[2][1] After the US entered World War II, Brennan enlisted in the Navy, serving as a chief petty officer aboard a submarine home ported in Guam.

[4] John Lindsay was elected Mayor of New York City in 1965 as a liberal Republican pledging to take on special interests, including the building and construction unions.

In the late 1960s, a diverse coalition of business leaders, construction companies, civil rights activists, reformers and the media wanted to open up opportunities for minorities.

A study by the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 1967 found that minority membership in the six most highly skilled building trades was only 2 percent and had not changed since 1960.

The Nixon Administration, under Labor Secretary George P. Shultz, announced the Philadelphia Plan in the summer of 1969 to increase minority membership of skilled building trades to twenty per cent within five years.

They persuaded George Meany, President of the AFL-CIO and a former plumbing union official in New York City, to sponsor Congressional and legal challenges to the plans, but these efforts failed.

[5] On May 4, 1970, four students were shot dead at Kent State University in Ohio while protesting the Vietnam War and the incursion into Cambodia.

[6] As a show of sympathy for the dead students, Mayor Lindsay ordered all flags at City Hall to be flown at half mast the same day.

Deputy Mayor Richard Aurelio, fearing the building would be overrun by the mob, ordered city workers to raise the flag back to full mast.

President Nixon held an emergency press conference to defuse the situation before tens of thousands of students arrived in Washington, D.C., for a protest rally on May 9.

Charles Colson was put in charge of developing a strategy to win union support for Nixon in the 1972 presidential election.

Despite the setback on Davis-Bacon, Brennan met Nixon again in April 1971 and offered to support his bid for re-election in return for the federal government adopting the New York Plan.

After a meeting with construction unions in 1972, Nixon wrote in his diary of labor leaders having "character and guts and a bit of patriotism."

Meany told Nixon in late July that he was going to win in a landslide and that he was not going to waste AFL-CIO money supporting McGovern's candidacy.

[8][15] Nixon duly won in a landslide, carrying New York easily with the support of the vast majority of building and construction workers in that state, who, four years, earlier had voted overwhelmingly for Hubert Humphrey.

In a three-hour meeting, Colson told Brennan that he would have to defend unpopular administration policies, abide by administration policy decisions, and keep Labor Department officials from investigating Teamsters president Frank Fitzsimmons, who had played a critical role in securing limited labor support for Nixon.

[18] But once in office, Brennan promoted a plan to raise the minimum wages in small increments over four years with no increase in the number of covered workers.

In 1973, John Lindsay, who had become a Democrat, withdrew from the New York Plan and set a new objective to increase minority representation in the building trades to 25%.

[22] The federal government won the ensuing legal battle, and New York City's fiscal crisis meant that it had to abandon its affirmative action plans.

[2] Civil rights advocates criticized him for not having taken enough action against the discrimination of Black and Hispanic workers by the building unions; Brennan defended himself arguing that it had not been possible to act faster due to the resistance of the traditionally white construction trades.