Planning the 1975 Conference

While Hopkins handled most chapter matters, I continued to be involved in the New York City chapter. So when the new president of the New York chapter, Brian Quickstad, was visiting Washington in 1972, he invited me to lunch at the University Club. Quickstad said there was someone he thought I should meet. The “someone” turned out to be Graham T.T. Molitor, a lawyer who acted as the Washington representative of the General Mills Corporation.

Molitor later became research director of the 1973 White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead, and he persuaded me to join the committee he assembled to help plan the conference. Participating in the preparation of the White House conference proved interesting in terms of the people I met and gave me my first opportunity to see President Richard Nixon. (I never got to see him during the two months that I worked on the White House staff!) I also got to see Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans, who introduced Nixon at the concluding session of the conference, as well as Attorney General John Mitchell, both of whom were later indicted in the Watergate scandal.

But the most valuable part of working on the White House Conference was getting to know Graham Molitor.

Molitor had attended the Society’s first conference in 1971 and had a vast knowledge of the Washington policy-making community. So in 1974, when I was looking for leadership for the Society’s 1975 conference, I persuaded him to become chairman.

Soon afterwards, I enlisted Victor R. Ferkiss, a Georgetown University professor of government, to be the program chairman for the conference. I had gotten to know Ferkiss when he gave a talk to our Washington chapter on his book, The Future of Technological Civilization.

To support Molitor and Ferkiss, I reassigned Nancy McLane, who had been working on the Energy Forum, to become staff coordinator for the 1975 conference. To help her, I hired Suzanne Seitz, wife of a State Department official, Raymond Seitz, who later became the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.

The conference committee’s first task was to choose a theme for the meeting. That seemed to me like a simple enough task, but it took us four long meetings to come up with seven words: “The Next 25 Years: Crisis and Opportunity.”

But the speed of planning soon picked up, thanks in large measure to Nancy McLane, who turned out to be a tireless worker and unbelievably efficient at administrative tasks. She was, however, temperamental and ruthless in pushing her co-workers to greater efforts.

At one point, Nancy became so exasperated with Peter Zuckerman and me for not doing what she thought we ought to do that she angrily resigned. To make matters worse, Suzanne decided to join Nancy’s “strike,” and then the third member of the conference staff, Jan Carson, felt she had to quit out of solidarity with the others.

So, suddenly, I faced a full-blown strike!

I was furious, but I couldn’t decide who I was angriest at: Was it Nancy for quitting in a fit of pique and starting the to-do? Or was it Suzanne for frivolously deciding to turn Nancy’s resignation into an employee walkout? Or was it Jan, who was betraying our years of friendship by siding with the other women?

But circumstances dictated that I had better settle the strike quickly if our conference planning was to remain on track. So I swallowed my anger and pacified the strikers. Within a few days, all three women were back working as hard as ever.

As speakers for the conference, the planning committee recruited almost every well-known personage in futuring as well as seven members of the United States Congress, including senators Edward M. Kennedy, Hubert H. Humphrey, and John C. Culver.

I was a long-time admirer of Senator Humphrey, who had served as vice president under Lyndon Johnson and later became one of the first people to join the World Future Society. Senator Culver was also a member of the Society and was actively pushing a futurist agenda in Congress. But “Teddy” Kennedy was the biggest star in terms of popular interest. The martyrdom of his brothers, John and Robert, had made Teddy a living legend. The mantle of the legendary Kennedy clan rested on his shoulders, and there was talk of him becoming the next Kennedy to run for president.

Molitor, who was used to dealing with prominent politicians, was not so impressed by Kennedy or the other politicians we recruited. Instead, he gloried in his success at recruiting distinguished futurists, and I must say that I rejoiced that we had secured Al Toffler and Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, both of whom had missed our first conference.

Bell had chaired the Commission on the Year 2000, which helped inspire the creation of the World Future Society, and had written impressive books, like The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1967). He had served on Bertrand de Jouvenel’s pioneering Futuribles project in the early 1960s and ranked as one of America’s most prominent intellectuals.