correctness is a very interesting term. I even myself have over the years frowned on “political correctness”, but what is political correctness? Being nice to people? Is it being civil? Is that political correctness? Is, if you think another politician or somebody running for office is a jerk, if you fail to call them a jerk, and say, “Well, they’re all right,” you know, try to be civil, is that being politically correct? I think people that’s being politically correct. What they like about Donald Trump, a lot of people tell me what they like about Donald Trump, and you’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it, is, “He tells it like it is,” so that if he says that Jeb Bush is weak and a fool, if he says that Hillary is a crook, if he gives some horrible, other insult to somebody, he insults people every day, people love it. Some people love it. Some people. I better be careful, some people love it, and they saw, “Ah, look at that. He’s candid. He’s telling it the way it is. He’s not politically correct.” People would say that. In my judgment, and I hope they’re listening, are fools to think that, are fools.
Lisa Belisle: I think that I meant… well, I know this, not just I think that I meant this. I meant the situation where people…. I agree, we should be nice to people. I agree that we should understand where people are coming from, and that we don’t have to go out of our way to say things that are insulting.
Harold Pachios: Right.
Lisa Belisle: I think that what I’m talking about is college campuses where there’s evidence of micro-aggressions and nobody feels like they can say anything anymore.
Harold Pachios: I think it’s ridiculous.
Lisa Belisle: That’s what I mean by political correct, extreme political.
Harold Pachios: Okay, that’s what you’re talking about. Microaggressions. You know, at Yale, they’ve had Calhoun College for 100 years. Students protested because Calhoun was a slaveholder. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence south of Maryland was a slaveholder. Every one of them. Jefferson was a slaveholder. Should we tear down the Jefferson memorial? Is that offending people? I’m the son of Greek immigrants, and there are a lot of offensive things said about Greek immigrants. So? It’s over. So what? I’m not offended. I can’t go around being offended by everything. These people on college campuses, if they’re going to be so easily offended, are going to have a very tough time in life.
Lisa Belisle: I would have to agree with you there. I’m hoping that people can… we can get a little beyond that so that we can be nice to people and we can understand where everybody’s coming from, but we can still have an open dialogue so that we can move forward.
Harold Pachios: What do we do about it? I guess maybe it’s a fad, I don’t know.
Lisa Belisle: Well, we’ll see.
Harold Pachios: Yeah, we’ll see.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been very gracious to spend time with us today and I know you’re a busy person so we’re going to take this time that we spent with you and wrap it up. Is there anything, one thing, that you hope to see as you continue your days on this planet?
Harold Pachios: Most of what I think about when I drive around and think about when I’m looking forward to something in the future, is Portland, Maine, and what it’s becoming and what it can become. To me, it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to me is to live in this city through a period of enormous change. I have lived here in the bad days, in the down days, and now I’ve lived long enough to see this renaissance of Portland, Maine, and its potential is so much more. That’s what really excites me.
Lisa Belisle: I have been speaking with Harold Pachios who is one of the founding partners of the law firm Preti Flaherty and has a long and distinguished career prior to that in the political world. I really appreciate your taking the time to come in and offer these perspectives and to have this conversation with me today.
Harold Pachios: Thank you for having me.