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IN THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL inaugural address after
the opening of the Littauer building, Ronald Reagan declared:
“Government is not the solution to our problem. Government
is the problem.”
That proclamation questioned whether government was even
worth doing excellently — the central assumption of the
newly reconstituted Kennedy School. Harvard President Derek
Bok wanted to put the school of government on a par with the
Medical School or the Business School, but the head of the
American Medical Association had not announced, “Medicine
is the problem;” the chair of the New York Stock Exchange
had not told the country: “Business is the problem.”
Yet Reagan had used those very words about his sector, shifting
the realities of Americans’ relationship with their government.
Leaders of Harvard’s newest professional school had to
reconcile their own objectives for the school with the imperatives
of the Reagan Revolution. They managed to do it.
In the 25 years since, the Kennedy School’s people have
moved constantly back and forth between the banks of the Charles
and the banks of the Potomac. It’s probably the most
glamorous aspect of the school’s existence: talent pool
and opinion lab for the White House. But the relationship
has been laced with a dissonance of ideals since Littauer
was dedicated, and may be more acute today than ever before.
The school’s relationship with the White House —
the president and his staff, that is, and the leadership of
the executive agencies — proceeds in two directions,
carried out along many channels. Both people and their ideas
shuttle back and forth between Washington and Cambridge —
the people quite literally, on the daily shuttle from Logan
to Reagan National; the ideas floated on the airwaves and
the op-ed page, propounded in academic conferences, and published
in journals. The people move back and forth, as one institution
or the other recruits expertise and leadership. Sometimes
it’s a one-way trip, and the emigrant stays for good
in the new world of academia or in public service.
The exchange of talent and ideas was ongoing when the school
was rededicated in 1978; it has continued amidst an oscillation
in the philosophy and rhetoric of the Oval Office. The complexity
of the relationship was perhaps best epitomized then by Reagan’s
successor, George H. W. Bush. He had proclaimed to a Houston
crowd during the 1988 campaign: “When I wanted to learn
the ways of the world, I didn’t go to the Kennedy School,
I came to Texas.” But when Bush ran the government, he
staffed his team with plenty of Kennedy School affiliates,
such as domestic policy advisor Roger Porter and budget director
Richard Darman.
The trip between Cambridge and Washington involves the shift
from theorist to practitioner, and back again. Many of the
school’s top leaders have made this loop. If they don’t
jump right to the White House then they take on positions
where their years of research stand an increased chance of
affecting White House decisions. For example, Joseph S. Nye,
Jr., spent years in the Carter administration State Department,
and joined the Kennedy School faculty in 1985. After President
Clinton was elected, he named Nye chair of the National Intelligence
Council. Nye moved from that post to become assistant secretary
of defense for international security, and left that job to
become dean of the Kennedy School in 1995.
Nye’s CV raises the question: What exactly constitutes
“White House” service? For some of the faculty,
students, and staffers, that’s easy to define: they work
in the building, often at the highest level. Elaine Kamarck,
who directed the National Performance Review for President
Clinton, defines “White House” as the president’s
political staff, i.e., his top advisors; the National Security
Council; and the Office of Management and Budget. All told,
Kamarck says, that’s about 1,500 people.
But Nye’s postings point towards another aspect of the
White House-Kennedy School connection: expertise developed
daily in research and writing has an impact on decision making
in the Oval Office, whether or not the practitioner has an
office under the White House roof.
Kamarck typifies the way talent makes the journey from Pennsylvania
Avenue to JFK Street — and the reasons it happens.
As a White House player, she’d spent a good deal of
time at the Kennedy School, talking about the Democratic Leadership
Council, which she helped found, and the National Performance
Review. The leaders of the school knew her well, and at a
certain point in her White House career, she made it known
she’d be interested in coming to the Kennedy School.
Nye recruited her to head the Visions of Governance Project.
And what point in her career had she reached? The edge of
burnout, Kamarck frankly relates — and a place where
she wanted different rewards than what the White House can
offer.
“Being at the Kennedy School is more satisfying because
my ideas have my name on them,” Kamarck says. “When
you’re in the White House everything belongs to the president.”
And while she confirms the thrill of helping to run the country,
Kamarck warns that what the White House often really does
is try to convince the 2 million federal workers to run the
country the way the White House wants. That’s confining
and frustrating, she says. She wanted to join those exploring
the possibilities of government, after grappling with its
tough realities. “I wanted to write in my own name, and
about things that were beyond just what could be done on a
daily basis,” she says.
Of course, Kamarck was famously willing to get back to Oval
Office service — she was Al Gore’s chief domestic
policy advisor in the 2000 campaign. Gore didn’t make
it to the White House. That put Kamarck in the position familiar
to many a newly arriving or newly returning faculty member,
fellow, or institute director. She became part of the loyal,
but vocal, opposition. This back and forth feeds and sustains
the diversity of perspective Kennedy School leaders strive
to maintain. As Nye points out, the school has no political
voice. It’s an assemblage of political voices. Nye and
his peers have recruited from all ideological quarters in
selecting administrators and faculty. For every Dan Glickman,
secretary of agriculture under Clinton, they strive to select
a Sheila Burke MPA 1982, chief of staff for Bob Dole, or a
Bonnie Newman, who from 1989 to 1991 served as Assistant to
the President for Management and Administration under President
George H. W. Bush.
As founding Dean Graham Allison put it, when he, Bok, and
other leaders re-created the school they intended it to be
“blatantly bipartisan.” This was a matter of credibility,
of staying keenly relevant by countenancing all points of
view. It was also a matter of trying to contravene the “Kremlin
on the Charles” perception Bush, Sr., wound up exploiting
against former Kennedy School Professor Michael Dukakis.
To address that perception Allison did what all good academics
or politicians have to do. He reached out to the right people.
In this case, it was Caspar Weinberger. Allison knew Reagan’s
defense secretary, and started talking to him about international
security issues and what the school could do in that area.
Before long, Allison was headed south, part of an “intellectual
strategic reserve” deployed in the geopolitical maneuvering
of the Cold War.
The school’s prestige has been built this way —
on relationships. David Gergen IOP 1984, communications expert,
recruited as a professor and then director of the Center for
Public Leadership, served presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan,
and Clinton. He says his entrée to the school and its
people was the Institute of Politics (IOP) — that, and
tennis. To Gergen, the IOP is a relationship-building enterprise
as much as a Forum, so to speak, for ideas. “People get
to know the place and they become friends of the institution,
friends of the Kennedy School, and then they’re happy
to come back,” he says. “Those relationships matter
a lot.” The IOP is a structure for remarkable people
to meet one another.
And at this point, the roster of remarkable people is long.
Darman and Porter were the most noteworthy recruits on the
first Reagan team — the first administration assembled
after Littauer opened. As the Reagan years went on, and the
fierceness of the ideological fires dimmed, more Harvard affiliates
helped out the Reagan administration: Allison led Weinberger’s
“intellectual strategic reserve.” Bill Kristol left
a professorship to become assistant to William Bennett, from
whence he was destined to become a powerful conservative voice.
Gergen went the other direction: he took a fellowship and
established his relationship with the IOP after serving as
communications chief for the Great Communicator. Bush, Sr.,
tapped his share of the school’s talent, too: Darman,
Porter, and Kennedy School graduate David Sparks MPA 1977.
The new president retained as attorney general Richard Thornburgh,
a former director of the IOP.
The Bush-to-Clinton transition resembled the moment after
possession of the football moves from one team to the other:
a whole troop of political players, Porter and Darman among
them, journeyed to Cambridge, while Robert Reich (lecturer
to Labor Secretary), Nye, Allison, and their supporting casts
moved to Washington. Former Academic Dean David Ellwood co-chaired
Clinton’s welfare reform effort, a hallmark of his presidency.
Professor Mary Jo Bane resigned her administration post as
assistant secretary for the Administration for Children after
that reform was enacted in 1996, and returned to the Kennedy
School. Many of the other Kennedy School players came back
to Cambridge four years later.
The “stars” tend to make headlines; but a steady
stream of students head for Washington every year, and a few
wind up at the White House, as White House fellows, or through
avenues such as the Presidential Management Intern Program
where the school is strongly represented. “It’s
too easy to focus on faculty and to forget that students are
our core product,” Gergen says. “We’ve had
an outstanding stream of young people who’ve come out
of here, or Mid-Career people, who’ve worked in Democratic
and Republican White Houses.”
David Morehouse MPA 1999, a veteran of Clinton’s national
drug control office, came to the Kennedy School to help him
make the leap to the very top. “I was starting to feel
like I needed some academic credentials to keep moving, and
I also had never had management training,” says Morehouse,
deputy director of the Executive Programs Office at the Kennedy
School. After graduating as a Mid-Career, he became one of
Gore’s senior advisors. He’s active in the current
presidential campaign and already has been to Iowa with Senator
John Kerry.
Betsy Myers MPA 2000 was well connected in the Clinton White
House, and her office walls at the Kennedy School prove it.
They’re lined with photos and documents from her time
in the West Wing. Myers’s sister is Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s
first press secretary, and Betsy headed the Office of Women’s
Initiatives and Outreach. President Bush eliminated that office,
but Myers, who left the White House to attend the Kennedy
School and now directs the Alumni Programs Office, is getting
re-connected — to Republicans. Chief of Staff Andrew
Card KSGP 1980 has helped set up alumni events. In working
with graduates, Myers has now developed a new Republican network
that includes entrée to a White House occupied by her
former foes.
That’s she’s been able to do it is witness to the
power of personal relationships.
At the same time, the personal side only goes so far. Kamarck
points out that the school remains a research institution
and school of management, whatever philosophy is dominant
in the current executive office. Thus she can say, and mean
it, “I tend to sort of have two lives here — I play
the role of the loyal Democrat within the realm of the press
and the political…but
in the research, it’s different and has to be. The actual
research tends not to be ideological. Good implementation
of policy is good implementation of policy whether it’s
a Democrat or a Republican.”
Craig Sandler MPA 2000 owns the State House News Service
in Boston.
Illustration: Bill
Jaynes
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