Carter’s Election Beckons Top Academics to Washington

Former President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1977, marked not only the arrival of the first democratic administration in eight years but also the departure of many Harvard faculty members to Washington, D.C.

With Carter’s electoral victory in 1976, local media ranging from The Crimson to the Boston Globe speculated for a year over which members of the Harvard community would be called upon to work in Carter’s White House.

Almost two decades earlier, when John F. Kennedy Jr. ’40 was elected in 1960, McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) left Harvard to become special assistant to the president for national security affairs.

And Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ’38 was a professor of history before Kennedy appointed him as the special assistant for Latin American affairs.

The Kennedy administration alone created a demand for the Boston-Washington shuttle flight.

Similarly, famous statesman and academic Henry A. Kissinger ’50 left Harvard’s government department in 1969 to become Richard Nixon’s national security advisor and, later, his secretary of state.

The Harvard professors that Carter tapped for his administration came from a wide variety of academic fields, ranging from health sciences and medicine to government and economics.

Harvard To Washington

Julius B. Richmond, Macarthur professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School was among the first faculty members to depart for Washington. He left Cambridge in 1977.

Under Carter, he became a member of the newly formed Commission on Mental Health, the assistant secretary of the department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and the administration’s surgeon general.

Richmond says Carter was interested in health care reform.

“I found him to be very intelligent and very concerned about the health of the American people,” Richmond says.

Richmond was no stranger to work in the public sector. He worked for Former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964, and worked to create public health programs that would aid local groups directly rather than channeling resources through state health departments.

In 1965, Richmond became the national director of Project Head Start, a child development program designed to serve the children of low-income families.

Noting his past achievements, the Carter administration asked Richmond to return to public service as HEW assistant secretary.

He agreed on the condition that he would also be appointed U.S. Surgeon General, widely recognized as a spokesperson for public health.

According to Richmond, his dual authority effectively improved HEW’s managerial capabilities in setting public health initiatives.

“For the first time, we set health goals for the next 10 years from reducing heart disease to improving mental health services,” Richmond says.

After the Reagan administration assumed power in 1981, Richmond returned to his work at Harvard Medical School, where he developed health care policy courses that combined elements of science, politics and economics.

An Unexpected Appointment

Hale Champion, former Harvard vice president for financial affairs also left Cambridge to take a top post as undersecretary of the department of HEW.

Champion, a former financial reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and a Harvard Nieman Fellow from ’56-’57 said he did not expect to work in the Carter administration.

In 1976, he ran in the Massachusetts primary as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, pledging to support not Carter, but Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.) for president.

“I just thought he was the better democratic candidate in terms of experience and knowledge,” Champion says.

Though he had supported another candidate, Champion was unexpectedly offered the HEW sub-Cabinet position.

“The secretary, Joseph Califano Jr. wanted to get someone with the appropriate government and financial experience and I guess I was that someone,” Champion says.

Champion describes Carter as an intelligent man but criticizes him for looking at issues as “a governor of a small state and not as a president.”

“The administration was not well-organized to make full use of all utilities and did not know how to divide responsibility in government,” Champion says.

After working for Carter, Champion returned to Harvard to serve as the Executive Dean of the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) until he left temporarily to become chief of staff to former Mass. Governor Michael Dukakis in his failed bid for the presidency in 1988.

Highly Recommended

Patricia A. Graham, Warren professor of the history of American education, says her appointment as the director of the National Institute of Education (NIE) was influenced by her acquaintence with Champion, who was directly involved in filling the vacant positions within HEW.

Before her move to Washington, Graham served as dean of the Radcliffe Institute and vice president of Radcliffe College.

At the time of Carter’s election, she was actively involved in developing the details of the 1977 Radcliffe “non-merger merger” agreement with Harvard.

Graham worked to create an agreement that would make Harvard responsible for the undergraduate education of women while permitting Radcliffe to keep its endowment and real estate.

During these negotiations, Graham met Champion, who sought to bring Radcliffe’s endowment under Harvard’s control.

“Though we were on different sides of the negotiations, we had come to respect each other,” Graham says.

At the NIE, Graham ran a $70 million agency responsible for educational research.

The agency was new and had a troubled political history. But Carter’s administration substantially increased NIE’s budget to fund research on the effects of race, gender, and social class on academic achievement.

“I learned an enormous amount at NIE, and when I resigned, I wrote President Carter saying that I had not worked this hard since the first year I taught,” Graham says.

In 1981, when she returned to Harvard, Graham was appointed dean of the Graduate School of Education, a position she still holds today.

“Working for my country’s government and trying to make it serve its citizens better is an opportunity I cherish and for which I am extremely grateful,” Graham says.

Early Opportunities

Some Harvard professors found their way into the Carter White House even before he was inaugurated in 1977.

KSG Dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. and Weatherhead University Professor Samuel P. Huntington were both given positions in the administration after serving as consultants for Carter’s transition team.

Nye continued working for Carter as deputy to the under secretary of state for security assistance, science and technology.

He also chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Huntington, as advisor on national security to president-elect Carter, worked to develop policy initiatives on global human rights, nuclear weapons, and world food shortages.

After the transition, Huntington moved to Washington and became a special consultant to the National Security Council. He is now the director of the Weatherhead Center of International Affairs at Harvard.

Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz and Dillon Professor of Government Graham T. Allison ’62 both advised the transition team as well.

Dershowitz says that after he wrote an article on prison sentencing in The New York Times Magazine, the Carter administration called him requesting his thoughts on America’s criminal justice system.

However, after Carter’s inauguration, Dershowitz remained at Harvard Law School. Allison also stayed in Cambridge to become the KSG Dean from 1977 to 1989.

A Harvard Tradition

Since Carter’s democratic administration acquired many of Harvard’s finest minds, other presidents and administrations have sought advice from Cambridge as well.

Richard Darman, public service professor of public management at KSG left Harvard to join the Reagan White House in 1981. There, he served as assistant to the president, and later in 1985 as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.

He also became President George W. Bush’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from 1989 to 1993.

Bush also appointed John D. Graham, professor of policy and decision sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health as an administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the OMB. Before leaving for Washington, Graham also founded and directed the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

—Staff writer Anat Maytal can be reached at maytal@fas.harvard.edu.