It seemed like a sensible way to break the logjam over a new civil-rights bill. At a private dinner arranged by AT&T chairman Robert Allen in New York last December, top CEOs and civil-rights leaders agreed to have lawyers meet to try to hammer out their differences. A similar measure, designed to reverse recent Supreme Court decisions making job-discrimination charges difficult to prove, was vetoed last year by President Bush, who insisted it would force employers to establish racial quotas. While obstacles remained, the two sides seemed to be making progress. Changes in the bill’s language had relieved corporate fears about quotas. The Business Roundtable, a coalition of 200 top CEOs, voted earlier this month to continue the talks. But that was news the White House didn’t want to hear. Late last week, after less-than-subtle persuasion from administration officials, Allen and the Roundtable dropped out of the negotiations.
White House chief of staff John Sununu is philosophically opposed to affirmative action. He also knows that quota-bashing makes good polities. Polls show significant white hostility toward racial preferences. GOP strategists believe that attacking affirmative-action programs as quotas would be an effective issue for Bush in 1992, and they’ve concluded that any civilrights bill perceived as a compromise on quotas would dilute their political advantage. Bush aides are confident they have the congressional votes to sustain another veto. Several Southern Democrats who supported last year’s bill are feeling the heat from conservative constituents for their opposition to the gulf war. They have no stomach for another unpopular vote.
Bush’s men short-circuited the negotiations with blunt efficiency. White House counsel C. Boyden Gray told several Roundtable members that the talks were “inconvenient” because they undermined business support for the president’s version of the bill. Sununu worked the phones, drumming up opposition among smaller companies that feared the compromise would expose them to ruinous jury awards in discrimination suits.
In the end the political pressure was just too intense for the businessmen. A displeased White House could make life difficult for big corporations dependent on the good will of federal regulators. “A chill wind blowing from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue sent shivers up the spines of the CEOs,” said one business source. Last week Allen came under attack from conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot, who suggested that Allen was cynically negotiating to benefit AT&T. Gigot also claimed that Allen belonged to a club that “has no black and no women members”–a charge Allen’s spokesman refuted, saying that the club had at least one black member and an antidiscrimination policy. For Allen, already having difficulty working out a compromise with civil-rights groups over damage awards in sex-discrimination cases, the column was the last straw. “I don’t need this kind of grief,” he said. Allen held out the possibility of reopening the talks. But he didn’t say when.
