David J. Doerge
August 26, 1948–July 26, 2013
It is with greatest sadness that we report the passing of our friend and colleague, David J. Doerge, a member of the American Political Science Association, the Academic Council on the United Nations System, the Council on Foreign Relations, and associate professor of political science at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who lost a protracted battle with melanoma cancer on July 26, 2013.
While his students at Mount Mercy will doubtlessly remember most his ebullient spirit, wit, humor, and restless intelligence, and his ability to bring the drama of world affairs to vibrant life in the classroom, his colleagues will also remember an analyst and intellect who was never satisfied with abstract formulas or conventional academic wisdom in confronting the international challenges of our times.
David's restless mind was much in play from his earliest service as legislative aide to Senator John Culver in the mid-1970s centered on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He attributed much of his political skepticism and appreciation for policy complexity to the influence of two of his Arizona State political theory professors, Don Wolf and Mark Reader. He took a hiatus from Capitol Hill to take a master's degree at Arizona State University, completed in 1978, then moved on to the University of Hawaii for doctoral studies. His colleagues there remember him as a spirited lampooner of facile policy formulations and grand theoretical claims. Doerge returned to Capitol Hill in 1980 as a staff analyst for the congressional Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus with additional service at the liberal Center for Defense Information policy lobby.
In 1983, Doerge left Washington to take a position as director of research at Iowa's Stanley Foundation. In that capacity, David's talent as convener of policy dialogue and skilled rapporteur were honed to perfection. In 1987 he was appointed as vice-president of the Stanley Foundation, responsible for planning the foundation's many policy programs, serving as its ambassador-at-large to the foreign policy community in the beltway, beyond the beltway, and abroad. His extraordinary talent for engagement and building collaborative programs with other foreign policy organizations was well recognized. His many colleagues are sure to remember the stimulating sessions he led at Virginia's Airlie House conference center during this period, especially those undertaken as part of the Foundation's New American Global Dialogue in the 1990s. They will also remember his skill in drafting reports and policy briefs advancing the insights and findings of these meetings.
In 2002, David joined the political science faculty at Mount Mercy College where his duties included oversight of the international studies and honors programs. He was appointed chair of the department of history, politics and justice in 2012. Until his death he maintained an active schedule of public speaking and policy writing with a special interest in the transformation of American foreign policy in post-Cold War era and the international role of the United Nations.
David Doerge is survived by his partner, Joni Rae Howland, daughter Hannah, of Austin, Texas, and son, Louis, in Tucson, Arizona.
—Stephen Mumme, Colorado State University
—Scott T. Moore, Colorado State University
Thomas S. Foley
1929–2013
It is a real honor to write this tribute to former Speaker of the House Thomas S. Foley (D-WA) who passed away on Friday, October 18, 2013. He was, for many years, my true political mentor. This began when I was a Foreign Service APSA Congressional Fellow in 1984–85. I divided my fellowship between then House Majority Whip Foley and, for a more abbreviated period before departing for an assignment in La Paz, Bolivia, with then Senate Republican Whip Alan Simpson (R-WY). I returned to then House Majority Leader Foley's office where I served from 1987 to his reelection defeat in 1994. For many years Mr. Foley served on the APSA Congressional Fellowship's Advisory Committee and, during his 30 years in the House, had hosted a legion of Congressional Fellows, including me.
As a Congressional Fellow, I had little direct contact with Mr. Foley who was engaged in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction negotiations and the 1985 federal farm bill, but I vividly recall being invited to join the staff to accompany the US-USSR parliamentary exchange visit that was headed by a Politburo member from Ukraine and included visits to Austin, Dallas, and Ft. Worth, Texas, and San Francisco. When I returned in 1987 to then Majority Leader Foley's staff as his press secretary, I was overwhelmed by the access to innumerable meetings he accorded me. I didn't have to accept someone else's public affairs guidance, but was expected to craft it myself. This included long sessions in one of multiple “budget summits” that included Senate, House, and White House leadership. It was in this setting that I was able to observe his acclaimed skills as a parliamentarian and negotiator. He could leave a meeting and repeat almost verbatim what key players had said. I also observed a less commented on side of his personality—his intellectuality. His conversation was rich with historical allusions and personal anecdotes, and you could hear classical music from his expensive audiophile equipment yards before arriving at his office.
When former Speaker Tom Foley and I collaborated on his biography Honor in the House: Speaker Tom Foley (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press 1999), my motivation was to help ensure that the values he stood for would find a place in history. Maybe it was a hope that the book could assist in making the past prologue. It is in the nature of legacies that much of the congressional heritage he bequeathed to the nation will be seen in contrast to the present state of our politics—I make no apologies for this because that's what legacies are all about.
As the late Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT), longest serving Majority Leader of the Senate, noted in his foreword to Honor in the House, “both Tom and I came from Irish immigrant stock, which probably meant we were destined to be Democrats. But the legacy also meant we had to see more than one side to any argument. I could feel right at home with former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill's comment that Tom Foley could always see ‘three sides to every argument.’ He emphasized Foley's commitment to what is now a somewhat old-fashioned tradition of concentrating on the legislative work of congressional committees rather than public visibility of national issues through the media, a level of courtesy or comity among members which extended across party lines and a sense of patriotism about Congress which meant you had a lot fewer candidates running against the institution.”
In his early congressional years, Foley chaired the Democrat Study Group and joined other Democrats in leading the series of historic reforms that reordered the House by dismantling its seniority-based system and decentralizing power among the subcommittees and individual members. He was a potential beneficiary of those reforms in 1975 when colleagues moved to replace long-serving Agriculture Committee chair W. R. Poage (D-TX). Foley, then the second-ranking Democrat, refused to take part in Poage's ouster, rose to his defense, and when elected chairman, Foley named Poage vice chairman.
Over the course of 14 years in House leadership positions, Tom Foley proved he could be hard-nosed when required. But he was always civil, and always a gentleman. On his last day as Speaker of the House, Foley invited Republican Leader Bob Michel to sit in the Speaker's chair (the first time a Republican had occupied the seat in some 40 years). In rising to bid Foley farewell, Michel spoke of the virtues the departing Speaker had for so long typified: integrity, decency, and a commitment to crafting reasoned solutions to difficult problems. What was striking in the highly partisan world of today was that these qualities were being highlighted by the leader of the opposition. “I had the privilege of serving as the Republican leader for fourteen years at the same time Tom was advancing through the Democratic leadership ranks to ultimately become Speaker of the House,” Michel said. “We obviously got to know each other well and became good friends. Moreover, we deeply respected one another as political adversaries, with never an ill word spoken between us. We had a mutual trust in each other that was not only good for us as leaders, but wholesome for the institution we both loved.”
During his congressional tenure, Foley served as Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, was active in ensuring successful Food Stamp legislation, congressional reform, campaign reform, a full House debate over the US military role in the Persian Gulf, and the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. In an interview in 1989 Foley indicated that of all his legislative achievements, he was most proud of his work on the Agriculture Committee to advance the Food Stamp program in which he was credited with forging a partnership between the Democrat conservative advocates for farmers and the more liberal Democrat advocates for increased social programs.
Foley's service during the George H. W. Bush years included presiding over the House during the passage of a landmark update to the Clean Air Act, expansions of the Head Start and Medicaid programs, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and notably the massive 1990 budget deal that established “pay-as-you-go” practices that forced President Bush to break his “no new taxes” promise and was instrumental in his 1992 reelection defeat. In the first two years of the Clinton administration Congress passed a second massive budget deal that laid the groundwork for balancing the budget but created controversy because of the tax increases it imposed. This same period included passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.
Although Foley could certainly rise to the challenge of being a solid Democrat, he did not believe in treating the Republican minority in a confrontational or hostile manner. He appreciated the fact that treating the minority with fairness and decency helps establish the basis for consensus that often has to transcend party lines—something Foley would have called governance.
As Speaker, Foley rejected the argument of those colleagues who urged him to adopt a policy of constant attack against recently elected President George H. W. Bush. “I think if you want a daily partisan battle,” Foley said in an interview, “and are not interested in getting anything more than the political embarrassment of the opposition … that's not for me. And if you have to have that as a requirement for the Speaker, then I think that I'm in the wrong job.” In 1990 Speaker Foley told the New York Times that “I sometimes envy people in the House who are engaged in stopping something. [During] most of my congressional career, I've had to try to put together coalitions of support or worry about moving legislative efforts… . It's a lot easier to blow up bridges and to block the crossings.”
Foreign policy issues, whether about the policy or the process, increasingly drew his attention. Foley was a prominent figure in the anti-Contra in Nicaragua, and he opposed the first Iraq war. Ireland was also never far from his mind, and he was inspired by the political bravery of an old friend John Hume who later became a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Foley steadily worked for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland throughout his Speakership.
Foley's interest in foreign affairs was never far from the surface and ultimately resulted in his being the only member of the House who had been awarded the highest honors from our most important allies: Great Britain made him a Commander of the British Empire, Germany gave him its Order of Merit, France conveyed membership in the Legion of Honor, and Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers, Grand Cordon.
The political pundits of the day could not have imagined that a sitting Speaker could be defeated, yet 1994 proved them wrong but also revealed a good deal about Tom Foley. He never shied away from voting his conscience, even if that occasionally went against the will of a majority in his district. His downfall in 1994 could be attributed to voting his conscience on three issues: gun control, term limits, and defense of President Clinton's budget that had not received a single Republican vote. In Foley's part of the West, most pick-up trucks had a rack on the back window for a deer rifle or a fishing rod. This was strong National Rifle Association country where its aficionados felt if you were right on guns, you were probably right on everything else. Foley had been a longtime opponent of gun control until 1994 when a psychiatric patient, having gained possession of an assault rifle, killed and wounded a number of people at Spokane's Fairchild Air Force Base. Foley's support of an assault weapons ban was regarded as a major factor in his 1994 reelection defeat. He also challenged a Washington State referendum that would have limited the terms of federally elected officials. Ironically, the Supreme Court sided with his view that this was unconstitutional, but the decision was rendered several months after his reelection defeat.
After his defeat in 1994, Foley noted that “I've taken positions that I think were damaging in a political sense, but I don't have any regrets taking them. I used to say that the most important thing about votes on the floor and positions you take in Congress is that when you consider them at election time you're able to say with some satisfaction that you can still vote for yourself.”
In 1995, the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service was established at Washington State University, in Pullman, Washington, to honor the former speaker's career in public service. The Institute continues the Foley legacy through its efforts to educate the public about civic affairs, promote scholarly research on major policy questions, and to encourage young people to pursue honorable careers in public service. Foley also donated his congressional papers, an extensive collection of correspondence, reports, campaign materials, and audio and video recordings to the Washington State University libraries.
On Tuesday, October 29, 2013, a rare tribute was paid to the late Thomas S. Foley in The Capitol's Statuary Hall. A host of tributes followed Speaker John Boehner's gracious welcoming remarks: Reps. Norm Dicks (D-WA), Jim McDermott (D-WA), John Lewis (D-GA), Democratic Leader of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA); Republican Leader of the Senate Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Majority Leader of the Senate Harry Reid (D-NV); former Minority Leader of the House Robert Michel (R-IL); vice presidents Mondale and Biden; 42nd President of the United States William J. Clinton, President Barack H. Obama, and Mrs. Heather Foley, his wife and unpaid chief of staff through Foley's congressional career. With a backdrop of Mr. Foley's official Speaker portrait that generally hangs in the Speaker's Lobby off the floor of the House, there was a heart-warming, inspiring, and bipartisan consensus that emerged. The tributes honored Mr. Foley's unusual bipartisanship that frequently found common ground on both sides of the aisle despite prevailing partisan animosities, his unwavering commitment to the public service, his willingness to take personal political risks to further the nation's forward progress, his widely recognized ability to use self-effacing personal anecdotes to cut tension and make a point, and his institutional reverence for and the honor he brought to “the People's House.” If some of the remarks bore the hallmarks of nostalgia for a bygone era, they also stressed the importance of the legacy he left for a sharply divided legislative branch much in need of healing wounds. Among the summing ups was one offered by President Clinton who recalled Mr. Foley's comment to him of the joy he found in seeing the sun rise over the Capitol and the sobering responsibility he felt in representing his Washington 5th District constituents—it was, remarked President Clinton, a joy and sense of responsibility that Mr. Foley, the epitome of public service, never lost. President Obama and Maryland Governor O'Malley ordered that the United States Flag and the Maryland State Flag be flown at half-staff on October 29, 2013, from sunrise to sunset in tribute to the late Speaker Thomas S. Foley.
Tom Foley's remarks at a celebration at the Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, would have served as an epitaph that encapsulated his political philosophy:
In a cynical age, I still believe that we must summon people to a vision of public service. For, in the end, this ethic determines more than anything else whether we will have Citizens and leaders of honor, judgment, wisdom, and heart.
—Jeffrey Biggs, Director, APSA Congressional Fellows Program, former press officer to Thomas S. Foley
Gene Lyle Mason
1940–2013
You don't meet many real cowboys anymore, especially in the American Political Science Association. But even among that rare breed, Gene Lyle Mason, PhD, was one of a kind. Born June 20, 1940, in Brownfield, Texas, Dr. Mason hung up his spurs for the last time on July 4 at the notable hour of 4:44 a.m., succumbing to complications of pneumonia and congestive heart failure, at The Washington Home and Community Hospices, in the District of Columbia, where he resided.
Dr. Mason graduated from Brownfield High School, received his BA, cum laude, from The University of North Texas, and his MA and PhD from the University of Kansas. He taught political science at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and at Franconia College, once a small liberal arts college in northern New Hampshire. He subsequently served as vice president of development at Bard College and was both founder and executive director of the Bard College Center in upstate New York, before he became the owner of Mason Farms, at the time the largest thoroughbred breeding farm in the state. He moved to the Boston area, and became director of Workforce and Entrepreneurial Programs at the Moving Ahead Program of St. Francis House.
Dr. Mason wrote and published in a wide variety of areas including the politics of exploitation, social justice, prison reform, addiction and recovery, and nursing home life. He received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Conservation Foundation, and he was a member of the Kentucky Regional Crime Commission and the Board of the Central Kentucky Civil Liberties Union. His last project (a work in progress at the time of his death) was an autobiographical series entitled “Growing Up in West Texas” that included stories of his first rodeo and his days in the National Junior Rodeo Association, which he proudly joined in 1953, the year of its inception.
Dr. Mason's major publications include The Politics of Exploitation, with Fred Vetter (Random House); 1984 Revisited, with Sam Bowles (Random House); The Senatorial Career of Hugo Black (Dr. Mason's doctoral dissertation published by Black's law clerks on the occasion of his 80th birthday); SOS: Step with Our Suggestions on Recovery from Alcohol and Addictions, with John Wong (Author House); “Reviled, Rejected, but Resilient: Homeless People in Recovery and Life Skills Education,” with John Wong (Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy).
Horseman, college professor and administrator, author, candidate for U.S. Congress, horse breeder, alcoholic and cocaine addict, addiction and recovery counselor, prison rights advocate, president of The Washington Home's Resident Council, blogger on issues of politics and health care reform, and multitime convicted felon, Gene was always instantly recognizable by his signature cowboy boots and hat and his infectious desire to grab life by the horns and take its wild ride. Charming and charismatic, both in great measure, he was capable of making each person he met feel they had forged an exceptional bond as easily as he could marshal them to one of his causes. His irreverence for accepted authority often chafed just as noticeably.
Gene Mason was fiercely independent, a life-long social activist, political reformer, and irrepressible liberal. A campus organizer for Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, Dr. Mason was standing next to Ted Kennedy in California when news came of Bobby's assassination. Never forgetting the lessons of his civil rights youth, Dr. Mason championed the causes of the poor and down-trodden with great passion and sincerity, giving voices to the voiceless from coal miners to prisoners to addicts and the homeless, and most recently to nursing home residents. His reform agenda often incurred the wrath of establishment politicians of different stripes, but if he believed in anything, Gene Mason believed that reality and the status quo should never stand in the way of what might be.
In his life, Dr. Mason was lucky enough to enjoy the sustained love and companionship of three amazing women, all of whom survived him: his first wife and the mother of his children, Susan Rea Davis Mason, who he rejoined for the last two years of his life; his second wife, Carol Young; and his companion of 15 years, Dianne Puopolo. He is loved and mourned by his daughter, Mary Hampton Mason; his son, James Price Mason; and his grandson, James Price Mason, Jr., and the many, many close friends he made virtually everywhere he went. He surely was one of a rare breed whose ranks seem to be dwindling. And he will be sorely missed by his many friends in all walks of life who were inspired by his many good deeds, despite his all too human imperfections.
—Mary Hampton Mason, United States Department of Justice
—Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., Research Scholar and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, State University of New York at Buffalo, and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Westfield (MA) State University
Richard Simeon
Richard Simeon, one of Canada's preeminent political scientists, has died at the age of 70. A highly prolific and internationally recognized scholar, Richard was also an unfailingly supportive colleague, an inspiring teacher and mentor, and friend to all who knew him.
Although his interests were broad-ranging—indeed, there was very little that he did not find interesting–Richard is best known for his contribution to Canadian and comparative federalism. His study of federalism and decentralized governance spanned his life, beginning with his undergraduate training at the University of British Columbia and his graduate studies at Yale University where he earned his PhD in 1968. His prize-winning PhD thesis for Yale, published as Federal-Provincial Diplomacy in 1972, was described by the prize jury as “a classic whose influence stretches far beyond Canada's borders.” A steady stream of publications on federalism and other matters—some 20 books, 100 articles and book chapters—followed to frame both academic debate and public policy discussion.
Following the election of the Parti Quebecois in 1976, Richard was deeply engaged with the federal and constitutional crisis that unfolded. During this time, he taught political studies at Queen's University (1968–1991) and directed its Institute of Intergovernmental Relations (1976–1983), before joining the University of Toronto in 1991 as a professor of political science and law. His academic preoccupation with the national unity debate was combined with service on the Ontario Advisory Committee on Confederation and his role as an occasional adviser on constitutional matters to Ontario premiers Davis, Peterson, and Rae.
Throughout the heated and polarized national unity debates, Richard sought to help adapt Canada's political and constitutional order to a society that was rapidly changing, both in Quebec and in the rest of Canada. Disturbed by the exclusion of Quebec from the Constitution Act of 1982, he was an ardent supporter of, and advocate for, the Meech Lake Accord, and greatly disappointed when it failed. As Richard reflected recently “My view then was not so much to take sides or go to war for national unity, but rather to help promote mutual recognition and understanding across the linguistic divide. This search for compromise, consensus, and accommodation, more than any partisan position, was and is my core belief and has shaped my responses not only to many aspects of Canada's linguistic, regional, and Aboriginal differences, but also to many international cases as well.”
Richard's academic and public policy contribution extended well beyond Canada's national unity and constitutional debates. He served as a research coordinator for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (1983–85), for which he produced four published volumes. From 1985 to 1991, he was the director of the School of Public Administration at Queen's, a position that had the fortuitous outcome of bringing him into contact with MaryEtta Cheney who later became his wife. The first nonlawyer appointed to the Ontario Law Reform Commission, Richard served as its vice-chair from 1989 to 1995.
His expertise was also sought out internationally. He advised the newly elected democratic government of post-apartheid South Africa on public administration. Under the auspices of the Forum of Federations, Richard went to Jordan, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya to discuss the potential of federalist ideas. He also served as an academic adviser to the Club of Madrid on questions of regional integration in Spain and Scotland.
His contribution earned him awards and recognition. Harvard University invited him to serve as its Mackenzie King Fellow, in 1998 and again from 2006 to 2008. His colleagues elected him to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004. And in 2010, he was awarded the Daniel J. Elazar Award by the American Political Science Association Section on Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations for “a lifetime of distinguished scholarship on federalism and intergovernmental relations.”
Notwithstanding his retirement in 2010, Richard remained intellectually engaged to the end of his life. He leaves a formidable legacy: one of scholarship and of an intellectual spirit that recognizes the need to be committed without being ideological, and the need to build bridges across divisions. His colleagues, his friends, and his family—whom he always described as “at the heart of it all”—lament his passing.
A full tribute can be found on the University of Toronto Department of Political Science website at http://politics.utoronto.ca/?p=6798
—David Cameron and Grace Skogstad, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Frank J. Sorauf
Frank J. Sorauf, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, died on September 6, 2013. Frank had a rich and varied life.
Before anything else, he was a Milwaukee boy. It was in Milwaukee that he developed his life-long love of opera and good music, ushering at the Pabst Theater for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, operas presented by touring companies, and other great artistic visitors. It was in Milwaukee that he became a life-long athlete. (He played semi-professional baseball in his youth and was a strong tennis player into his 80s.) And it was in Milwaukee that he encountered a great teacher of English composition, Gracia Tourinus, whom he always credited with his analytic approach to writing prose.
At the University of Wisconsin (BA through PhD, with a short detour through Harvard), Frank became a political scientist. After seven years at Penn State and a year at the University of Arizona he moved to the University of Minnesota, where he spent the rest of his career.
His dissertation, The Growth of Voluntary Committees in Wisconsin Political Parties, established him in the method that would mark all of his research—careful and thorough fieldwork and interviews. Through the 1960s and 1970s he built an impressive body of work on decision making in political parties and in appellate courts. Party and Representation and The Wall of Separation were joined by important articles: “The Public Interest Reconsidered,” “Party and Patronage,” and “The Impact of a Supreme Court Decision: The Case of Zorach v. Clauson.” In the late 1960s he wrote his well-known textbook, Party Politics in America, which still is in print under the authorship of Marjorie Randon Hershey.
Frank served the University as dean of the College of Liberal Arts from 1973 to 1978. When he returned to the department after his term as dean, he felt it was time for a new and fresh start in his research. He was invited that year to be academic staff expert to the Twentieth Century Fund's Task Force on Political Action Committees, chaired by Edmund Muskie. This was the beginning of a long and fruitful research program in campaign finance. His work in this area included two books, Money in American Elections and Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities, and an important amicus brief coauthored with Jonathan Krasno to McConnell v. FEC, the case in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold Act. In the early 1990s Frank was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and appointed to a Regents Professorship at the University.
One of the great professional pleasures of Frank's life was a series of trips he took at the request of the United States Information Agency in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s to the Scandinavian countries plus Paris, to the lower middle east (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen), and finally to Turkey and Kazakhstan. All three trips were in the summers of American presidential campaigns, and offered many opportunities to meet and talk with students, academics, political leaders, and journalists.
Frank was a citizen of the cultured world. In the 1960s he served as a member of the Minneapolis Public Library Board of Directors. He was very knowledgeable about classical music, especially opera, which he aided as a strong supporter of the Minnesota Orchestra and (in the 1980s) as president of the Minnesota Opera. He was a noted collector of southwestern Native American art, and several items from his collection are on permanent display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. From a Fulbright to Italy early in his career he developed a love for Italian cuisine, and he became an accomplished cook. He later described his life in retirement: “I have used these years to read some of the great books I never had time to read, to expand and document my personal collection of the pottery of the American Indians, to improve my tennis game, and to do a great deal of traveling.”
His friends will miss his exacting and precise use of language, his refined taste, his incisive wit, and his loyal affection.
—W. Phillips Shively, University of Minnesota
Denis G. Sullivan
Friends, faculty colleagues, and former students mourn the loss of Denis G. Sullivan, the William Clinton Story Remsen Class of '40 Professor of Government Emeritus at Dartmouth College. Denis, who was a member of the faculty at Dartmouth for 45 years, passed away at Kendal in Hanover on June 8, 2013.
Denis arrived at Dartmouth in 1968 after receiving his PhD in political science at Northwestern University and having taught for eight years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Denis was a visiting professor in the political science department at Stanford University during the 1966–67 academic year.
A Cleveland, Ohio, native, Denis attended the Western Reserve Academy and Brown University. He left Brown and joined the US Army, becoming a lieutenant and serving in the 2nd Armored Division. While in the Army, he met and married Margaret Allen (Peggy) Henderson, and subsequently completed his undergraduate studies at Oberlin College. During his graduate studies at Northwestern he was a student of Harold Guetzkow and Donald T. Campbell. While his dissertation was formally in international relations, he always considered himself to be a student of politics and political psychology.
When Denis and Peggy came to Dartmouth, they settled across the Connecticut River in the small town of Norwich, Vermont, where they continue to have a home. Small-town politics in Norwich fascinated Denis, and his re-telling, elaboration, and lessons learned from one galling personal political defeat always marked the opening day of the team-taught introductory course in American politics at Dartmouth. Several of his colleagues heard the story dozens of times and never tired rehearing the tale of the triumph of political practice over political theory in small-town Norwich. While his political loss was immediate, the lessons he learned from practitioner and Town Road Commissioner Charlie Hodgdon live on with his students and colleagues.
Denis's ability to engage theory and practice was tested early on in Norwich politics. Denis and Peggy lived on a lovely local town road that the Town Highway Commissioner wanted to widen and pave so as to ease maintenance and winter snow-plowing. Denis engaged a fraction of his neighbors to oppose the action and thereby save the beauty of the narrow tree-lined, gravel road. Many other neighbors opposed him, but Denis took it to the annual Town Meeting, where his appeal to “save Goodrich Four Corners Road” was debated. After lengthy debate, the Town Road Commissioner asked that it be tabled, saying he would work out a solution. Commissioner Hodgdon's solution was to pave the first half mile of the road up to Sullivan's property line, leave the next quarter mile unpaved where it abutted the Sullivan's property, and pave the last one and a half miles past Sullivan's land. To this day, still unpaved after 35 years, one can picture the locals racing down the paved road only to hurtle onto the unpaved quarter mile and cursing Denis for his challenge to Norwich politics. Denis, on the other hand, regarded Charlie Hodgdon a master of local political practice.
In exploring the broader theoretical meaning of this anecdote in the opening-day lecture, Denis masterfully employed the analytics from the assigned essays by Madison in The Federalist papers and the chapter on “constituency size” from Grant McConnell's Private Power and American Democracy to explore the consequences of shrinking versus enlarging the geographic and population spheres of political action. Norwich, of course, was just about at the lower limit of “small constituency democracy,” where divisive issues are configured at the Town Meeting so as not to be disruptive to the fabric of the community. Town leaders endeavor to shape the agenda to avoid such division, thus underscoring the limits of deliberative, direct, popular democracy. His analysis, albeit not the anecdote, can be found in Chapter 3 (“Constitution and Constituency”) of Sullivan et al. How America Is Ruled (John Wiley, 1980).
Denis's colleague, Lynn Mather, now at SUNY Buffalo Law School, writes, “that lecture was my favorite of the course … so when Denis was on sabbatical, I worked hard to recreate it, using an incident from Cornish town meeting but mine paled in comparison to the funny, insightful, and compelling delivery that Denis gave. In relaying the Norwich story and his many others, Denis punctuated them with gestures, laughter, and guffaws. As one of his students, Rob Saltzman put it, “one of Denis' singular traits was laughter; he giggled and laughed a lot, both in class and out—and he made his students (and certainly me) laugh as well. We laughed at politics, politicians and—to be honest—leaders in general. The only way I can deal with the state of politics today is to think of Denis and to laugh.”
Denis joined the department of government at Dartmouth with Roger Masters just as it was considering a departmental PhD program. To pursue this objective, Denis, Roger, and their senior colleagues were given several new hiring lines over the next three years that yielded Don McNemar, Dick Winters, Nelson Kasfir, Joe Massey, Ben Page, Jeff Pressman, Lynn Mather, Bob Nakamura, and Dianne Pinderhughes. Denis played a very important role in the hiring process, one that he and others hoped would better reflect new and emerging trends in the discipline. The market for political science PhDs collapsed in 1970 and the PhD program was shelved. But the department was further strengthened. By 1980, Government was either the most- or second-most popular major at the College, and it has remained so to this day.
Despite the shelving of the graduate program, Denis was never “shelved” in any sense of the word. He was one of the most involved and active of his colleagues, with an impressively eclectic research and writing agenda. Early examples of the diversity of his research work include his 1960 writings on the political psychology of cognitive conflict and his Northwestern dissertation, widely cited in the 1960s and 1970s, and titled “Towards an Inventory of Major Propositions Contained in Contemporary Textbooks in International Relations.” His uncanny ability to apply concepts from one area to another inspired his colleagues. Roger Masters noted that Denis's immense gift of teaching colleagues about rigorous scientific methods and statistical techniques “… opened my career to valuable new directions. Our collaboration should be remembered as an illustration that scholars in different academic traditions (empirical hypothesis testing with experimental evidence and Straussian political philosophy) can work together successfully and open our discipline to new insights.”
Two major research projects stand out from the 30 years he was active on the Dartmouth faculty. His research analyzing the preferences and belief systems of Democratic Party convention delegates in both presidential and midterm Democratic Party conventions was published in The Politics of Representation: The Democratic Convention of 1972 (with John Lyons, Jeffrey Pressman, and Benjamin T. Page, 1974) and Explorations in Convention Decision-making (with Jeffrey Pressman and F. Christopher Arterton, 1976). Second, he and his colleague, Roger Masters, examined the congruency and inconsistencies in leaders' verbal and nonverbal cues that resulted in numerous, path-breaking articles including “Happy Warriors: Leaders' Facial Displays, Viewers' Emotions, and Political Support” (with Roger Masters) in the American Journal of Political Science (1988) and “Nonverbal Displays and Political Leadership in France and the United States” in Political Behavior (coauthored with Masters in 1989). Dianne Pinderhughes, “found the work in political psychology on political affect and facial display … most exciting. It left a lasting intellectual impact in my understanding of how the broad public responds to political candidates, as well as the possibility of varying responses to candidates (and faculty) based on their gender.”
After retiring, Denis began his final and uncompleted project to recode all of the historic NAES respondents' open-ended political issue and preference answers so as to better analyze the role that voters' wishes play in their presidential and Congressional vote choices. Finally along the way, he and his American politics colleagues also wrote a textbook, How American Is Ruled (John Wiley & Sons, 1980).
His faculty colleagues admired his ability to attract the very brightest of our majors—some of them destined for the academy, others for the professions. Kate Stith, the Lafayette S. Foster Professor at Yale Law School, writes that “Denis Sullivan really charged my intellect for the first time in my life when I took from him the course that he usually taught with Roger Masters … ; I really had to think about intractable issues like freedom and choice. I looked forward to that class like no other I've taken or taught. And then there were the political convention studies in the 1970s—with undergraduates working alongside Denis, Bob, Jeff, and other greats. What a terrific experience for every one of us.”
James DeNardo of University of California, Los Angeles notes “Professor Sullivan was among the most thought provoking and stimulating of the many great instructors I knew at Dartmouth. The seminar I took with him on the philosophy of social science deeply influenced my own career and directly informed my decision to pursue political Science at Yale rather than Russian studies at Harvard. I must admit to resisting his point of view during the course, and we spent many hours after class debating about the possibilities of a scientific approach to social affairs. The coherence of his point of view, his subtlety, and analytical depth deeply affected me, and my first book about the political strategy of protest and rebellion (Power in Numbers (Princeton, 1985)) is a direct outgrowth of our conversations.”
In like vein, David Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that “[n]one of us who were undergraduates during the period of Professor Sullivan's reign as philosopher king in residence will ever forget the shambles of his office, the generosity of his spirit and the steely discipline of his mind. You didn't have to be a Government major to be marked deeply by the experience of being his student and, later, his friend. My guess is that I am one of scores of Dartmouth students whose career was marked by Denis Sullivan and who draw on the lessons he taught, and not only in the classroom, every single day.”
Robert Saltzman, an associate dean and professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and a member of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners remarked that, “The hours Denis spent with me on my Senior Fellowship thesis on the US Vice Presidency were invaluable to my professional development. He helped me figure out how to use raw polling data to evaluate the home-state effect of vice-presidential candidates. He counseled me wisely about approaches to my personal interview with then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in the Vice President's office in the Old Executive Office Building—approaches which resulted in some extraordinarily candid comments by Rockefeller about Donald Rumsfeld, then President Ford's Chief of Staff. It was heady stuff for an undergraduate—and it would not have happened without Denis' guidance and mentoring.”
These sentiments are echoed by Jason Barabas, a 1993 graduate of Dartmouth College who went on to get his PhD in political science from Northwestern University. Jason, now an associate professor of political science at Stony Brook University remembers his time with Professor Sullivan fondly, writing that, “Denis Sullivan is among a small subset of people who have proved to be the most influential in my personal and professional development. My counterfactual life—without Denis having shaped it—is hard to imagine… .”
While Denis was uncommonly wide ranging, bright, and prolific in writing and research, he was also collegial, forthright, and sociable. Denis constantly offered piercingly accurate and even-handed views of his colleagues' beliefs, preferences, and activities. His observations and evaluations in department meetings were uncommonly wise.
For many years Denis was also the “social leader” of the lunchtime group. As one of his department colleagues noted, we learned more social and political science in lunch-time conversations there than anywhere else. Ben Page writes that “Denis was one of the smartest and most creative people I have known,” and “he was never better and more powerful than in reacting to a small group of colleagues.” Another former colleague, Joe Massey, writes that “He had great gifts, of intellect and drive, that made working with him a journey into deeper ways both to see the world and to think about it.” Nelson Kasfir discovered that no argument he tested on Denis ever survived more than a few minutes' conversation. That was when he realized how fortunate he was that Denis was not at Dartmouth just to teach undergraduates. Bob Nakamura concurs, “what I learned while teaching, eating, and skiing with Denis has shaped how I think about politics for the 30 years since then.”
Denis and Peggy were among the most sociable of the senior faculty couples hosting dinners for younger and older faculty couples. All of us from that period have warm and wonderful memories of entertaining and being entertained by “the Sullivans.” At Denis's retirement dinner, his son, Kevin in closing remarks noted how important the dinner conversations were to him and his two brothers, Marc and David, “it was a running post-graduate seminar in political science.”
We would be remiss in not commenting on one of Denis's traits that set him apart from all others on the faculty—the whole faculty. Denis was the most competitive person any of us have ever met. It helped that he was athletically gifted, but his spark, his drive, his demand and need for perfection, drove him like no other. Tennis, squash, and handball were his sports of choice at Dartmouth, but he was also a gifted and talented intercollegiate athlete as an undergraduate football and baseball player at Brown. The Boston Red Sox gave him a try-out as pitcher at spring training. As Denis told the story, Ted Williams was standing near the plate, watching him. Denis was so nervous he threw the ball over the backboard. Williams said nothing, just walked away, perhaps, in addition to his other well-known accomplishments, saving Denis for political science.
—Richard Winters, Professor of Government, Emeritus, Dartmouth College, with Nelson Kasfir, Professor of Government, Emeritus, Dartmouth College, and Robert Nakamura, Professor of Political Science, University at Albany, State University of New York
James Sterling Young
James Sterling Young died peacefully at his home in rural Albemarle County, Virginia, on August 8, 2013, at the age of 85. A graduate of Princeton who earned his PhD in political science at Columbia University in 1964, Jim then joined the faculty at Columbia, where he remained until 1978. He spent the balance of his career at the University of Virginia, with both the Miller Center and the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs.
Jim will be largely remembered for two extraordinary contributions to the study of American politics. The first was the publication in 1966 of The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (Columbia), which won the Bancroft Prize in history for its elegant prose and revealing analysis of the behavior of Washington, DC's first generation of national leaders. The second was the creation of the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center, which under his direction has collected the audio-recorded testimony of hundreds of national political figures to capture for the permanent record memories and insights otherwise lost to history. This interview archive now comprises some 30,000 pages of transcripts, about half of which are currently available for scholarly use.
In an age of academic hyper-specialization, it may be difficult to comprehend how such disparate topics could fall within the compass of one person's labor. Yet when asked about the breadth of his interests, Jim would respond simply, “These are my tribes.” For as much as his life's work was informed by the ways and means of political science and of history, his approach to thinking about American politics was distinctively anthropological. His debt to Conrad Arensberg was openly acknowledged in the preface to The Washington Community, and his commitment to oral history owed at least as much to the methods of anthropology as it did to his familiarity with the work of historian Allan Nevins of the Columbia Oral History Office. No doubt these inclinations received daily nourishment through his marriage to and long intellectual partnership with anthropologist Virginia Heyer Young, herself an accomplished student of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.
The convergence, then, of the author of a book about the political folkways of the early nineteenth century capital and the present-day interviewer probing the experiences of a Jimmy Carter or an Edwin Meese or an Edward Kennedy was possible because of a deep fascination with how politics was experienced from the inside, by the communities of people who govern—that is, their habits, their fears, their partisan religions, their hierarchies (or, more likely, in the United States, the absence of them), their unique systems of rewards and punishments, their social boundaries, and how they viewed their great successes and failures. In sum, their tribalism. In this vein, James Young may have been the most eminent practitioner of the method pioneered by another of his teachers at Columbia, Richard E. Neustadt, who counseled readers of Presidential Power to look at “the Presidency from over the President's shoulder.” For three decades, Young was the field-worker poised with a tape recorder at the shoulders of those leaving the Oval Office to capture their recalled view for posterity.
James Sterling Young was born in Savannah, Georgia on October 14, 1927. He served in the United States Army just after World War II, then returned stateside to attend Princeton, completing a degree (summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) at the Woodrow Wilson School in 1951. From there he attended New York University Law School for one year, quickly determining that a legal career was not for him. He later claimed that the year was a fruitful one nonetheless because it afforded him frequent opportunities to spend weekend afternoons at the Metropolitan Opera. Following a two-year stint doing contract research for the Army, Jim began graduate school at Columbia in 1954. After finishing his PhD, he quickly converted his dissertation into The Washington Community.
Two decades later, Michael Nelson noted that this book's publication “created something of a scholarly sensation … and justly so. The Washington Community was that rarest of all things in modern academe: a book praised both by the historians for its thoroughness and the political scientists for its analytic insight. The American Historical Review called it ‘an important, long-overdue corrective to earlier misconceptions about the viability of American governmental processes’ during the critical early years of the new nation. ‘So penetrating are his questions and so persuasive his answers concerning the relationships within and between the legislative and executive branches,’ wrote the Political Science Quarterly, ‘that their power of illumination is nearly as great for the same relationships today.’ ”
Young framed this extraordinary book around an ordinary, but profound, proposition—that constitutional forms alone do not fully instruct us as to how our early forebears expected our political institutions to work. Watch, as well, how they behaved.
They created ex nihilo a government village, the very existence of which was a source of considerable discomfort—a political town in a nation uncomfortable with politics. Successive chapter heads tell the story: “A Government at a Distance and Out of Sight;” “The National Bantling;” and “Self-Image: ‘Splendid Torment.’” An ambivalence about national power infused everything the early governors did. The town they designed and built from scratch kept the president more than a mile apart from Congress, a distance made practically impassable by internal marshes and wilderness. “Paved streets were unknown and roads were few, dust bowls in dry weather and morasses when it rained. To venture forth upon them was to risk life, limb, and vehicle. Diplomats in full regalia, paying state visits, would find themselves marooned outside the executive mansion in their magnificent equipages, mired in the red mud of Pennsylvania Avenue ‘to the axletree.’” The governors reinforced this separation, too, by their settlement patterns, which Young carefully mapped, creating independent legislative and executive neighborhoods. And the political culture of the time frowned greatly on those who might reach out to the opposite side. For the residents of Capitol Hill, “to be involved in a collusive relationship with the White House in any circumstances was to run a continuous risk of social stigmatization for sycophancy as one of the ‘toads that live upon the vapor of the palace.’ ”
How, then, in a world so thoroughly steeped in the notion that “power holding [was] essentially a degrading experience,” where the formal “legal authority for presidential leadership of Congress was nearly as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard” —how in this forbidding environment could any common purpose be achieved? The right place to look, drawing on their behavior, was to “statecraft”—to the “exercise of political skill … by the occupant of the White House.” One hears, here, echoes of Neustadt: the power to persuade. One sees, here, foreshadowings of Fred Greenstein: the hidden-hand presidency. For Thomas Jefferson long ago had mastered the art of indirect leadership. By Young's telling, Jefferson staged intimate dinners at the Executive Mansion, where “the President's uniform for the occasion was nondescript, marking his for a humble station: slippers down at the heel, faded velveteen breeches, hairy (not quite threadbare) waistcoat. Politics seemed somehow the one subject never discussed.” Such evenings, supported by his French chef and a collection of fine wines, created the conditions for securing by indirection support for his policies when no direct approach was feasible.
To be sure, when the going got tougher in Jefferson's second term, requiring decidedly un-Jeffersonian policies to meet a gathering British threat, mere statecraft was a poor match for the system's inherent divisions. But the brilliance of Young's book was in its thorough-going assessment of the cultural barriers to collective political action in the early capital, and thus the indispensability of informal authority to achieving common national purpose. Those lessons still resonate today.
While working his way to full professor, Jim spent a year each at Brookings and Harvard's Institute of Politics, but was back at Columbia at the height of the civil unrest in 1969, and was known then as somebody trying to build bridges between the administration and the protesters. These were not events he chose to discuss much in later years, perhaps because he and Harvey Mansfield (the elder) were assaulted when the Students for Democratic Society took over Fayerweather Hall in the spring of 1969.
During the 1970s, he revealed a gift for academic administration. He first served as the associate director for academic affairs at The Urban Center, where a main focus was Harlem. He then became vice president for academic planning and deputy provost, from 1971 to 1977, serving as the university's third ranking academic officer. In 1978 he was recruited by the University of Virginia to come to the newly established Miller Center of Public Affairs, to help devise and run a core program on the presidency.
During his earlier stint at Brookings, Jim had conducted a series of interviews on the advent of a presidential-congressional relations shop in the Eisenhower White House, and he had concluded from that experience that there was much to be gained by extended conversations with political professionals about their craft. (This experience also provided Jim a lifetime of anecdotes featuring the shop's father, Bryce Harlow.) As a result, he sought to begin a major project on the Jimmy Carter presidency, building on a one-off group interview on the Ford administration Herbert Storing had convened at the Miller Center in 1977. In the aftermath of Carter's defeat, Jim prowled the halls of the Old Executive Office Building to secure a critical mass of people willing to talk about the fellow-Georgian widely deemed a failed president. He succeeded, and on February 12, 1981, only days after Carter had left office, Young began that interview project, bringing to the Miller Center Anne Wexler and three of her top aides to discuss a recently developed public liaison operation. Ultimately some 50 interviews were conducted for the Carter Project, including a full day with Carter himself in Plains, Georgia.
There were two innovations in the way oral history would be practiced at the Miller Center. First was the use panels of scholars to conduct each interview. Jim's reliance on group interviewing was at once a sign of his audacity and his modesty. Group interviewing was a violation of the first principles of oral history orthodoxy, which held firmly that interviews should be conducted by a single questioner alone, to assure good rapport. Jim believed, however, that open discussion was possible among small groups of people, if they were well chosen, properly instructed, and properly moderated. But more importantly, he knew that it was impossible for him (or for any single scholar) to know how to ask all the right questions. No one person could possibly anticipate what a reader 50 years hence might want to know about a given White House. (To date, more than 100 scholars have joined these interview teams.) The second innovation grew from the first. These were long interview sessions, usually extending over two days. Their length was made possible by sharing the burden of questioning, inasmuch as no single interviewer could keep the plates spinning as long as the group could.
The Carter interview project generated two remarkable products. The first was an archive of transcripts that can still be fruitfully consulted about American politics in Jimmy Carter's time. The rawness of defeat is still palpable in those early sessions—with Carter's aides reflecting painfully back to the Iranian hostage crisis, a devastated economy, and the bitter in-party challenge Edward Kennedy mounted for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Second, those transcripts were used as the basic source material for three major books sponsored by the Miller Center, one each by Erwin Hargrove, Charles O. Jones, and Robert Strong. These volumes transformed scholarship on the Carter presidency. Hargrove's Jimmy Carter as President was honored in 1989 with the Neustadt Award as the best book on the presidency published the previous year. And in an extensive review essay about the Jones and Hargrove volumes, in Polity (1990), the reviewers asserted that these books “contributed to the rehabilitation of a President who had been all but left for dead after the election of 1980.” This accumulated professional recognition confirmed that oral history was an invaluable tool for achieving scholarly insights available in no other way.
There was not, however, an immediate follow-up project on the next presidency. Instead, in the aftermath of the Carter Project, Jim immersed himself in various writing projects, including a book that occupied his time on-and-off for over a decade. But it was never completed—at least not to his satisfaction. The chorus of luminaries who read the manuscript (fittingly titled The Puzzle of the Presidency) and were eager to see it published as a worthy successor to The Washington Community included Neustadt, Aaron Wildavsky, Theodore Lowi, and Matthew Holden. But Jim would not let it go.
Some 20 years into my relationship with him, first as his graduate student and then as his faculty colleague in the Oral History Program, I had something of a “Rosebud” moment. Over a casual lunch, Jim remarked to me that he had perfect pitch. I had long known that he was a fine, classically trained pianist. But I had not known until then how deeply rooted was the perfectionism that characterized all he did, whether playing the piano or writing a book or running the large administrative apparatus needed for conducting scores of interviews each year. Even minute—maybe especially minute—departures from the right note grated on his ears, making it impossible for him to accept that his composition was ready for public consumption.
In 1992, Jim retired—but he was coaxed out of retirement, at the age of 71, by a new Miller Center director, Philip Zelikow, who shared his enthusiasm for spoken history and wanted to revive the oral history enterprise. Zelikow, a historian who had worked on George H. W. Bush's National Security Council staff, was perfectly positioned to broker an arrangement to initiate a project on that presidency. Jim assembled a team to conduct the Bush Project and also began the often complicated business of coordinating his efforts with the Bush Library Foundation, which funded the transactions costs of the interviews. But the basic framework of the Carter Project, including full editorial control, was preserved. Under Jim's direct leadership the Center subsequently undertook parallel projects on the Reagan and Clinton presidencies. For the next 15 years the Miller Center got more than 40 hours a week from a previously retired scholar who worked for half pay to institutionalize an ongoing program in oral history. The Center's current project, on George W. Bush, is a continuation of that personal legacy.
The capstone of his career came, however, on a derivative project. In 2003, Jim was approached by representatives of Edward Kennedy to ask whether the Center might be willing to take on an extensive oral history project about the senator's life and public career. Although at that time the program was already engaged simultaneously doing interviews on three administrations, Jim saw unique opportunities in a Kennedy Project—and his determination for it to happen sealed the deal.
The interviews with Kennedy himself were not without complications, initially derived from the senator's lifelong habits of being fully briefed for interview sessions—preparation that can intrude on oral history's spontaneity. Yet over time what made the Kennedy Project work was the relaxed chemistry of these two people—one an Irish pol, the other a quiet southern scholar, but both about the same age and both sharing a love of story-telling and a commitment to leaving for posterity the reflections of a man who had taken part in some of the most consequential history of their time. Kennedy sat for some 30 interviews, no holds barred, and the later sessions are occasionally punctuated by Kennedy's singing and the barking of Sonny and Splash, the Portuguese water dogs. Added to these remarkable records are more than 250 interviews about Kennedy by staffers and fellow politicians (aided by interviewers Stephen Knott and Janet Heininger), and topped by Jim's Oval Office interview with Barack Obama.
It bears emphasizing here that the institutional success of the oral history program is largely due to Jim's own masterful interviewing skills. He was always expertly prepared. He was an exceptional listener, able to pick up cues from word choices and body language about obscured paths that might be usefully explored. And he understood in his bones the merits of open-ended questioning that is at the heart of oral history. He was comfortable with silence—with giving the respondent the first chance to fill it. Indeed there was no quicker way for an interviewing scholar to get on his “Do not invite again” list than to bring an intellectual (or, worse, a partisan) agenda to the table and thus to bias the course of the interview.
But the most valuable trait he had as an interviewer was a paradox: his rare ability to establish intimacy with a respondent by virtue of his disciplined critical distance. What is of merit in these oral histories—what will stand the test of time as unique resources about the inner life of today's Washington community—is a direct product of the confidence both Democrats and Republicans have had that Jim's only purpose was to help them preserve their own memories for posterity, not to score debate points or to trap them with clever lines of questioning. By being treated with utmost respect; by being invited to reflect in a nonjudgmental way about what went right and what went wrong; by being encouraged by the prize-winning author of a book about early Washington to consider what they owed to our own children and grandchildren to get the history of our time right, these respondents have voluntarily generated an archive that future generations will consult fruitfully long after most of the existing books about our era are gathering dust on the library shelves. This is the legacy of an unusual artist, whose best work was to help others paint their own self portraits.
—Russell Riley, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia
