Collecting Merit Badges: The White House Fellows
Rand, Peter
Collecting Merit Badges: The White House Fellows by Peter Rand Fifteen years ago, Pete Dawkins was captain of the West Point football team. Dawkins was an All-American, winner of the...
...He’s not Reyes Tijerina, although he has no quarrel with Tijerina or Chavez, but he has conceived a role for himself as a potential political leader...
...This is standard Horatio Alger stuff...
...trustee, Opera SOC...
...Comes the Dawn worked painfully hard without inspiration to get good grades, in order to make it into Harvard...
...American children, of course, are all encouraged at some point, usually early, to collect badges, and White House Fellows are the ultimate players of that dream...
...This is the awe that the finalists have for each other...
...People don’t want to risk failure by speaking out...
...He has five directorships and one trusteeship...
...When he completes his year in Flanigan’s office, where he has learned about international financing and multi-national corporations, Jayne will go back to being a pilot...
...By the time you and his other colleagues catch on and the posse begins to form, he’s safely on his way to his new job as vice president of General Electric...
...These bittersweet victories can keep the achiever pushing on to gather proof of his continuing progress, while blinding him to the kinds of personal development he really needs, and to the contributions he can really make...
...Came the dawn that this track was endless, and he felt betrayed, because he discovered he hadn’t done enough by succeeding...
...And so it was inevitable that, although John Gardner and Lyndon Johnson had not intended military officers to be eligible to compete for White House Fellowships, the rules were soon changed to allow thesoldiers to come crashing in...
...The average achiever ends up having an attention span of about eight months in each job before he starts paying less attention to what he’s supposed to be doing than to where he can touch down next...
...You don’t become a national policymaker at 35...
...They are systematic achievers...
...a girl I know asked me...
...trustee, Nat’l Braille Press...
...Clements is the Assistant Secretary of Defense...
...Under those circumstances it’s hard to grow...
...Comes the Dawn Yet there is a line that separates those, like my friend, who would like to have credentials because they’re useful things to have, and those, of whom the White House Fellows are symbolic, who hurtle down the credential path seemingly for its own sake, interested in the badges not as a means but as self-sufficient ends...
...It also shows that Zapanta has maintained his identity by making use of the establishment for his people, and demonstrates that achievement can be put to use...
...I saw villagers change from a scared and apathetic type of people and become warm to U. S. soldiers, who enabled them to take crops to market on U.S.-secured roads...
...it” with some clear goal in mind...
...There, instead of attaining the self-realization he had awaited so long, he found only more pressure to succeed, to get good grades, more competition, and more parental nagging...
...Henry was an AllAmerican football player and a member of the National Football Hall of Fame...
...After graduating with honors from Harvard Business School, he went to work for Polaroid, where he did very well indeed...
...M.B.A., Columbia U., Grad...
...As much as any class of winners, the White House Fellows illustrate the contrast between “making it” with a new credential and “doing...
...The fear exerts itself in the tyranny of awe, and rewards respect for that awe...
...They are proud of their victories, but they have disciplined themselves to stamina and confidence, and deserve credit for their success...
...He was capable of sustaining all alone an alien population under siege until death, out of inner conviction...
...He will be an agent of assimilation, he hopes...
...White House Fellows show an inclination to move from one job to another after their year in the program...
...Beating the Posse “As a group I would have to say that we do not get down into the trenches and claw our way to the top...
...As people like Henry have discovered, there is an undeniable practical utility to credentials...
...I called my wife up in Boston and told her to slow down the packing,” Bruce Henry recalls...
...In Good Companv There is another awe, too...
...I went to a New England prep school where apple-polishing and competition among students for high grades and awards was particularly intense, since the business of the place was to get as many graduates into Harvard and Yale as possible...
...Then in 1969 he returned to HEW...
...He took his revenge by quitting school and moving in with his parents, who reluctantly put up with him until his mealtime tirades became intolerable and they threw him out...
...If that’s the case, then . . . .’ ” Nearly half the Fellows have stayed in Washington...
...He is the ideal 20th-century corporate technician, dedicated to winning, yes, but not so much on his own terms as on the terms of his society...
...I serve among other things on the Committee on Excellence of Educationlooking at how all the corps [ ROTC, the War Colleges, Officer Education] could improve their systems...
...Since he was a self-created leader himself, it’s unlikely that he really thought you could recruit the raw talent for leadership and cultivate it...
...Bruce Henry, who’s at the Department of Housing and Urban Development this year, was born to wear the badges of success...
...The recent strike at The Washington Post is a fine example...
...You get programmed into thinking that way...
...Viva Zapanta...
...As many professions become more hierarchical and guild-like, credentials become more and more a necessity in the years after college...
...I’m staying right here, which I think is just great,” he told me...
...This is most true during school years, when a student knows that if he wants the genuine advantages a good college can provide him he must systematically set about building a well-rounded dossier of grades and extracurricular activities...
...The Happy Ringer Now and then there is talk that the military may be an unhealthy influence on the White House Fellowships...
...One of the ironies of military life is that those badges available outside the systemadvance degrees, Rhodes Scholarshipscan provide that extra touch that distinguishes the future general from the future frustrated colonel...
...The last thing this person wants to do is risk ostracism...
...The external rewards-the scholarships, the institutional attainments-often lack the power to confer any permanent sense of self-respect...
...The officials are eager to snare a highly credentialed star, even a Fellow, not only because they will get to wear his badges on their sleeve for a while, but also because they hope to get some real work out of his talents...
...At issue in the strike was whether the base pay for reporters should be raised to $25,000 range from the present level of about $20,000...
...He moved up to Deputy Assistant Secretary there in 1969 and then in 1970 became executive assistant to the president of the Great Western United Corporation...
...Office: 600 New Hampshire Ave., N.W., Wash., D.C...
...Yet the risk is great for someone with a minority identity to start competing for established rewards...
...The inner-directed man is primed in childhood to pursue specific goals even at the risk of social alienation and loneli.ness...
...Gordon of Khartoum is an .extreme example of the 19th-century inner-directed man...
...campaigns (N.Y./Mass...
...He will weigh his moral imperatives, because, unlike them, he knows the consequences of his judgment and untempered ambition...
...Later, there are sportsmanship cups, athletic prizes, good citizenship awards, and a whole cluster of academic awards...
...The self-congratulatory a tmosphere in which present and former Fellows dwell is suggested by their own description of themselves in the White House Fellows Association Directory as “gifted and highly motivated young Americans...
...Personally...
...School of Bus., 1966...
...Yet as long as the suspicion lurks in his mind that he hasn’t done enough, the achiever will doubt himself, an existential dilemma that the Airlie House ritual vividly reflects...
...In spite of strong egos, achievers have a besetting affliction, and that is the self-doubt that prevents them from walking away from it all...
...prof., Govt., Dept...
...Well, he got into Harvard...
...Fear of failure, that old stigma, inhabits governments and achievers alike, and so they reinforce each other, like the teacher and the pupil who gets the gold star...
...dir., Corporate Dev., System Dev...
...This can create a dangerous anger, all the more explosive in the event that the rewards don’t add up...
...At the same time he’s been serving since 1971 on the Colorado Governor’s Task Force on Returning Vietnam Veterans, and established a political base for himself...
...I do want credentials, certainly, although I tend to scorn them...
...Anne Armstrong, who is President Nixon’s liaison with the Fellows program, will tell you that the Fellows do speak out...
...He worked @ gfororw Cinogn tuinpe,n taanl dC aanft ewr hoilbet aihnei ngw aas degree in industrial psychology, he went on to work for Bethlehem Steel...
...It’s instant pay-off for good behavior, and it’s success...
...In that era its supremacy as an Ivy League feeder operation was being challenged by high schools all over the country, and the pleasure of scholarship for its own sake was one of the casualties of the challenge...
...Yet uniformly the Fellows I talked to had hardly anything critical to say about government operations, particularly the bureaucracies...
...On the wall opposite his desk hangs the familiar poster and &awing of Emiliano Zapata in his sombrero and Sam Browne belt...
...I’m on the civilian side this year, as administrative assistant to Bill Clement s, ” continues Dawkins...
...The program tends to look for high achievers, and people of proven performance, of course...
...His use, too...
...One original success often leads to another, so that successful performers tend to have a pattern of it...
...It shows that even a poor Chicano, working summers at Continental Can, may make it into big business...
...Law and Govt., Columbia U., 1965...
...Achievers” is the wrong thing to call such people, because for them the question of whether or not something is achieved in the world is far off to the side of the main question, which is what new identity the person can collect attempting a new activity...
...But someday he’ll probably be back, with the Air Force, to serve on the National Security Council...
...The effects of this compulsion are hard on the government officials who have to work with the White House Fellows, or with the other rare birds of achievement who migrate from agency to agency with the government...
...Science Assn...
...Yet there’s definitely far too little outspokenness and criticism of ourselves and the government...
...None of the Fellows 1 talked to had thought they had a prayer when they saw what their peers had achieved...
...The awe sticks, too...
...That’s not much time-particularly when you have to start almost right away to wonder what you’ll do next...
...He played football as an undergraduate...
...If, for example, you are looking up Sanford D. Greenberg, you will find out the following: GREENBERG, SANFORD D., chairman of the board...
...Of course what he’s been doing is figuring out where to go next, where he’ll get his next badge...
...Harvard was the promised land...
...faculty, Ctr...
...He is the refined and highly trained later version of the cooperative first-grader who gets the gold star for doing what the teacher wants...
...Phone: (202) 965-0090...
...He also plans to teach...
...He was Assistant Postmaster General from 1969 to 1972, and in 1972 he became a director of corporate marketing analysis at Xerox World Headquarters...
...worked on various pol...
...The Fellowhip program is success oriented, and it ends up being a form of government narcissism-rather like putting your favorite child behind the steering wheel for a photograph...
...I saw some good things come out of the war...
...pres., Int’l Communications Asso., 1961...
...A former government employer who has worked with White House Fellows says that working with the high-fliers, a category which includes hundreds of people rather than the dozens in the White House Fellows program, has its drawbacks...
...We called him Comes the Dawn because he took a long time to get the point of a joke, particularly if it was on him, and he was capable of the most terrible delayed rage if it was...
...They would all be satisfied when he got into Harvardhis teachers and his rigid and Teutonic parents who forever prodded him from the sidelines of his life...
...In 1968-69 he was on the staff of the Urban Coalition...
...The conglomerates are represented by Charles Thornton of Litton Industries and R. V. Hansburger of Boise Cascade, conservative publishing by Francis Dale of The Cincinnati Enquirer, conservative academia by W. Glenn Campbell of the Hoover Institution, and the military by General Earle G. Wheeler, The program is a roaring success as far as everybody involved in it can tell...
...M.A., Ph.D., Harvard U., 1962-65...
...You know, ten goodies and one baddie...
...An outstanding achiever, who was once a Rhodes Scholar, says that he still half resents anybody he hears about who’s achieved, say, a Supreme Court clerkship, because it indicates that others are still collecting hard, quantifiable evidence of their diligence and skill, while he’s cut loose in a world without those clear markers of success...
...It may not have been so hard for him to get out of the barrio and into the establishment because he was trained by it from early adolescence on...
...After all, those credentials are yours as long as he stays...
...I recently talked with Fellows past and present about their year at the helm of government, and it was a great way to cheer myself up...
...One of the most striking traits of the Fellows, to those who have seen them in action, is the eagerness with which they set up White House Fellows Dinners, a White House Fellows Alumni Association, and other linkages formal and informal to insure that no Fellow loses the company of his impressive colleagues...
...The White House Fellows program was John Gardner’s idea when he was serving as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and as befits the author of Excellence and Self Renewal, it was a noble idea...
...He formed a commission, appointed regional panels, and set up the White House Fellows program...
...Dawkins is the most professionally polished of the Fellows, almost beyond being one, like a happy ringer...
...Applicants must be accomplished in their chosen field, whether it be academics, business, the military, law, or medicine...
...We’ve been told many times by people how surprised they are at the questions we’ve asked,” Doris Meissner, at the Justice Department, told me...
...People who want the badges, yet can’t have them, those we call losers, suffer the most from the gold star system...
...At those rates editors won’t take the kind of chance on raw talent they once did when an interesting resum&, a few yellowed clips, and a glib interview might land you a job on a major newspaper...
...The fate of the loser is altogether too predictable in our society, like the drunkard whose decline and fall is depicted in those old New England murals, and this is unfortunate because there’s an important place for people who have suffered major disappointments...
...for Int’l...
...Jayne doesn’t fit one mold,” a colleague said about him, and this is borne out as I talk to him, borne out slowly, because Jayne is reticent about his accomplishments...
...Too many Fellows, and it represents a masculine value system as far as I’m concerned, see the year as an investment...
...She paused...
...They belong in a category all their own...
...And the White House Fellowships are, in their own turn, an enlargement and idealization of a central current in American cultmethat drive, often misleadingly labeled “achievement,” which propels people along in a continual search for badges of accomplishment, emblems of success...
...If West Point conducts special classes to prepare students for the Rhodes competition, could the services long ignore the potential of these new fellowhips...
...The reward of being so privileged kind of shuts them UP...
...Jim Fletcher, who last year lost in the finals and won this year, says, “You felt as if you were awake and died,” when he lost...
...Affairs, Harvard U., 1966...
...Zapanta works for Claude Brinegar, Secretary of Transportation...
...I mean we’re supposed to be flushed out...
...Often grammar schools even provide an improvement cup for the best non-achiever . Eventually, most people drop out of the all-around rewards and prizes effort, as they begin to contemplate the future, and decide what really interests them...
...It’s also easy to ridicule people who go after them and particularly when they get them, for the achiever is an adult version of the “goodie-goodie,” as one of the Fello ws’ childhood acquaintances called her...
...We operate on the presumption that most anything in the world can be improved...
...He was also student council president at the Colorado School of Mines...
...It now has a pronounced Nixon flavor, with, among others, Robert Abplanalp, Patrick Buchanan, Frederick Malek, and Robert Finch...
...They’ll ask the tough questions,” she insists...
...These people are on top of the world...
...He has attained one of the priority goals of the achiever, to be at the right place at the right time...
...Many use the program as a way to break from the past and move into new fields.’’ President Johnson expressed the hope that they would go back where they came from...
...You have to be very careful,” a Fellow who works at the White House told me, “because, after all, one mistake and you’re through...
...It takes about six months to find the men’s room,” one former Fellow said, referring to the amount of time it takes Fellows to get to know their work...
...And it’s a terrific risk...
...20037...
...He’ll be more careful with success, than, say, the callow young men who worked under Nixon and got into trouble with the law...
...Credentials begin with the gold star the first-grade teacher awards to the child who can sit still the longest...
...Harvard Law School, 1965-66...
...Collecting Merit Badges: The White House Fellows by Peter Rand Fifteen years ago, Pete Dawkins was captain of the West Point football team...
...Assn...
...Yet he’s a Phi Beta Kappa and all that, and it just doesn’t figure...
...Yet the Fellows I talked to are all serious, congenial people...
...Military Marvels Nowhere else in adult life is the credential-and-badge system developed in such detail or applied over so long a period of time as in the military...
...20037...
...When he was in Southeast Asia he flew search missions out of Thailand by day and taught a University of Maryland extension course in political science at night...
...I said to John Gardner,” Peter Dawkins recalls, “when we all had dinner with him, ‘It’s a failure, isn’t it...
...For example, Ronald B. Lee of the 1965-66 class was the appointed director of Planning and Systems Analysis in the U. S. Postal Service from 1966 to 1968...
...Doesn’t look good...
...The “victor” of these contests pays his dues, too, for although his attainments are admirable he often has to sacrifice too much along the way...
...Failure comes to be a self-fulfilling prophesy for these unfortunate souls...
...When last I heard of him he was living in a rooming house in Boston, still enraged...
...He was professor, assistant provost, and director at the Center of Urban Affairs, Michigan State University, from 1968 to 1969...
...He was an unconventional fellow, really, who should have been left to his own devices...
...govs./trustee, Ford Theatre...
...The White House Fellows program, with its one-year terms, only aggravates this general situation...
...Honors: One of Ten Outstanding Young Men of Am., 1966...
...He enjoyed his corps of Fellow and developed particularly close friendships with some of them, most notably Professor Doris Kearns of Harvard, who often visited him in Texas after he left office...
...Home: 700 New Hampshire Ave., N.W., Wash., D.C...
...One of Four Outstanding Young Men of Mass,, 1966...
...In 1964, acting upon Gardner’s inspiration, Johnson established a talent hunt...
...you think you’ve really lucked out to get one of these guys...
...He is exceedingly modest about all this...
...trustee, Charles River Acad...
...b. December 13, 1940...
...of Wash...
...1968-71...
...You can’t have people in these positions who aren’t reliable,’’ Ursula Farrell said...
...I commanded an infantry company in the Mekong Delta...
...The leader is closer to David Riesman’s definition of the Inner-Directed person, whom he describes as “gyroscopic...
...He’s short, with sleepy eyelids to belie his energy...
...The suspicion that you may not have done enough, the cold possibility that can often occur when you’ve taken a sidelong glance at your confreres-achievers are particularly vulnerable to this, because they take their indices of success from the scoreboard...
...Even Omenn, who in his own words is “way ahead of other 32-year-olds,” could imagine failure at that stage in his competitive performance at this highest place of judgment...
...We’re going back to be pilots and so forth...
...Ten of the 1968-69 Fellows have held over two jobs-not counting Edgar F. Kaiser, Jr., who has had four positions in different branches of the Kaiser Corporation...
...Since West Point and Oxford he has been a battalion commander in Korea, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Princeton, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and even chairman of the Armed Services Committee of the YMCA...
...I think in general too much is made of that issue...
...We’re tight on time,’’ she reflected, “but you have to make time to talk about these things...
...More probably he liked getting smart young men and women into the White House...
...bd., EDP Tech., Inc...
...A dozen years ago he was at Oxford, a Rhodes Scholar and rugby star...
...Discouragement, or the odor of defeat, is treated like an affliction, and people who lose a few times get a bad name...
...That should tell you where I am,” he declared, without a trace of Mexico in his speech...
...I have grown so much I feel like a budding flower...
...The White House Fellows are not leaders...
...We sat in a large reception room, looking out at a marina of small white boats, and when the Secretary of the Navy shuttled through in a black suit, Dawkins had a bit of badinage with him...
...Timothy Wirth, who’s running for Congress this year from Colorado, is the exemplary Fellow...
...Two of this year’s Fellows are military officers-Pete Dawkins and Randy Jayne...
...The system that metes out rewardsa system made up of a . collusion between parents and educatorsinflicts a panic along with rewards, threatening disaster for the “promis4ng” young if they don’t pursue their responsibilities...
...Someone who hasn’t been too bruised by hardship to come back from it will be much more skeptical of blind obedience than were these young men who had such exemplary college records...
...And why not...
...The executive secretary...
...I’ve always envied people with lots of credentials, haven’t you...
...Yet a person who has lost a few rounds usually knows his strengths and weaknesses...
...The trouble is that there is only a precious, short interval between the time the star arrives, and the time he starts thinking about where he can go next to be hailed as a star...
...The mutual respect, the awe at being part of such a distinguished company, is in no way diminished once the winners are chosen and begin their year’s work...
...This weekend six of us are going out to the Naval Academy and we’ll look at the big picture there and the little regulations, also...
...Jayne, who may have the most luxurious office of all the White House Fellows, and certainly the sunniest, works in Peter Flanigan’s complex domain in the southwest comer of the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House...
...He was in the class of 1967-68, where he served as an assistant to John Gardner at Health, Education, and Welfare...
...A.B., Columbia College, 1962...
...In some ways they are the very opposite of leaders...
...She’s been working as George Schultz’s executive assistant this year...
...Zapanta has managed to do it by keeping one eye fixed on East Los Angeles at all times...
...He merely conceded that being a White House Fellow had changed him enough so that when he visited old high-school friends in Dallas recently he discoverd that you “can’t just plug right back in again...
...He is the most decorated Mexican-American from the Vietnam war...
...One member of that class, James E. Connor, holds four degrees and has had five jobs since 1969: senior associate with Cresap, McCormick and Paget, Director of Planning and Analysis at the Office of Economic Opportunity, special assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, associate assistant director of the Cost of Living Council, and director of the Office of Planning and Analysis at the Atomic Energy Commission...
...My number one goal is helping people,” he says, and he has already used his talents to bring federal money into the barrio and to set up a workshop where handicapped Chicanas do packaging and assembling work for North American Rockwell...
...of Pub...
...From the numerical class rankings at West Point and Annapolis, to the “fitness reports’’ that determine an officer’s chances to ascend to the heavens of high command, the military is expressly designed to judge its members on the badges they have picked up along the way...
...By now the Fellowships are so attractive that the program is deluged with applicants (more than 2,000 last year), and a quite formal and competitive screening process has been set up to choose the winners...
...chmn...
...At the other end is the outerdirected man, as Riesman calls him, whom the achiever more closely resembles...
...To command men in a field of battle, where you existed without knowing if you would be killed the next minute, and then to survive into that nightwhy, I experienced a joy, and a close relationship with my comrades, that I will never experience again to such a degree...
...Leonard0 Da Vinci notwithstanding, most of us can’t get deeply absorbed in more than a few pursuits at a time, and there’s a satisfaction in the concentration on some singular effort that turns out to be more rewarding than the uncertain struggle for other people’s approval...
...as one young man said after winning a scholarship, “Before I had thought it would mean so much to me to be a Rhodes Scholar, but once I found out that I had won, the whole thing was somehow debased for me...
...They can’t be made to go home, wherever that may be...
...It would be hard to find a man less depressed than Zapanta...
...Co-Editor: “The Presidential Advisory System”, 1969 (with Cronin...
...The directory, by the way, is not a simple “where is the old gang now’’ list of present addresses and phone numbers, but includes complete resumes and seems designed to impress future badge awarders...
...She was thoughtful about the program: “We’re all high achievers...
...This awe gets stimulated when each finalist is given a list at the entrance to Airlie House of the accomplishments of their competition...
...Dawkins is tan and smartly dressed...
...The commission itself varies from administration to administration...
...on US-China Relations...
...A1 Zapanta does not live on his knees...
...It’s hard to know exactly why the idea appealed to Johnson...
...Asst...
...He takes his values from the group, and is primarily attuned to the shifts and nods of the system that rewards him...
...I mentioned his name in a bar one night, and immediately someone beside me turned and recited Dawkins’ achievements...
...Finalists meet in the spring with the commissioners at Airlie House, a secluded conference center in the Virginia countryside...
...One of my classmates, whom we called “Comes the Dawn,” was a person who had permitted himself to be goaded by his parents and his teachers into the conformity that was a requirement of success there...
...from the University of Seattle, and his own successful laboratory there, along with a burgeoning friendship with Armand Hammer...
...Lyndon Johnson, himself a schoolteacher, must have known that...
...He was a caricature of the British ideal-a bold leader and adventurer, eccentric to the point of madness...
...Jayne, 28, is the model of an Air Force captain in civilian dress-tall, handsome, rather rugged...
...Four stages of nearly unbearable tension later, and probably feeling older, the 32 finalists are treated to two or three days and nights of awe...
...The world and sunshine are opening up for me,” said AI Zapanta...
...Oxford U. (Marshall Scholar), 196465...
...Today, at age 35, Pete Dawkins is the most enduringly promising person in the whole country, and one of the more famous in that category...
...The program was designed to bring talented young people (applicants must be between 23 and 35) into the highest circles of government for a one-year exposure to the workings of state...
...People who succeed smoothly and consistently are sort of a rebuke to those whose struggles are plain and painful...
...v. chmn...
...He belongs in the Pentagon, very much as a prince belongs in a palace, giving every appearance that the palace belongs to him...
...Corp., 1967-68...
...Quarter finalists must go before regional panels and face an inquisition by local eminences...
...He is everyone’s favorite choice to be Army Chief of Staff in the 199Os, and his Army assignment last year put him in the Chief of Peter Rand is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...dir., Nat’l...
...w. Susan R...
...bd., KMS Industries, 1971...
...Dawkins was an All-American, winner of the Heisman and Maxwell trophies...
...NO More Gordons “It’s a tough year...
...It’s hip to scorn badges...
...The original commission consisted of such certified establishmentarians as Gardner, David Rockefeller, and Douglas Dillon...
...He just isn’t paying attention any more, he’s not doing the work...
...Staff‘s office...
...Phone: (202) 337-6969...
...For a veteran of the achievement world to step away would be like Hank Aaron entering a league where they don’t count home runs-he can’t prove he’s doing well...
...at 32 he was a senior manufacturing manager...
...In a corporate system that relies on data banks to make judgments about people, the rugged individualist with a few bouts of bad luck can become a cast-off...
...She was an IBM executive in New York, and she’s quietly effervescent, clearly a person who is fulfilling a function well...
...It’s better to die on my feet than to continue living on my knees,” goes the accompanying quote...
...This year the path to glory has led Pete Dawkins, as it has led him in the past, away from the Army and toward one of the civilian world’s honorary pursuits...
...This is the occasion the Fellows have been primed for over a grueling eightor nine-month period, and so the grand finale in a great country estate quite predictably might seem unreal...
...Living with life-and-death decisions of men was exhilarating...
...If the sparsely settled American colonies of the late 18th century could produce Washington , Jefferson, Adams, Monroe, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and others of superlative talent, breadth, and statesmanship,” Lyndon Johnson asked in announcing the program, “should we not be able to produce, in this generation, ten times that number...
...Member: Phi Beta Kappa...
...It’s possible that Gardner thought that the program would isolate and promote a natural elite for whom the year’s experience would be invaluable training...
...That leaves six months to do a job...
...Stopping on the high-energy circuit, my one-time achievcr fricnd points out, might mean looking into the abyss...
...He acknowledged, in a dry Texas accent, that he had played football and so forth, but he made no special claims for himself because of it...
...Gil Omenn, like Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night, one of those people who’s meant to work well in this world, could feel unnerved and uncertain of his chances in this crowd, in spite of a record that includes a Rhodes Scholar nomination, an exemplary undergraduate record at Princeton, a Ph.D...
...To see what can be changed...
...He’s supposed to be this terrific hot shot...
...This is general awe, and none of the Fellows 1 talked with made a distinction between the commissioners-the chance to lock minds with Milton Friedman was no more exciting, or less for that matter, than the chance to dine with Robert Abplanalp . The setting itself contributes a hush-hush rural sanctity we came to know so well in James Bond movies...
...It may mean giving up the last vestige of selfrespect...
...This year Pete Dawkins is a White House Fellow...
...Not just medicine and law, but even formerly free-wheeling trades like journalism place increasing emphasis on the right schools, in short, the right badges...
...I’d say that as over-achievers we’re more interested in job mobility,” Bill Graham, the head of the White House Fellows Alumni Association said...
...While Dawkins is the most famous of the 17 men and women now holding the Fellowship, and for that matter is one of the most renowned of all Fellows in the ten-year history of the program, his career and its long string of notable berths epitomizes what the White House Fellowships are all about...
...He will go on being at the right place, too...
...One of Ten Outstanding Young Men of Boston, 1966...
...I like to have as many as I can get,” she said, and she would never in a million years qualify as an achiever, nor want to...
...His performance depends on the approval of the establishment...
...People have asked whether it’s”-and c Peter Dawkins widens his sky-blue eyes-“ ‘good’ to have the military in the program...
...Peter Dawkins will not go back to being a pilot...
...My group is the stamping ground of this committee,” he told me, and drew on a pipe, “and I’m the, well, the gofer of this august body...
...But what’s so frustrating is that after the briefest period of substantial work, his eyes get glassy...
...The increasing necessity of credentials means that many of us who don’t want to play the White House Fellows game must still pay attentjon to our badges...
...Yet most achievers go on being achievers: the Fellowship program, instead of being the capstone of promise, turns into a milestone in a career of perpetual promise...
...He won a National Science Foundation scholarship to MIT, and took a doctorate there in strategic nuclear policy in the program established jointly by William Kaufman of MIT and Henry Kissinger...
...Oxford Union SOC.;A m. Hist...
...At first you think, why this is going to be heaven...
...It was like Grouch0 Marx’s old line, that he wouldn’t join any club that would accept him as a member...
...The ingredients for the rapidly disappearing American Hero, the Rugged Individualist-resilience and independence and healthy skepticism-are created in direct confrontations with often unpleasant experiences...
...and three Presidential campaigns...
...Now the price of misguided hiring is too high, so an editor will hedge his bets by taking on someone with all the right credentials-a key recommendation, the right journalism degree, a position on The Harvard Crimson, or whatnot...
...They are home free...
...That’s for a different kind of person...
Vol. 6 • June 1974 • No. 4
