Page 39 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE PROGRAM

candidates was reduced significantly, Gardner might be persuaded to fund
a three-year pilot of the program through the Carnegie Foundation.
Goldman received the memo back with “an enthusiastic go-ahead from
President Johnson and with notations by both him and Mrs. Johnson.”
President Johnson decided that the work assignments would not be in agen-
cies as Gardner had suggested but in the highest reaches of the federal gov-
ernment. The total number of Fellows would decrease from 100 to 15—one
for each of the ten cabinet officers, one for the vice president, and four in
the Office of the President. The first lady indicated that she liked the
name White House Fellows, and so it was chosen. The program would be
announced at a special event for student leaders that was to be held, at the
president’s request, on October 3, 1964—only two weeks away.
Goldman was correct in guessing that the Carnegie Foundation would
fund a pilot of the program: At Gardner’s behest, the Carnegie board
approved a $225,000 grant for the White House Fellows program. From
the campaign trail, President Johnson appointed a bipartisan Commission
on White House Fellowships and chose a Republican, David Rockefeller,
as chairman. David Rockefeller was the younger brother of New York’s gov-
ernor and former Republican presidential candidate Nelson Rockefeller.
Goldman wrote that “the presidential approvals of the names came back
from the campaign jet over a radio-telephone which was acting up in a
storm. The words were so garbled that it took me several minutes to make
sure whether David Rockefeller, as chairman, was being okayed or berated.
He was okay, bounteously so.”
At that time, Rockefeller was president of Chase Manhattan Bank,
chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, a founder and chairman of the
Council of the Americas, and president and chairman of the Executive
Committee of the Harvard College Board of Overseers, to name a few of
the positions he held back then. He was exceedingly busy but felt obligated
to accept President Johnson’s appointment. “I was sitting in my office at
the bank, and I was told that President Johnson wanted to speak to me.
He was on Air Force One,” Rockefeller said. “I haven’t been asked that
often by presidents to do things. I guess I felt a request was a command,
and so I agreed to serve as the first chairman of what became the White
House Fellows Commission.” Rockefeller wrote in a 2008 letter, “I have
never regretted that decision. The White House Fellows program has been
an exceptional success. Based upon my experience with the first few classes

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