Df· Eberhart l~/16/75 I Wash, D.C. EAR Well anyway, that is where I stand. I have gotten started and I should tell you that one other thing that I want to do is in addition talkiftg to about 25 to 50 people, some at greater lengths then other, obviously, I am preparing a letter which I hope to send out to as many as 200 other people who have been involved in the NIMH program in various ways. Whether they have been on various committees at one time for an extended period of time or whether they have been involved in a particular activity. I would like to be able to collect not only personal anecdotes and reflections and commentary but also information whic5itha1dn't know or neglected to think about. The book, I do have an outline for it right now which I will show you later, is intended not to be a chrono­ logical presentation from year 1. But to focus on various aspects of the program. One major aspect of which would be the intermural program, obviously, I couldn't hope to cover even a significant portion of the whole intermural program and I neglected to say that I talked to Dave Shakow for one afternoon and we had a very lovely time together. Earlier, he had told me that at one time Bob Cohen was,hoping to write a history of the intermural program. And so ••• JE He thinks historically alot. EAR Well that would be a definitive statement which I couldn't even come close to. But the thing I would like to include since the intermural program is an important part of the total picture is how the intermural program in one way, this is one facet of it, how the intermural program in one way related NIMH to the rest of NIH. And in another way caused a problem within NIMH because the intermural program at one time was more a part of the total NIH than a part of the total NIMH program. I don't 2. EAR(cont) need to tell you all the ••• JE The intermural program was always excepted by the NIH as a typical NIH component and the rest of NIMH was not always as well accepted by the NIH. Seymour Kety, of course, since he was in at the beginn­ ing was responsible for the shape of the program including a good deal of the current shape because of the structure set up then as a guide that you ·ought: to t·aILkr<ab:out. EAR Yes, I will •.• JE And Bob Claussen, because in a way those early decisions and early actions were what set the key to alot that followed. EAR And here, I quess, NIMH is not unique but it is terribly important that the people involved in many respects, let alone Bob Felix and Stan because of their position and personalities played major roles shaping one way or the other not always to the liking of everybody. But the Seymour Ketys and Dale Camern had a role early on.o JE Oh, yes. EAR And yourself and Phil Sapir and a whole host of people and some on the outside who were also fairly important even though they were never a part of the official NIMH family but either on the council or otherwise. JE John Romano was the classical example. EAR John Romano and Frank Bracelin. JE Yes at the beginning, the very begi~ning. And still very active. And still ver alert infact, they were young, I guess, no older than I am maybe under. EAR Well, what I would like you to do is really ••• you played a very unusual role at NIMH becuase you were one of the few people who had been importantly involved in both the early extramural program 3. EAR(cont) and since then the intermuralprogram~ Probably no one, I guess, has played th~t kind of bridging role. JE Well that is true and that is true not only at NIMH but NIH as far as that is concerned. Nobody has done both intermural and extramural. Well, what do you want to talk about? EAR I would like you to begin and give me some of your reflections. You have been at this a long timee Give me some of your reflec­ tions about what were, and from a personal point of view, if you want to do it, what were some of the influences early on and as you played a role both the sorts of things that you canrecall that were important from a perspective of your own responsibilities and what you viewed as the Institute first began? What do you think really served to make the NIMH move in the direction it did? JE Is your machine turned on? EAR It is on. JE Well, I suspect that the ••• to really talk about this requires some little bit of personal history. EAR Please. JE Because my relation to the NI~H is •• was determine in part by the way I got here and the reason why I came and what I was here for and stuff like that. I am a dissapointed academe during my graduate years and during my teaching years the thing that I wanted most I thought was to be a successfuly scholar and scientist in a univer­ si1Y that was the role in life that impressed me as most satisfying. You didn't make much money but it was good. And I struggled along at it. And I found that it was really kind of hard for me to play that. I liked teaching and I thought I did pretty good though but I thought about it afterwards and I decided that I really wasn't 4. JE(cont) all that hot-shot of a teach~~- But I was a pretty good lec­ turer and some students liked me but as a teacher I don't think I was really that good. And research I felt kind of thick in the head about research. Research problems did not dissapear out of the air like this and the great and ready to go but the terribly tedious difficulty dulls to find a good research project. This is crazy for someone who is a honest to God scientist becuase good research projects are around him all the time. He has many more than he can ever do, I just never felt that way. And so a year, two or three would go by as an instructor and assistant professor and I would not do any research. And this is terrible, you can not survive this way even in a place like I still though being a scholar and scientist was the best way to live. A friend of mine at Northwestern was Merlin Herskovitz .• Melvile Herskovitz and Mel was interested in me we were both teaching there at the same time. And kind of encouraged us and was a sort of a sponsor. Mel even then was a relative young man and a distinguised guy in anthropology and a leading African student of anthropology and had his finger in pies like the so6ial science research council and there weren't many foundations but one or two foundations and influential friends and so on. And Mel ~9st doctoral . . was influential in getting Angerson SSRUf"researcn training fellowship which Angerson took as sort of as personality and culture and spent time in the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas in about the year 1938-39. And he sort of interested me in the same thing and I finally came up with something that involved the relationship with political science and in 1940-41 I got an SSRC fellowship that was Herskovitz's responsibility really I am sure and went to Harvard at the Lithouer 5. JE(cont) Center for a semester and then spent 8 months in the House of Representatives. This came just before the war and the war came along and I got in the Navy and s~ent three years there in a non­ psychological billet because all the psychology billets were taken up so the recruiting officers had by advertising stock brokers. And so I spent the three years as an air combat intelligence officer and the last two years I was assistant air operations officer on Admiral Nimit staff in the Pacific. And it was an absolute God- damn fascina·tlJ:).gc~-busines·sl As the way war is suppose to be fascinating it was fascinating. There was no danger and lots of ,hard work and to be at the inside of an enormous enterprise like this that I thought was a just and important was just absolutely fascinating. It made my teaching years so insignificant as~unimportant that it was almost a scandal. And I came to feel through those years in the Navy the way a lot of people did I am sure in ther services got new insights into themselves and their lives and the world and what not. I decided I really didn't have the call to teach, it really did not satisfy something some deep need wihin me and it was a hell of a hard job and that there must be better ways to earn a living and still with some satisfaction. So I came out of the Navy into what was called a demobilization award by the SSRC which they gave to some of their former fellows to enable them to get back int9 civilian life and a¢ademic life and it enabled me to go back to the House of Representatives to finish some of the things that£ was doing~ I tried to finish. I wouldn't go into that it was an over ambitious program, nieve program, I learned a lot that it could have been pursued with some professional profit, I think. But the •••• it didn't work into the rest of my life. That is, I decided then 6. JE{cont) I would not_ go back to teaching. I h~ve been negotiating with psychblogists at Berkeley, Tollman, for a ch~nce to go to Berkeley because I had a brother at Berkeley and was interested in California and it always seemed to me to be a first rate place. I was deter­ mined I wouldn't work anymore in the Chicago area, I hated living there, if I was going to teach I would go to Chicago though. I would go to California though I had tentatively I had accepted the post at the University of Hawaii when I was out there. I had met the Dean of the Graduate School and he had talked with me and said why don't you come out here and teach and offered me a social pro­ fessorship. Well Tollman invited me to come out for two quarters and see what it was like for me and for them. I could have gone to Hawaii and I decided I won't go into teaching. It seemed to me that if I did I was bound to be a second class citizen in that kind of institution. Becuase the first class citizens have some things that I did not have.They could be real scholars, real scientists and although I could have been a good citizen at the institution I could not have had the kind of leadership role that would have given me real satisfaction. I didn't want to sit around and be a second rater and though the universities are full of second raters it was not a status that I liked. So I didn't want to go into bus­ iness, I was through with the military, I didn't want to go back to teaching so what does that leave you the government? So I decided to look around the government and see what I could find. And with the cooperation of Stuart Rice who was in the Bureau of the Budget at that ·time he conviened a seminar of budget bureau officials and social scientists and they met with me one day a half of dozen of them to advise me on my career in government and suggest various 7 JE(cont} things. The kind of, things you can't imagine happening now. And herewas a stranger on a SSRC fellowship who wants some advice on where you can work in the federal government with pleasure and profit. And the BLB people sit around tell you well how about this and how about this and how about the V.A. and how about the CIA and how about the Public Health Service •• really wasn't a possibility then. Anyway, I had an interview with the CIA which I well remember it caused me to make up my mind real quick about that. And finally the best thing I saw was a new program which was developing in the VA. I was going in the VA under the leadership then of Felix Moor.. A survey division which was made up of people like Felix Moor and John Clausen and Parker Malden and some others who had been with •..• been in the information education branch of the Army with famous Sam Stouffer and it was a high level survey group and so it sounded interesting and I went over to see them and I got a job in 1946, late '46 and worked there for a few months and then it turned out that the survey division was going to be phased out. The VA did not really want •• they had to economize or something so they wiped out this frill. And so sooner or later I was going to have to get out of the VA and while trying to figure out my fate I spent 3 or 4 months with Jerome Frank and Florence Powdermaker working along with them trying to find a useful role in their research on group therapy and trying to be methodologically useful since I didn't know anything about psychotherapy. And I was not very useful and partly because I didn't know anything about psychotherapys And sometime along in there, early 1947 I quess I saw Joe Bobbit again who I had known at Northwestern when he took his degree and I had known him some through the war. And Joe had come down from New 8 JE(cont) London, Conn. to join Felix in the Division of Mental Hygiene. And there had been a new bill passed in 1946, National Mental Health Act and they were gearing up to start a new National Institute of Mental Health and Joe thought maybe there would be something there that would interest me. And Joe arranged to talk to Felix about this, I guess. And Felix suggested that I come out and talk with him and so Joe set up a luncheon at which Joe, Felix and Cameron and I went to the Navy and had lunch at the Navy and he sort of sized ma.up and I sort of sized them up and we went through ••• well, a fairly short period of back and farthing and talking about various slots that they had set up and what I would like to do. I don't really remember all the alternatives now. The one I eventually accepted was the Training Specialist in Psychology, which they had not had •. I think they also had something in service, I don't think there was anything in research because the whole re­ search enterprise which was tiny was handled by Larry Kolb, who is incidentially, womeone else that you ought to talk with. EAR Yes, absolutely. JE Larry, was half-time at the Navy and half time in the division of mental hygiene. And in his half time he was handling all of the research grants and research fellowhsips and keeping an eye out and also doing the necessary planning for the NIMH, part of the clinical center. And Larry stayed, this was '47 when I came in, Larry stayed until '49 and during that period he also had responsibility for the addiction research center as a sort of intermural research. He also hired Wade Marshall as a special fellow and made him a little laboratory in Building T-6 and then he continued with the help of one secretary to handle all the research grants through research fellowships and 9 JE (cont) planned the clinic ceriter. It is indication in part of what a good man Larry was and in part of how small the program was. So, I came in and agreed to be the Training Specialist in psychology. And held this job for really only ••• I did nothing but that for 2 years from '47 until '49. And then in '49 took over the research grant fellowships job from Larry Kolb but it took us one year or two years to get us a replacement for me in psychology. It turnedout to be Max Levitt. My recollection is that it took two years and I carried the psychology training thing until '51 when Max came in. Arla then went over into the research grants thing fully from '51 until '54 when I left to go to Commonwealth Fund. I found the Division of Mental Hygiene which was not my first federal agency, I knew a little bit about the Navy after three years and after 8 months or so in the VA I knew something about the VA. So could take a look at a federal agency with a little bit of experience what one sees in retrospect is not what one saw at that time. A small organization of ••• when I joined them in '47 they probably were not more than 50 or 60 people, I don't know what the size was and th!=?Y were building up somewhat and bringing more people in and the group that they had was a curious group. Felix was obviously the key figure and seemed to me several cuts above any of the other psychiatrists in the orga­ nization. I better explain what I mean by that! Before I do that let me say something about the role of psychiatrists in the organiza­ tion. Clearly, Bob had been sort of picked and groomed for this job during the war by Surgeon General and R.C. Williams, if that was his name, the head of the bureau of medical services and Felix was a guy with real leadership and real imagination and he came in to do this. He and a commissioned officer in public health service and he 10 JE(cont) wanted for reasons that are not entirely clear to me now. Some of his colleagues in the commission corp of the Public Health Service to come in and work with him in this new organization. I think his decision was probably a practical one and also maybe even a wise one. He could have done something elseo He could have taken a look at Ve-ste· Mart who was, when I came in in '47 Veste was still in Fort Worth with clinical duties, he may have been Clinical Director of the Forth Worth Hospital at that time. And Bob and Dale Cameron had there on Veste from the very first-. to come up here. I think Jim Loury was already there. So there was Bob, Dale, Veste and Jim all were approximately the same age, not too far apart. All commissioned officers in the Public Health Service, all psychiatrists, all having come in in the early 30's which was 10-12 years before. In the early tough days of depression and had their training largely at the government expense in gov­ ernment hospitals though both Bob and •. Bob got some of his training from the Commonwealth Fund in Colorado. I don't believe Veste did, because I think Veste had only i year of residency in psychiatry. Now Bob could have taken a look at Veste and said he is not very sharp and since we are going to be running a training program that is going to affect training in psychiatry and psychology and social work and nursing in universities and medical schools we obviously have to have the top talent in the country or as top as we can get and this is what I am going to go out for and I am going to get the best guy. So, he didn't do that he wants·to bring Veste in. Now, why the hell does he want to bring Veste in? Honest to God I don't know. Veste came in after I had been there for about a year, I guess arid we had not really had a training branch 11 JE(cont) though I think Ester Garrison was th~re and Danny O'Kieffe came in about this time to do the early handling of social work training. And who handled psychiatric training? before Veste came •• maybe Larry did. I think Larry Kolb did both. I think Bob was a wise guy but I don't rea·i:ly:.~,th±nk he was wise enough to see all of Veste virtues at that time. I think there was some lucky accidents in this. Veste came in to head the training branch and he was woefully nieve. And I had the feeling during the 1 year that I was in the branch after Veste came that I was making a major contribution by supporting Veste as Chief of the Branch. I had no desire to succeed him or push him aside or be a rival to him. I am not quite sure why except perhaps I thought that the leadership of the branch had to be a psychiatrist and I was not a psychiatrist and Veste was obviously a very nice sincere guy and meant very well and very helpful to everybody but Jesus not very bright. And •• but he learned •• I had to leave it on tapes saying that Veste wasn't very bright. EAR If you want me to take it out I will take it out. JE NO, I certainly am not I am not talking for you to publish verbatum I am not giving you an quotes at this point. EAR O'K. JE This is off the record background stuff because I am not editing my words really •. EAR O'K JE Except to the very deapest sense. There are about 4 different layers or levels of editing I could be doing that I am not doing. EAR O'K JE There are probably some secrets that I am not telling you but if I was talking for quote I would do a very different job. I am sure 12 JE(cont) you undeistand. I don't really want to take time to go int6 Veste character which I greatly admired .. He was remarkably loyal, faithful, helpful, colorful good guy but some .of the sharp dis­ tinctions that needed to be made and sharp perceptions that needed to be made he didn't really make them quick. He did learn and as I said I do not know why Bob shaped the Institute in this pattern with these ••• but those 4 guys where actually, in:general very good able men. They are •• they were of an abler generation in public health service commissioned officers that were to come in in a number of subsequent after the early thirties when most of them came in. Because if those 4 guys had been coming along say in the early fifties they would not have gone right out of medical school into commissioned officer and stayed. I don't think. Some people were doing that in research. We were getting research and clinical associates at the NIH at that time who w9uld come in and take commissions and,stay but psychiatry was so much more lucrative that I think a number of those would probably not have done so. So he had good people and maybe that what he got was a kind of a dependability which was of a more than average importance at that stage in the organization to develop and perhaps a more than average loyality to him, I am not sure and this could have been important. He had to shape an organization with 'a lot of people who were coming in from the outside with no special tradition in either the federal service or in health affairs. He had to make a health type people out of psychologists and social workers for example who some of whom, a number of whom came from academic backgrounds who were not affiliated with the health system at all. And it may have been important to have this small cadre of all-boy commission officer of psychiatrist who could take the leader 13 JE(cont) ship role and see to it th~t eve~ything went straight. The four of them who really encompassed the early history of the NIMH was four psychiatrists. They differed very markably among themselves. None of them I think could have done what Felix did none besides Bob. ,I Jim was far to irascible and I'll leave it at that. He had very strong supporters in his people but made many enemies among people who were not in his own group. Veste was the salt of the earth, obviously but there were too many situations that the director gets into where he would have floundered because the salt of the earth was nmt good enough, you had to be on your toes in many ways that Veste often was not. Dale Cameron funny and a cold guy, efficient in a way but never really stirred any special warmth in people. And then Bob on the other hand stirred a great deal and I think that was important in the Institute. While I have been wondering around. I don't know in what direction you would like to have me. EAR That is very helpful because I think one other interpretation of what you just said is that in an unusual way the four of them com­ plimented each other that the various efficiencies they may have had as individuals so that none perhaps could have done the job Bob did. Nonetheless, each of them had alternatively a kind of competence that that when the four intoto made the combination a lot stronger than anyone would have anticipated from the beginning. JE Yes, I imagine that is so. Bob gave Jim Loury the toughest part of the job, I thought. Which was the services program, Community Services it was called. Much less structured, foreshadowed the federal role and the whole mental health services delivery as it is now regretably called and Jim had to fight up from nothing almost and tried to get state cooperation and get state mental health commissioners appointed. 14 JE(cont) And to get the formula_ grant funds as small as they were paid out and so on. And Jim developed his own services group with a kind of fierce loyality in the group and a kind of we against them attitude towards the rest of the Institute which is understandable, I think. Given Jim's temperment and given the nature of the task they had to do and the fact that for some reason that is not the rule and has not been entirely clear to me he made due or had;totmake due-one or the other with what I thought was a inferior group of people in his ~~~ue~s it was a branch at that time, later on a division. And I am not quite sure why I am thinking in the field of psychology, I am thinking in Medicine, I am thinking in Nursing. I remember the Social Work and it may be a kind of academic snobery that I am talking to, I don't know really. But it seemed to me that there are people who by and large would not have been very satisfactory in either the training or the research programs. And I merely mean that they had a lot of other virtues which these training research programs simply didn't appreciate or need. EAR Well, the first 2 years that you spent with the training program, what is your recollection as to how the long range objectors ultimately developed? Did you start, from the very beginning with some clear ideas as to where you were going or was it a kind of haphazard growth? JE The training program had the task of using federal money to produce more psychiatrists, gross numbers, more psychia~rists, more psychologists of the special kind - clinical psychologists and more psychiatric social workers and more psychiatric nurses. My concern was mainly in clinical psychology. But I was involved in the others too, to a considerable extent. Clinical psychology was a strange field for me to be in because I had never had any work in clinical psychology and I had Hl JE(cont) never given a single Stanford._Benet test or any other indidivual test of ability br anything else that is th~ clinical appraisal or any other kind of appraisal of a individual human being. I simply never have done. And if the truth were told I found that when I was in Graduate School, not only was I not-.especiaTly intex·ested but it seemed to me that the inferior students tended to go into that path., Again, snobery if you like. And now I find myself in a position where I am suppose to be responsible for developing training programs in American universities to train clinical psychologists. I didn't find this so strange then and I regarded it as a sort of challenge and it seemed to me that· the~ ci ~-o I didn't resent doing that and I didn't dis­ agree with the theory behind it at all because it seemed to me that the National Mental Health Act and the things that had been shown in World War II and what not the mental health needs of the country were great and that the mental health act was well thought out and a good state­ ment of what the country needed. And that psychologist could make a contribution if they had appropriate training and so I was going to do the best I could to work this out. I suppose I would have been happier if it had been a social psychology training program for some reason but the country didn 9 t need that. And I was trying to find a place for me in the federal government and in this new organization and didn't know whether I would or not. I was •• I had abandoned the university, my home, for 14 years and I was somewhat at sea and what not. Well, the task was to get universities to set up curricula in clinical psychology because most of them did not have them and if we were going to make grants:to the universities to train psychologist students and they would have to train them in a way which our con­ sultants thought·was worth doing. And we either had or were about to 16 JE (cont) have a training committee that would look over applications and we had to talk- to the people and find out what they were prepared t6 do or willing to do so that it appeared we had to do some traveling. So Joe Bobbitt was breaking me in and we decided for some reason perhaps some inquiry by letter that we should go visit the Univ. of Pennsylvania and Princeton which are not too far apart. And Joe was going to show me how this was done. He had made a few such visits the previous year. He may have made a good many because I came in the spring of '47 and I think that the original few grants had already gone through a training committee and had had projects like this. So Joe and I went out to Pennsylvania and met with Brook Michael who was the head of the department as he called the chief. That was a strange name and talked with him at length and talked with some other members of the department and back to talk with Michael and I remember that Brook Michael who was a kind of a feisty guy. He is probably dead now. Is he? Sb~ he was making some disparaging remarks to us either about the public health service or the division of mental hygiene of the federal government or some God damn thing. Any way, he made me so mad that when we left there that day I said Joe I' 9 mnotgoing to go back and see that guy. And Joe thought we ought to and I just said I would not and I didn't and Joe went back alone and finished the interview the next.:day and we eventually made him a grant, I guess. Then we went over to Princeton and all the majesty of the Princeton psychology department there is little Glen Ramsey off to one side and he was teaching some kind of course in clinical and wanted to do a bigger program. And so we dealth mostly with Ramsey and saw the department chairman and it turned out to be, as far as I am concerned, somewhat pleasant kind 17 JE(cont} of thing to do. That is I finally found that I could get some satisfaction dealing with these university people. I felt right at home with them as a matter of fact because I spent many years in the university and I could understand their reluctances and their problems and I understand the needs that the division of mental hygiene had. And to serve as a broker between them and try to get off things there was a meaningful role which I liked and appreciated. And so it turned out to be a hell of a lot of hard work. In those day we were of course running a national program from coast to coast and we invited the interests of psychology departments. Many indicated their interests and it was -- we thought it was important to visit them and see what they wanted to do and let them have as much good word as we could give them about what we wanted and so I traveled a lot. I remember perhaps it wasn't the first year, but it was probably the second year where I figured out that I had visited 40 different college and universities in 40 working days and nights, traveling by train and traveling usually overnight and then at the end of the week traveling back here and spending the week end in the office T-6 typing out my reports because I didn't have a secretary and then Sunday night taking off on a train again for some other place with I jumpspace so I could do one a day and do 5 in a week and get back. It is incredable to think that anybody can work that way and I obviously couldn't do it now and nobody else would do it now, I think. But again I did not resent that schedule at all. I quess, my wife probably resented it because it seemed to me worth doing. It is a strange thing to see worth doing and see working that hard. And in part, I suppose I spent 3 years working very hard in the Navy. I was working 7 days a week from 5 in the morning until 18 JE {cont) 11 o'clock at night, mostly staff work with maybe one afternoon off every third week. And this kind of schedule just takes you so far away from the academic easy life, if academic is a easy life which I don't think it is. That I didn't mind this I thought this was a good thing to do. And I 'm ••• EAR Let me ask you a question at this point. Wasn't the VA involved about this time too? JE Yes, who the hell was it .•• Jim Miller was the guy at the VA who was developing the VA clinical psychology. EAR And there was no collaborative efforts there were no individual enterprises. JE There were 2 individual enterprises. And we touched occassionally when there was any point in it. And the VA was providing, I think, what amounted to stipends. I think maybe they were actually jobs to lots of psychology graduate students in the VA hospitals. So there were VA traineeships maybe that could get combined in the psychology department with training grants from the public health service. And •. EAR But in no way were the two programs coordinated? JE I think the answer to your question is that in no significant way were the two programs coordinated. That is we wanted to have as many good training programs in universities as we could support in clinical psychology and so we were opened to any bid by any good university. We were relatively unreceptive and out training committees were too to the up from starvation kind of college that suddenly decides that it wants to give a Ph.D. in clinical psychology when it has never given a Ph.D. in any kind of psychology. And we gave such institutions rather a hard time for perfectly good reasons, I 19 Je(cont) think .. That is iJ~ we had gone along with ·them and su,pported ' . their work they would have beeri turning up probably poor products who could not have competed very successfully and it would have given the field of clinical psychology a bad name and slowed down the total effort. So we were concentrating on major institutions that had good graduate programs and for example we wouldn't even deal with the University of Oregon which is my alma mater at that time because Oregon had given only few Ph.D.'s in psychology and needed more graduate work under its belt before it could do a satisfactory job. EAR I want to ask you one more question about the training program and then I would like to turn to the research program. Do you recall what the impetus.was how the idea for the Bolder Conference began? Did some- one suggest it to Dave or vice-versa? JE Let's see. I am not sure if I can remember Eli. Dave was on the outside then. Dave was at Chicago or Illinois. EAR He was on your training committee. JE Ha? EAR He was on your committee. JE OK, he was on the training committee. I wonder if Lowell ~elly was on the training committee. EAR I think so. JE Was he? EAR I think so. JE Lowell became the planning chairman of the conference. I don't know where the idea came from. I don't know whether it came from within the staff or outside 6f the staff. EAR Dave remembers that someone asked him to do it. But I don't recall that he mentioned who it was. Ok, well so then you shifted over to 20 EAR(cont) research and what was the· reason for the shift? JE Before I' talk about that let me_ go back and say something about another general item or too. And again I speak quite confidentially. EAR OK JE You can discard this but don't quote it. It may give you some insights that may turn up some other things. I was really thinking back over my own role in the Institute and what it meant to me and what role I thought I was playing in the Institute, in the division as in the first 5 years that I was here. I was about as inexperienced in government things as any body on the staff. And I was not a manipulator of important political portions and stuff like that which is essential in federal operations. But I still felt that I was important to the work of the Institute. It may be my our delusions but I will give you them for what they were - delusions. EAR Please go ahead. JE I thought that I was a better man than many of the people in the Institute at that time. I thought that I was smarter than many and that I had higher standards for a number of things. Higher standards for various aspects of work I am thinking of and that these were important to the Institute and that I was making a contribution by being there and doing what I could do to help out the work of the Institute. This soufuds graridizing and I really don't mean it but I am trying to be honest about •.• it seemed to me that the Division of Mental Hygiene and I really was comparing it, L.quess, with my knowledge of the universities. And I had been to Harvard a semester and had been to Northwestern many years and had been to a number of other universities and knew university communities and university faculties and many of the people on the 21 JE(cont) division staff were not as_ good people as university people. And then there are lots of bombs on the university staff too but I was obviously comparing the best and we had often good ernest people but not very inspired. Some of them and this tended to be on the administrative side the kind of civil servants who had been in the government for a long time kind of beaten down the way either beaten down of self selective and it probably more the latter than it is the former. There willing to do what they are told they are less likely to have knew ideas, they are less likely to turn over the apple cart stff like this. And that the development of a new agency and a new program this is in retrospect, I quess. It seems to me to have required more than that. It re­ quired more knew thinking and more importation of the values of out­ side the federal inclave and it seemed to me that I had a role in that - an important role in that. And also, I quess, just temperantly I liked the people and the people that I was working with and I think they liked me and that well not in a formal role as a leader of the Institute, as I was never a Assistant Director or Social Director in those years but I still was an important component. Not a negligible one. This is really were satisfying to me to have felt that, rightly or wrongly. Whether I really was or wasn't it wasavery satisfying feeling and the feeling was justified that was even more satisfying. JE I know, I know. She use to be Milton Fry's, Milton Shy's secretary. Milt Shy was Head of Neurology. EAR Right, she said she worked with Heller too. JE Wfth whom? 22 EAR Heller JE That is right .. And Mar.y Cally is her name .. EAR I didn't mean to dive~t you. You were talking about your relationship with these other people and your felling about being a important member?· JE Yes, I applied in 49-'48. We had maybe 100 people in the Institute and for several reasons Felix was concerned about the bad morale in the Institute and so in those progressive days if you had the suspicion of bad morale you did something about it you just didn't sit there. So Felix appointed a committee to study the morale of the employees division and he made me the Chairman and John Clausen was on it, Joe Bobbitt was on it Julia Rowatty was on it HectorReges was on•it Hattie Arnold was on it and we did a combined interview questionnaire study of staff morale at NIMH. And I think a good study and again I am citing this as an example, I guess of my own high morale feeling that this was a worth while organization and that I could be of value in it and that Felix gave me an opportunity to be of value. This really is an important part of the whole thing because Bob was very accepting of me and I think he was of lots of people and that was one of his characteristics and he gave lots of people the feeling that he thought well of them and that their contributions were important and I remember one of my key recollections with Felix was and I think this has to do with training grants before •••. ! think it was an issue; dealing with training grants. The issue was when are we going to be able to notify the departments that they got their grants. An issue that you were very familiar with. And the problem, of course, was that Congress had not yet passed the appropriation. So we were sitting around in the hot summer in T-6 waiting for the God damn appropriation to get passed. 23 JE (cont) Finally,. the House passed an appropriation and the whole matter went over to the Senate which had acted. So I went to Felix and I said lets send out the notices. And he asid we can't the appropriation bill isn't passed yet. I said yes but you know as well as I know that when the appropriation bill finally gets through the House figure is always the low figure and the Senate figure is alwa~s the high figure and the two then compromise the issue. Now, we know the House figure so lets use the House figure as though it was the appropriation figure out what grants we can make and notify the ones that we can make. And we will thus get at least a 2 week jump on the final appropriation. And 2 weeks at that time was important because it was time for school to start or something. Well, Felix kind of hemiandJhawed the way a good administrator ought to but he finally said OK, I guess maybe we could do that--you certainly are right. So we quick got together and sent out a bunch of telegrams to the ·departments. I think it was the next day .•• the next day the Senate acted with a lower figure that the House figure and we had to quick sent out more telegrams trying to tell people why they didn't have what we said they had the day before. And I felt absolutely terrible because Felix had yielded to my pleas on the basis of the fact that I had spent 20 months studying the House of Representatives and just before the war and just after the war and thought of myself as something of an expert and I had talked him on to doing this thing which turned out to be absolutely wrong. And he could have just given me plain and fancy hell. Well, he didn't we just sent out the other telegrams and back­ tracked and we caught up and we eventually resolved it. Felix was 24 JE(cont} very_ generous to me in that case when he didn't have to be at all and I thciught this was one of the things that characterized Bob. You asked me something about research? EAR You went from training to research and I am really interested in . getting the perspective on the early research days. That is obvious of equal importance. JE Well, let's see. I had been in the training program for 2 years from '47 until '49 and Larry was due to leave. He had taken a job at Mayo and so Dale Cameron took me aside one day and asked me whether or not I would be interested in taking over the research grant fellowship program. And he said as we chatted a little bit, if you do that you would be right in line to handle the intermural research program too when we get that started. I said no Dave, I could never handle the intermural program I might do the research grant fellowship but the intermural that takes a different kind of guy then me. That would take a real scientist. And I meant it and I would not at that time have taken the intermural program and I an not sure whether Dale meant it or whether he was giving me a come- on to induce me to take over the reserch grant program because it was at least four years from that time before a real intermural program could get started in the clinical eenter. So .. and I think that I had •• my 2 years in the training program were two very very busy years had shown me that as far as I was concerned that program was not going to go much farther. I had what that program could give me, I gue·ss. And in contrast to Milt Whitman who was able to stay with social work training for 25 years EAR Forever ••• JE I could not have done it I don't think. I would have been restless 25 JE (cont} or bored and so I would like to do the··research thing and I was real pleased and really quite flattered to be asked despite the remarks I made about myself awhile ago. I knew very well that I was not a leader for the mental health sciences and so on and would have thought;that the NIMH might easily have gotten someone like that from somewhere else the university. We would have to go the universities because we didn't have any programs of our own. Again, I don't know why Felix and Cameron picked somebody from inside to do this job when there were people with lots better substantive knowledge and undoubted!~ just as good in administrative skills on the outside who might have been pur­ suaded to come in. I never asked Bob that and I wouldn't expect him to tell me anything. EAR Did you know Alan Greg at that time? JE Only be reputation. But not really. I got to know him by ••• yes I knew him. He had been a member of the council, I think, by that time. So I did know who he was and had talked with him a few times. I got to know him bet~er by ~p~ointing him later as the Chairman of the investigator grant committee as it was called. And then I remember when I was thinki~g of going to the Commonwealth Fund I called Alan and spent a couple of hours with him in the West Philadelphia station of the Pennsylvania R.R. trying to get his advice on what foundations are like. So I took over the research grant fellowship program and was really very excited to have a chance to do this sort of thing. And I guess ••• I immediately began taking a couple of courses in the Washington School of ?sychiatryto find out what psychiatry was like because now I was going to have to deal with psychiatry and 26 JE(cont) I didn't know anything . about psychiatry and didntt learn anything . . about psychiatry from Alfred wha.t the hell was his name McClain Hospital supe~interident. EAR Stanton? JE Alfred Stanton who taught sociology and George H. Meade but anyway and Phil Sapir was there at that time. I think maybe Phil was already in the research grants thing having worked with Larry Kolb some. Anyway so I took over research grants and Phil and I then for the next 5 years with the help of a few secretaries and a research study section and having Arnold and Agnes Kosgurl running the files and doing the paper work ran the research grant and fellowship programs. And I think that Phil and I were a good team at that time. Despite the fact that not everything always went smoothly. I found Phil a little bit of a difficult guy to get along with. I had the feeling that he never really approved of me and he sort of suffered my presence there. But you couldn't always be sure because Phil is somewhat but Phil was willing and able to play a role that needed to be played that is of someone that is very goom, to work very hard and get most of the work done while Ias a branch chief went to meetings. It seemed to me then that many jobs and organizations like this you need 2 people, one to go to meetings and what not and somebody else to be there running the store all the time. And that is what Phil did. And though officially I was executive secretary of the study section and had the branch Phil really served as executive secretary instead of section head and later on, I guess, maybe he actually he had that title. And so we went ahead running the research grants.program. EAR How did the stu?y section function at that time in terms of providing you with either advice or consultation. Where did your grand 27 EAR(cont) ideas come from and how did you see yourself as developing major policy, etc., etc? JE Well I am not sure that I had any grand ideas at that time. And I am not sure that anything very distinctive was done by the research grants program outside of starting the investigator grant which I think was a useful device that we thought up during that period '53 I guess. The research grants program had been started by Larry Kolb and had been running for a couple of years and they had made 100 grants or so already and we picked it up from there and we ran it and sort of by looking over the applications that came in and getting reviews and supporting the best ones,answering questions and going to meetings and talking about the program and stuff. It would be nice to be able to say we sat back and tried to think what would a good research grant program consist of in the field of mental health, outlined it and proceeded to do whatever was necessary to build that program. I think that would characterize what we did. EAR It was an evolutionary process. JE Evolutionary and opportunistic and I would be willing to make an argument for the necessity of performing i t that way in that kind of pioneer stage but I am not sure that is true. Somebody might very well, if for example he were in a foundation that started out to support mental health research. The Commonwealth Fund was supporting mental health research in the same years •• a''little of it. Rockefeller probably had supported a little bit too. But the trouble was that there were so <"Ct~mm few good people interested in the problems •• the research problems of psychiatry which was the way which was what I viewed as the major issue. That is we supported 28 JE(cont) a lot of psychologists from behavio;i:-al science stuff because the people were Studying something like •• something that seemed relevant to illness ••••• We didn't. I don't believe at that time,in the early days, we supported much straight experimental psychology. Though a good deal of that was done later after the behavioral science study section was set up. We performed with the aide of one study section that included all the disciplines that we thought were re~evanto And the study section was big -- it was very close to 20 people. And it would always have/ at least one anthropoio,gicsts<'.,·on: and: maybe· one sociologists but there would usually be at least one internist a pediatrician and several psychiatrists and a neuro&physiologist or somebody like that. And often somebb~y either from a biochemistry or from pharmacology and I quess, a statistician and maybe a biologist from public health. We had a lot of people with varing points of view and it made it hard to review some kinds of research grants. But this heterogenous group was able to give us advice based on both the scientific quality of the proposal and also its general relevance to the field of mental health. And they were thinking of both and giving a combined priority score that often represented a compromise of relevance high in quality and low compromise and vice versa. EAR Do you recall at one time that Dave Shakow came up with a grand plan for a whole series of variables that would be built in to the so-called priority score and taking into account a variety of attributes, one of which would be scientific competance, relev.ance, priority. No.? JE I don't really remember that, though, in various times I have gone over and over the whole issues of priorities and how one could break them down and make them better and so on and so on. And this is 29 JE (cont) the factoring out of th~ various ele~ents and providing .... ! don't think even then I h~d very high faith in rating scales even the most finely made rating scales. EAR I am going to quit even though we are obviously, in the middle of something. Ma~e this effect will take place and I will come back and we could pick up, fro:g:,: -.here ,,'_:,_:~An hour and a half is about all one should do of this kind of thing. JE I think so too .. r find myself getting kind of tired, EAR It is too much. But I do appreciate this and I do want to come back and I want to know why you left and what happened when you came;:i:back.. We haven '·t even started to talk about the intermural progra:rµ. OK. And I am reading a very fascinating boom. now called "The Awkward Embracen-.