Page 88 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ROOT OUT PREJUDICE IN THEMSELVES AND OTHERS

Postal Service. Of course, it didn’t hurt that his principal, Larry O’Brien,
practically gave him carte blanche to shake things up. O’Brien was serving
as President Johnson’s special assistant for congressional relations and per-
sonnel when he was named postmaster general of the U.S. Postal Service
shortly after the first class of Fellows arrived in Washington in 1965.
O’Brien was heavily involved in helping President Johnson get his Great
Society legislation passed, and although he was now responsible for the
postal service, he would still maintain a White House office and be respon-
sible for finessing legislation through Congress. He told Lee that he would
need his help keeping the postal service moving.
Lee enthusiastically accepted that challenge, and while still working
in the White House waiting for O’Brien to be confirmed by the Senate,
he began studying the practices of not only the postal service’s adminis-
trative offices in Washington but also those of every post office in the
country. In 1966, the U.S. Post Office was the biggest civilian agency in
the government, with 600,000 employees, delivering over 70 billion
pieces of mail annually to 60 million locations, using a fleet of 70,000
vehicles. What he found appalled him: Out of 44,000 postmasters
nationwide, only two were African Americans. “It was disgraceful, and
Larry and I agreed that it was something worse than that—it was segre-
gation, because about 30 percent of the postal service employees were
minorities at that time,” Lee explained. “So O’Brien gave me the go-ahead
to find people to promote.”
Lee set about finding minority employees who were qualified to be
postmasters. Within months he had found three African-American candi-
dates: John Strachan for New York City, Henry Magee for Chicago, and
Lester Shaw for Los Angeles—and an Asian candidate, Lim Poon Lee, for
San Francisco. “Those cities represented the four largest postal responsi-
bilities in the country. We wanted to put them in those big cities to boost
morale,” Lee said. “They all came from inside, and they’d all been there a
long time and had been passed over for promotions.” By the time the year
was out, Lee had helped identify ten people for O’Brien to recommend to
President Johnson for postmaster appointments. He also helped increase
the number of African Americans in the senior management ranks at
the headquarters from 5 percent to 12 percent. During the thirty-one
months he served as an aide to Postmaster General O’Brien and then as
one of the six assistant postmasters general, Lee went on to help hire an

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