DIRECT LINE W/JOHN ROY PRICE

We are joined this evening with John Roy Price is a Grinnell graduate with a B.A. in history. After graduating from Grinnell, he studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and later received a law degree from Harvard Law School. He was the president and CEO of Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh from 2006 to 2010 and earlier, a managing director of Chase Manhattan Bank, New York. At Chase, he managed the mortgage banking and consumer finance businesses, did investment banking, and later was in charge of government relations worldwide. He is now managing partner of Infrastructure Advisory Partners. Among other major posts, Price was a special assistant to President Nixon from 1969–1971. A founder and later board chair of the Ripon Society, he chaired the advisory committee of the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Downtown Development. He served as chair and president of Americans for Oxford, as president of the Bankers Association for Foreign Trade, and as a trustee of the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Shadyside Presbyterian Church.

We will be discussing Price’s book – The Last Liberal Republican is a memoir from one of Nixon’s senior domestic policy advisors. John Roy Price-a member of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, a cofounder of the Ripon Society, and an employee on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaigns – joined Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and later John D. Ehrlichman, in the Nixon White House to develop domestic policies, especially on welfare, hunger, and health. Based on those policies, and the internal White House struggles around them, Price places Nixon firmly in the liberal Republican tradition of President Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and President Eisenhower.