Discusses recruiting two LSC presidents; obtaining the significant increase in appropriations; and moving beyond us-vs-them mentality of the 1980s to a collaborative, supportive approach.
Oral history details
| Storyteller: | George Wittgraf |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Houseman, Alan |
| Date of interview: | Jan 23, 2025 |
| Where relates to: | Iowa and National |
| Topics: | Civil legal aid: Funding and LSC: General |
| Law type: | Civil |
| Collection: | CNEJL |
| Georgetown Law Library link (possible video): | |
| Length: | 0:54:38 |
Full text of transcript
Download PDF: TranscriptConsortium for the National Equal Justice Library
Oral history collection interview with
George Wittgraf
Conducted by Alan Houseman
January 23, 2025
Dennis Groenenboom:
Hello.
Alan Houseman:
This is an oral history of George Wittgraf by Alan Houseman on Zoom on January 23rd, 2025. Dennis Groenenboom is also on the call. So George, let’s begin with an overview of your life, essentially where you grew up, where you went to college, law school, your stay at Rutgers, your many activities and your private practice. Just a brief overview of those.
George Wittgraf:
Sure. I was born in 1945 in the District of Columbia, Columbia Women’s Hospital. My dad was stationed in that area near the end of World War II. My parents both grew up and spent their lives in the Minneapolis area. After my father’s military service, they returned to the Minneapolis area until I was in about seventh grade. I grew up in a near west suburb called St. Louis Park. Then my family moved a little farther west to the suburb of Wayzata. That’s where I went through junior high school and high school and graduated from high school in 1963.
I was interested in a attending a smaller school for post-secondary education. I looked at Cornell College in Iowa and Lake Forest College in Chicago and Carlton College south of Minneapolis. Eventually I decided to go to Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, in part because of something called their program in practical political education, PPPE, which interested me. So I went to Grinnell College in the fall of 1963 and graduated. Then in the spring of 1967 I went to graduate school. I had applied among other programs to the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I was fortunate to receive an Eagleton Fellowship. So I was able in a nine-month program to get a Master of Arts degree in political science from Rutgers University. Then I worked in a US Senate political campaign back here in Iowa.
Then I needed to deal with a military obligation made more imminent by a low draft number. I joined the Iowa Army National Guard and went to basic training in about the first half of 1969. I finished that training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where we had both our basic training and infantry advanced individual training.
Then I came back to Des Moines and got a job working for the Iowa Office of Economic Opportunity. I worked there for a couple of years. With some federal money that was given to many states including Iowa, Iowa established a position called state youth coordinator. It was really primarily concerned with obtaining summer employment opportunities for young people, high school students. So by appointment of then-Governor Robert D. Ray in Iowa, I was the state youth coordinator in 1970 and 1971. I decided toward the end of 1971 to give up that position and become the campaign manager for a state senator named Art Neu who had decided to run for lieutenant governor. I managed Art’s campaign through the primary, which he won in August of 1972. Then in the general election he was successful and was elected Lieutenant Governor of Iowa in the fall of 1972.
In the meantime, in late August and early September of 1972, I had begun attending law school at Drake University in Des Moines. So Art was inaugurated as lieutenant governor in January of 1973, and I began working for him really on a full-time basis as his administrative assistant. At the same time I was going to law school as a full-time student. So I continued working for Art and I continued law school. I went to school during the summers so I finished up in just a couple of years and graduated, I think in January 1975. I was admitted to the Iowa Bar.
Then in 1976 I began looking at practicing law and found a position with a two-person law firm in Cherokee, Iowa, in northwest Iowa. I left my position with the Lieutenant Governor’s office. My wife and I moved — and at that point we had our first son — the three of us moved to Cherokee about July 1, 1976, where I began the general practice of law. I have been here ever since, for not quite 50 years.
Alan Houseman:
Well, that’s very helpful. Why did President George H.W. Bush choose you to be on the LSC board and chair of the board?
George Wittgraf:
Well, I’m not sure that I could speak for him, and I don’t recall that he ever told me. My best guess would be that if we go back a little bit in time to the point where in March of 1979, while living in Cherokee of course, I agreed to become the Iowa campaign chairman for George Bush in his campaign for president. In fact, I think the early expectation was that Berkley Bedell’s predecessor as congressman from northwest Iowa, a man named Wiley Mayne, was going to be the campaign chairman. But Wiley, of course, was primarily in Washington. I was in Iowa. In part I suppose because of my experience from having run Art Neu’s campaign for lieutenant governor in 1972, George Bush asked me — I think with the encouragement of his colleague, former Republican National Chairman Mary Louise Smith — to become his Iowa campaign chairman. I agreed. So from the spring of 1979, until our Iowa precinct caucuses in January of 1980, I spent a great deal of time with George Bush as he campaigned in Iowa, largely following the Jimmy Carter example from 1975 and 76 of being seemingly omnipresent and building a great deal of grassroots support.
George Bush unexpectedly, narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan in the January 1980 Iowa precinct caucuses. At least briefly until that winter’s New Hampshire primary, George Bush became the front runner or the co-front runner with Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination for 1980. I continued to do some campaigning for George Bush throughout the spring and the summer and the fall, although obviously he didn’t spend nearly the time in Iowa during the spring and the summer and the fall that he had in the preceding six to nine months leading up to the precinct caucuses. But he of course was on the ticket then as the vice presidential nominee with Ronald Reagan. And they succeeded in November of 1980 to be elected. At that point, probably the middle of November of 1980, one of the people who was helping Vice President-elect George Bush fill out his staff was a man named Dean Burch.
I had met Dean Burch through the campaign. Dean Burch was an old Barry Goldwater campaigner and a former Republican national chairman. He reached out and asked if I would like to be counsel to the Vice President beginning in January of 1981. So on Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and I traveled to Washington DC. We visited with several people who were going to be the chief of staff and members of the staff. We looked at housing. My wife had just given birth on October 14th — just five or six weeks before — to our third son. So this was kind of a big deal. We’ve got a very young family, three young sons, and are contemplating the possibility of moving to Washington DC. We decided that weekend that it was not in the best interest of our family for us to do so. So we flew on from Washington down to Houston, Texas that Sunday after Thanksgiving and told George Bush, who was in Houston at the time, that I wasn’t able to accept that generous offer.
So as the Eighties went on, we continued to do things that maintained a George Bush presence in Iowa, including his seeking reelection with Ronald Reagan in 1984, and of course being reelected. Again, we had Iowa precinct caucuses in January of 1988 that didn’t go as well as January of 1980. In 1988, George Bush not only did not win, but he finished third in the Iowa caucuses behind then-Senator Bob Dole and newcomer to presidential politics Pat Robertson. But in 1988 George Bush did much better in the New Hampshire primary than he had in 1980. Winning there he was on his way to winning the nomination for president in 1988.
Our three sons were just in school, growing, and doing lots of activities in addition to school. My wife and I never gave any serious thought to moving to Washington DC to join the Bush Administration in 1989. But I did express to Chase Untermeyer, who in 1989 was the director of personnel for the president-elect, and the president that I was interested in the possibility of appointment to a board or commission.
Going back, I suppose to my days in the Iowa Office of Economic Opportunity and then my legal practice, and then just following the news, I had become interested in this relatively new thing called the Legal Services Corporation. So I had expressed that interest to Chase Untermeyer as I recall. Nothing happened, as you well know, in the year 1989. It wasn’t until, we’ll say January of 1990, that Ed Rogers on behalf of Chief of Staff John Sununu, reached out and asked if I would like to be a member of the Board of Directors of Legal Services Corporation and if I was willing to serve as chairman. That’s a very long answer to your question. Again, none of it is based on direct conversations with President or President-Elect Bush. It’s just my recollection of how things unfolded.
Alan Houseman:
So what challenges did you face as board chair and how did you handle them?
George Wittgraf:
Well, as we met for the first time in February of 1990 as the new board members, I did not have from anyone or any place a history, if you will, either in general terms, let alone in specific terms, of the internecine warfare which had occurred throughout the eight years of the Reagan Administration, or particularly in 1989 leading up to the appointment of a new Legal Services Corporation board of directors. So I suppose ignorance left me blissful that I could come and chair a body that wasn’t necessarily a nest of vipers, and I didn’t approach it that way. In fact, it was not a nest of vipers.
One of the first people I met getting to Washington in February of 1990 was then President Terry Wear. He, as I recall, made an effort to ingratiate himself to me. But I think I was aware that we were really looking at a president beyond Terry Wear. I think I probably let him know that, and I think he probably assumed that as well. So one of the first challenges we had was the fact that there was going to be new day-to-day leadership in the form of the president, and much of 1990 was devoted to finding a new president. I don’t remember all the candidates. The two I remember particularly would be John Rother, who was then working for the American Association of Retired Persons, AARP, and David Martin. I don’t honestly recall at this point how those two and a couple of others came to us, if we had a search firm or otherwise. But eventually, the board, as you know, selected David Martin to be the corporation’s president. He was a compromise selection and I guess one that the majority of the board, perhaps all of the board members felt they could live with. Now, I don’t want to keep rambling through the next three years necessarily. Alan, if there’s something more specific, I could try to address that, or I can just keep rambling if you wish.
Alan Houseman:
Well, let me ask. A little later you chose John O’Hara, right?
George Wittgraf:
Yes.
Alan Houseman:
And why was that?
George Wittgraf:
Well, I don’t know that David Martin was ever smitten with the job, nor in turn perhaps was the board particularly smitten over time with him. So by summer 1991, he indicated that he wanted to move on after really about a year’s time in the position as president. I think that came as a bit of a surprise that his tenure would be so brief. The board vice chair with me at that time was former congressman Guy Molinari (R-NY) from Staten Island. John O’Hara was somebody Guy knew from his congressional service, John O’Hara being somebody who had worked staffing congressional committees. I don’t recall today what John O’Hara was doing at that time, but he apparently was available for that position. And Guy Molinari reached out to him and he was interested and I think was appealing to most or all of us board members because he had no prior involvement in the legal services battles, but rather was coming as a bureaucrat, being hired to do a job to administer the Legal Services Corporation.
Alan Houseman:
And just for the record, John O’Hara was well regarded by the legal services community, and most of us thought he did a very good job as president.
George Wittgraf:
To my recollection, and hopefully then the recollection of the legal services community and the grantees in particular, I think he was a so-called honest broker and dealt with people straightforwardly and as I suggested a moment ago, wasn’t bringing any separate agenda to the position.
Alan Houseman:
Right. Let’s move on to appropriations. During your tenure, the LSC Act’s appropriation rose from $308.5 million to $357 million, which is the highest it had been in actual dollars since 1980. What steps did the board take and you take to encourage this substantial increase in funding?
George Wittgraf:
Well, I think over the course of 1990, 1991, 1992, all of the board members to varying degrees had become believers in the government’s involvement with the provision of civil legal services for the poor and generally become believers in and supporters of the grantees. The grantees thought of course that more money was needed to meet the still largely unmet needs of the grantees’ clientele. The Bush Administration tended, as I recall, to just take the prior year’s appropriation amount and move that forward. We as the board were recommending larger numbers, not usually quite as large as our friends in the legal services community wanted, but an increase over what the administration was recommending. Then we had the formal appropriations hearings before the House Appropriations Subcommittee chaired by Congressman Neal Smith (D-IA). In addition, Julie Clark on behalf of the NLADA and I on behalf of the Legal Services Corporation, met a number of times with Neal Smith to encourage him to do as much as he could to help meet the needs of the grantees and of the clientele, and he was supportive.
Alan Houseman:
Who was Neal Smith, just for the record?
George Wittgraf:
Okay. Neal Smith was a longtime central Iowa member of Congress from the greater Des Moines area. He was the chair of the appropriations subcommittee that had responsibility for the appropriation for the Legal Services Corporation. Also, to my recollection, I visited on one or more occasions with Hal Rogers, who was Neal Smith’s Republican counterpart, Hal Rogers being a congressman from Kentucky, and who also had been an early George Herbert Walker Bush supporter for president. So just as Neal Smith and I had an Iowa connection, Hal Rogers and I had a bit of an early George Herbert Walker Bush support bond. While Rogers probably wasn’t as interested in and committed to legal services funding as Neal Smith, Rogers as I recall went with the flow and certainly was not fighting the Legal Services Corporation or its funding level at that time.
Alan Houseman:
Right. Okay. Let me turn to a couple of other matters. During your tenure, I don’t know if you remember this, but the board set up a committee of staff, board, and LSC representatives that I was on. It did a set of performance criteria for LSC grantees. These criteria were to be used in evaluating programs and later in competition if there was such, and these criteria are still alive today. A few of the criteria have been expanded. Basically the criteria that were created under your board are used today by legal services programs in evaluation and, if there’s competition, in competition. I don’t know if you remember this, but the question is, do you remember this and what role did you think the board played in this?
George Wittgraf:
I do not have much of a recollection, and I’m inclined to think that the board members did not have that much of a role in the development of the criteria. We may well have approved them at some point, but I don’t recall them being a subject of a great deal of discussion among the board members.
Alan Houseman:
Right. I think Nancy Rogers and maybe Bud Kirk were on this committee.
George Wittgraf:
Okay, Bud Kirk, but who did you say before Bud?
Alan Houseman:
Nancy Rogers.
George Wittgraf:
Okay. She would not have been a board member with me during that time.
Alan Houseman:
Oh well, I have it wrong. Bud I think was though for sure.
George Wittgraf:
Yes. Bud Kirk and I worked together about two and a half years. Yes.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. My memory is wrong on that, sorry.
George Wittgraf:
Well, that’s something you’re far more familiar with. Obviously I just do not have a very strong recollection now 30 years later, I’m sorry.
Alan Houseman:
Right. So what other steps did LSC board take during your tenure to improve the legal services delivery system or the Legal Services Corporation, if you can recall?
George Wittgraf:
Well, I don’t know that we can take too much credit as board members for any improvement in the delivery system. Looking back, I would like to think that we moved beyond the us versus them mentality that seemed to exist during the 1980s, the eight years of the Reagan Administration and then the first year of the Bush Administration. During the four years I was involved, there was some turnover in board members. But I’d like to think that everybody who was a member of the board to varying degrees was supportive of both the mission of funding civil legal services for the poor and supportive of the grantees who were responsible then for delivering the services, for the delivery system to which you referred. So I’d like to think that in the period from 1990 through most of 1993 we went from an us versus them approach to a collaborative approach and a supportive approach. We were there because we believed in the mission, whereas some of our predecessors apparently were there because they were wanting really to undo the Legal Services Corporation and its mission. So that would’ve been a dramatic change from the 1980s to the early 1990s.
In connection with that, we all felt that more funding was necessary and worked to get the increased funding that we just discussed. Those $300 or $400 million dollars seem pretty small by comparison with today’s billion and a half dollars, but maybe in inflation-adjusted numbers, they’re just as greater or greater. So I would like to think we had some success in increasing funding as well as in establishing a collaborative and supportive relationship rather than a negative us versus them relationship.
As things unfolded then in the two thousands, once the Clinton years were passed and we began with the George W. Bush years, as I look back I regret that in the early 1990s we didn’t have the time or hadn’t been able to develop broader support among Republican members of the House in particular. Historically, if you go back — as you can more readily than I — in the beginning of the War on Poverty and the Office of Economic Opportunity, and particularly then the Nixon Administration and Director Rumsfeld, there was always substantial Republican congressional support early on, particularly in the 1970s, for the Legal Services Corporation. I regret that that was lost, a lot of it probably at the initiative of Ed Meese and his California experience, if you will. And then his influence with President Reagan and as Attorney General. I wish we had been able to get a stronger bipartisan congressional base than we did, but we were only there for a short four years. Perhaps if we had been there for eight years as some legal services board members have been during other administrations, maybe we could have accomplished more. But as I look back, that’s where we came up short.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. You’ve won a number of awards according to your resume, and I wonder which of these awards are the most important to you? Maybe they all are.
George Wittgraf:
Sure they’re all appreciated, I suppose. In fact, I’m most grateful for a local award, a so-called Citizen of the Year Award here in our community back in 2015 or 16. We’re a community of only 5,000 up or down a little bit from one census to the next. A lot of my activities have been local, not only some local political activities, but also through our local service club. The Cherokee Rotary Club at my initiative back in March of 2009 began providing food packets for children in need on weekends to ensure that they had food over the course of weekends when they didn’t have school breakfasts or school lunches. Since March of 1989 to the present, 32 or 33 Fridays per school year, our Cherokee Rotary Club provides at the moment about 153 food packets for kindergarten through fourth grade students. From a national perspective, that’s no big deal, but ultimately, we’re all parts of a community and here in our community, that’s an important step to help deal with food insecurity. The award I got back in 2015 or 16 in part at least, was in recognition of that effort. So I suppose, to answer your question briefly, that Citizen of the Year award means the most to me.
Alan Houseman:
Well, you also received the Iowa Legal Aid Hall of Fame Award and the NLADA Arthur von Briesen Award just for the record. I don’t know about the Iowa Award. Dennis can talk about that, but the Arthur von Briesen Award is given to someone not in the legal aid community, but who has provided extensive support to the legal aid community. It’s a major award that NLADA and ABA give. So just for the record, you did get that award.
George Wittgraf:
Well, and I’m grateful for that. Looking back over the last 50 or 60 years of my life, that period as LSC board chair ends up being a relatively short period of time, 1990 to 1994. As I talk about some of these local activities and a community in which we’ve lived not quite 50 years, the food packets have been about a 16 year project at the moment. And it will continue, I hope, beyond my lifetime. And that’s why that means more to me individually.
Alan Houseman:
Right. I wasn’t trying to suggest the opposite. Okay. Dennis, do you have questions?
Dennis Groenenboom:
Yeah, I do have a couple. I want to go back, George, to the board a little bit,. Howard Dana was a board member with you. He’s commented about the style that you took in leading the board. I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about how you approached managing and leading this new LSC board that you ended up taking charge of?
George Wittgraf:
Well, unquestionably, of the 11 board members at any one point in time, particularly early on, several came from a critical or reform perspective. Several came from a perspective of strong support and a few of us, including perhaps me, were sort of in the middle. We weren’t easily categorized. So as I became chair, I guess my concern was finding consensus so that we could move forward. And early on we did spend time educating ourselves, the 11 board members, about legal services and its grantees. And we did that particularly throughout the year 1990.
Then we began traveling, as you’ll recall, around the country to different cities — Memphis, San Diego, Denver, Minneapolis, Portland, Maine, and others. So we learned first hand about the operations of different grantees and met first hand not only the administrators such as you were, but also the frontline legal services attorneys. We also met and heard and learned more about some of the clientele. I’d like to think that that educational effort, which sort of began in Washington and then spread out around the different cities in the country, helped us really all appreciate the work of the grantees and the work of the legal services attorneys. So if we were talking about funding for example, we wouldn’t always agree absolutely on one number. But it made it easier for us to all be supportive of the mission and to find consensus so we could move forward.
As I’ve read about the boards that functioned in the 1980s right ahead of us during the Reagan Administration, I’ve been almost shocked by the vitriol and the lack of collegiality and comradery, in part of course because there really wasn’t a common purpose. My recollection of the four years that I spent as a member of the board and with I suppose probably about 20 different board members in the 11 slots over time is just the opposite of that. We got along. We were respectful. While we obviously didn’t agree completely on everything, we managed to work together and managed to make decisions and managed to carry out the mission of the Legal Services Corporation. Perhaps the passage of 30 years here is making it easier for me to think of things in a very positive way, but I really do not recall difficult times among board members. Certainly we disagreed, but not to the point of disrespect, let alone attacks on one another in the context of board meetings.
Dennis Groenenboom:
Well, I guess Alan has touched on this, and you have too, George, in your comments about collegiality. Certainly, as a grantee who worked in legal services beginning in 1978, you brought a very different perspective and feel to the organization. As grantees we were able to feel like we were being heard, that there were people who respected what we did, and that it wasn’t an us against them attitude, which clearly had been the case for the eight years prior. So that was from a grantee standpoint just a major contribution that I think that you made. I think I speak for the vast majority of the people who worked in legal aid at the time.
There are two other things that I’d like to address with you though. One of the things that you talked about with me, and I think this was maybe even after your time as the board chair, was that to the extent that legal services portrayed themselves in any partisan way, we were going to lose at some point. At some point or other, you’re going to lose. Then we saw that in the Nineties, after the Gingrich Congress came in and did dramatic cuts in funding to obtain state funding. That advice was one that I used many times. I even contributed to a few Republican candidates and elected officials over the years because of it. But that was very good advice.
George Wittgraf:
Well, in any kind of congressionally supported activity, especially supported by appropriations, wants to have as broad support as possible. We of course are in an extended period now with a very narrow margin between the two parties. It makes it even more important that you have to have supporters of both parties and there’s really no reason why there shouldn’t be. As I said a few minutes ago, the history of the Legal Services Corporation really goes back and includes a lot of prominent Republicans. Now things have changed a bit from 2017 to 2025 and the way perhaps appropriators in Congress look at appropriations. I think the need for education and broad based bipartisan support probably is greater than ever. There is probably somewhat appropriately skepticism toward funding all of the different activities of the federal government. Everybody needs to show, once again, the value that the taxpayers are getting from the monies that are spent.
I think for the relatively small billion and a half dollars spent by the federal government on civil legal services for the poor, there should be a pretty good case to make. I don’t know because I’m too far removed what of the 1980s reform movement remains still, or if that’s a thing of the past and now budgetary support for the Legal Service Corporation is just a matter of funds availability. If it is, that’s probably a good thing. But there continues to be a need to justify spending, just like any kind of spending. That may be even a little tougher going forward or a greater need going forward. Certainly that’s a bipartisan situation that you want obviously as many members of both parties as you can to know and understand and appreciate the work of the corporation and its grantees.
Dennis Groenenboom:
The other thing I wanted to ask about, George, is you often described yourself as you were just a county seat lawyer in rural Iowa. And I wonder whether that experience and that background you think helped you in the leadership that you provided to LSC and to get that increase in funding that Alan talked about.
George Wittgraf:
Well, in my early years of the general practice of law, typically I was involved with not only some criminal matters as a prosecutor for a few years and as a criminal defense lawyer, but also with an awful lot of family law matters. It could involve what we in Iowa call dissolution of marriage, as you know, or it could involve the needs of children in or out of juvenile court. As we all understand, it costs a lot of money to have legal fights or to go to court. I certainly saw that beginning back in the late 1970s as I practiced law in county seat Cherokee, Iowa. It is even more true today.
One of the increasing challenges for the legal community and those it serves is that there are fewer lawyers interested in being in county seats to practice law. Fewer lawyers, fewer doctors, fewer dentists, fewer ministers. The calling, especially here in the upper Midwest where we do have winter, the calling is not very loud for an awful lot of younger people. The calling is much louder to Minneapolis or Des Moines or Omaha or Chicago or to the East or West Coasts or to the South. We’re going to continue to have a challenge just getting lawyers here, period. But to go back to your question, I certainly saw the need. A lot of this is provided in Iowa by volunteer lawyers rather than by grantees, lawyers who’ve really got, I’ll say higher priorities, more urgent priorities. The needs I’m talking about in basic dissolution of marriage cases in particular really require the investment of time by volunteer lawyers. With fewer lawyers that volunteer time is getting to be harder to come by. But certainly my experience here, working with those people, and knowing the difficulty of those people being able to provide or to pay for civil legal services, influenced my thinking.
One other note that’s more personal to you and your experience, one of your predecessors. At Polk County Legal Aid, Bob Oberbillig developed a pretty close relationship with Art Neu, both when Art was a state senator, and then when Art was Lieutenant Governor. And I got to know Bob as well. Bob’s originally, if I recall correctly, from northwest Iowa, Calhoun County. He inspired in me a great deal of respect for what they were doing and the people who were doing it. So that probably influenced by thinking in addition to just the practical experience of being here in my county seat of Cherokee, Iowa
Dennis Groenenboom:
On Art Neu, I just can’t resist mentioning this that I didn’t know about your connection with Art, but Art went on to serve nine years on Iowa Legal Aid’s board of directors, and two years as president of the board. I got to know him well I think during that time and really appreciated his leadership, his approach, and just what a decent man or it was.
George Wittgraf:
Right. And undoubtedly he was influenced in that direction by Bob Oberbillig. Sure.
Dennis Groenenboom:
Yeah, for sure. Well, for the record as well, I think that from my perspective, you were a breath of fresh air. The leadership that your LSC board provided after those eight or nine awful years of the Reagan Administration. Your board’s impact on legal services was just great. So your legacy continues for those of us who were around during that time. Right, Alan?
Alan Houseman:
Yes, absolutely. I totally agree with that.
George Wittgraf:
Well, I feel bad for the people who served on those 1980 boards to have had to experience such a difficult period. It just shouldn’t have been. But I guess there was a battle going on for the hearts and minds of the people who thought the government should be involved with the provision of civil legal services. It just sounded like a terrible experience. I could easily see why a lot of those board members quit because you just say, why continue? I guess kudos to those who did continue and help the corporation survive until we got to the 1990s. I’m not aware of there being really that much controversy today, and either of you might be able to tell me otherwise. But I would like to think that most of the controversy involving some of the different activities of legal services lawyers is pretty well behind us that where we are now is just a matter of what funds are available.
Alan Houseman:
I think that’s correct.
George Wittgraf:
Good.
Alan Houseman:
The current board led by John Levi has been very, very good at building bipartisan support in the Congress. Whether that will hold we’re going to find out. But they’ve done a very good job of building up strong bipartisan support.
George Wittgraf:
Good. I’m glad to hear that.
Alan Houseman:
So I don’t know, Dennis, if you have anything else. If you have anything else to add, George, to what we’ve talked about, please do.
George Wittgraf:
Oh, I think I’ve probably said more than enough. I’m good. I thank you for the opportunity.
Alan Houseman:
Great. Thank you.
END