Page 37 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE PROGRAM

brought together for weekly seminars that exposed them to the “big pic-
ture” issues of governing, and he proposed holding a ten-day retreat dur-
ing which the class would discuss leadership principles. He envisioned
panels in which the participants would not only identify challenges to the
country in the coming years but also hash out ways to meet those issues
head on. He recommended that a few of the participants be invited to con-
tinue their work for a second term, perhaps in the overseas offices of their
current agencies.
Finally, he suggested that if some of the candidates chose to stay on
in Washington at the end of their service period, they should be allowed
to apply that time toward civil service seniority. Gardner justified his plan
by stating that “if the sparsely settled American colonies of the late eigh-
teenth century could produce Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Monroe,
Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and others of superlative talent, breadth,
and statesmanship, should we not be able to produce ten times, or fifty
times, that number? Where are they? We have few. Surely the raw mate-
rial is still there . . . the program described here should be so designed and
so administered as to give these superbly qualified young people precisely
those experiences. Then, whether or not they stayed on in government,
they would constitute a natural resource.”
Through his Presidential Corps program, John Gardner, like his step-
father, was mining for untapped resources. Now he waited to see if the
president thought he’d struck gold.

THE PLAN COMES TOGETHER
Born in Washington in 1915, Eric F. Goldman earned a Ph.D. in history
from Johns Hopkins University at age twenty-two. He was a history pro-
fessor at Princeton when President Johnson, newly sworn in, asked him to
come to the White House to serve as his “idea man.” Goldman was a gate-
keeper of sorts, always on the lookout for promising proposals that would
further the president’s agenda. Upon receiving Gardner’s proposal for the
national service program, Goldman sent him a letter that called the plan
“very welcome indeed,” noting that “by coincidence, it fits in very much
with something toward which I was fumbling and it also fits in with a
desire which Mrs. Johnson expressed to me.” Goldman assured Gardner
that he had sent the plan to Lady Bird for her input. However, Goldman
later wrote that he was not impressed with Gardner’s plan because he feared

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