Conning the Boss: The Art of Getting Away with Doing Good
Shell, Richard
Conning the Boss: The Art of Getting Away With Doing Good by Richard Shell Neither Roger Morris nor Thomas Hughes is a name that is instantly recognizable outside the narrow community of...
...It is easy to suggest that Morris and Hughcs should have been more honest with themselves and each other...
...Hughes, on the other hand, made effective use of Morris in publicizing the work of the Carnegie Endowment and seems to have gotten rid of him at only minimal cost to his own State Department hopes...
...What originated as differences over the proper role of a humanitarian research program escalated into charges and Richard Shell is a Washington writer...
...In his letter, Morris complained about “conditions of abuse” and “insults...
...1 was really burnt out, disillusioned, and all the rest,” referring to h s quitting the NSC over the Cambodia invasion...
...I called Morris in to tell him he was threatening the objectivity of his Biafran study...
...Attracting Morris meshed with Hughes’ plans to revitalize Carnegie by assembling a team of innovative thinkers who could also attract public attention in Congress and the press to their liberal ideas on foreign policy...
...Contemptuous of the usual “foundation rip-off’ study, Morris characterized such institutions as Brookings as engaging in “intellectual masturbatim,” producing dessicated monographs which have no impact outside the tight little foreign affairs community...
...Morris had left Mondale’s staff just three months earlier to write a book and teach at New York University...
...Later, when Morris’ attacks on Kissinger and foreign service officials aroused the wrath of professionals, Hughes looked for ways to rein in his troublesome subordinate...
...After flaunting h s clientism article in the Foreign Service Journal, there was no way he could have hoped to bring out a Biafra report that would have been perceived by knowledgeable readers as objective...
...He refers to Morris’ program as an “administrative shambles...
...Using Nader as a model, student researchers would be an important part of these projects...
...Three months later the interns left, bitter about their experience...
...Even at this point, despite later denials, Morris continued his hidden activities...
...It was an outside article by Morris entitled “Rooting for the Other Side” which appeared in the November 1973 issue of The Washington Monthly that triggered the first crisis with Hughes...
...Hughes also quotes Mondale as saying, “I always enjoyed working for Roger Morris, when he could spare the time .” Morris himself is not unwilling to take a few personal swipes at Hughes...
...Morris’ article for this magazine, however, had already gone to press when the memorandum was written, and Morris had left the .Endowment by the time the Columbia Journalism Review article appeared...
...Service on the 303 Committee (which coordinated covert intelligence projects) is the kind of left-wing guilt-byassociation slander that is really meaningless until one knows what position Hughes took in the internal discussions of the Committee...
...One indication of their stature is that both have been associated with one of the shadow Cabinet’s institutional bases, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...In his resignation letter, more than a year later, Morris charged, “It was not intellectual judgment on the merits that killed the Biafran project, but Washington gossip, innuendo, suspicion, fear, and ambition...
...Appropriating the work of student interns and full-time employees is an all too common practice in Washington as well as in academia...
...You can maintain face within the community by holding virtually any intellectual position as long as you do not break the cardinal rule and criticize one of your colleagues in government directly...
...One Morris article is described by Hughes as an act of “sensational self-subversion...
...In a sense Morris and Hughes fooled themselves more than they fooled eaah other...
...An unstated concern of Hughes was that his own standing in the foreign policy community was threatened by all the controversy...
...He received a letter from Hughes in return telling him that he was “sad but not surprised” at his sudden departure...
...Morris angered both Hughes and student researchers by using Endowment time and resources to develop articles unrelated to the topic Hughes felt Morris should be studying, Baugladesh...
...countercharges of political interference, incompetence, bias, and so on...
...By using the Carnegie name-and its prior reputation for noncontroversial monographsMorris was able to get access to middle-level State Department officials who are generally off-limits to the press...
...I killed the Biafran study right then...
...If someone in Morris’ position can show that he understands what threatens so me one like Hughes, and will do his best to avoid it, he will usually be able to do what he would otherwise have to hide...
...Moreover, the discussion of “clientism” in regard to the Biafran war occupied only seven paragraphs of a much longer article...
...The scattershot nature of Morris’ invective is also illustrated by his disapproving mention that Hughes “was also fired from the Embassy in London in a dispute with Annenberg...
...In any case, the dispute here is not a legal one, but an ethcal one...
...But if that had been the case, perhaps Morris should have been willing, earlier in the game, to resign on principle...
...Morris, on the other hand, had his own delusions- besides grandeur...
...Hughes is the Endowment’s president, and Morris, before his angry resignation last November, directed one of the Endowment’s major programs...
...The answer from the head of the center, who is a writer of some note with his own reputation to maintain, was, “Absolutely not, I want to keep all of that for myself...
...Often the individual carnage and organizational failure is due not to insuperable obstacles but to the feeling of people up and down the line that they have to dissemble and manipulate and con the boss in order to get away with what they really want to do...
...Aimed almost exclusively at Morris, it states that “the Endowment reserves the right to claim or forego credit on publications produced at any time which were drawn from research data derived from Endowment employment, entree, and auspices...
...In their extensive written comments on an earlier draft of this article, both men inadvertently told us a good deal about themselves...
...Equally confident in their assertions, Morris and Hughes also share an eagerness to insult each other, as well as a fondness for making basic questions of fact a matter for intense debate...
...Foreign policy debate is one of the refuges for the true metaphysicians...
...In “Rooting for the Other Side,” in the November 1973 issue of ths magazine, he explained the role of “clientism” in the U. S. foreign service, a practice whereby State Department officials unconsciously become advocates for the countries they deal with...
...Neither article was discussed with Hughes...
...Morris saw in Hughes somconc who could provide him with the money, prestigc, time, and researchers to do the kind of exciting, headline-grabbing work that could alter American policiesand turn him into another Ralph Nader...
...One of the major illustrations he used was that the U. S. embassy in Lagos had suppressed damaging information about the Nigerian government when the Biafran war began...
...It was a paranoid and quixotic letter,” said Hughes, “The board of trustees did not even discuss it...
...This becomes more difficult to believe, however, when one notes the trip Carnegie students made to Vanderbilt University’s videotape library in Nashville and the easy familiarity with which Morris detailed in his article even visual aspects of television coverage over a three-year period of the Allende regime...
...but we reached the point where the author had done hmself so much public damage on the issue that we could no longer conscientiously defend him...
...Nearly a year later Anderson would do another column on Burundi, and Morris’ rising stature was clear: “Roger Morris, a former Kminger aide, is rapidly becoming the Ralph Nader of foreign affairs...
...Morris clearly exploited the Carnegie Endowment to the hilt and much of it was probably done to further his reputation as “the Ralph Nader of foreign affairs...
...What made matters worse was that the article which appeared in this magazine was also critical of State Department correspondents Marvin and Bernard Kalb-which for a potential Secretary of State is akin to a Broadway producer sponsoring an attack on Clive Barnes or Walter Kerr...
...Compared to most members of the Washington foreign policy community, Morris and Hughes are not only more gifted than average, but are clearly “good men...
...Without new studies, the students who had already been recruited for the summer of 1974 would arrive in Washington and find there was little for them to do...
...This is obviously a “who cares...
...These articles were a clear violation of Hughes’ midOctober memorandum on outside publication...
...In recent months Roger Morris has published two articles which seem to be derived from the students’ sub rosa research projects, without giving proper credit to the Carnegie Endowment...
...Dueling Memos Over the next few months, Hughes searched for a way to fire Morris without causing the kind of controversy in the press and with his board that he has tried so hard to avoid...
...Perhaps Morris would not have been able to do his good work if he had been wholly candid with Hughes...
...State Department, rather than speaking in abstract terms about institutional failures...
...It criticized specific people in the State Department, and it argued that humanitarian considerations had not been properly considered in framing American policy...
...That kind of work was also needed in foreign policy, he decided, and he was the man to do it...
...Since then he has upset the staid world of foreign policy analysts by daring to criticize individual decisions by specific officials in the...
...One was an article on U. S. food policy, “Why Leave It to Earl...
...Their story is typical of the way men become victims of their own organization a1 politics and illustrates how good men working on good programs can bring bitterness and back-biting to a respected foundation as they squabble over a project called, ironically, the Humanitarian Policy Studies Program...
...As a defiant gesture, they left by the front door-research and all...
...But he also knew that he could go only so far...
...Unfortunately, this sort of thmg is typical of how bureaucratic self-justification distorts one’s view of the truth and of other human beings...
...The students were a bit confused, but they went along...
...To get rid of Morris, Hughes sought to find a bureaucratic solution, as ex-government officials are wont to do...
...Hughes wanted to lead an innovative -but ultimately res pe c t a ble - fo un dation as the groundwork for realizing what is said to be his prime goal: to return to the State Department in a future Democratic administration as Secretary or Under Secretary...
...The study not only made the news pages, but was also highlighted in Jack Anderson’s column...
...The article carried the by-line of Roger Morris and Hal Sheets, a Morris protege at the Endowment, and it was stated that “this article was written without any institutional sponsorship...
...which appeared in the November 1974 issue of The Washington Monthly...
...Most importantly, the program was the first to consistently study foreign policy from a humanitarian perspective...
...In the more typical case, however, a little bit of openness would go a long way...
...Lake was scheduled to work on a third project involving Rhodesia...
...Although the policy critiques are intimately connected with what real people in the State Department are doing each day, by gentlemen’s agreement debate is confined to the abstractions of policy, and steered away from the officials involved...
...Morris, on the other hand, simply hoped to become the Ralph Nader of foreign affairs...
...He was aided by a May 1974 board resolution which extended the Bangladesh deadline until June 1975...
...Along with Morris came Tony Lake, who had also resigned from the National Security Council staff after Cambodia and most recently had been working on the ill-fated 1972 Muskie campaign...
...The Name Game The Humanitarian Policy Studies Program represented an important break with tradition in a more threatening sense as well, for Hughes’ and Morris’ colleagues in the foreign policy world...
...Even though Hughes had rejected all the new proposals, Morris, for some reason, interpreted the response as a go-ahead signal for still other projects...
...Morris was hired by Hughes in July 1972 to start a new Carnegie project, the Humanitarian Policy Studies Program...
...Describing Hughes’ background, Morris notes, “He was in government since 1961, mostly as State’s Director of Intelligence and Research, where he attended the 303 Committee, the predecessor to the 40 Committee...
...Hughes arrived first, having been chosen to head the Endowment in 197 1. At that time Hughes was serving as a member of the policy and coordinating staff of the State Department, where he landed after his departure from England in 1970...
...The longer Bangladesh took, the longer Morris could enjoy the support, both financial and logistical, of the Endowment...
...Today Hughes insists that the Humanitarian Studies Program is not dead...
...Hughes clearly sought to combine flair with the continued approval of foreign affairs experts...
...The ambition of those studies was different from the standard soldiered approach of think-tanks like the Brookings Institution...
...In September 1972 Morris and Hughes formally agreed on the structure of the program, which would focus on two major “pilot” studiesBiafra and Bangladesh-but which would leave Morris room for “articles or short studies on an issue of the moment...
...He made sure to bring to this magazine’s attention criticism of Morris by two former employers, New York University and Senator Walter Mondale...
...The climactic event occurred one day in late July when Hughes caught a researcher duplicating a Morris manuscript for Rolling Stone...
...He noted that a year’s work on thc subject was wasted...
...But if Hughes came out a little better than Morris, he was still the original sinner in his frightened cancellation of the Biafra study...
...issue, which makes the total contradictions of the two statements especially unsettling...
...This was too much, even for the confused and compliant students...
...Morris viewed things differently...
...For example, Morris flatly denicd a reference in an early draft of t h s article that he had joined Senator Walter Mondale’s staff in 1970, after leaving the National Security Council, to work on domestic, rather than foreign policy...
...Biafra was canceled only after Morris had so flamboyantly telegraphed his biases on the issue, to the most interested and critical audiences, that hc had suicidally undermined his own credibility,” Hughes wrote in a memo to The Washington Monthly...
...And despite denials by Hughes, it seems evident that Morris could not have taken such outspoken positions unless the trustees of the Carncgie Endowment were mollified by words of reassurance from Hughes about that nice, responsible young moderate, Roger Morris...
...Moreover, Hughes felt that Morris jeopardized the Endowment’s reputation for objectivity with his controversial outside writings...
...This article provoked the antagonism of the Washington community,” recalled Hughes in a later interview...
...Instead one must realize that both decided that they could accomplish more good (both institutional and personal) by bending their somewhat vague mandates as far as they could in the direction that they wanted the Endowment and the program to go...
...Morris, for his part, was probably unrealistic in believing that he could avoid the inhercnt procedural conservatism of any mainline jects for Morris, belatedly, was designed to deprive hm of any further possible excuses for failure to produce on Bangladesh”-along with Biafra the two major studies agreed to at the program’s beginning...
...When the article was reprinted in the Foreign Sewice Journul and mailed to the 7,000 people who make up our foreign service contingent abroad, Hughes drew the line...
...But withm what might be called the foreign policy “shadow Cabinet,” they are both important figures...
...Morris resigned from the National Security Council staff in 1970 in protest over the Cambodian invasion...
...At one point, an assistant even instructed the students to leave the Endowment by a rear entrance so they could carry their research materials away with them...
...For a while they worked harmoniously together to launch the program...
...Earlier, in a taped conversation with me, Morris had said just the opposite: “When I did [join Mondale’s staff], by deliberate choice I decided to work on non-foreign policy matters...
...The Biafra episode must have made clear to Morris that if Hughes couldn’t back up criticism of our embassy in Lagos, it was highly unlikely that he would support criticism of bigger targets...
...In mid-1974 Morris wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review a devastating critique of the way the press has lionized Henry Kissinger (the piece was also later reprinted on the op-ed page of The New York Times...
...But both men viewed the Camegie’s program as a way to further their own ambitions...
...They were both congenitally insiders, who had found themselves on the outside, and who still remained eager, in their own ways, to influence policy-making, to be close to the action...
...But in recounting the events that led to the Morris resignation this fall, one is faced with the problem of reconciling sharply differing versions of the same events...
...In a parenthetical aside, Hughes points to a “memorandum from [Morris’] NYU supervisor...
...Hughes and Morris are enemies now, quick to exchange insults, channeling their hatred into the cool medium of letters and memos...
...From this moment, then, Morris began hs practice of the art of getting away with doing good...
...I got calls from outraged ambassadors, outraged foreign service personnel, who wanted to know what was going on...
...Hughes, after all, is primarily an administrator rather than a writer or critic...
...Shortly thereafter, Morris resigned, claiming in a 15-page letter that he had been unreasonably restrained...
...Constructive Criticism ~ Here’s the way Hughes assessed his former employee: He charges Morris with an “abdication of his assigned responsibilities to manage the student program, his constant absenteeism in the fall of 1974, and his excessive personal writing coinciding with his co n t i n ue d on Bangladesh...
...Unfortunately, the controversy doesn’t end here...
...But to make this gesture of candor and understanding requires a basic faith that you are dealing with reasonable people, and that, unfortunately, is a faith that institutional life makes hard to sustain...
...Sometimes they are right...
...In mid-October he prepared a “memorandum of understanding” regarding the terms on which Carnegie employees could publish outside of the Endowment...
...Both men came to the Endowment by different routes...
...We were lied to, deceived, and pushed around...
...Morris reportedly called a staff meeting to tell students to continue to work in their respective areas, but to inform anyone who inquired that their work related solely to Bangladesh...
...Said one, “We thought we were coming to Washngton to work for the good of the country, but we turned out to be working for the good of Roger Morris...
...For his part, Hughes is generally considered to have been one of the more progressive .and humane figures within the State Department over the last decade...
...Journalists usually don’t have the luxury of having researchers doing laborious research for . them, but writers like Morris, who has never lost the mind-set of the National Security Council, tend to take those kinds of benefits for granted...
...So often, if the employee only shows that he understands what most worries the boss about his work, he can find ways to avoid that point without giving up the heart of his effort...
...You’ll note that‘ Jelin says some positive things about the summer despite the ‘hassles,’ and regardless of ‘what a schmuck Tom Hughes was.’ ” Morris cast further doubt on his objectivity and reliability in ths affair by offering contradictory statements on questions of basic fact...
...I recently applied for a job at another newly funded center and was sailing through the job interview until I asked innocently, “Can 1 write articles about the research I will be doing here...
...What all this adds up to is something indigenous to so much institutional life in Washington, New York, university cities, and elsewhere across the country, wherever people gather in institutions to serve some larger end...
...if he lost his job at Carncgie he might have a more awkward time finding an organization to direct than Morris, in similar straits, would have finding other opportunities to write...
...they were to ‘L name names,” and everyone hoped the studies would create maximum impact in the press when they were published...
...Since coming to Carnegie, he has tried to transform the Endowment from an inbred and ethereal foreign policy institute, endlessly pouring over the Talmudic complexities of international law, into something more effective and “relevant...
...This mticle was adapted from a manuscript submitted by him and from documents supplied by Thomas Hughes and Roger Morris...
...Thc problem was rooted in the vastly different goals which Hughes and Morris had always had for the Humanitarian Policy Studies Program...
...As one student-who didn’t get any credit for the food article-put it, “It certainly is a coincidence that the food article came out just after we spent all summer working on it...
...He points to a few remaining projects...
...The idea for the Humanitarian Policy Studies Program originated when Morris, during his work with Mondale, became an admirer of Ralph Nader’s public-interest approach to domestic problems...
...For anyone who is not a right-wing ideologue, being fired by Walter Annenberg, TV Guide publisher and Nixon loyalist turned ambassador, would be something to brag about...
...Hughes exploded and fired her...
...Conning the Boss: The Art of Getting Away With Doing Good by Richard Shell Neither Roger Morris nor Thomas Hughes is a name that is instantly recognizable outside the narrow community of non-governmental critics and observers of American foreign policy...
...We would have happily withstood criticism as such...
...About three weeks into the summer, two students were discussing press coverage of Biafra outside of Hughes’ office when the Endowment president overheard them...
...One student explained later, “I’ve had enough peace and humanitarianism to last me for a couple of years...
...There were some embarrassing moments along the way, but people like Morris, who get public attention, are supposed to be controversial...
...Hughes saw in Morris somcone who would be innovative enough to help him rake the ivy off the Carncgie image, while still maintai ning thc Endowment’s s tan ding within the foreign policy community...
...When he realized they were not working on Bangaldesh, Hughes ordered Morris to cancel the other programs...
...in the Carnegie files” attacking Morris’ “absenteeism, failure to perform contractual commitments, and exploitation of the relationship for outside purposes...
...One especially troublesome area for Hughes may have been two sharply anti-Kissinger articles that Morris wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review and The Washington Monthly in May and June, respectively...
...I told Roger that he had lost any chance he had at turning out an objective study...
...If he wanted to reform Carnegie, Hughes had little real choice but to behave this way...
...There may even be a further collaboration between Morris and the Carnegie Endowment, since Morris is now hard at work on the old, oft-neglected Bangladesh study, having promised the Endowment that he will turn something in to them even though he no longer wishes to be part of the Carnegie team...
...In the case of Roger Morris and Thomas Hughes, it is difficult to tell who was taken for a longer ride...
...Similarly, Morris claims that the research for his Chile article in the Columbia Journalism Review was done after hours and on weekends by his two student research assistants...
...Although it fitted Morris’ Naderesque ambitions, this emphasis on newspaper coverage was a departure for the Carnegie Endowment, whjch had traditionally produced technical monographs for specialists...
...Both Morris and Sheetswho co-authored the food piecevigorously deny the implication that they used the Carnegie resources in any way...
...The other programs of the Endowment were in danger,” explained Hughes...
...Far more serious than the failure to give credit to the students was the failure to mention that some of the re search- p articularly the ou t-of- town trips-was paid for by the Carnegie Endowment...
...Morris’ response to Hughes’ order was interesting, particularly in light of what he had written about the accomplishments of the student intern program in the Endowment’s 1974 annual report: “I think we have disabused several young people of a somewhat conspiratorial view of American policies, institutions in general, and foreign policy in particular...
...Morris protested that this would leave the students without anything to do...
...And to prove that he was not the only one disliked by the student researchers, Morris also writes, “I have included a note, for example, from Bill Jelin [om of the student intcrnsl...
...Knowing ths, he should have recognized intuitively that putting these ideas into practice was not apt to be popular for long in such a basically staid organization as the Carnege Endowment-especially in the face of official criticism...
...The article made a case against “clientism” in the foreign service-the phenomenon by which foreign service officers often transfer their conventional loyalties to the foreign country where they are stationed...
...Things at the Humanitarian Policy Studies Program began on a high plane...
...It is easy to understand why Morris would not have, under his new restrictions, wanted to work on Bangladesh, since completion of that study might mean the end of his relationship with the Carnegie Endowment...
...The study was published in the summer of 1973, and its conclusions were sharply drawn...
...Take two of his best recent articles...
...The second article dealt with the press’ coverage of Allende’s Chile and appeared in the November-December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review...
...Through Carnegie, Hughes not only commands attention for his own work, but also gets reflected glory from everything published by the foundation, including Foreign Policy, a quarterly affiliated with the Endowment...
...Nevertheless,” talent scout Hughes adds, “we gambled on Morris and hired him...
...Twelve interns came to work at the Endowment last summer...
...What makes this over-heated attack on the article so bizarre is that there is no dispute about the facts Morris reported about the behavior of our diplomats in Lagos...
...According to them, the material used for the food article was from the public record, and Sheets says he re-researched the students’ work in order to avoid ’a charge of exploiting Carnegie resources...
...The first study, completed in June 1973, was about American policy (or lack of policy) toward genocide in Burundi, where the U. S. had “passed by” a tribal war in Central Africa which rivaled in sheer gore any other world slaughter except the Nazi extermination of the Jews...
...Big Boss Man Washington has a tendency to bring out the hidden Machiavelli in almost everyone...
...Of course the task of finding the original sources was done by the students, so Morris and Sheets got their bibliography on a silver platter...
...Both Hughes and Morris werc deluding themselves, and each other, that these differences could be sheltered under the genteel conventions of foundation life...
...It was thus to the credit of both Hughes and Morris that they were willing to undertake a research program that had as one of its purposes the destruction of this internal taboo...
...Hughes had first met Morris in January 1972 and was sufficiently impressed to return six months later with an offer to join Carnegie...
...Hughes later said that it was his understanding that Morris would consult him about topic selection and publication...
...They continued with their research-in two cases going on week-long trips at Carnegie expense to Chicago and Nashville-but it was only a matter of time before things came to a head...
...But he parted ways with NYU after two months over a dispute on how much time he should spend at the university...
...Yet the story behnd Morris’ departure has no heroes and no villains...
...Morris divided the students into three groups-one each to study food, foreign affairs and the press, and Chile...
...It was in response to this article that Carnegie began getting phone calls about Morris...
...S tartiiig Out Together All this nit-picking and bitchiness is background-albeit necessary- to the main story of what drove Hughes and Morris to such an acrimonious separation...
...Moreover, the use of student researchers raises import an t questions about reputations built on the legwork of others...
...Hughes may well have agreed with much of the articles’ criticism of Kissinger, but the doublebarreled blast from a Carnegie employee was bound to appear unseemly in the eyes of Hughes’ respectable constituency...
...In effect, congressmen do it all the time when they use ghost-written speeches and publish ghost-written articles...
...There was also a less self-interested reason why Morris objected to Carnegie’s refusal to fund any new projects...
Vol. 6 • January 1975 • No. 11
