It is not surprising, perhaps, that the development of Phase II should have been accelerated by Lyndon Johnson, a Southern populist who was emotionally committed to bringing blacks and other minorities more fully into American life. The real surprise is that the program moved forward steadily under Richard Nixon. Graham suggests that, having consolidated his right wing and captured the rank-and file of organized labor, Roman Catholics, and evangelical Protestants, Nixon sought opportunistically to add blacks to the “emerging Republican majority” (in Kevin Phillips’s phrase).
But whatever his motive, it is a fact that under Nixon, for example, the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare put into effect an aggressive program requiring universities to set targets for preferential hiring on grounds of race (and sex) in order to remain eligible for federal contracts, while Nixon’s Secretary of Labor, George Shultz, in Graham’s words “a systematic manager of . . . organizational lines and boxes,” went out of his way to appoint a black former professional football player, Arthur A. Fletcher, as the point man for equal-opportunity contract compliance. Fletcher kicked off his new career in 1969 by revising the “Philadelphia Plan” (created two years earlier to force integration in the recalcitrant contruction-trade unions) into a scheme requiring fixed and specific “goals or standards for percentages of minority employees,” or, in other words, proportional representation by race of the kind explicitly banned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By early 1970, Graham reports, the Labor Department had issued rules extending the supposedly limited Philadelphia Plan model “to basically all of the activities and facilities of all federal contractors—which by Arthur Fletcher’s estimate covered from one-third to one-half of all U.S. workers.”
