On Thursday, June 8, 2006, Hon. Edwin Meese III spoke at the inaugural Lincoln Institute Breakfast Forum at the University Club in Washington, D.C.  During his remarks over breakfast, Ed Meese revisited the historic Fairmont Conference and assessed the progress we have made, as well as the work still before us.

In December of 1980, Ronald Reagan had just been elected but had not taken office when a historic gathering took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. It would come to be known as the Fairmont Conference.  Participants at this conference included Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Clarence Thomas and Milton Friedman, to name just a few of the notables gathered to discuss the historic opportunity the “Reagan Revolution” offered black Americans. The Fairmont Conference represented the search for new ideas and approaches to black and other minority problems, an important development for those of us who felt that the energy and creativity engendered by the old civil rights movement had run its course.

Also prominent among Fairmont Conference attendees was Edwin Meese III, already one of Ronald Reagan’s most important advisors. As Attorney General, as Chairman of the Domestic Policy Council and the National Drug Policy Board, and as a member of the National Security Council, Ed Meese would play a key role in the development and execution of the Reagan Administration’s domestic and foreign policy.  At the time, Ed Meese called the Fairmont gathering “more than just another event. It is a significant starting point; it signals a lot of things that are very important to the entire nation.”

Pictures of the June 2006 Lincoln Institute
Breakfast Forum Featuring Ed Meese