DR. LEONARD DUHL January 9, 1978 EAR I have some stuff that Richard William's has done. The formal historical material plus a lot of written stuff, whether it is budgetary or whether it is council or whether it is major memoranda I have either available to me or in fact in my files LD Do you have that one called the r e a l ~ : : _ 1 ~ ~~ EAR No, I don't, but I will LD It was in my book with Bob Leopold • EAR That is one of the things I am concerned about that there may be some things. I saw Esther Garrison Saturday, she is living in Sam Fra-nciseo at a retirement place, she said to send you her regards. She, of course, had worked with me for quite some time, so I have a lot of stuff, but she gave me some stuff that I didn't have in my files, so if there is anything that you can think of that I may have missed, please don't hesitate. What I would like for you to do, if this is the way you weuld prefer, is really begin at the very beginning. You came in 1954, you were there for about a dozen years, you were involved in the professional services there, of course, for a·good part of that time. I t·hink the Space Cadet"story is tremendously important and·you we:Ee ther.e at a time.when really the program was impor.tantly getting off the ground• ~o however you want to do it. LD It is hard to know where to begin. It probably began in 1950 for me because- I had been working for ----Speakeri I had been working for the White House Conference for children and youth to organize their big conference in Washington from Kansas, and I was the Kansas delegate actually and my mentor at that 2. LD(conniued) time who is still a close friend, was Ed Greenwood) ·± donl,t_-know wheth,,er you know him . \ EAR I know;him, but not that well. LD Ed was then Head of Southern School, he symbolized something which nobody else did except maybe a l±ttle bit of Will Menninger, which was it was a concern and preoccupation with consulting in the schools, working in recreation and, a lot of the public health stuff. \He didn~t call it public health, it was really like the early ortho days~ it was a concern with a lot of the broader issues relating to the problems that psychiatry,_ children an~_Jamily and the like and Ed got me ~ W'.I.J>\. \~~ deeply involved in _ _ _conference and got me involved in meeting all the cast of characters, Ericson and wh_at have you In December, I think it was December, because whenever the Conference was I went and visited Bob Felix and I walked in with a sunflower on my lapel and his secretary, whose name I forget now, greeted me. EAR The little hunchback« very little LD We had a long talk and Bob was really amazingly supportive of that one and said that he was really very excited about all these things and tha.t was the first hint -r had that there was anything more than psychanalytic psychiatry·or shock psychiatry, I had known shock psychiatry in Albany and knew a lot of psych­ analytic stuf_f in Topeka. I was a· year and a quarter through my residency at that time. I went back and suadenly there was a tap.on my shoulder which was the Army to pay my military debt. ] got on a plane and flew back to see Bob Felix and saw Vesty. I don't know who else I saw at that time, they said that they had no job for a half-trained psychiatrist, but Bob again was 3. LD(continued) interesting. I listened to what he was talking about, he said "well, he ,didn't know what to do but; would ,, I go to see Palmer~Assistant Surgeon-General. Palmer~ had talked to Topeka some time before and the next thing I knew ~f> I was downtown. They asked me to join the ~ divisi-on~of the Health Service, I left Topeka and was·~assigned ·out here working for Henry Blum, who is now Professor of Public Health, was one of the space cadets later and is probably one of the great health planners and has developed into one of the great health planners over the years, but that was the beginning of a funny, a little tie with B.ob, it wasn • t very much, I didn't think he knew me more tha:ir\anybody else, but that quality of his informality to me was very different., l?ublic ijealth ~ervice was a very different organ­ ization. When I came in I had tea with the Surgeon General. K.y public Health Service number was pretty low, so very quickly it was a very small organization where everybody was really worried about who and what you were and they kept very close· tabs on you, so that even though I went of·f to the T,\ di~isi6n, Bob Felix knew who I was and th.at was an important part of the Service at that time. ~~MR WAS A strange place out there, it was just starting T-7 EAR T-6 LD· That's right, T-6, T-7 is here. That was the last I saw them really• 'Then I went back to Topeka and finished up. It's really in trouble in Topeka, I was in Topeka this week. I remembered a lot of these things talkin_g with ~arl Menninger and ~arl immediately called me a prostitute because I was interested in broader public health issues, I should have been a young analyst, they kicked me out of the"""-~ Institute. That was 4. LD(continued) important, too, because I didn't quite know what I was going to do at the end of my residency by 54. • Then there was a character that came plodding through ~opeka one day, it was Dick Williams, and I didn't meet him, but Ed Greenwood did and immediately called me on the phone and said that there is some character here that has a very strange job, and he said "I didn't know anybody that could fill that job, because you are nuts, they're nuts and I don't know what they want" so I said "what's this job and he said "something having to do with just keeping in touch with strange new ideas, he said that you could do anything that you wanted, I couldn't believe this. I met Dick and Dick said "why don't you come to Washington and see whether it is of interest to you" and in my usual way I started probably a relationship which should be familiar to you since, because it was a pattern what I did later. I asked ~arl whether I could go and he said no, you have 36 hours of and if you can go and come back in 36 hours you can go, so I made a reservation it was on Ozark Airlines in Kansas City, TWA and I get down to the god damn airport, Ozark didn't land, and I said I will never get to Washington, so I started my crazy career in Public Health Service by chartering a plane into Kansas City, that fiew me in right next to the airline, got off the TWA plane and flew into Washington, met a guy named Joe Bobbitt and handed him my bill for the charter, and that was how I started. The first thing that I heard about was Bruce, I didn't quite know what that was all about. He essentially said that I could do what I wanted, it was very amorphous, and I said what is Professional Services Branch, and they didn't know, but you were supposed to really keep track of new areas and if you kept track of it, it was important, you were the eme~g i;n.9 areas, i t is fine, you 5• .:,ot'-r LD(continued) are going to be the psychiatrist., John Cla~son sought of had the job before me and John was moving over to the clinical center. He didn't quite know what it was, they were doing something different when John was there. They were getting a new guy, his name was Ray Gould and I think I came June 21, 1954. Ray arrived the same day. The sort of joke was when I was a little kid I went to a camp called Camp Rising Sun, which was an interesting camp of kids picked from high schools all over New York and from all of the many countries around the world and Ray had been Counselor in that camp in 1930 and I had gone there in the 40's There was a nice chinese boy in my group and he turned out to be Chou En Lai's secretary, I mean it's that kind of place. It is symbolic in a sense that the Space Cadets became symbolic of connections ~~ ~~ ~~ 9 ~~.·~·k~~, And they sent me this. At the beginning I hadn't the vaguest idea what that job was about, I really didn't know. Bob Felix told me that if1'stayed two years ahead of Congress everything would be alright. I said stay what?cM€l \le said llyou are going to have money, go start projects and if Congress ever asks us a question, I have to be able to answe.rthat we are doing it and you better figure out how to do it. I didn't know what that was. As you remember years later, various people gbt.furious 0 at us because of this because it was the royal road to a grant, it didn't follow any of the procedures, it didn't go through Review Committees' in the same way, everything was ad hoc, it was loose. We gave money to ·people who had nothing to do with mental health. The first th1ng that I got involved in was, what was the guy's name? He was the Deputy Director of NIH. He was working for Shannon, Van somebody EAR Van Slyke 6. LD Right, Van Slyke. There was a meeting downtown, he called \lP Felix and said we got to get involved in mental reta:t!dation 1 send us your expert. I became an instant expert~ If t gave myself about three weeks I could be an instant wori:d expert an any subject. That was the first time in my life I knew of a place you could institutionalize C.."'v+2.. y"'-~J so I went down with him and met Joe DouglasjJ who was working downtown with Undersecretary Nelson Rockefeller. Me-t Nelson Rockefeller• that was my beginning of my heady roie, here I was, I was about 28 years old and here I was spinning around Washington and then they said well, what are we going to do about mental retarda­ tion, we didn't know, and nobody knew. I had been reading all kinds of things, I think I had better get on the road and start looking. , we are going to have a meeting, "I started some interdepartmental committee •. Doug:lasSwas chairing it, the Office of Education was iniit" and they didn't quite know what a.. to do and I took off and w<fmdered and then I found a State hospital; a strange-state hospital in California, some little hungarian and talked to him, he gave us some long tales about e{Ecaping from Hungary, his jewish background; gentile wife, all kinds of crazy things, his kids playing chess and mathematics, now this kid is now the world's champion. He had all these patients working for him, he was a real king of a czardom. We just started to talk and out~hat emerged a first set of research projects, Mort Kramer follow up the patients, that ,-~..,..\C\.~ was the discovery of George ~argin, George had come, I think, Illinois, that "\:O,.a1>"'~ the first time that George had hit the 7. LD(continued) the national scene and tha.t became a them of finding people, sort o;f; digging them o:u:t and setting them loose. 1hen I started working with a guy by the name of Dick Maslandt, Seymour ~,J"-tx..CS-0,f\. Sarensen, a character that I had never heard of at that time ,,was ' Cr-Lo...<:\ \,J \"' D.i:~nzz,en, Tom Clad:wick and, we put together that book within the National Association of Retarded Children, I spent a lot of time with them, organizing them to get interested in broader issues, they ended up producing mental subnormality ,. that book out of that Masland became Director of NIH and Saraeen started ~~"' the off from that into being/\clinical psychologist at Yale. Gladwi~ w~nt into NIMH, so that was another god damn thing that started to happen,you would find people and bring them into prominence and ~·°'- the next thing you knew they were up on their own., they were at ~u__ ltt.A-, very important peaee lives-. In those days NIMH was, you know, a very tiny place 6 &ig decisions took place around the lunch table. By the time you came there, there was some of that, but not very much :/and Seymour Kety, Cohen, Bobbitt, Vesty. Sometimes Mil--t'Whitman would stick his head in but he really wasn't part of that. EAR Phil Sapir LD ~,~n" + Phil was sought of there, but not really part of it. I never understood that httt he gradually he was there in name, but he really wasn't part of that group. Kety, Cohen and Eberhart, later Dave Shakow sat in with us. It was a very interesting phenomenon. in those days, a phenomenon with something and I haven't (v~"'~ thought of this in a long time, Tinkers, to Bel,v:ards, to th°' 1',l~.• Bobbitt to Vesty to Felix and I realized very quickly that Bobbitt was doing most of the formulation, most of the critical issues 1t was a paradox I could never understand with Joe. On one 8. ,t\Jrt\ :> LD(continued) level he was probably one o:f the dullest peepl:e I knew and on another level he was the most exciting, interesting human-beings and fabulously supportive of me during that period. Dick Williams was always there, strange Dick, sitting up on the side, writing and looking a little paranoid,.~hat was there from the very beginning. He was working at the time with Maury Schwartz ~ peopl,_e·that became the aging project here in San Francisco. Joe was deeply involved in the group that became the Communications ~~ group at Stanford, '¼'ramm, I think they were then at Illinois. \.lere I was doing retardation. What was interesting was in those days, J?~ofessional Services Branch was not outside aim because we all sat around the table and everybody would 5C.\iw.,b"Z.C:.- Kety would talk about his stuff in research, Shakow would bring up something and Cohen would bring up something and Felix would tell stories about ~"' ~ he was going Kansas, he would get to talk about i-e-analys$s, through this analyses with Fried~ at that time and everyone was trying to convince Bobbitt to go into analysis, it was a formal, informal family. I would say in a funny way, very jewish, the majority of jews there, Mort Kramer. EAR And, even the non-jews were jewish. LD Yes, were jewish. Bob Felix, there is a story that he is jewish, and somebody claims that there is a··.i:Md<aen brother who is jewish., but God only knows. Remember Sy Goldstein, he is here, you know. He sometimes sat in and all these characters said that it was really like a big family, it would always have the same character­ istics with Bob goosing the secretaries going down the hall, pat them on the ass, all the sexist things that everybody hates now, but it had another quality, it was not very sexist at that time, that was the funny kind of glue that kept that group going and Bob 9. LD (continued) always operated walk,ing in and, .oqt qf everybody's office, pestering them, his door was then really wide open, you could walk in and out - it was kind of strange - and he had a very important philosophy which he stated to me, which he never made explicit, but he really did with a lot of other people, but he said to me, you can go out and speak for the NIMH anytime you want and doesn't matter where you are, you are free to talk for NIMH, he said you are perfectly free to say a:rlything and commit us to anything, that was kind of a wild statement and he says I will back you to t.h.e-,J'1il t~ Tf you make a mistake you son of a bitch, 1 when you get back I am going to beat the shit out of you, but it is going to be private, He never did, but in a sense there was a sense of trust that disappeared years later, it was a trust that said -"I think you guys are pretty god damn good,you know things I don't know, I don't trust aomputers or things like that, i .just trust you as people,"it was a varied people,\\amish organized, which was very family-minded. It was coupled though with stories at least in my concurrent philosophy about even psychotherapy, which is very personalized. The fact that Bob and everybody else was telling tales, reliving of the mythology of the Institute, they redid the story of what happened at the Coast Guard Academy, how this thing evolvecfli ':how these guys floated in and out of places, why Curtis Southerd got into this, and what was Vesty's relationship, there were jokes about the difference between the jews and the high episcopalians, Vesty and Felix. It was than· so completely different./\ anything that I knew later that for me it was very freeing, they did things which never happened later 6 \lere's your book of TR's which you carried in your pocket. you never wrote orders, I had orders that were written once a year; to go anyplace in the United States and occasionally I would 10. LD(continued) have to get ~t amended, to go to Europe, but that was it. Nobody checked your telephone, nobody checked anything and you were free to move and that was the beginning of a lot of things. Well, two things happened to me - one, was that I really believed in the National Mental Health Act, which was the care and treatment and rehabilitiation of mentally ill, and the mental health of the population of the United States. "Who· was that other guy who was there, he was in sort of the administration, LD No, way before, I forgot his name, it started with a B. He did a lot of business adminstrations, but he had that framed on his wall, that statement. And, I said that the first part of it reall meant that I had to get concerned with anything that had to do with illness, even though it was not done by mental health people and the other one, which was the mental health of the population of the United States, I interpreted it as the general welfare costs, and a lot of things are re;la-ted to that, that was how Joe Bobbitt brought in psychology under that thing, growth and development, that's how we got into to study institutions and organizational development. There is another little footnote.;.. I had another job offer at the time, that was to work with ~~Cl."' Eric Linden and Gerald Kaplan and Dick Williams and Gerald met before and only years later did I ever learnthat they flipped be a coin and argued and finally they decided it wouldf\better if I went to NIMH and I had no decision, they withdrew their offer. i?ut that started me into getting deeply involved in caretakers having to do with mental illness because I was public health, I got interested in the other science, so I went up to Wellesley and saw Eric, got to know Don Klein pretty well and out of that 11. LD(continued) emerged the West End Study, which got me into what became very quickly the largest city planning study in the United States, urban renewal study. It shocked the hell out of ,-4- me. becaus,e it changed national policy, just by its act~ being be,fore the result even came out. That led to me seeing crazy,' people in many different fields. I started to have to seeing housing people and planners. One day I saw David Reisman and he introduced me to Herb Ganz, Dick Meyer and characters and I said because I was lazy I think that's what happened,l\you know, it crazy me going to see all of these people. They introduced me to Jack Seeley, too~ It was crazy to visit everybody, why don't they all bring them together. At that same time, there was another guy who started to do things, that was Jack Calhoun, he came to see me and he said, I don't know whether Eberhardt-or Or Shakow sent him to me, he said that he was trying to look at the relationship with animals to their environment and he had been working with Schneirl~ and all kinds of people, and they told him to talk to me because Professional Services Branch . ~ - ~ ____to -~ bring them together and we talked and I suddenly had th~s crazy notion which said, okay, let's bring both the groups together, that was the origin of the Space Cadets and acutally that's the only files I have, that's the whole Space Cadets file. We brought all those characters together, there were no great ~°'-they had no product, which killed Phil Sapir, it drove him nuts and they kept asking me for cost accounting later as to what was the effect of this, what was I doing with it, where's the product. EAR The first meeting then was LD in 54 12 EAR Yes, but I mean that there was no formal ~ "'\ ~ ~ , LD No, what it was, the first meeting was let's get together and talk about man or relationships, the environments, we are all a bunch of experts, what have you got on your mind and the theme emerged out of there for, each half day of the meeting somebody would present and the rest of these characters would talk. It became very clear to me that no matter what field you were in, they were all in the same business, people like Alec Mickell"~ned, Scott Buchanan, Eric Linde~avid ~ was in this. All these characters, Van Snyder later came in and then at the end they divided into two groups, one was the c.J:t:i. ~ ~J people nobody ever heard of, like Herb Ganz, Mel Weber, people with Calhoun, nobody knew who Jack was at that time. We had two groups and one d a y \ - \ ~ essentially said that it w a s ~ ~~ ii;i. education, it really was. Over the years there were about 40 guys, the people involved, even Bob ~H-Ol>.. ~ ~~ Weaver was involved, he became my boss"- Catherine Bauer,~ the housing legislature •, A A A A The strange thing was you V'->'4..;>~ 4 4 go back and look at it, we were talking about issues that years later, some of them have came to the fore and to this day some have not even been touched on and that was my theme in that whole place and the theme was always what kinds of things could I get into ahead of the game. I am not sure if you even knew that I ran the first conference, law and it relationship to poverty and ,vec about six months later,Shreibe:r ran one and ib was all the same cast of characters, that was when Tony Cha'Sf6• was working for me. She wrote that thing, out of that w~ -~rie,te it out of the Space ~~~ Cadets, it was a thing we wrote. Fhil Seskinieh wrote it with me, we made a proposal and Tony Gh~-,and Matt made a proposal 13. LD (continued) for having demonstration cities a.round the country, "/ Lv~(~t.\'{e.r- gave that to Paul 1DVetsa-ek, Bob Wood, and then it became the core of a model city bill and you went back to the beginning} meeting with Van Slyke and downtown in Douglas,and the things that came out of those discussions, maybe the Office of Education ~~,~ really should get into research programs, we did 9 and we were I\ .maesiae ef the first research program, the Off.ice of Education around mental retardation. We put a footnote saying that they could go into some other things, and we had the fantasy then that they could have something like NIH, so in a large part, that vv-..~~~ piece which I put in became the origins of NIE Ht A STAA.NGE crazy way. EAR Well, characterize this a little bit more if you would, Len because yoJre. stressing an important aspect thisc".whole thing, the serendipity, the flipping of the coin, that put you one place rather than. the other, the idea of getting these guys togethe~ rather than you going out to visit them, but in fact it was more than that because you were thinking·::a.11 the time, they were thinking aTl the time, there were problems that needed ) to be solved, the· atmosphere and the environment for creativity was greatly facilitated by all of this· freedom, even amporphous J but they were positive, what was it as· yQ11 now look back that served as the intellectual articulation of these things ... LD Several things, one was that very early on we decided that we would bring the very best people we could find on any subject so NIMH became a University in itself, whether we were talking about Study Sections or Councils we really touched on everybody we could touch on. There was a hell of a lot of trust in the place, so that ween somebody said, go design a new field, I O!' . would wfnder around a lot, check with all these people in the 14. LD(continued) network and I would say "okay, what we got to do is this project"·and Joe and I for example, designe~ a major thing in education, which ended up supporting the Bank Street College of Education, which they ep.cil:ea up moving up town, and Bank Street beeattse changed radically because of some of the things we did at that time. Joe was even offered the Presidency of Bank Street I\J-\ ~ \,:l-D but he refused, this is after he went up to NIMII, CHDr Sut it was the ability to go beyond the establish:eql:"-d:efinition 0d5 what the problem was, so that we weren't talking about mental illness in psychiatry, but Joe Bobbitt said "man, that's also psychology and development and behavioral science" so we became the big behavioral science supporters. I think the big turning point came when we ended up talking about community mental health and we began to focus on a much narrowert·;definition of what "°'o\~ our ~ 1 and function was. But I don•t really blame that because at the same time we had spun off so many other programs in so many other places that metrtal · retardation was not ours any more - there were some new Institutes on child research, there were pro­ grams down at the Office of ];;ducation, but that never botherea ~tl. ~ t k . when Stan me because my ph<lllosophy f a ~I\ may or may no now, Yolles was being considered as Chief, and Dale and I were the two other contenders, the battle had to do w~-th whether we would narrow down to community mental health or we would do, which was my strategy which was you put mental hea:lth wherever it goes and all kinds of other programs, we should have a very narrow program but we aEe doing with sponsor it would stir up a lot of other things and Mike Gorman.and Wilbur Cohen beat the shit out of me one day at a.meeting, and said I would never get anywhere near that and •I really wasn•.t:;mnterested in being Director, that 15. LD(continued) wasn't my sch½-ick at all, but my name had gotten into the pot and they were upset enough",,to call me together for dinner and a whole bunch of us came, my wife, then wife, cried and Mike Gorman drunk,screamed at me and called me names and said, '"I am going to decide who the next Director is,,: and if you think any son of a bitch around is going to do it, not·Wilbur Cohen, nobody, it is going to be me and I am the King maker. That was interesting and it was his decision he said to make Stan,King, so that there was a philosophical difference there, a really philosophical difference. The early philosophy was, let's go the route as broad a definition of mental health as you can go and very frankly, I think Joe was responsible for that. Dick Williams was a technician in that. Bob Felix never understood it except to trust it. Vesty certainly didn't believe in it. John ,Eberhard had notions about it, but that was not his stick, he sort of supported it. Phil wasn't really into that at all. Bob Cohen said "'yes, that is sort of good, Bob was a very nice guy and he would support ('""') it. Ketfy not really. John Clauson, no .. ~ EAR Was Sid Newman no longer part of that group. LD Sid had left. I had been in contact with him through Joe, so that the philosophy really was a hell of a lot of freedom, even inside the clinical center it was done the same way. Everybody was given free reign to run and they chose a bunch.A?~ people who this \(~, were bright son of a bitches and just look at~~, he is not a jerk, he was running and Cohen is not< and certainly David is not. Everybody just took off. Thet:,second error really was an error which was, okay we have got to go, how do we organize our resource,s and meet that goal and it was then that I felt restricted and that's when our battles took place and that was when I had 16. ~ ~ ~ LD (_continued)_ a.lready started w,pndering :tb_\l,..l \?b.t.l... and everythi~g else. EAR One more point on this, Len, because you would be, do you think that as one looks at the growth and development of organ~zations per se, that perhaps what you are describing is almost inevitable in the restructuring and formalization of an organization or could there have been ways which what you did early on might have been continued for a significantly longer period of time? LD Two pieces for that,one is, as you may or may not know, I recruited Bert Brown. Bert, at that time was interested in that and in only relatively recently said he wished we had gone that route rather than the other route, but events were taking us - I think events took us, people took us. Mary Lasker took us and a lot of people took us. It was almost that we didn't have any power to do anything, that was one thing and the second thing there were a lot of other organizations that did it, took on responsibility and we were not the core anymore and I suppose O,_ that is why I wct>ndered through these organizations, I was in all those others, but there is a third piece and that's something that the only person I really spent a lot of time talking about this withe I don't know if again you know this story, but when John Gardiner became Secretary of HEW, I had the hui;:.zpah to get on the telephone and call down and say could I see him and my secreuary said, I won't call down, so I got on the phone and called down and Alice,his secretary answered the phone and said well, he will call you back in three months, you will never see him he is too busy. About an hour later he called me up. EAR You had known him before? LD No, never met him. I just said that I had read his book and I 17. LD(.continued} would like to see him and Stan never knew this. I had lunch with him every three weeks from then on and we sat and talked and he and I had talked about what it is like to work for the organization, we never talked about NIMH specifically, we always talked about his problems in HEW and his problems with Wilbur Cohen, what happens when you get stuck just listening to the administration structure, you don't have outside information, he was sort of tickled that I had come down, he thought it was a great thing for him, but one of the topics that came out in . book that he ·wrote self-renewal his _______1.s . how you create an organiza- t i o n ~ ~ ~ ~ he was probably the only administrator that I ever knew who was concerned about that issue in Washington, he was very preoccupied by that. His feeling at that time and that was the only time that we really talked about NIMH, was probably we couldn't have done a god damn thing about it and that's the best way to self-renew is to create other organizations, so that what you are saying is in part true and one of my secretary's was asked what I did in HUD and she and Dot Cole had come with me all the way through and she was cute, she looked at me and said "same business, new location" and that I was really doing what I was really doing all along. Again, when I was in HUD, as you may not know or know, I was reassigned officially and unofficially back to Phil Lee, so in fact, I was in Phil Lee's office all the time that I was really in HUD. EAR I did know that. LD It blew Stan's mind all the time, but that was part of the world. In a funny way, you know, you ask what course I teach here, somebody once asked Alfred North Whitehead what course he teaches, and he said "I teach Whitehead I, Whitehead 2, Whitehead 3, so that you 18. LD(continued} are really are in the same business all the time and then I was still in the NIMH business when I went to HUD or went to the Peace Corp. I was still at NIMH and the Peace Corp as you know what we did, we started to train a lot of people in community mental health and th eybecame all the professors of community mental health later and then they became Prfessors of Psychiatry all around and Carl ~ f r o m Seattle's is one of ours, if you just look at them they are all over the place. Walt . ~4-<l, Menninger was, so to speak, these are all our - the kids we :fe:M.. So that in a sense, I acted out my own philosophy which said that mental health could be done any place. While the NIMH acted out its philosophy, which I think it had to do, which was to carry out the implementation of the act. Though, retrospectively, I think the act was a mistake, though I, myself, participated in its fruition, the only person who explicitly said it was a mistake, interesting enough, was Harold t~ because Harold said in Illinois, the most important thing was not to build up your own program, but to build everybody elses program and he was a voice.which was really quite different from us and from every­ body else. Frank Braceland didn't believe that, Jack certainly didn't believe that. Al Deutsch did, Al was part of the Space Cadets. EAR Another theme that you are talking on now and I don't want to stress some aspect of invevitability about things, but a lot ~ of people retrospectively that it would have been better if ~ we did something this way versus that way, but in·fact, at the time that things were evolving,· weren't many of those people that after the fact, I don't want to make it so general, but people who after the fact often say, it would have been better 19. EAR(continuedl if we had done it another way, during the time ~ that ~ w a s going on ~ enthusiastically involved -fn this. LD As you know, I wasn't. I mean that is how I got into the battle with Stan. I wasn't that enthasiastic, the idea originally I was tnterested in and Joe Bobbitt wasn't, but I would say most of the others were. Bert wasn't but got on the band wagon, everbody got on it, but that's because change is really very interesting - change is involved in getting on band wagons 1arld knowing where the bread is buttered~ Jt is hard to run trends against trends. Ribicoff use to amaze me always because I used to watch Ribicoff and figure out that Ribicoff always knew how to ride the crest of the wave just before it hit at which point it became important, that's how he did the Nader_ stuff. One day I met with him at \p Dave ~s 'RI\NO~ i house and everybody was trying to tell him what his next one was and I t6ld him the next one was Urban~, at which point he looked at me, Stan and everybody was leaving, and he said "okay, I want you to report on Monday to my office and we are going to have a big set of urban hearings, it was he knew how to ride the crest, it_didn't mean that he believed in it, but I think that an awful lot of politics is that kind of stuff and a lot of Washington is responsive. Some of the stuff I did with Professional Services Branch was the other way around. We antici­ pated things. 'when we took mental retardation and broke it wide open it started to evolve, poverty in it, all kinds of strange people, that was not the pol~~owerful thing to do, but by slowly seducing the Dick Maslen'-s and the NARC, I became a Vice President of the American Association of Mental Retardation at the time by getting Tarjan in, and by getting later the ~ 20. LD (_continued)_ Kennedy'· s. and ~creibe:t"' s, it became a very different · ~ issue. Actually Dave --Ba.sle-n got a prize for writing some papers on mental retardation, having to do with the broader issues, it ~ was written by Jack Seeley it came out. Later, Bob Aldrich was ) a very close friend of mine and we went upstairs to that, picked it up so when he became the Head of Programs Committee on Retardation, his focal point was poverty, so that anticipated issues, so that we did have a few times where you ran against issues but it really required laying the ground work. Bob was right, two years in advance before it happened, if you didn't do that you were really responsive,. I suppose one of my great criticisms about national policy is that most of it is responsive policy but I call it treatment response, always treat the symptom you!:. always treat the symptom that comes out, rather than spending that time to anticipate what the real critical issues are, which nobody has time to do and I can't blame administrators. Stan had a job to do, I got pissed at times, but you can't blame a person because he is caught in a web of EAR If there is nothing else specifically on the Space Cadets or any other aspects of those early years that you want to put on the record, is there something? LD Obviously, it could be thousands of things. EAR But, anything else that you really think ought to be stated as LO ONe piece that should be known about the Space Cadets w w ~ one po~\l,t somebody did corner me and said what was the c o s t ~ 01) ct', cf/ 'tru:_J~ 1b, rw fl• It cost us about"l'l00, 000 in eleven years of travel money, primarily. I asked all these characters, please 21. LD (_continued)__ tell me, what re.s,earch they were doing and what research. they were doing had a relationship to the things we talked about in the Space Cadets. When we finally put all that piece together it turned out th~y were doing $5,000,000 of research a year having to do with subjects that we were involved in. EAR Was that written up anywhere. LD It was done by a student who worked for me at the time. He is a psychologist now in Sweden, Bill Deckings, and I reporte~ i\ n, w ~~'l.A.. to I don't remember who, I don't know whether it was Lou Winkowsky or Phil at the time, someboday had asked me. I was sort of amazed myself, but it was a self-report by these guys and they were saying honestly that they were in another area, but on the basis of discussions, this is what they were doing, all mental health money, $5,000,000 a year out of this was a fairly good return on the dollar. EAR You haven't written up then,an extended story of the Space Cadets. 1 LD Part of the contract, the transcripts belong to the people, that there was no product. There is an newspaper man who became Mayor Yorty's Deputy, by the name of Bob Goe, who was looking for money recently to write up all the Space Cadet stuff, he has all the files, he was kind of awed by what was there, but I respected that and we have edited transcripts and I have all the papers ~ ,, that were distributed. The only real product·that came out was the urban condition, which they did at an Ortho meeting. A lot of the papers, there were a lot of papers published from this, Jack Seeley wrote a lot and Sir Jeffrey Vickers, one of the really great people in social change. He is an English barrister, who ~ is about 85, has about ten tapes interviewing~ Lindenman when he died, talking about what the Space Cadets meant in his life, 22. LD(.continued) personally, none of that is published. Betty won•t let me release those tapes. EAR Okay, how about a couple of things before we close, hopeJully we have another 15 minutes.. You had another responsibility with Stan in the Office of Planning later on, with Stan and Bob, is there anything worth saying about that? LD Some where down here is a collection of papers that I put together about, it had something to do with recommendations at NIMH about what planning was all about. This ia a whole set of things where I wrote Stan about what planning was about. I don't know whether you have even seen those. EAR I don't think so, those are transcribed? ., LD These are the handwritten ones, they really reflect a lot of the differences that we had where I talked about, there is one 1965, planning is ambiguous concepts, it subsumes nearly all of the preliminary preparatory activities related t8~B~b~!~1e future courses of action, but since planning activity may take different form for different purposes the form appropriate for one. purpose may be useless for another. Establishment ii.in Office and Planning doesn '·t automatically assure the agency's Planning will be met because even reasons of question whether all the essential plannings of Agency will ever be effected. by a staff in a single office and we made some proposals about the difference between mission planning and program management planning. EA.R Why do you think Stan put you ·in that job? LD I have no idea EAR Why did you take it? 23. LD They abolished Professional Services, that's how I took it, Professional Services became the Office of Planning.J_ EAR That's the way you felt? LD As I understood it, it was told to me, and that was partly because the mythology was that that was the Office of Planning but we had to hide it because Planning was a dirty word. Now the difference in concept was this, in fact I just said this in class today, it's a class on social change for city planners, I said planning very often to me is the technological implementation through a series of procedures of something that has already been decided on and that my perception of planning was the creation of the very concepts and ideas by which one would arrive at decision which we would t h e n ~ i w a s not interested in the technical implementation and that's why the Office of Planning changed because I got out of it, but I was interested in the other issues and the battle ... that I had with Stan was that Stan said essentially he made those decisions.. t°he truth is, he didn't make the decisions either, it was being made for him by a hell of a lot of other things~ I felt that it was important to be involved in that process, so that we ' didn't have to follow out somebody elses god damn decision about what mental health was supposed to be~ io we really have a very deep ideological difference about what planning was about. I have, to this day, no interest in implementing planning. A lot of the stuff that is being taught in Planning~ schools and even the School of Public ,Health is implementation planning. I am really interested in the pre-planning value conceptual models of what ) Wes Churchman calls design. Wes,_ in his philosophical way, talks about the fact that one has to go through a series of processes having to do with problem solving and that some of those early 24. LD (.continued)_ things which are really more critical than the later ones. Now th.at I am preparing for China I came pp against some interesting quotes about Chairman Mao, which essentially ~ said, "once you can get into the heads of people -whe.ee the organizing concept is, you can permit full and total freedom in decentnalization", but I was more interested in what was first ~ said of what was in people's heads~ I was interested in imple- menting what Chairman Mao says. EAR Stan is very much a detail4 man. LD Yes, he is a detail(lllj? guy and in the Peace Corp, for example, the partnership that I had with Bob Leopold, I wandered and Bob was the detail man, and he reall~ w e ~ dove-tail ,very beautifully. He implemented and wrote all of the details of every God damn thing that had to be done, but within the context of some of the things we were doing in a broad sense and I probably didn't learn very much detail from BobG Bob learned a hell of a lot from me, and still is involved in that in many ways. These were real basic differences, it was a radical difference, it is the.differ­ ence between the Frank Fremont-Smith 1 s and Margaret Mead~"-, those characters in the early days and the later technicians who came on with the Council, it was just a different breed of characters. Again, there are different parts of a developmental process and my feeling now still is, is that there is a partnership needed between these two and that the g·ood administrators of organizations recognize you need them both. EAR Why wasn't there an effective partnership between you and Stan? LD We never worked out• ,o much so, that there was a great division between the partisans of Stan, yourself included, me and my deviant world and in a way I had to end up going underground, and when I left, as you may know, I was offered a job by John 25. LD(continued). Gardiner in the Secretary•-:s Qtf,ice, but Stan vetoed that and he thought he won and r went over to HUD. ife. a.greed to that one and I went back and it even got worse a.s you may know, when T finally, didn't know what to·do at the end of HUD, he just wanted me to quit Public Health. Service• I s:till had four years to go so I wanted to retire and he vetoed my leave. without pay status out here, so .it got complicated, but pa.rt of it is another thing, I think, that •·s Stan •s background in Psychiatry was quite different from mine, his was a much narrower training at Lexington, the like, ln his background was path.Ology, it was a different world.. I came out of a much more loose sociopolitical jewish radicalism than h.e did" tl:e didn '·t have that as a background. r ' came out of a - ~ whi•_ch. was crazy. it had 1 ~ ~octors~-w .. 12--,1\e.:-n~ r went to medical school, and h.e came ,9,,w,~~°'--~'--· 10 out of ':h!ayle:r:-, I\ & it was a different kind of world and there were many times we couldn • t communicate •. EAR What about his relationship to Bob, do you think that played any role in his relationship with other people like yourself who had been there early on? You know th.ere were pos·itive and negative aspects of his relationship with. Bob, too. LD Remember the story was very complicated, one piece. was the ("\ heir apparent and one time was AlJan - - . \.:./ EAR Right, the European situation changed that -- particularly England., LD No, it is not just England, his divorce did that.. I remember Bob r':'\ really cursing Alfan out about the divorce• ·H.e never cursed me ~ out after I got a divorce, but that was much later. He really r cursed Al\an out. ""--= n EAR I know that, I talked to Ai[an about that 26. LD Stan was an afterthought. EAR Why wasn't Dale ever considered early on as a. possibility: LD He was, but that was years before and then Dale moved out of the circuit, he left that central core and then when he came back through the St. Elizabeth's route, as you know, he was considered as one but not by Bob at that time. Bob had a crazy head. 'the head was that he really wanted the best young blood to set loose and as I remember it, he was very ambivalent about Stan, very ambivalent. Didn't know whether he should or should not support him, but part of it was Bob - Bob never wanted to really create a replacement and he never knew how, and I used to talk to him about putting down in words~ I would interview him, put down in words what his theories were about how he ran the organization, he kept denying it and refusing, even to this day, he refuses, and every once in a while when I am with him at a meeting and I happen to ask to talk, he gets embarrassed when you say something about what I thought he was doing, so I think that was part of his problem and Stan wanted to get rid of that world. EAR Well, you said something early on which I think in a very quick way is a superficial attribute of the extreme difference. Bob's office was always open, Stan's was a structured tight, you couldn't ~ get in unless~ wanted you to get in and in fact, as you know, earlier on when he came to Bob and became the Assistant Director he closed Bob's office« -y·ou had to go through him to get to Bob,­ and I think Bob realized it a n d ~ he felt that this is the the time for that kind of a change. LD I would say off the record, not off the record, bu~ I would - maybe you can ask him - I have a feeling that Stan was scared shitless at that time. At the beginning he didn't know quite 27. what was up. EAR I think that is partly true, but it was an anxiety due to his need to control things rather than he felt it was beyond him. LD Oh, yes. EAR Is there anyone we left out, is there anything that we haven•t talked about that at least you can give me a couple of words on? LD The only pieces that have always interested me was the shift that took place on the Councils', what I called the Margaret Meadi.._ and the Frank Fremont Smith•s, second stage which which were the Ewald 4 s and the Braceland's, that crew. Part of it was a move from what I call Statesman Allan Gregg types which was Bob Felix's guy. EAR John Romano LD Romano was . broad ---lo o much narrower psychiatric thinkers, who broad in some ways, Frank is a broad guy in some ways, but in some ways his view of psychiatry is much narrower than Romano or what Allan Gregg was talking about. EAR But isn't at least part of that due to different stages of the organization. LD Of course, but again, it's a circular phenomenon. fou have this kind of organization, these kind of people, you have this kind of world, suddenly you get a different organization and then it invites different kinds of people, so you get different kind of feedback and you get a reinforcement, and then you start changing your staff. You remember at the beginning there was a lot of - most of them were psychiatrists, psychologist, professionals, and slowly over the years we started getting all kinds of characters who were technical planners and stuff like that. At the beginning almost everybody, even Felix's hats and 28. LD (continued} Vesty' s- hats, clinical experience and after a while some of these people didn't know what a patient looked like, even in theii jobs they never visited a hospital or a clinic, there were a lot of shifts all the way along the line. EAR ONe last point, is there anyone that you think I ought to see that for some reasons I may not even think of-· you know, the Curtis Southerd'-s, the Bob Hewitt's and all the rest of them, LD That's the obvious ones. You have one in your era Bob Atwell EAR I am going to see him~ LD That is a funny story, my daughter wanted to get into College and she said I am not going to use any influence and she got into Pitzer and the next day, there was an announcement that Bob Atwell became President. You know, it would be interesting for you to see people slightly outside the system. EAR Name them LD Bob Aldrich, for example, was in Denver, who started this the new Institute. Joe Bobbitt came to him. Margaret Mead/, a lot of our early cast of characters who we worked with joined him. My crazy interest in City planning where I went to Doxiatas he ended up going, he dragged along the ~ L~ and a lot of people who became part~ot sort of the periphery fk~ EAR You mentioned Paul ILlosacker LD He had nothing to do with NIMH. Paul was very active in the poverty and urban issues. Ernie ~ y o u ought to talk to. Ernie has a very different perception from where he was at Millbank at the time. If you have time, it would be fascinating, he is now in his 86's, you ought to see lcarl Menninger in Topeka. ~arl, at the time, he is from Kansas, he knows Bob's family, both 29. LD{continued) their fathers: knew each 0th.er and there was a competition between them. When Bob hired mei he called him up and said "what are you hiring out of the baby carriage for" and they fought over it. E1~R Did you ever know a guy named Charlfe SchLa~fer? LD Charlie was important to the NAMH, very important, and very much broader than I expected from a lot of people like that. EAR Bob Stubblefield? LD Bob was in and out. Bob was important, later Bob Leon and who you knew. He' s dead now, was : ~ ~,:tl. He was on the edge when he was at the APA. EAR I may see Art Brayfield when I am down t;.here. LD But, he was later EAR Much later LD Fillmore was in a lot of stuff in the beginning, he may know some of those pieces, even before the Joint Commission, when we were first there, Joe Bobbitt was negotiating with him always with the APA. He actually lived on the corner right where NIH was, what was that street, the one that cut through Georgetown Road and Wisconsin Avenue, and he was right there. He was in and out all the time when Joe was there. EAR Dale a.l .l' 1 ? \,,J ~, LD Dale, is Dale still alive? EAR I th~nk he up at the University of Washington in Seattle. LD He would be worth talking to because he was very close to Joe Bobbitt, interesting enough, at the time. EAR Joe Douglas.Sand Joe Bobbitt are the two people LD Douglas~was not that important EAR Well, to Stan he was~. LD Yes, but he later, he had some interesting things earlier on, 3 0. LD (.continued)_ except for one of the few Republ.i.ca.ns. a.round@ EAR Well, listen, Len, I ·very much. appre.ci~ate..:yom{ tc;;l,kiJ19 the time to do thi:s:, it is very helpful a.nd .t:f you think. of an:y documents tha.t I ought look at other than . t:.ho·se. tm:i.~t you ha:ve · mentioned or· anything· that you ha:ve fn du~lt_ca.te,! . thc;;l_t rou could lend me, r would be very· h.aPl?Y to dupl.i:ca,.,te. 'it and $.end send it back to you~ LD Do you want all the. Space Cadet documen·ts:? + don t. t know what to do with them EAR If you can spare. them:, r· can t:t take them nowt but could you pi.ck. out one. or two that you think·were e.s'.pe.c.t'.a.lly··us:e:ful., When you get a chance., give it oa.ck to you •.