<Begin Segment 12>

TI: And your title was Assistant to the President for Policy Development. Tell me what that meant in terms of the scope of your work.

JS: Anything you wanted. [Laughs]

TI: Yeah. To me, when I read that, it's not very descriptive.

JS: Actually, that title, the Assistant to the President was, as I said, just rank. And "for Policy Development" was actually created for Marty Anderson, Martin Anderson, who was at the Hoover Institution, then a PhD professor at Stanford, who was the first Assistant to the President for Policy Development in the Reagan Administration, it was a new title. And Marty developed that title because he didn't want to be hampered by artificial barriers. So what's policy development? Well, it's anything you want. So you could put your fingers in any pot that you wanted to. Plus the fact that there were a whole lot of pots that you might not want to put your finger into, but you had to because you were the guy who was charged with policy development.

TI: That's interesting. So the previous one, was he a little bit more of an academic then?

JS: Marty?

TI: Yeah, Marty.

JS: Yeah, he was an academic politician.

TI: You seem very different than that. In your background, your upbringing, I wouldn't think of you as an academic sort of...

JS: Oh, no, I'm not an academic.

TI: You're very much more pragmatic, get things done type of person, is how I...

JS: You give me a job, I go and do it. I mean, that's sort of what got me where I was.

TI: This is fascinating. This is taking longer than I thought, because I'm just so curious about all this. This is really, really interesting

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.