Mr. Break-It

...Sweden's system, touted as a useful model in The Silent War, a book Magaziner co-authored in 1989, is spared any additional bureaucracy because unions are powerful enough (95 percent of the workforce are union members) to police skills programs themselves...

...When the dust settled, Reich was in the cabinet as secretary of Labor, and Magaziner had what sounds like a decidedly humbler tag—special assistant to the president...

...I saw there was going to be a deplorable vacuum behind when they left," says George Papas, a Brockton community activist at the time...

...It's not a coincidence that this, roughly, has been the tact taken by the Health Care Task Force...

...This movement, like others he was to lead, did have some campus support but it was very much a top-down effort...

...Not all the details have been vetted with Clinton's mandarins for political viability...

...In part that's because it made classes smaller and experimenting easier...

...This, of course, is a vast disanalogy...

...Those who don't know him well describe him as humorless, aloof, and arrogant...

...A 1990 profile in Boston Business Journal opined that Maga-ziner's track record and phenomenal fees prove that in the consulting biz "it's not whether you win or lose but how much you pay the brain...

...First it was Brown University, then it was Brockton, Massachusetts, then it was the state of Rhode Island...

...His plan was to use local universities to identify which industries should be nurtured and which should be lured into the state with tax incentives and aid packages...

...As importantly, he had failed to insulate Greenhouse from the snake pit of Rhode Island politics...

...Among Magaziner's more famous clients is the now-defunct Wang Corporation, the soon-to-be defunct Swedish economy, and two politically defunct candidates for president, Richard Gephardt and Michael Dukakis...

...Though he spent the next decade and a half advising the Fortune 500 and a number of countries, when critics charge Magaziner with favoring the heavy arm of government over free enterprise, the Brockton project is part of the reason...

...Shortly after the election, he went to Clinton and, in one of the transition's more audacious lunges for power, asked for authority over health care and labor...

...Indeed, Magaziner's career consists mostly of rearranging things that are already there...

...But with the nation-wide ascendence of distribution requirements and core curricula, the school's system is starting to look thin and dated...

...He arrived with a group of eight Brown graduates and devised a full frontal assault on the city's economy...

...We met inside this building and there were students outside the building with loudspeakers," says Hirsh, who supported the reforms...

...Whether Greenhouse could have protected the state from the recession is still a matter of debate...

...So how could they possibly direct an economy...

...In part that's because the plan made classes smaller and experimenting 12 The Washington Monthly/May 1993 with new disciplines easier...

...The perennial rap against industrial \ policy—that elites are no better, and might be a lot worse, at picking winners than the market—is still the rap against Greenhouse and, indeed, against Magaziner himself...

...They were natural rivals...

...In a speech to the Economic Strategy Institute last May, he argued 'that the country should establish a national system of "performance based assessments" whereby children would earn merit badges by demonstrating competence in a series of skills, leading, ultimately, to a "certificate of initial mastery...

...erendum...

...Rethinking college curricula was all the rage back in 1969 (Robert Reich, in fact, was tinkering with Dartmouth's at the time), but today Brown students tell the story of the school's adoption of the Maxwell/Magaziner plan as if they were recounting the story of Exodus...

...But he, not Reich, is the central figure on the Health Care Task Force, which is about to unveil a plan to reform one-seventh of the nation's economy...

...Break-It The not very reassuring past of Ira Magaziner, the brains behind the Health Care Task Force by David Segal One of the uglier power struggles that played out after Clinton's election was between two Friends of Bill from the Oxford years, Ira Magaziner and Robert Reich...

...The venture capital fund suddenly looked like a pork barrel...

...But the biblical account airbrushes important details, some of which presage Magaziner's methods in future missions...

...It's just the hope that if we shake people up, the dust will fly and when it settles the results will be more desirable...

...I wouldn't say that Bentsen is completely signed on," says an official at the Treasury Department...

...And it was disingenuous...

...True to form, he put together a working group, came up with a densely written 1,100 page document—the executive summary alone runs 50 pages—and began to court the state's elites...

...He created his own course of independent study, never took a degree, and spent a lot of time organizing anti-Vietnam War rallies with, among other people, Vanessa Redgrave...

...Magaziner, according to insiders, moved first...

...or p.m...

...One of the arguments used against Ira," says a transition insider, "was what happened in Rhode Island...

...Indeed, if the health care crisis in this country is, as some have predicted, the next Vietnam, Magaziner seems fated to be its Mc-Namara...

...Most of the NCEE report was extremely trenchant, but it ended with a Maga-zineresque flourish, urging that every business, large and small, be required to spend 1 percent of payroll on training...

...If so, Treasury needs to be in on the design...

...schools...

...The sense, according to Brown English professor David Hirsh, was that if they passed this plan, more violent explosions could be avoided...

...At the time, Magaziner was on a $20,000 a month retainer from the state of Utah...

...Other countries that have tried mandatory systems found that small companies opt out by the thousands and pay a tax rather than pony up for schooling they don't need...

...Now, finally, it is all of us...

...But what is left in the wake of his reformist zeal...

...There were strong hints that bio-tech and high-tech firms would be big winners, but some of what turned out to be the state's cash cows—like Hasbro, the toy company—would not have seen any Greenhouse funds, and the jewelry industry, which was identified as part of the problem, is still one of the state's largest employers...

...We were young and naive," he would later say of this Utopian project...

...Not coincidentally, Magaziner has been the Health Care Task Force's ideas coordinator and traffic cop, "but James Carville is hovering nearby and Stephanopolous, [White House press liaison Bob] Boorstin, and Hillary are in charge of the public face...

...No doubt many do, but among Ivy-bound high schoolers and in colleges across the country, Brown is informally known as the four year vacation school...

...Train in vain Magaziner sold Telesis for $6 million in 1988, and has since retired to front other civic projects and plump for one of his, and now the Clinton administration's, favorite themes: increasing productivity by creating a more highly trained work force...

...Mandatory training," says Dan Ham-mermesh, a professor of economics at Michigan State, "is a wing and a prayer...

...And selling products in state is as good for the economy as selling them to Nebraska...

...But some of Magaziner's solutions have been longer on drama than wisdom...

...It was an expansive, multi-tentacled program designed to grow (or greenhouse) certain industries in the state...

...It was never any great grassroots cause," says Gerry Hausman, a classmate and friend of Magaziner's at Brown and later at Oxford...

...He helped rebuild the consumer electronics division at General Electric and persuaded Volvo to venture into the luxury auto market, a move which helped rescue the company from oblivion...

...If you had taken a poll in May of '68, I guarantee you would have found that reforming the curriculum was not among the top three issues in people's minds...

...One hobby horse was fighting construction of a low- and middle-income apartment building, which, the paper argued, would ruin the town's largest park...

...May 1993/The Washington Monthly 11 For all appearances, Magaziner had been out-maneuvered in his first big-league dust-up...

...Shalala is rumored to be a detractor and more leg-work may be necessary to win over others...

...Clinton and Reich were meeting a lot then," says another person familiar with the transition, "and he told the president that Ira's just a little bit far out for the center image that he's trying to create...

...Both had the ear of the president...

...What got the group truly exercised, judging by several Examiner issues from 1972, was development...

...GE ended up recalling a million of the compressors, a measure that resulted in a $450 million pretax charge on earnings...

...They set up a tenants union, a land trust, ran a food co-op, and organized consumer rallies, all the time holding down day jobs and publishing a muckraking weekly newspaper, The Brockton Examiner...

...Many of us were intimidated...

...But he's tremendously warm and loyal...

...Since Cs are essentially the school's failing mark, Bs can be had for little more than showing up...

...He's not the 'hail fellow well met' type," says an acquaintance...

...Luddite tendencies aside, the group did have some positive effects and enjoyed community support, but Magaziner seemed to lose interest in the project, and he and his friends neglected to train anyone to continue the work they had started...

...He won rave reviews peddling advice and spreadsheeting for corporate bigfoots like Corning Glass and AT...

...But the no-exceptions approach is riddled with problems...

...They eliminated virtually every requirement, from language to mathematics, reduced the number of credits needed to graduate, and best of all, wiped out the D grade and allowed Fs to be stricken from transcripts...

...The 500-strong colloquy he's now orchestrating may be too sprawling to bear Magaziner's imprimatur distinctly, but browse the standout chapters of his life and you get the sinking sense that if health care reform is anything like his past projects, it will be hopelessly complex, or impossible to sell, or simply ill-advised...

...The faculty found itself voting on the issue shortly after the student take-over at Columbia and while anti-Vietnam brushfires were starting at colleges around the country...

...The charitable will say that Magaziner's instincts are in the best tradition of FDR's impulse to try something...

...But it's also because the Maxwell/Magaziner reforms, in their broad outlines, are what you'd expect if the guys from Wayne's World designed a university...

...His friends contend he's just extremely shy and awkward...

...He makes a good May 1993/The Washington Monthly 13 point when he argues that in the American system, "We don't have any quality control, we don't have a clue what we're getting for all that money that we're spending...

...This system has naturally spawned grotesque grade inflation...

...Magaziner has been unabashed in calling the plan "industrial policy," and he made no secret of intending it to serve as a model for what could be done at the national level...

...After Brown, Magaziner studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship...

...When GE was a client, he convinced the company to develop a new rotary compressor (the pump that cools air in refrigerators) rather than buy the item from foreign manufacturers...

...By then Magaziner was married with children and had set up Telesis, his own consulting outfit in Providence, Rhode Island...

...In the long term, what Magaziner's presence in the White House will mean is not yet clear...

...The uncharitable will think that he'll nudge the Clinton administration to adventures in what Bush called "social engineering...

...Too often his schemes sacrifice pragmatism to ambition...

...It requires a network of watchdogs, since managers who want to duck the expense can easily cook the books to fake compliance...

...Before scientists discredited the findings of two University of Utah scientists who claimed in 1989 to have created a new source of energy in a glass of water, Magaziner was testifying before Congress that the government should immediately sink $25 million into cold fusion research...

...After Magaziner met with Clinton in Little Rock, he didn't hear from his soon-to-be boss for several weeks, time enough for Reich to Iago his erstwhile colleague...

...As the administration's reform guru-at-large, don't be surprised to see him in New York a year from now, fixing the U.N...

...Rhode Island can't use tariffs, doesn't control the amount of its currency and sends 12 percent of its workforce across state lines...

...Essential also were a few key allies in the administration's upper echelons...

...He's focused to the point of absent-mindedness: Legend has it that he once unwittingly traversed a tarpaulin stretched over a hotel pool on the way to a meeting...

...And it's hard to see how Magaziner, who is still proud of his work at Brown, can square the whatever-you-like spirit of the New Curriculum with what has recently been among his principal obsessions: the lack of standards in U.S...

...Representations were made to a variety of people that there would be collaboration, and when he made the grab, he did it for himself...

...GE whiz Magaziner's mind is legendary...

...They give the money to a general pool, which only ends up redistributing funds from small to large firms...

...It was a flat out power grab," says a person familiar with the transition...

...And since Magaziner is not tied to a single portfolio, once health care is safely in motion, he'll be free to apply his talents elsewhere...

...Take Brown University, the site of his first and perhaps most successful redesign...

...Magaziner, cast as co-Moses, foments an uprising, holds massive rallies, and overwhelms an incredulous faculty...

...Both seemed naturals for the top spot at either Commerce or Labor, or as head of the Council of Economic Advisers...

...In France, small firms punt rather than spend money on unnecessary training," says Laurie Bassi, associate professor of economics and public policy at Georgetown University...

...That's partially true...

...What's still known around campus as the "New Curriculum" has proven to be wildly popular with students, and over the years, attempts to alter it even slightly have been repulsed with rallies and even death threats...

...His history in the private sector and his previous forays in government reflect a passion for bold strategic thinking and public policy of New Deal-sized grandeur...

...Ever since he organized a labor strike at summer camp as a teen, it's been the same: Point to the institution and he'll overhaul it...

...No doubt there's something to both notions, but Magaziner's intellectual pedigree, youth (he's now 45), and faith in the sheer wattage of his brain recall another place and time: the roundtable of Kennedy's best and brightest...

...And I asked them to make sure that they trained people...

...We understood that these guys couldn't run the government efficiently," says Dan Shedd, president of Taylor Box, a manufacturing company in Warren, Rhode Island...

...Rhode Islanders, who know that, felon for felon, they've got the most corrupt state government in the country, saw what was coming and torpedoed Greenhouse...

...By early 1973 Magaziner had left Brockton...

...But they didn't, and the food co-op and the tenants union just withered away when they left...

...And though this reform got most of its credibility with faculty from the Maxwell/Magaziner report, teachers were also persuaded by something more primal: fear...

...He went to Clinton," remembers one campaign insider, "and said 'Look, I'm a friend of Ira's and it hurts me to say this, but he's just too radical.'" Reich's message dovetailed nicely with a number of reports that had been leaked into The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere tarring Magaziner as a central planner with an affinity for industrial policy...

...Magaziner assumed that all students would be just like him and would put their freedom to responsible use...

...The rest of the reason is the Greenhouse Compact, drafted back in 1982 at the request of a former Rhode Island governor, Joseph J. Garrahy...

...For anyone familiar with his career, Magazin-er's unique position is enough to make you, well, concerned, and the profiles published in the drum roll preceding the Task Force's plan—with the exception of the one in Newsweek last month—have tended to gloss or ignore what is worrying...

...Though they had been Rhodes scholars at the same time and had co-authored a book on industrial policy, both men felt best qualified to direct Clinton's economic policy...

...Though it has doomed past projects, Magaziner's love of the vast may be precisely what After two University of Utah scientists claimed to have created a new source of energy in a glass of water, Magaziner was testifying before Congress that the government should immediately sink $25 million into cold fusion research...

...And while we're waiting in line for blood tests and barium shakes, Magaziner will be off . . . fixing the U.N...

...But Reich exploited his F.O.B...

...But there's another reason: His reforms were what you'd expect if the guys from Wayne's World had designed a university...

...In 1969, Magaziner, then a junior, and a friend named Elliot Maxwell decided that the school's curriculum put excessive emphasis on grades and was over-larded with requirements...

...Research assistance for this article was provided by Jennifer Elsea and Ann O'Hanlon...

...More often they are of the 'Why didn't I see that?' variety...

...The only hold-out, ironically, was the entire economics department at Brown—and, as it turned out, 80 percent of the state's population...

...In 1990, he offered more specifics in a study he chaired for the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), which persuasively argued for the need to increase the skills level of the American worker...

...But already there have been mutterings that when Magaziner takes the health care plan public he's in for the sort of surprise Rhode Islanders handed him...

...The plan required the state to raise $250 million, which Magaziner insisted on packaging as a one time tax surcharge and putting to a state refMagaziner's curriculum is still wildly popular at Brown...

...Magaziner was in his mid-twenties at the time and would shortly ditch the sandal-and-cloves crowd for the wing-tipped halls of the Boston Consulting Group...

...They drafted what was called the Maxwell/Magaziner Report and after a year of debate, the school's faculty adopted it with virtually no modifications...

...By the time the plan was unveiled, virtually everyone was on board: labor unions, church leaders, state legislators, bankers, the chamber of commerce, even the state's biggest newspaper...

...Because, for instance, Greenhouse was intended as a pilot program for a national industrial policy, it gave bizarre emphasis to Rhode Island's "balance of trade": Goods traded with other states would be favored over firms selling within Rhode Island...

...The 1 percent training requirement, Greenhouse, the "certificate of initial mastery," and even, to some extent, the Brockton project are all vintage Magaziner: right-hearted, impressive in scale, but tinged with heavy-handedness and im-practicalities...

...There may be a subsidy arrangement for small business and individuals who need government help .There may be taxes on benefit values above a threshold...

...Cross...

...The result was an expensive, defective debacle...

...is necessary for a morass like national health care...

...Brown continues to draw in top students and thrive...

...Both men were touted early on as brilliant thinkers, both enjoyed lucrative stints in the corporate world, both slid into public life as proteges of a new, young president, and both were unleashed on the day's most Byzantine problem...

...All companies, organizations and institutions, regardless of size or type of business...

...And he's apparently impervious to exhaustion —when he tells aides to produce something "by four," they have to ask "a.m...

...He can synthesize pie graphs, streamline bureaucratic waste, and parse economic indicators like a one-man mainframe...

...Magaziner's mandatory training idea, which you'll find in Putting People First, is also regressive: A big firm's outlay to train 50 workers is far more cost-effective than a smaller firm's outlay to train five...

...would be required to participate...

...An administration of big ideas needs a big ideas man, but you can't help noticing that if Magaziner is a social experimenter his petri dish just got a lot bigger...

...But just days before the vote, the two leading Democrats in the state legislature named themselves to the ostensibly, non-partisan commission which was to oversee Greenhouse dispersals...

...The report recommended a system of federally sponsored employment and training boards to oversee a new system of school-to-work programs and skills certificates...

...People took it as evidence of a lack of political sophistication, that he didn't have a good enough sense of the hurly-burly...

...And this is the last ingredient of a recipe that Magaziner would reuse in the future: Dig into a problem, imagine a way to fix it, hole up with others to write an exhaustive report on it, win powerful folks to the cause, and warn darkly of repercussions if the plan isn't adopted...

...With a wiry shock of black and gray hair and a complexion like chalk, Magaziner made his reputation storming company compounds, rattling executives, and rustling documents until dramatic solutions emerged...

...In 1971, he resurfaced in Brockton, Massachusetts, the grizzled, decaying Boston suburb which was then a foundering shoe factory town best known as the home of Rocky Marciano...

...He put the firm's resources at the state's disposal for free...

...status more ruthlessly...

...The housing was built, the park is fine...

...But you can't help thinking that those sound like words you'd expect from the parent of a Brown student, finding out how the school's grading system actually works...

...The Examiner took a hard stand against a proposal to build a Bob's Big Boy...

...It's funny," Robert Reich once said, "his insights are rarely startling...

...He was, after all, an early and ardent fan of the ultimate high-tech boondoggle, cold fusion...

...Magaziner, who had put manic energy into devising the plan and selling it to leaders, had forgotten to sufficiently pitch it to taxpayers...

...The idea was that if Greenhouse could improve a state's export ratio, then the concept could be sold to the whole country as sound national policy...

...An across-the-board rule has some merit: If smaller businesses are exempt, they can swipe skilled workers, which, in fact, is what happens in Germany now...