1 George Kingman EAR ••• out of research funds that I have from one of my grants. As I told you yesterday, Stan has two of everythi~g so there are lots of taperecorders all over the place, but this is a nice little machine I've just gotten. Let me just remind you again. I've already done a number of interviews and the emphasis that I am interested in and your experiences is right smack in the middle of what I'd like to be able to do. The emphasis I am interested in is really trying to illuminate the important decision~making processes thatiDok place, and don't, you would do it anyway, but don't worry about your own personal perspective. That's really what I want. And I will then use that against all the written record which I have, so that I'm not going to put anybody either in a bad light, so be comfortable. I really want you to begin from your early years because when you got there, I think you had a fresh perspective and then by the time we get done I'm going to ask you some questions about how you now see NIMH in the light of the other things you've been doing because two important things that I am trying to tap is, what were some of the important char acteristics of NIMH-that made it NIMH and how does that compare and contrast with other health agencies at the federal level, so that it makes it, you know, in the context of a larger picture, it makes it that much more interesting. With that introduction, go ahead. GK First of all, I went to Mental Health in my late 20s and I left in my middle or late 30s so it was a personal growing time and much of my perceptions of what was going on while I think they're valid, probably are very much colored by the fact that I was doing a lot of growing at the same time and all the rest. When I arrived in the office of the Director of Mental Health, Mental Health had just gone through a very dramatic experience~ It had gone from 17 to 37 million dollars a couple of years previously, the budget I remember very clearly. The last budget I ever worked on I can remember was $52,419,000 when I arrived, the budgeted strength of about 700, 750 people all together. EAR That was fiscal year 58. JK And I arrived in the fall of the year, just after the 59 Budget's Commission and as I said last night, I was directed to go there. And the reason I didn't want to go was because of~~~~. prickly pwar 2 GK cont. Chuck Mills. He's got a kind o:f k~~K¥ personality. The decision-making group at the Institute was really kind o:f a very large and a very small group, as I remember. Well, the smallest part o:f the small group was Bob Felix himself. I think that characteristic stayed the whole time that I was there. There came a point beyond which he didn't take input, he kind o:f cut o:f:f his input sensories and whatever he did and with whomever he did, he did outside and he made the large decisions pretty much himself. Meanwhile, there was the old :folks group which was in the process o:f beginning to die o:f:f and made up o:f Bobbitt, VeBtermark and Felix. Vestermark was then in the hospital. I had known him slightly and I guess he came out and made a pretense o:f appearing in the o:f:fice periodically. In those days, as you know, we all had lunch down in the Chie:f Training Branch's o:f:fice. I didn't at that point. I was ,µ·oo junior on the scene and generally was busy o:f course. And clearly your influence on the decision-making process was in direct relation to how long you had been with Felix, more than what your position was in the Institute and as I remember, when I appeared on the scene the ten-school study was ongoing, 20 sE.hools, and Bobbitt was detailed OD NIH and Stan Yolles was acting as Assistant Director, having come over :from the Study Center> Interestingly enough he I think worked very hard to learn a lot :from Chuck Mills during this time. He did, I think, a lot o:f smart things with Stan. I :found it a very happy kind o:f situa­ tion :for me, in terms o:f me as a person because there was never a time when I didn't :feel like I could express my disagreement or give my opinion or whatnot and since that's kind o:f in my genetic tree I :felt very comfortable. Fel.ix encouraged that, it didn't mean that he was going to do anything that anybody ever recommended to him, :frequently he didn't to the despair of the staff but cer­ tainly there was a :feeling that you could participate in whatever was going on and the longer you stayed the more you :felt that you were :free to participate in things whether or not you had had very much to do with it. I:f something seemed kind o:f interesting and you :felt that you had an opinion you could express it, which I think really made probably one o:f Felix's great strengths as an administrator. He didn't pidgeo:e.hole people in terms o:f the kinds o:f inputs they might give him. Somewhere, as organizations do, we :floated along with that kind o:f structure through the time 3 GK cont that I guess Chuck got sick and Van Staaden came on board as Executive officer, after Chuck's death, and that was in the Fall of 1960, as I remember it, and Van looked around and said, well, you know, you've got a very large operation here being run in a highly informal kind o:f way, which is kind of the way Felix wanted it and you're going to get bigger and there's no way to live with this kind of situation. At that point, except in the intermural program, every branch did report to Felix directly. A plan :for reorganization was put together which Felix sort o:f bought, or in fact, endorsed, or nothing would have happened to it, which re­ sulted in three major program areas, intramural, extramural and what was called Program Development, which included the old Professional Services Branch and some other things which I have kind o:f :forgotten. Extramural was unique at NIH like most of Mental/ Health was in that it included the Regional 0:f:fice sta:f:fs, it in­ cluded two branches, one research grants, one training, it included the old community serviees branch, by whatever name, and at that point in terms of dollar resources that part o:f the Mental Health Institute rapidly became larger than any total institute at NIH and I think when I left that job in 62 it was 149 mil.lion, or something like that. A substantial part o:f which was in training. Now we went througha kind o:f :funny process which I guess happens to people like Felix where he wanted to make the new organization work and he didn't want to hurt anybody's :feelings. For the :first year, and I remember this very vividly, Stan was in a very diffi­ cult polition. He had two very strong Branch Chiefs, in Research Grants and in Training, neither o:f who saw any parbicular necessity for reorganization, but I think, Ray Feldman in Training was kind o:f more realistic about organizations having to do this, whether or not he agreed with it. Phil Sapir actively disliked the whole thing and he and Stan didn't get on very well, anyway. And the Community Services area was particularly difficult because Stan had been jumped over his previous boss and made an ass·ociate director and that got to be very difficult. For over a year, as I remember, Curtiss Southard never really acknowledged Stan as Director o:f the Institute and to Stan and Stan would respond and the situation was messed up. While this was going on I think the view of the people who were in the branches, I'm going to fill this pretty much on extramural 4 GK cont. because theF-e 1 e two reaenns, one that's where my experience was ~pre than anyplace else and in the immediate • And two, to a large extent, that's where much of the kind of dra­ matic movement or activity was. Felix continued to try and run a highly informal type of operation and Yolles was trying to run a more structured on, not as rigid as he later became, I think, but still trying to get some structure out of an awful lot of chaos that weoould see and he put together a staff which was kind of interesting, becaase it included Alan Miller, who ran a Regional Office Operations, Bert Brown as his Special Assistant, who disappeared in the mall at the White House, at the Bureau of the Budget for a while, Joe Douglass who was kind of his Program Analyst and myself as Administrative Officer. And I guess that was pretty much the group at that point. And each of us had some staff or another. I guess the largest staff group became Alan Miller's because he had the largest rung in the administra­ tion operation. And Stan really tried to create a sense of unity in terms of how to coordinate • Certainly he was one of the best users of an immediate staff I have ever seen in any situation. My background is military, so I come from a tradition like that. And by the same token whereas you had a feeling with Felix that he was alternately going to do what he wanted, you never had the feeling with Felix that he felt that he was better than anybody else, and with Stan you did, and he generally was. He didn't have Felix's wisdom, he sure had his plain ••• he was an incredible generator of ideas, an incredibly generator of energy. At that point, that staff worked pretty well together. Things kind of cranked along until the publication of the Joint Commission which had a kind of, and I don't mean to go into a lot of detail, but the effect of that was that nothing much happened. The critical thing, I think, is that the Commission really called for massive additional federal support £or public mental hospitals and we wrote a piece of paper which supported that. Felix kind 6£ asked for some ideas because obviously we had to react to it and Joe Bobbitt & Co. wrote a long memo which I don't have a copy of, and as far as I'm concerned, went back to sleep. A new president had just come in, President Kennedy, and Stan felt that this was clearly an opportunity for something to happen. 5 GK cont. At that point we had a new Budget Examiner in the Budget Bureau Bob Atwell who later joined the Institute and he saw this as an opportunity for something to happen and helped generate an inter­ agency task force and the HEW representative was Bill Jones. We provided the staff and essentially Stan's immediate staff plus kind of selected people from around the Institute, of course you were one, provided the staff support for that activity. I was going to say staff expertise but ,I think that in many areas we discovered that we were not expert and probably the strength of that group was that it was able to attain at least a ten minute level of ex­ pertise about things that we didn't have the foggiest idea abcaut. I remember Julian Hanlin and Bert Brown writing a staff paper on the law of the mentally ill,Bert Brown and you, and it may not have been very good but it was the only act in town, and therefore it looked awfully good. EAR It was good. GK As a matter of fact, I helped plan some of the administrative kinds of things when people would come up with these goofy ideas, I would try to figure out how we:• were going to try to do some of them. The decision-making ••• stan's use of staff during that time, it's kind of interesting because I don't think there was anybody on that staff who didn't have at least a full time job doing whatever he was doing and with the professional staff, there were also ppople who were trying to maintain some kind of professional identity. And then everything else was kind of extra and the extra, I think, grew to kind of dominate our lives. When I think back on that experience on one level I'm dissatisfied with the level of acti­ vity, my personal level of performance in terms of some of the on-going responsibilities that I had and then I think how much of my energy waa diverted to things which weren't essentially part of my on-going respon_sibili ties, but again I think that Stan was able to use people marvelously. Interestingly enough, we were kind of charging along and I don't have a chronology of what we did, but it was Felix who really made up the concept of community mental health center. One Saturday afternoon we were working in Stan's office, God knows what it lfas about.;; .,and Felix had come in to work, as he put it, and must have spent at least fifteen minutes in the office and then drifted in to see what the crazies were up to. When he came down, he sat down at the end of the table, at the 6 GK cont. opposite end from Stan,and said. "What are you all doing? I hate to make you all work on the weekend". the old routine, so Stan kind of said where we were and what we were thinking about. It was obvious that Felix wasn't really terribly happy with all this, not that he was dissatisfied with the quality of what we were doing, he wasn't very happy with, well you had that sense about Felix, and so Stan kind of pushed him and said, Well, what would you really like, you know, that's what we really need from you at this point, a sense of direction. Felix said, what I'd really like is to get rid of the God damn hospitals and to put patients where the~ belong back out in the community and then we could see the layout in about five minutes, essentially all the ingredients of the community mental health centers, without calling it that. That was the point at which we stopped talking about massive support arld kinq of shifted gears and began talking about really a community concept, and really what the federal government was going to support was a totally new effort, not an effort to shore up an existing activity. The whole business about the hos­ pital improvement grants which were later made was really an effort on the part of Beau Jones to do something for the hospitals until the world changed and also to take some of the heat of the mental hospital administrators off our back. To put all that in some context, in 1960 I had gone to a meeting, and I'm sure FOU did, maybe under the same circumstances, Mental Health had to send somebody to a meeting downtown and they frequently would se­ lect somebody to go, Felix or somebody else, who they were sure would not commit them to something they didn't want to do and so I was scheduled to go to this meeting, where they were going to talk about some of the bureau's state services, which had undergone a reorganization and we got into a discussion, this is off the track, we got into a discussion about what kind of ~lanning activity, this new activity was going to be called, I think it was the Division of Community Health Services and the level at which the federal government would get involved and the delivery of health care services. This was 1960. And a couple of senior people, there was an assistant surgeon general there, and I think a bureau chief or somebody, who said he could not envision a time when the Public Health Service would be actively involved in the delivery of health care services out in the world. L 7 GK cont. A year later we were involved in this exercise which, in effect, was federal support for just that and of course, the federal efford just across the board, grew from that time on. To me this illuminates two things, one, the Mental Health Institute was there first in a real sense, barring Harry Truman's exercise in the 40s in this area. And the other, you know, there were a lot of people with real vision at that timei We wrote an awful lot of papers over thos years. ~y sense was that we probably documented relatively few decisions. I'd suspect that the Jean Brandts of the world are still going crazy about it because it was a highly informal deci­ sion making process, a lot of emphasis on a person's word being his commitment. I remember Jean Brandt even wrote Stan a memo at some point in time raising hell because some of these things weren't being documented and somebody ought to do something about that, and they kind of fought about that, and I'd suspect she was very military as much as eager about things like that. In many ways I was too busy at that time to have many feelings. I was too busy thinking about what we were doing to be very reflective about it and I suspecp in some ways you feel the same way. The one thing I was certain about, because while all this was going on we were also running a store and having customers come to the door, was that in spite of the fact that we had day to day squabbles about this or that, space, dollars, people, whatever, there was really a strong sense of community interest and I think that was best illuminated by the fact that when you came in my door, and I haven't seen you since the 25th reunion, in two seconds we were back where we were. That's pretty characteristic, I think, of the kinds of relationships I had with a number of people in the Institute that I felt personally and that were undoubtedly influenced -very much by Felix's own feelings of people and the level of trust he generally had, and this kind of thing. While there may have been lots of memo writing about whether somebody got more space than somebody else, our relatively low level of needing to document important decisions probably speaks to a high level of mutual trust. Now the time goes on. In the fall of 62 I became an assistant exec of the Institute I exploded in a mammoth kind of way and began to write proposals about and other things and then if we had problems confronting us in the mid 60sof taking on tlB ancient hospitals and all the problems 8 GK cont. they ·involved us in. Somewhere in the fall or spring of 19~4, I guess, I had a falling out with Stan, because I took lb.im on on a decision, and I was right, which probably made it worse. It was that God damn movie he made. I had some expertise in that area, and I didn't like these films of contract, I didn't like the movie, I didn't like the script idea. It had no redeeming social virtues as far as I was concerned, and I told him so and I kept telling him so, that I have since learned it is something that you don't do with your boss, and once you've told him so a couple of times, you;ve told him so. And if he proceeds to push on, he's the guy who's paid to make the mistakes. But, in any event, I,then in the spring of 65 Van moved to NASA and Bill Sadesky came in and that was kind of unhappy and the whole deci­ sion making process began to change and the Institute, with Felix's departure, became far more rigid, partly I think in response to an enormous amount of too rapid growth. I watched the Cancer Institute do precisely, make the same kinds of mistakes. There doesn't seem to be much lea:rming in the organizations. EAR Let,s go back. When you first came, you mentioned last night, the Edith P~FR,E~8 report. Were you there at the time that whole thing was underway? GK Yes, I was there when the Hundley Report came and helped write some of the rebuttal to it. Most of the rebuttal,as I remember, was written by Joe Bobbitt. The activities that went on with, well let me say thi~. The draft Edith Carper report was, insofar as I know, absolutely accurate. There was no major substantive error, as I acknowledge the situation. The edited report merely ma;kes it a little general. Now many of the things that Felix did, and I ' l l speak shorthand because you know, many of the things that Felix did, he did not confied in very many of the staff. Some of the things we knew and some of the things we didn't, and he clearly took it on really on two levels. It was kind of interesting. One was the bureaucratic one. We were about to destroy an organization that he had helped to create and he alluded to the fact that, in some cases, the people who were giving him trouble, like the State health officers, .were the very people he went to for help in the very early days of the Institute. And they wouldn't consider being a part of mental health. The re other was the he perceived that any/organization would destroy 9 GK cont. the mental health program in the Public Health Service, andI think he was right. There was just no question about that. At that time I was less clear, I mean I really wasn't all that sure. But there was no happy home for the Menhal~Health Institute anywhere in the Public Health Service and so there was a common effort to assimilate it, and since we were the largest employer of behavioral scientists, Psychiatrists, social scientists of various kinds in the department we really had a critical mass that couldn't be replicated if you b:oke us into the three parts. EAR Noone knew about the political endruns he was making in his con- tacts with Fogarty and Hill at the time? GK I was aware of them, but not precisely •••• EAR He was feeding them information all the time. GK Oh, yes. Absolutely. And I helped write some of the stuff, as I remember. This is clearly an example of where your memory gets better and better with the passing of the years.· I am just not clear how much I was actually involved then. It was clearly a situation where Felix didn't ask for much advice. He did what he did in a highly intuitive way and we fed his need for certain kinds of information, but the mechanic, the minuetto that he danced, it was his own. EAR Now, his story is, and I should have brought the material with me, but in effect, he didn't know until it was almost too late what those guys down there were doing, so to speak, and it was only by this strenuous effort on his part at the very end that he managed to derail the whole business. GK I think Curtiss Southard was involved in that group. EAR Curtiss was the one that reported back to him what was going on the first go around and then from then on he went into high gear and did all the things that you know he did. But that brings up another point which is very interesting and we alluded a little bit to it last night and that's the interaction and the competi­ tion between Bob and with Jim Shannon. Do you recall any personal incidents? Were you involved at any time with that? GK Yeah. I sat in, over the years that I worked with Felix. I might as well put it on the tape. I told you last night. I worked with the man for over two and a half years before I realized I was taller than he was. I mean that literally. It came as a great 10 GK cont. shock to me to discover that he was really quite a short man. But I sat in on a number of meetings over the years, from the time I was a brand new budge~ officer with Felix, through a number of different areas and problems, and I also used to sit in with John Eberhardt on the intramural review of his budget, so I had, I think, while I was clearly Mental Health staff, I also tried to retain my identity as NIH staff and it was difficult. My percep­ tion of the relationship between Shannon and Felix, I think, is different than most of those that I've heard. I think Shannon had enormous regard ~or Felix. I think also Felix had enormous regard for Jim Shannon. They got on in a way, and I don't know how to describe it, there was kind of an element of two wrestlers circling each other constantly. That's a little dramatic but you know what I mean. Shannon always scared Felix a little bit in the sense that Shannon maintained his inputs from a whole world, at a very high level. He knew a whole lot more about what was going on in our Institute frequently than Felix did, particularly in the intramural program. Felix traveled more than Shannon did and I saw Shannon embarrass him a couple of times by saying, Well, what are you going to do about so and so, and so-and-so would be some­ thing that Felix enly dimly perceived as a problem. By the same token they had, I think, a very congenial type of relationship although a high mutual respect and to the extent, very competing interests. Mental health did not fit comfortably into the phi­ losophical concept that Shannon had built for NIH and so that was always going on and Shannon would do things like not commenting on part of our budget request as he transmitted it, simply because he thought it didn't make sense in relation to this other problem. Well, Felix's interest in the budget process began, chronologically after the President made his mark on it. He played a very small role in the development of the budget, if there was a key actor, it was probably me when I was the budget officer and I would try to get some kind of decisions from him. He was a good decision maker in that frame of reference but he didn't really spent much time with it. I remember trotting over the hill from T6 to Bldg, 1 frantically trying to brief him on the budget, lie was about to discuss with Shannon, Walking in there and we all sat around the table and Shannon started off something ••• "Ok, Bob, what are you up ton So Felix went through this elaborate dissertation on 11 GK cont. roast pig, which dealt with the terrible decisions he had to make with regard to his budget and this that and the other. I thought it was a horrendous budget, in terms of its size. Shannon made some kind of comment about it being big and sloppy. Felix said, "Jim, you should have seen it before I got it to you. God, I really had to wring it out." And this went on in only the way that Felix could carry it off. Shannon sat and looked over his feet, which were propped up against the edge of the table, and let him carry on at great length and he finally said, ''Oh, _shit Bob1" But I always had the feeling that, given the fact that Felix was not a Scientist, and that was an important caveat since NIH Directors by, and large were, and Shannon had been a distinguished scientist, given that caveat, Shannon, I think had real regard for Felix and I think he also felt comfortable with him in the sense that regardless of what Felix was up to he never did anything to Jim Shannon. Felix was a man in motion, he clearly worked nhe Hill, he clearly worked other parts of the bureaucracy, but he never did it against friends of NIH. In fact, my perception at that time was t.ha""t he worked a whole lot harder at being part of NIH than NIH worked at having Mental Health part of it. EAR Yes, I think you are absolutely right. And I think Shannon's regard for Bob inreased after Bob left because of his dissatis­ faction with Stan. GK And he did not want Stan as Director. That whole thing got very messy, and I think Shannon;s performance with regard to Stan gid", no credit to him. It was unfortunate. I had mixed feelings about Stan being Director. I was concerned that such a dramatic change in style would ruin the organization. I had no question about his brains, his ideas, or where he was coming from, or anything, but I really was concerned about what would be happening if he became Director of NIMH. But once the decision to make him Director I think Shannon should have supported him and I think his conduct was rather unseemly. But there was none of that that I ever saw with Felix. I think they enjoyed each other' EAR I think you're right. I think that actually, and it may be a slight exaggeration, but if you can think in terms of someone at that level having a dislike, I think Shannon disliked Stan. There were many characteristics about Stan that he couldn't take and interestingly enough, in some instances, because they were very 12 EAR cont. similar to Shannon's• GK Absolutely, absolutely. And Felix was a better psychiatrist than Stan, clinically, and he worked that f'a:::i:rly well too. I think he saw Shannon real, as a whole. EAR Now, I think we've come to a very interesting po:ii.nt, and you would have a very worthwhile kind of' perception about the dif'f'erence between Bob and Stan, administratively. We all know the dif'f'er­ ences in style and personality, but you a~luded earlier to the f'act that under Bob it was a kind of' a leisure type of' administra­ tion, with Stan it kind of' tig~ened up. We know, of' course, about the problems of' the varying allegiances that took place because Stan came in to take Bob's place. But how can you describe what really happened at the Institute administratively when that transition took place? GK I think the most dramatic thing, and I have not sat down and talked to Stan in a long time. The last time I saw him, I can remember, was at the 25th Anniversary, and we chatted with each other f'or a while. I have an enduring fondness, but I think the best way to characterize it is that Felix had a basic trust of' people an::l their wanting to do the right thing which frequently was not supported by the past. And Stan had a basic distrust of' people and their wanting to do the right thing which frequently was not supported by the past. Stan's kind of' a paranoid administrator. He's always buying two of' everything. Obviously the system is going to break down before I need another one. My own feeling is that those kinds of' people generally have the system break down, but Stan's smarter than Felix, there's no question. I think he's more imaginative than Felix, he does not encourage growth in people the way Felix did. There are, I'd suspect, a whole group of' us who f'eel that somehow, the years in which we did the most dramatic personal growth was those years when we associated with Felix. In terms of' my own personal interest, I am interest in small group interaction and things like that. I was always absolutely fascinated with the way Felix worked one an one, and then a small group, and how he handled a larger group. He was an artist. There was a certain element of hot air about it all but, by the same token, he really got an awful lot out of' us. EAR I think, perhaps, one of the most dramatic examples of the contrast was the way the two of' them worked with the Council. Bob Felix 13 EAR cont. ~iayed the Council like a fiddler playing a violin and Stan couldn't wait for the thing to be over even before he even started. B~ the time that meeting took place he had already decided what he didn't want to do and what he wasn't going to be involved in and made them sorter and shorter and rarely, re~lly interacted at the level, certainly not at the level that Bob did, or even at the level that he could. I think that's illustrative of a very dramatic dif­ ference. But how about specific kinds of activities, for example, why don't you comment a moment or two about Stan's famous budget books, and Branch books, which never really got off the gruund, as you well recall. GK I was with Stan the first time he testified and I was with him a number of times when he testified. He is a compulsive doodad artist. He loves gadgets. We talked about that last night. We had previously done two briefing books for Felix, and by the time we got through briefing Felix, which was kind of a long indepth exercise that went on, apparently, forever, he essentially knew everything that was in the briefing book and didn't pay any at­ tention, but he went through a lot of business about being able to find things anq he added annotations. We did the budgets with wide margins. We came up with the idea of using Cardex files and we ended up with two enormous binders I felt were longer than my arm and in it he had every conceivable kind of thing, crossreferences and whatnot. He used to drive the budget chiefs crazy who had to put that stuff together and I guess Julie Siegal played a large role. Being Stan, he wanted things precisely right, so things were li:ged~,up correctly and whatnot. Actually, he had a neat idea, as a matter of fact, but typically it was carried to excess. I was with him the first time he went to testify and there comes a time when people as a witness either hunches over the table or pushes back from the table. After about ten minutes Stan, sitting there with this enormous binder on his lap, leaning back in his chair talking, it was quite clear that he had not, from the first moment, looked at anything in that book, nor was he ever going to look at it, because it was .all in his head and all digested. So be it. I could not bring myself to--,,, tell the troops that he had never used the books because, obviously, the process of putting it together organizing it and whatnot, was his own way of learning what was in the books, in much the same way that Felix used to, who also, 14 GK cont. Felix would frantically search through the book each time, particularly when he was trying to think up an answer and he would make a great show of it and everything would come to a halt and Stan never had to do it. Stan was a superb witness. The only time I ever had anything checked by Felix that I did was when he got nervous, and I always knew when he was getting into deep trouble and until the very end, he was very nervous when he had to testify. The last year or so, he kind of relaxed about it. But he was terribly ner­ vous. He would literally turn grey the morning he had to testify and it just scared him terribly. There were some marvelous stories r about why that occurred. He would get very nervous and he was a superb witness. Normally, when Felix got terribly nervous at some point in the briefing session, he would kind of disconnect from what wasg>ing on and I would find him adding up a column of figures and I learned very quickly that that meant that he was really getting scared. Anything might be wrong in this whole thing. Stan started off adding up the figures, he assumed that there would be enormous errors. Like Felix, he worked very hard at understanding how budgets were put together and what they mean and he was willing to sit down and go through the drudgery of finding out how you can discover what's wrong in a budget, if you want to. He had a real analytic sense that I found very few program leaders do or wanted to develop vita regard to budgets. EAR How about the extension of that characteristic though to these fam ous Branch books and some other things, do you recall how that was being.handled? Bk ~ have forgotten EAR. Well, I don't know all the details and I think even Stan has for­ gotten, but I think Joe Douglass was involved at the time and Stan came up with this idea one night that as long as he had organized the budget this well, he could now organize all the branches, and we were literally supposed to put down in these branch books all the material, all the information, so that at a moment's notice if he opened up the right branch book to the right page, he would know exactly ••• GK Oh, God, yes,. I was involved in that. I played passive resistor. Joe.was much more cooperative with Stan on that. I thought the whole thing was inane,. I don't know if I ever expressed that. I do know I said, when you go to testify, that you've done is taken 15 GK cont:.;~ a snapshot of a moving target and to try and maintain that level of stuff for an ongoing operation was just insane. EAR ExactJ.:yr and I think you've touched on exactly the resistance that the people of the branches had. My feeling was that this was ab­ solutely crazy and I was dragging my feet on thE in the same way, and his relationship with me then (GK - the Rubinstein shuffle) he liked me very much as a person and wasn't about to tolerate anyone not doing what he wanted iio do, regardless of' his personal feelings. They had absolutely nothing to do with that. And of course, if he didn't like you, as was the case in other instances, then you were in trouble. But I think you've hit on exactly the dilemma that we saw in those things, because they just couldn't work, and Joe Douglass, of course, trying always to be an aide to his boss, would go through this. Were you still there when Joe Douglass took over the whole communications business? Were you there that famous day when he had this pert chart all around the room? I think you may have, were you there, do you remember that? GK The Booze Allen pert chart? That whole exercise has indelibly imprinted my perception of Booze Allen. EAR Let's talk about aoe awhile, because unfortunately, we can't go back and talk to him personally. What are your recollections of' JoeJ How did he come along? How did he operate with Stan? Some of the thoughts you have about him as a person because he was a very unusual guy and it's too bad that he died. GK When Joe came on he was very grateful to Stan. Stan had saved him, in a sense. That was not the first time, I gathered that it had occurred. I've talked to Jerry Kieffer about it and he found Joe, when he came to the Department, really demoralized. Joe, for example, and I think I knew Joe pretty well, not as well as Stan did. Stan and He had a very unusual relationship, which unfor­ tunately, kind of came apart. Joe, £or example, as a consultant to the LOf'~i:ca:,:\,_: of Education at the time the Supreme Court ren­ dered Brown vs. The Board of Education and he said he tried to convince the people at OE that they ought to be doing something and the Office of Education was saying they couldn't say anthing for the federal government to do in this as a result of the decision which, of course, bothered Joe as a black man. I think Joe was a tortured black man in the sense that he was about as black as Edmund Brooke of MaSSAchusetts. His father had been an educator, 16 GK cont. he had been on the faculty of Howard University, he had been educated at Fiske and had gotten his PH.D. at Harvard. He had all the right credentials by aaybody's criteria. Joe, unfortunately, wasn't very bright, when you really got down to it, and it took me a while to realize that. He didn't have anything like the intell­ ectual capacity that so many people on the Institute staff did and I ' l l come back to that later. And he also didn't have the kind of common sense bureaucratic sense so many people in the Institute have had. He played very much the role of the attendant lord for Stan, which was a role that Stan wanted played. What were his great strengths? He was absolutely the best note taker I had ever seen at any meeting and he used to do it multi-colored and the whole business and he could generate paper like only one other' person I had ever met who can do the same kind of thing. And for a lot of things, that was plenty, but you could not ask Joe to go away and think great thoughts. He had all the colorations of the bureaucrat in that they want a lot of staff and they want a lot of people kind of fawning over them. I'm being unkind to Joe and of course he's now dead. On the other hand, I'm saying preciesly what I would say if he were alive, and I think that's the fairest thing I can do for him. I was extremely fond of the man, and I've told you this story about , which is a classic and I found him, by and large, until things kind of got wild, a very easy person to work with, he was a very professional staff person and he really knew how to maximize his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. What happened between Stan and he:? I don't know. Well, a whole series of things happened. He had a black woman on his staff who accused him of being a racist, which he was, intellectually at least. And that kind of bothered him 1 , He was not comfortable as a black man in this society. The other was, Stan told me later, that when they were in Europe on that famous tour, they got into a discussion, he and Joe were sharing a room, on whether or not the Americans would use the atom bomb on Germany and it was Joe's deep conviction that they would not have, we would not have. The only reason we could bomb Japan was that they were not white. It was kind of interesting. This was one of the few times I ever saw Stan when he was absolutely unable to accept a concept. He tried very hard but he ca~ld not get GK cont. across that bridge that separated Joe and him. I knew Joe casually socially when we were working late those nights. He lived clear across town, he would have dinner at my house several times. He was a delightful person. The kids loved him and he was great fun to be around. He needed more trappings of rank and majesty that I needed. EAR Well, I think that part of what happened is that Stan who really, not enough people know this but you and I and other people in his inner circle know that althuugh he can make very hard decisions about people and be ruthless at times about people, on a one-to- one relationship he really was a very soft-hearted guy. It was very difficult to do things to peoplewhen they were sitting there with him, which caused a lot of problems. But I think his positive feelings about Joe led him to hope that Joe could take on more than he did and when it turned out that Joe couldn't do it, I think that's when Stan started , and I think it started because Stan is so perceptive about evaluating people's performance. I think it started with that communications thing, because Joe just muffed it. GK He had no concept of what he was trying to do. EAR You were in the room that day when he made that presentation? It was really sad, it was terribly sad. I remember it so vividly, I had the feeling that he felt to himself if he just said it loud enough and long enough and with enough conviction that it would be so, and it was so clear if you looked around that room and listened to some of the things that we were saying, that that was not it. I'm trying to remember who else was in there with him. He made part of the presentation. There was a woman there working with him. Who was it? It wasn't ••• Lorraine Torres, of course, n~t Lorraine Torres, Lorraine Bouthelet was the other person there. Lorraine was working with him. Now it's coming back. GK That started the Clearing House Concept, which was near and dear to Stan's heart, and he was right, at least he was right in concept. EAR But it was not something that Joe could handle and Lorraine of course is such a cold fish that that didn't work out well either. One other relationship that was very important, and you saw a good bit of it there too and that was between Stan and Ber~. Stan in a sense hired Bert and you're right that Bert went to the White 18 EAR cont. House for a while and disappeared and came back, but talk a little bit~out Bert in those early years. GK Bert really felt he was one of God's chosen pepple and in a sense I think he really was. He is very clearly almost as bright as he thinks he is. I first met him just before he went to the White House that I can remember. He'd come back from not long before tha~ and he came over and he had an office in tlB gog house and then he was called to the White House. Bert had an enormous facility for learning things very quickly. I remember, as soon as he got tapped for the White House thing, he started to really pump me about some things, in a positive way, I mean, he wasn't trying to get anything he shouldn't have. He really wanted to learn some things because he didn't have the tools to do some of the things he was doing. So I explained the federal budgetary process to him, which he was able to spiel off, practically word for word. And some of the processes of decision making as, at least, I had read about them in the White House. Then the most vivid memory I have is when he'd come back at least for a while, he and I shared a suite next to Stan's and I had an office that opened into Stan's office, so Bert would come into my office to go into Stan's, which is what we did, and we were about to go into a meeting where we were going to discuss our use of the J14C, they were all formula grants A through C's. Bert knew essentially nothing about formula grants and we had come up by that time with a comprehensive planning grant, and we had dona all this mickey mouse stuff and I think I was the person who had done most of the working out of the details of how we were actually going to separate this block of money into key pieces and use very different criteria from the order, which everybody kept telling us was illegal. Stan kept saying, but find out how we do it. It turned out that it was ne!Lther illegal and it was quite possible but it threw everybody. We were going to discuss something about the formula grants at the meeting, and Bert was also on his way into the meeting, which I was also going to go to, and he stopped at my desk and he said, tell ~e about formula grants. So In five minutes I told him about formula grants, and everything you need to know about formula grants and Bert went into the meeting, had assimilated all of this and proceeded to be intelligent on the subject. He was not only intelligent because he could use the right words but clearly he had done something with what he had heard, more than just disgorge 19 GK cont. stuff to show how bright he was. Stan has a need for •• , well Stan should have been a teacher in many ways. He really likes being a teacher and I think he perceived Bert as his student and I think he did Bert a disservice in terms of some of the jobs he gave him, because they exceeded Bert's grasp at the time and I think other people had to clean up some of the mess after him, but Bert had so much in terms of brain power but he does not have anything like Stan's mental discipline. I haven't seen Bert in a long time, but he was really kind of Stan's pride and despair simultaneously. He also frequently had his own agenda which was more important to him, and God knows the Institute was full of people who had their own agenda. But clearly, Stan thought very highly of him. EAR I think that's true. I think what happened is that, you touched on a main point. I think that his lack of mental discipline, he really was a sloppy thinker in some ways that bothered Stan, because he is very precise in everything he does, and also, in a peculiar way, I think it's almost inevitable because Bob Felix feels about Stan to some extent the way Stan feels about Bert. You never think that your successor is doing, or can do, what you d~d. And so it's kind of a love-hate relationship to some extent. But also, I think, that Stan feels that Bert's sloppiness may even have carried over to the point where it somehow weakened his integrity and that Bert may, on occasion, have done things which really, either he had promised otherwise or he had indicated that he would do otherwise. Well, Stan didn't trust him towards the end in ways that I think caused problems between the two of them, Of course, the famous incident, are you privy to what happened at that St E's thing, when Stan went away for a couple of weeks, and left Bert •• Well, I don't know the whole story myself, I still have to get it. But Stan left Bert some instructions about something important to do, for or against st. E's and when Stan came back, Bert had still not done it, and that, in a sense, was almost the last straw. You were gone by then. This was, had to be 67, 68. GK We got St. E's as I left. EAR You're right. It was the year I was gone. It was between 67 and 68. OK. One last person, I know it's difficult to continue at this length. I just want to ask you about one more person, and then perhaps take the closing portion of this to get into the compari­ so~}ontrast with the other agencies with whom you've had responsi- A 20 EKRcont. bilities. Bob Atwell is an interesting case in point about NIMH because in one sense, I dould say, and this is overly drama­ tic and not altogether true, here's someone who got to know the Institute in a kind of adversarial relationship, if you like, and ended up really being coopted by us because he saw so many things happening. Would you talk a little bit about Bob and your per­ ception of him? GK Bob, like a lot of guys at 0MB, Bert always said he was going to write a paper about it, about the 0MB examiners because they're an interesting group. They do scut work at home and they kind of tow-tow to. they're abroad with their clients and all. Bob arrive at 0MB, apparently looking for a sphere to conquer and probably for a ili~ng time was the only person in the federal govern­ ment could be said to have read the Joint Commission Report from cover to cover. I'm convinced that Felix has not read it yet. Stan did, I think I read most of it by the time we were through, part of it under duress, it really wasn't all that well written. But at our first meeting with Atwell that I can remember he had come and said, well, what are you guys going to do about this and we kind of said, well uhhh, and we went on from there. I think there was a power play tn BOB at the time and Bob came out at the short end of that. I've forgotten the details of it. He was really looking for a real job in the agenc9ies, as many of those people do. We came along at that time. I mean we were there, and he had been very much involved, and had a lot of emotional investment in this and what not. So he got in on the early implementation plan of the community mental health thing. Bob was very bright. He was like a lot of the people who grew up at the mental health institute at that time, including me, who had plenty of brains and plenty of energy and even some imagination and very little experience. When I -think now of the level of experience I had when I first went to work for Stan, it was really kind of disgraceful that they had to select someone like me, because the program pays a price for not having well trained people in place. It clearly payed a price for having put somebody like me in. I can say that now, 16 years later. But Bob was a lot like that too •• Well, Bob left the Institute and went on to bigger and better things. I haven't met him since he left so I haven't talked to him. 21 EAR I'm going to try to see him when we get to California, because I think he has an interesting story to tell,from his perspective. GK Yes, I think he wil.}., and probably a very good perspective. EAR You just reminded me, one of the things that I think lends strength to our entire operation was that we had a number of people there who could, in a sense, without doing it reflectively. I think you said before quite rightly that we were too busy doing things to re~lect about them, but we could be objective about what our res­ ponsibilities were and how that fit in with the larger picture. And I think a number of us had that capacity which is very impor­ tant. I thinl< this is where Joe Douglass got lost, for example. He couldn't do that. He couldn't step outside of himself in the way that some nf us did and see what it was that you were doing and how that fit in with what somebody else was doing, and then even step back one step further and look at the whole thing in a kind of an objective way and I think that was a great strength. Stan had it. Stan's capacity also, and which you've alluded to without saying it in so many words is that he knew how to pick people. Felix knew how to pick people and stimulate them to do their best. Stan couldn't do that last step. He can't really stimulate people that way because he doesn't have that personal warmth. Felix is corny, he's always been corny, but it works, because we're all willing to be flattered, we're all willing to be loved and you blossom under that. Stan can't do that. He can do it on a one-to= one basis in a very small situation, he can be very very supportive but only if you really need it. That's when he'll give it to you. If you really need it, but on a regular basis he doesn't give out that way. He can't••••• GK EAR He is, he really is, and people don't realize that. Alan had said that to me a number of times and those of us who know him well know that that's the case, but he has this amazing capacity to be able to evaluate people well add pick good people. Every one of his special assistants, with one or two minor exceptions, turned out to be people who went on from there to do important things and partly as a function of Stan's involvement with them, but more a function of their own capacities. I mean, you can't,_-·give people they don't have, really. And he picked people. Mort Miller, John Adams, a whole bunch of people came on board. Brown of course I guess was really the best example of all and also people like 22 EAR cont. Bob Atwell. Stan was the one that made the final decision on whether the guy should come. OK, let's put that aside for a moment. I know there are a lot of things we didn't talk about but you obviously can't do it all in one fell swoop. You've been away from the Institute for a number of years, in terms now of how you see it in retrospect. Are there some things you can say about it that characterize its uniqueness. Sure we were fortunate with the kinds of people that we had. we were fortunate in being a program that was growing, we were fortunate in being at a point in time when things were supported, but what else can you say about this? GK Well, I've thought about this a lot over the years because some of the things that we're about here, although the environmental movement doesn't have the beauty of being concentrated in one or­ ganization in the way that mental health did. There are some real analogies. We're not a good fit at NIH. We need people on our staff, although not the behavioral and social scientists who are not natural fits in the united front. We have cheilt:__ical engineers people like that. Our grantees hire crazy people like metalurgists etc. But anyway, so I have thought about it. I've thought about it a great deal. In fact when Paul Cokeman was director, he used to call me a psychiatrist. He also said that my years in the Mental Health Institute had made me probably one of the best ad hoc Jews he'd ever met. I could feel with him about some things, and he said no Christian could feel. Paul is Jewish, sort of, you know. But anyway, the kind of Jil~pple that would go into Mental Health, their ability to be high level people who care about a lot of things I care about, art, arts,½music, very literate people, both orally and on paper, a lot of very fun people to be with. I cannot imagine ever being in any situation again and a part of it is my youth, where I would be with so many people I found so inter­ esting as individuals and so challenging. Phil Sapir and I had an interchange of correspondence on why he left $173 out of $18 million one year and I wrote him a letter as budget officer saying. It was a terrible thing. Dr. Felix had promised the Congress that he had a terrible need for funds and that money came from the Bureau of of the Budget reserve and we were supposed to spent it all and where the hell did Phil Sapir get off vouching $173. And time goes one and I'm shortening the story considerably, and I get a memo 23 GK cont. back from Phil, which unfortunately I don't have, which said that this was really part of a grand master plan, that we knew of course of the successes of the small grant program and that we was really trying to get himself in the right funding situation so that in the succeeding year he could start a grant program which would he hereafter referred to as The Mini School Grant Bill. These would be grants of a dollar or less. Well, you know, somehow, in the midst of everything else we were doing, we had time to do that kind of silly business. It was very rewarding, professionally and personally. There were so many people to learn from and I think back, because I was awfully young when I went there, I was not all that old when I left how many people I still feel very warmly about after all these years. What did I learn? I learned a whole hell of a lot, some of which falls- into the category of well, I'll never do that again but a great deal of it falls into things which are far more valuable and a whole lot more difficult to be very explicit about. And that is, now how do you approach a problem? I got a whole collection of tools on how you begin. I have since said that one of the real problems of people when they begin new programs is that they don't know how to begin. Happily I have spent the better part of my career in jobs that have never been filled. I'm now on the fourth job I've ever had which has never had a prior employee and so there are certain kinds of things you learn to do. I don't want to get maudlin about this, but I think there was, because the group, and so many people in that group, were such busybodies, I mean, they were intellectual busybodies, they were interested in their problems, in your prob­ lems, and they had solutions for your problems. I think there was a certain sharing of a kind of experience that I really haven't had since. The other part of it, begun by Felix but certainly I think one of Stan's greatest single contributions was the final, almost final, resolution of the issue about where did the four disciplines rank in relation to each other ar.d since I was of neither, or none of them, I watched all that witg great interest. It was Stan who made a lllrBBthe head of a regional office and with the rise of the Equal Employment stuff and the Federal Woman's program and things I've realized that there were some problems I just couldn't relate to like women versus men. Hell, if its nurses versus social workers versus psychologists versus 24 GK cont. psychiatrists, those I was used to and we had ranks of women, we had nurses who were women and psychiatrists who were women and the psychiatrists who were women were better than the nurses who were women, and the psychiatrists who were women were better than anyone who wasntt a psychiatrist , so that I think Stan really contributed a great deal and because of the need for so many different kinds of skills in the mental health field, there is much less sense, once you get through the psychiatrists that anybody has got all the wisdom they need. And as a result, there 1 e more a sense, and I don't mean in a disciplinary effort, but I guess what I'm really saying, there's more need of, no one of us can do this job by ourselves. And I don't ~hink I've ever been in a place where that was so obvious and where people would come to you for help. They might not take it, they might not take your advice. but that's how it was. EAR Well, we shouldn't close without allowing something on the negative side to be said. We're being very positive, and I think we both feel obviously very positive, but can you think of anything now in ret~Dspect that you think maybe the Institute missed the boat, for one thing, or where there were some deficiencies or something negative, in a sense, about the way the thing operated. It's kind of a leading question. GK I think so. As I said before, I think most administrators let them­ selves get shackled to people they should get rid of, and be able to do that. And many of the people who were around long after Felix left and Stan had to deal with were legacies from him. The 6ne thing I think I have learned,and it has taken me a long t~me, decision-making doesn't have to be cute. And probably the time you should be least cute is when you are telling them things they don't want to hear. The~e was a lot more internalizing and sharing than there needed to be, I think. I have learned, finally, at age f"orty­ five; if" somebody does something that is not very good, the thing to do is to tell them it is not very good. And probably that's as kind as you can be. It really doesn't help to play this game. And Felix was prone to do that. In one area one of his great strengths became one of his great weaknesses and Stan had great difficulty. I think all administrators have it, but the nature of the·people who get into the mental health field and the things that predis­ poses them. On the one hand, some of the staff meetings were 25 GK cont. some of the most fun congretations, I can remember your triple punning on one occasion. At that level, marvelous. on the other hand it had relatively little to do with getting this show on the road. I think the negative thing that happened at the Institute was that it grew too fast. It's interesting. Dave Ralls, he is a director here, and I came through two organizations wmich went through that. He spent his career at the Cancer Institute and the one thing that really scared us as we put together these crazy budget~requests is that this organization would grow too fast, and we won't build the kind of people who could carry it to the next step and we both view this as something terrible to happen. EAR It 1 s a hard thing to avoid. At the very end, is there anything else that you want to say, in the course of having gone through ' all of this, something I missed. GK I think the only thing that I can say is that 1 really cannot imagine anyplace else I could have been, and I've seen a lot of places since then, where I would have learned so much and so fast. EAR George, I thank you so much••••••••