Victor De Grazia Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

A: Oh no, I think Fogel was a very, very smart guy. I'll never forget
. . . to me, the most chilling and most pressure cooking things that
occur is when there is a riot or a disturbance in a prison. And that
happened a couple of times, and I'll never forget that first time. We
were down at the mansion, we stayed all night at the mansion, and trying
to work it out . . . one of those wonderful bureaucratic stories, right?
We're sitting there, the top people in the administration. We decide,
this is what should be done. The governor gets on the phone, talks to
the person in charge of the prison and says, "1 want you to go. I want
you to talk to them. I want you to say this to them. Okay, you got it
straight? Let's go over it. Do it. Okay." And then we wait. You can
imagine the incredible pressure. Maybe they killed them. We don't hear
anything, we don't hear anybody.
Q: They're hostages taken, that kind of thing?
A: Yes. We don't hear anything. Finally we call again, The guy is on
the phone. "Well, we've been discussing whether or not we should do
that." (laughter) Right? I mean here's the governor telling . . .
(laughs) but so, Dan in his most sweet and convincing tones told him to
"Get the hell out there and do it." He did it and it worked. Now, Fogel
was in the meeting with us and he said, "The most important thing to do
fight now as the prisoners go back to their cells is to take that small
group that were the ones who were the ringleaders and parade them through
all the cell blocks so that all the prisoners can see they haven' t been
beaten." Now that's the kind of thing only somebody who understands what
guards are like, and what prisoners are like, can do. You know, that was
a brilliant kind of thing, So, Fogel to me was not a mistake.
Q: Who do you think turned out to be the very best appointments? Who
jumps into your mind as really good?
A: Langhorne Bond was . . .
Q: Why was he . . .
A: Well, he was an extremely good recruiter of talent. After all, he
recruited [John D.] Kramer and you know (laughs) Thompson kept Kramer on
as his secretary of Transportation. Be was a blend of very high grade
ideas and ideology about transportation, but on the other hand understood
that there are politics involved in a road program and a transit program
and would listen. He didn't always give in but he wouldn't automatically
oppose you. Some people just automatically oppose you. If you said
political then they said no.
It's strange. When we were down in Florida talking about putting the
cabinet together, there was a guy who had been the top assistant to the
Democratic governor of Ohio, Gilligan, and he had been helpful to us in
our campaign in advice, and we asked him to come down to Florida and meet
with us and talk to us. So he did. And one of the things he said was,
"You'll be surprised. You'll take your toughest political organizer and
you'll put him in as, say, assistant director of Conservation, and he's
the guy who would do anything to get a vote. So you put him there
because he's reliable and trustworthy. Then he makes a speech somewhere
to a group of conservationists. All of a sudden he's got a constituency.