Page 236 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS LEAD THROUGH EXPERIENCE AND COMPETENCE

be as operational as possible by always being on the lookout for a problem
or set of problems to solve. Dewey’s principal at USAID, Bill Gaud, was
happy to give him a chance to solve a problem and sent him to Nigeria to
find out how the agency’s relief effort there was panning out. USAID was
spending a great deal of money supporting those caught up in the Nigerian–
Biafran war, and Gaud questioned whether all the supplies were getting
through.
Dewey traveled to the war-torn region and found that the Nigerian
Air Force was shooting down relief planes during the night airlifts, and so
he hatched a plan to get food in by using a combination of sealift and river-
boats. He returned to USAID with his news and his recommendation and
promptly was sent to brief Clyde Ferguson, President Nixon’s newly
appointed special representative for Nigeria–Biafra at the State Department.
“So I mentioned my idea to Ferguson when I briefed him, and he said,
‘Listen, come and work with me for a couple of weeks. I’d like to launch
this scheme,’” Dewey said. “It was called the Cross River Scheme at the
time. When it floundered and came close to failing, it was known as the
Dewey Scheme. It just got so intense that it was mutually decided with
Gaud that I would stick with Ferguson at the State Department until the
end of the Fellowship year.”
With no previous experience coordinating large-scale relief efforts,
Dewey set about the task of making the project safer and more efficient.
One of the first entries on his to-do list was to determine how many
Biafrans there actually were so that he could send in a sufficient amount
of food and supplies each night. He learned about a man from the Centers
for Disease Control who had a reputation for using statistics to come up with
innovative ways of solving problems. He and Dewey created a formula that
was based in part on the numbers of smallpox vaccinations that were
administered in the region before the war. They came up with a figure of
just over 3 million people, and that was the number Dewey used in planning
and executing the relief effort. “That was a rather novel technique,” Dewey
said. “I’d never run into this approach before where you wheel out all
the disciplines that you can imagine that might have some bearing on the
problem.”
As the efforts to bring relief to the people of Biafra continued, Dewey
became more involved in the diplomacy required to set up a formal, enduring
procedure—based on the Cross River Scheme—for getting food and other

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