In this life-history interview, Butler describes his San Francisco roots, his experiences in Malaysia as director of the newly founded Peace Corps, and his work as a lawyer/strategist in the early days of the environmental movement. A Republican political maverick, he directed Pete McCloskey’s legendary campaign for Congress against Shirley Temple Black in 1967 and shortly thereafter joined the Nixon administration as an assistant secretary of HEW with a progressive agenda. Returning to San Francisco in 1971, he was cofounder and director of the Health Policy Institute at UCSF and founding chair of Ploughshares Fund, devoted to the elimination of nuclear weapons. But what he describes as “the centerpiece of everything I wanted to do” was California Tomorrow, an organization he founded and led for twenty years, dedicated to an equitable and inclusive multicultural society in California.