An Unlikely Nominee

Bank teller, insurance agent, real estate salesman, magazine distributor. He has drifted through a string of jobs without ever making a career out of any of them. He is the owner and sole employee of a minority recruiting firm in Detroit, which has not placed a single employee this year. His company, called Bold Concepts, Inc., is not even listed in the telephone book. He is a stranger to the Detroit civil rights community, and his political career consists of winning a meager 5% of the vote in a congressional race in 1980.

So why is William Bell, 55, being nominated by the Reagan Administration to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an agency with 3,400 employees and an annual budget of $140 million? It is a question being asked with increasing dismay by both Congressmen and Civil Rights Leaders as Bell's nomination comes up for a vote in the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee this week. True enough, Bell worked briefly for the EEOC in the mid-1970's, but his primary qualification seems to be that he toiled for the Reagan-Bush committee in Michigan during last year's presidential campaign. "He's bad news," says Maudine Cooper, Washington Lobbyist for the National Urban League. Says Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri: "Mr. Bell is a perfectly decent and honest man, but he is absolutely and totally unqualified."

"We stand by him," counters E. Pendleton James, White House director of personnel. "Bill Bell is not a lawyer, he's not wealthy and he's not out of the civil rights movement. But he is a conservative Republican and a staunch Reagan supporter." And that is exactly what Reagan wants: someone who is willing to battle civil rights groups and lead the Administration's redefinition of affirmative action. The Senate committee is split on Bell. Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah pronounces him "honest and intelligent." But Hatch has trouble keeping Republicans Lowell Weicker of Connecticut and Robert Stafford of Vermont from often siding with the Democrats. If they defect this time the vote will probably be 9 to 7, and Bell's nomination will be blocked.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.