John R. Price, Special Assistant to President Nixon for urban affairs from 1969 to 1972, presented a lecture at Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute on President Nixon’s leadership on the domestic front.
Titled Richard Nixon: The Last of the Moderate Republican Presidents, Price covered the 37th President’s far reaching initiatives including the desegregation of the nation’s schools, the War on Cancer, and his early efforts at welfare reform.
In the Nixon White House, Mr. Price worked for then Urban Affairs Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan on welfare reform, health care policy, and urban development issues. He has held senior positions with Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., Chemical Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, JP Morgan Chase & Co., and recently retired as President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh. A Rhodes Scholar, he was founding chairman of Americans for Oxford.
“Nixon’s basic view was that government has a role to assure opportunity to people. What they make of that is up to them. It sounds like a basic conservative, individualistic outlook to be sure,” Price told Oxford faculty and students. “But Nixon understood that there was want and hunger and that government could not abdicate its responsibility.”
Read the whole lecture below: