Hamburg - 1 - 2

	TTT
	Session OnePRIVATE 


	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg
	Date:  December 4, 1996

	Interviewers:  Mary Marshall Clark, Brenda Hearing
	New York, New York


Q
:  My name is Mary Marshall Clark and I'm here with my co-interviewer, Brenda Hearing, for the first session of our interview with David Hamburg at Carnegie Corporation.  Today is December the 4th, 1996.  Okay.  Dr. Hamburg, you have so many interests that have culminated in your years here at Carnegie, in terms of children, in terms of prevention of deadly conflict.  We want to go back to your early life a little bit and find out who you were, how you became who you were.  We'd like to hear a little bit about your parents, your grandparents, if that's appropriate, what kind of milieu you were raised in, what books you read as a child, what you discussed at the dinner table, and we'd like for you to just start anywhere you like, and then I'll ask you some follow-up questions.

Hamburg:  Okay, fine.  You know, I appreciate that.  I think that the early context of a person's life makes a big difference in what happens later, and I do think it's possible to trace out some issues or themes we've addressed in the fourteen years at Carnegie, that I probably wouldn't have addressed had I not been sensitized to those issues in my early experience.


I did, incidentally, write something about one part of this in the introduction to Today's Children[:Creating a Future for a Generation in Crisis].  It's a sort of a semi-autobiographical introduction.  My son was the one who put me up to it.  But it basically says some things about children, youth, and families, from my early experience, that sensitized me to certain themes, like social support, that we pursued here.  But I'll come back to that.


I suppose a defining characteristic of my family, in a way, was the fact that it was an immigrant family, in the great wave of Jewish immigration at the turn of the century.  My grandfather came from Latvia on his own, basically because of anti-Semitism in Latvia, pogroms and all the rest.  He did not have any formal education.  He did not have, as far as I know, a word of English.  To me, it was an enormously courageous thing that he and so many others did at that time.


My father was born in 1900, in Latvia, and I guess it was in the following year that my grandfather came here, on his own, with the idea that he would earn some money as soon as possible and bring his wife and his first-born son, my father, to this country.  A classical pushcart peddler kind of story.  He had no skills.  He just wanted to find some way to make a living.


He came to New York first.  There were just too many pushcart peddlers, and he very quickly decided, very shrewdly -- he was actually a very brilliant man, without formal education -- but he decided very quickly it would take too long in New York.  He had some kind of a distant cousin in Cincinnati, so he went to Cincinnati.  That was better, but he also understood that down river a couple of hundred miles there was a city that had, as far as he could tell, no pushcart peddlers, so he went to Evansville, Indiana, on the Ohio River, and set himself up as a pushcart peddler, and made enough money to bring his wife and son a year or so later.


It's an interesting thing.  It was part of the family legend -- I was very devoted to my grandfather.  He was an enormously important figure in my life.  He found that he could relate to the Germans in Evansville -- there was a sizable German community -- because their German and his Yiddish had enough match that he could communicate while he was learning English, which took a while.  But it's kind of a nice story of the basically tolerant pluralism that existed in the community.  It became a great irony later, with the tremendous upheaval in Germany thirty years later, but it was the Germans who basically kind of gave him a foothold.  So that whole thing was part of the family legend.


What my grandfather did -- my grandfather decided that Europe was not going to be a good place for Jews in the foreseeable future, and he was going to do everything he could to bring his relatives.  So he would make a few bucks and bring another, make a few bucks and bring another.  We don't know exactly, but we believe it was fifty-some people he eventually brought, and, of course, they were fruitful and multiplied and there were several hundred people in Evansville who directly, in the end, actually, owed their very lives to the fact that he'd brought them.


He was knocked out by the Depression.  He borrowed a lot of money to do whatever business he was doing, and he lost it, and then he got going again, and kept it up -- kept bringing relatives right up to the onset of World War II.  So that was a defining characteristic of the family.

Q:  How old was your father when he came?

Hamburg:  Oh, he was still a toddler.  I don't know.  A year or two, I'm not sure.  I want to go to Ellis Island and see if I can track him down on the computer there, but in any case, he was very young.  By the time I was born in 1925, there was a sizable family there, and a very mutually supportive family.  It was an extremely important influence for me.


I write in the introduction to Today's Children about my grandparents -- this was on my father's side -- my grandparents' home in that city, which we called Second Street.  It had an open-door policy.  Two or three nights a week, after my father got home from work, we would drop in over there.  We never called or made any plans.  They knew that on any given night, there would be some set of people from the family, some cousins, aunts, uncles, whatever.  So that was, for us, a kind of community center, and there was a very strong mutual aid ethic, so that there was this sense of solidarity, that people were interested in you, and I felt as a kid, probably, as their first grandchild, I was undoubtedly spoiled rotten.  I had all kinds of adults who took an interest in me.  The positive side, it gave me great encouragement, you know.  They clearly had a very positive sense towards me.  But it was a great feeling, that you knew that when you went in there, if there was a problem, you could discuss it with somebody, get the gossip of the day.  My grandmother always listened to the radio and would give us the news.


So that warmth and solidarity and mutual aid ethic was a very important thing for me, and it certainly, in subsequent decades, heightened my sensitivity to the issue of how hard it is to come by that kind of experience now.  The massive technological, economic, and social changes of the twentieth century have modified all that.  There are not an awful lot of people who have had the terrific opportunity that I had, of not only a warm and supportive immediate family, but a very dependable and available extended family.  So that was one of the themes.


As a second theme of the family experience, there was a great premium put on learning.  From my grandfather, there was a kind of starry-eyed idealism about the United States as a land of opportunity.  I really grew up in that atmosphere.  It gave a great sense of belief and faith in this country, and if you worked hard and you learned, and you were adaptable, that there were great opportunities.


There was always a sense of limitations that carried over from the culture of the shtetl and all that in eastern Europe.  For example, when I applied to medical school, it was still the era of Jewish quotas in medical school, so that my grandfather, my parents, were pretty realistic about it.  You know, "You have to do very, very well.  There are opportunities in this country, but you have to do very, very well, because there still are barriers connected with that kind of issue, but don't carry a chip on your shoulder about it.  Look for the opportunities.  Do the best you can.  It's so much better than it was where we came from.  Don't fuss about the fact that you can't ever be president."


And I'm sure if even my parents, but certainly my grandparents, were around, the notion that I'd become president of a major foundation would have seemed to them far-fetched.  Or put it the other way, had I said in childhood, "Some day I'd like to be president of a big foundation --" you know, "Don't get yourself out on that kind of a limb.  There are lots of good things to do, but that's not going to be available."  So there was that kind of balancing, sort of realistic appraisal of constraints, along with a great sense of hope about opportunities.  But the point was, premium on learning, work hard, be adaptable, take advantage of the opportunities.


There was also a very strong sort of humanitarian sense, of democratic, humane, compassionate values.  You have to look out for other people, your extended family, your community.  That was very strong.  You can't be selfish or greedy, that kind of an attitude.  As I say, starting with my grandfather, and very strong in my father, the paternal side had those kinds of values very strongly.  Maternal side had them, but to a lesser extent.


I think obviously all that influenced what I did in my adult life altogether, but it certainly influenced what I did in the fourteen years at Carnegie.  So then in the community, the surrounding community, I was impressed by the sort of tolerant pluralism that characterized it.  By and large, people were quite accepting.  At least in my own personal experience, it turned out somewhat better than I had any right to anticipate, even in the early years.

Q:  Can you say more about that?  In terms of acceptance about what -- your Jewish identity?

Hamburg:  Yes.  Because you remember, in the background, after all, was the emergence of the Holocaust.  We didn't know how severe it was, but clearly, clearly, there was just flaming anti-Semitism not only in Germany, of course, in Poland, and in Austria, and so forth.

Q:  You would have been ten, eleven, something like that?

Hamburg:  Right, right.  But that was part of the background, and there was always a certain amount of apprehension about whether this might be contagious, and to what extent it might spread to the United States.  Would the German-Americans in Evansville turn flagrantly anti-Semitic?  They did not, but that was certainly a plausible possibility.


You know, it was, to some extent, a relief, and certainly a gratification, that this community in which I grew up was, within fairly broad limits, fairly tolerant and accepting of different kinds of people.  Now, there were limits to it.  It was still the days of segregated schools.  The blacks just didn't enter into it, sort of.  It was kind of a non-subject.  There weren't Hispanics.  But on the other hand, there was a huge diversity of European immigrants in that town.  In that era, it wasn't the easiest accommodation of people from northern and southern and eastern and western Europe, but still, in all, my overall impression, as I say, was one of a tolerant pluralism.


Related to that, too, was the Depression itself.  I was born just before -- a few years before the onset of the Depression, but I remember being aware of it, because my father's income was marginal.  He was helping his father.  I should come back to that in a minute.  There was a real sense of insecurity about could you make a living, and what was going to happen.  And one of the things that happened that I'm sure shaped my life to some extent was that my father had gone to school with a fellow who became the Democratic party boss in our county, and he offered my father a job during the Depression, and so he went to work in the county courthouse.  I didn't really know what he did, but that in itself gave some sense of the value of government.  But then there was this sense of the changes that were being made when [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was elected, and the hope that we would get out of the Depression.


The man who gave my father the job also made him a delegate to the 1932 convention that nominated Roosevelt.  It's an interesting insight into how dangerous those times were, how desperate people were, that my father, who was as kind and gentle and democratic and humane a person in his inclinations as anybody you could meet, went to the convention leaning toward Huey [P.] Long.  There was this sort of desperate sense of needing somebody strong and decisive, and the populist rhetoric was appealing -- somebody who cared about ordinary people, and was not just protecting the richest.


So he came back absolutely enchanted with Roosevelt, but his apprehension about Roosevelt was twofold.  One was that, you know, was he really too patrician to understand the problems of ordinary people?  And the other was that he had succeeded Al [Alfred E.] Smith XE "Smith, Alfred E." .  My father had been, four years before, very -- I didn't know it at the time but he was very partial to Al Smith, mainly because he was Catholic.  It was just simply the idea of a Catholic breaking through the barrier, that a Catholic could become president, was an important symbol about overcoming prejudice.  So when Al Smith XE "Smith, Alfred E."  lost, I think that there was a certain lingering bad taste about that.


But the general point was that there was a sense in my family and in the community that government could be constructive and helpful.  It's just very different than the attitude that exists today, because we were experiencing this terrible Depression, and here came a government that was very dynamic and obviously experimental, and trying to find ways to improve the lot of ordinary people.  So I grew up with that atmosphere, too, and it left me with a sense not only about government, but about other powerful institutions, that leadership matters, and attitudes matter, and that social policy, be it government or non-government, the policy of large institutions can have a bearing on the way people live their lives.


So those are some of the things about family and community that come to mind.  I'd be happy to go into other things, but tell me what you want me to do.

Q:  Could you characterize your economic life?  What was your daily life like?  You say your father helped your grandfather.  What was the business?

Hamburg:  That actually had an important bearing.  My father was the first member of the family to go to college.  They valued education enormously, but it was such a struggle, such a struggle, that it just didn't seem a feasible proposition in the early part of the century for anybody to go to college.  How would you do it?


A very good teacher sensed that my father was gifted.  He was rather shy, and he'd had a kind of sickly childhood, probably related to the immigration process.  But in any event, this teacher said, "Look, I think you could get a scholarship to the University of Chicago."  Had some connection there or idea about it.  So he went to the University of Chicago, and that was very much part of the family legend, that this was then a young university, but a great university, and very exciting, and ideas really mattered.  My father always conveyed that to me, the sense that a university can open horizons that are sort of beyond imagination.


He was very scholarly by inclination, and what he really wanted to do was, in essence, to go into -- to study medicine and go into academic medicine.  There was very little of it at that time.  It was real foresight on his part.  There were very few professors in that field.  That only really, really came after World War II, much later.  But that was his aspiration, but he recognized that he'd have to come back with his father, help his father.  By that time they'd moved from pushcarts to a neighborhood dry goods store, a small one, but one that offered promise of bringing further relatives and all that.


So he felt an obligation to go back, but there was that sense, it was conveyed to me, as a kid, his regret that he did not have some kind of scholarly career, preferably in medicine.  And I'm sure that that had influence, although my father was not the kind of man who would say, "You must do so and so," or anything, but I got the picture that this was a very important opportunity he had to pass up because of his circumstances, and maybe I could pursue it, or at least explore it.


But economically, our family was really marginal, partly because of the money constantly invested and plowed back into bringing relatives from abroad, and partly because of the Depression, and partly because my father was not a kind of an aggressive go-getter in terms of making money, and that was a source of some tension in the immediate family.  But that was the case, so that while we weren't in poverty, there's no question in my mind it heightened my sensitivity to issues of poverty.  We were close enough to the line, and particularly during the Depression, that I realized what it was to be poor.  We lived in a pretty tough industrial neighborhood.  Evansville was, in those days, a heavy industrial town.  I think I got then a concern that I've never lost, about people who live in or near poverty, and the importance of having some sense of social responsibility, and, if possible, some public policy that would address those questions.

Q:  Do you have siblings?

Hamburg:  No.  No.  Another reason -- I mean, I should have, by all rights, been really impossible, in terms of being spoiled by -- I had both devoted parents, and then my grandfather on my mother's side died shortly before I was born, a few months, so I was named for him.  And then my maternal grandmother came to live with us, because I was the replacement, sort of, for her husband.  I was the David, King David, and all that.  So I had all this stuff of attention and an important place in the family.

Q:  A lot of pressure.

Hamburg:  It was a lot of pressure.  Oh, no question, it was a lot of pressure.  But, I mean, I think, over the years, that people who have known me have not found me to fit the characterization of the spoiled brat, but I don't understand how it didn't happen.  It should have happened.  And it probably had a lot to do with my father, who was a very reasonable, level-headed, modest person.  In a very nice way, I think he always gave me some perspective.  So I had kind of the best of both worlds, I think, of getting the confidence, the very deep dyed-in-the-wool confidence that comes from that kind of an early childhood, that people believe in you, are supportive and available, and all that stuff, but on the other hand, not having it affect me in such a way that I would be a hard person to deal with.

Q:  What was your mother like?

Hamburg:  She was the baby in her family, baby of a big family, and she was probably somewhat spoiled.  She got a great deal of attention; she was very pretty.  She was very devoted to me and very caring, and very helpful and supportive.  At the same time, she was a very demanding person.  Maybe my reaction to that, to some degree, was helpful in not being so demanding myself.  She really was.

Q:  In what sense?

Hamburg:  Well, she made it kind of the family mystique, almost, that I should do things that would kind of make up for whatever disappointments or frustrations or suffering she had had or others had had.  It was vaguely formulated, but there was some kind of a notion both in terms of accomplishment and in terms of my behavior towards her, devotion to her, that I would sort of make up for whatever it was that, theoretically, she had missed in her life.  In point of fact, I don't think she missed a lot in her life.  I think she'd had a very good life.  But she was quite demanding in that sense, but at the same time, as I say, very supportive.  


She centered her attention on me quite fully, and to the point where, in adolescence, it was too much.  I just felt she needed to have more of a life of her own, and neither --  her life shouldn't center totally around me, and my life couldn't center totally around her.  So it was well-meant, but it was too much.  It was an overdose of affection, in a sense.  But, nevertheless, we were close.  I always was easier and more comfortable with my father, but I made every effort, right up to the day of her death, to be good to her and accommodate her, and so on.  But she would have controlled my life in a way that my father never would have.  She would have prescribed how I should behave and what I should do, and so on.  


I think she was, to say the least, ambivalent about my ever getting married.  I think her notion would be that my time and energy would be best devoted to her.  I don't say she took an explicit or intransigent position about my getting married, but it was clear to me she wasn't enthusiastic about that.  And the way it manifested itself was, nobody was ever good enough.

Q:  How did your family handle conflict?

Hamburg:  Not very well.  I wouldn't say there was -- now, on an intimate level, in the family, I wouldn't say there was an aversion to conflict, but certainly there was an uneasiness about it, and I think that it was on my father's side.  My father and most of his relatives were easy-going and put a premium on understanding other people's point of view, and finding mutual accommodation, and sorting out differences.  They had their flare-ups and so on.  


On the other hand, my mother's side was very stormy, and there was an uneasy feeling about that.  I know my father had it, I had it, and I think my father's relatives basically looked on my mother's side of the family as kind of stormy and impetuous and fighting too much.


It came to a head, I recall.  One of my aunts committed suicide.  They lived in Chicago.  We didn't know the details, but there was a lot of concern that, you know, perhaps fighting within the family had precipitated it.  Nobody really knew.  I think, in retrospect, she was deeply depressed, and a lot of things could have pushed her over, but in any event, there was a level of uneasiness there about handling conflict.


And I think your question is a perceptive one, in that it was one of the factors that sensitized me to that issue of how do people sort out conflicts at every level -- family, community.  I mean, as I became aware of the Holocaust and World War II, that was a powerful conditioning factor as well, but at every level I have this sensitivity to that issue, that it was sort of an assumption that people ought to be able to find reasonable ways to sort out their differences, and live and let live, and so on.


And then, you know, the appalling nature of the atrocities that gradually became clear in Europe left a really indelible impression.  Here was Germany, which was such an advanced country, so "civilized," where if you wanted to get the most advanced work in science or medicine or music or art, you went to Germany.  And this highly civilized country to be conducting the most efficient, large-scale mass slaughter in history was sort of beyond imagination.  It certainly influenced me from then to the present.  I always assumed, in a way, that if it could happen in Germany, it could happen anywhere.  Not just anti-Semitism, you know, human inhumanity.  That struck me very forcibly.  And I never lost the curiosity about trying to understand.  I always had the assumption, somehow, if you could understand how things like that happen, whether it be Jews in Germany, or Turks and Armenians, or, later, Stalin's massacres in the Soviet Union, whatever, if you could understand those things, that, in due course, there might be some chance to prevent them.

Q:  That's fascinating to me.  Where do you think that kind of faith in rationality comes from?  Is it somehow from Judaism?

Hamburg:  Partly.  Partly it was, again, I think, my father's side of the family.  I think they had that inclination.  Certainly my father did.  He was a kind of a rational problem-solver in his nature.  But it was certainly reinforced for me when I went to college, and maybe I ought to say a word about that.  That's where I got turned on to science.


When I was in adolescence, we spent a fair amount of time with relatives in Chicago, and that, for me, was a megalopolis and so exciting.  One summer -- I was fourteen -- I spent a fair bit of time at the Museum of Science and Industry there.  They had exhibits on the sciences, but particularly the one on biology and medicine really appealed to me.  They had an exhibit of the brain where you'd push buttons and it would light up an area of the brain that was associated with speech or whatever function.  And they had an appendectomy, stage by stage.  You could see from the time the skin incision was made to the time the appendix was pulled out, and so forth -- the appendix was pulled out and then removed and stitched up, all that.


Those kinds of exhibits really did turn me on to medicine.  It was, of course, related to the fact that medicine was a very highly respected profession at home.  There was a lot of attention paid to health and people taking care of themselves, and, in a rudimentary way, foreshadowed the later disease prevention/health promotion work in which I became engaged.  


But against that background, then, when I went to Indiana University -- young, by the way.  I skipped a couple of grades, and so I guess I was about sixteen.

Q:  The notes said you were sixteen.

Hamburg:  It did open intellectual horizons.  It was extremely exciting to me, and some of my teachers in science had a powerful and lasting effect, I mean both in strongly reinforcing a kind of rational problem-solving approach to a lot of things, but just the sheer joy of discovery.


There was particularly a geneticist named Tracy [M.] Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M." , who was one of the great pioneers of modern genetics, but I didn't know that at the time.  Genetics was a nothing.  I stumbled onto it, basically.  And, indeed, in that era, when I got to medical school a few years later, my medical professors discouraged me from pursuing genetics.  They didn't think that it would have any real significance.  So much for foresight.


And another teacher named Breneman, William [R.] Breneman XE "Breneman, William R."  always taught the introductory course in biology, which included an evolutionary perspective.  They were both brilliant, gifted teachers.  


I had a really thrilling experience just three or four years ago, a lecture series honoring Breneman XE "Breneman, William R." , so I turned it into the Breneman and Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M."  lecture, but anyway, I went back to IU [Indiana University] and talked about those men, and what they stood for, and how their fields have evolved since that time.


But if any evidence were needed of the value of excellent teaching -- that, again, is a theme that I've picked up here.  One of the first things I did when I came here was to focus on teaching as a profession.  I mean, I think these sensitizing experiences, you may or may not be able to pursue them, but given the opportunities of scope and flexibility that the foundation offered, I did, in fact, pursue a number of themes that clearly were stimulated earlier in my life.  But anyhow, I'd say the basic attitude of my father, reinforced by these gifted scientists when I was still in my teens, set an attitude about that.


But since you ask about the faith in rationality, at the same time, I always had an understanding, even from the early family years, that it only went so far, that it was a very desirable way to deal with human problems, but that operationally there were powerful motivational and emotional forces that somehow rather tore people apart and messed up rational problem-solving, and it was very important to understand that, and I didn't really have a clue.  It puzzled me a lot.  Like some of the storminess I mentioned to you in my mother's side of the family puzzled me, and I didn't understand why.  They were in many ways such wonderful people.  Why would they be fighting each other, and so forth?  And then, of course, the larger social context, as I say, of the Holocaust and World War II.


So I had this rather intense latent curiosity about these motivational and emotional factors that, in a way, transcend rationality, and so I guess I was susceptible.  When I came -- in my senior year of medical school, somehow or other, came to read some of [Sigmund] Freud's lectures, kind of overview lectures, his approach to the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, which, as I remember now, mainly had to do with motivation, emotion, and interpersonal relationships, and the effect of early experience on later behavior.  Those were the fundamental themes, and I found that absolutely fascinating, because it seemed to me here was a rational approach to the irrational.  Here was a scientist striving for the spirit of science to illuminate these kind of dark recesses of the human mind, unconscious mental processes, and all that.  That seemed to me enormously interesting and potentially important.


I'm jumping around here chronologically.  But all I have to say to answer your question, that although there was a faith in rational problem-solving and a wish to extend the domain of rational problem-solving, nevertheless, the very clear sense of the constraints on rationality and the powerful emotional forces that affect judgment and action.

Q:  Just one more question on the Holocaust.  Did you discuss that openly in the family?  How did you handle your fears and your feelings about that?

Hamburg:  It was discussed pretty openly in the family.  There was great concern that the situation might be worse than we knew.  I don't think anybody dreamt that it was as bad as it was, but there was a great concern of finding ways to get more Jews out of Europe, that sort of thing.  But the full horror of it really only emerged with clarity at the end of the war, when the American troops went into those concentration camps.  But it was discussed openly.  It was a matter of great concern.  And I'm sure that that shaped me in ways far beyond what I was aware of at the time.

Q:  When did you first know that you wanted to go into medicine?  When you went to this exhibit?

Hamburg:  I think that at age fourteen, I had pretty much decided it would be fascinating.  There was a meshing of the intellectual fascination and the sense that this was a highly respected profession, that you could probably make a living, which was not trivial.  So it all jelled at fourteen, fifteen, and, you know, I kind of needed to get on with it, because, was I going to be a pre-med when I went to college or not?


And then, of course, with the onset of the war, because I graduated in '42 -- we entered the war at the end of '41 -- then I quickly got caught up in it, because the army had a program -- well, the navy did, too -- of doctors.  There was a great need for more doctors.  There was an expectation there would be enormous casualties later in the war, so they had this speed-up program.  So I went into the army and was assigned to medical school, a medical school where I'd been accepted, and then we went round the clock, round the year.


So I did have a little sense that I'd lost my youth in all that speed-up.  I mean, I didn't even have a date the first year in college.  It was just like going under water.  Take the maximum you could take.  Once in medical school, they would get us up at five in the morning.  We would drill, and then get to class by eight.  Of course, there was a huge amount of studying to be done.  After that, there was no issue of reconsidering whether I did or didn't want to go into medicine.


Our daughter, she went to college with the expectation of going into medicine, too, but halfway through, she decided she'd better think about it, and she took a year off, and went to the World Health Organization to see what it was really like, and so on.  I didn't have any of those kinds of options once we were into it.  I was just pushing very, very hard.


I had, in the pre-medical time, you know, three years compressed into -- I don't know what it was, a year and a half or something.  I did have, at the very end, a chance for a couple of electives, and that's when I took genetics as an elective, a busman's holiday.  But that really changed my life when I took the genetics course.


But, no, it was a pretty early decision.  I think it was less an independent decision than it seemed to me at the time, because I'm sure I'd been influenced by my father's attitude in the background.  But it was firm, and I never really wavered about it.  The only way in which I wavered was a question whether -- I got so fascinated with the basic science -- you know, what is heredity?  And later on, other aspects of basic science, that there were times when I considered, "Should I really pull back from clinical medicine, and concentrate on the basic science?"  What I ended up trying to do was to combine them.  For a couple of decades, I combined them.

Q2:  I had wondered if you had ever reconsidered that decision to go into medical school.  I find that focus at such a young age, and that determination, really special and really rare.  From fourteen onward, it seemed like a pretty clear trajectory, from what I'd read.  I just wondered if you'd had any second thoughts, and I also wondered about your mother's -- if she had any influence on your decision to go to medical school, and what her response to that decision was.

Hamburg:  It was clear to me -- she did -- it was clear to me that she also had a lot of respect for doctors.  They were very much into quality in medical care.  The various problems with the family -- they'd run to the Mayo Clinic, which wasn't so far away, but it was that idea of the best possible quality of medicine based on the most advanced science.  That was a part of the family belief system.  However, my mother really wanted me to be a rabbi.  I mean, her idea was that that was the kind of the ultimate, but medicine was a kind of acceptable fallback.

Q:  Did you ever consider being a rabbi?

Hamburg:  No.

Q:  Was your family religious?

Hamburg:  Yes.  Not by today's standards.  I mean, they were kind of on the borderline between sort of Orthodox and Conservative -- closer to Conservative at that time.  There was a Reform temple in Evansville.  There were social stratifications, too.  The German Jews came earlier, and they had been established, and they had a temple.  And the eastern European Jews, like my family, had a synagogue that was not so fancy and they were much less established.  The German Jews were Reform, and we were, relatively speaking, more nearly Orthodox, though not really terribly strict.


But it was a kosher house.  My mother and her mother were observant.  It meant a great deal to them.  Culturally, it meant a great deal to them.  For my father, it was much more a matter of an ethical -- a set of ethical beliefs.  He could take or leave the theology -- he was tolerant about the observances.  He'd go along with it, but it wasn't a big deal.  I guess he fundamentally was really agnostic.  He was socially Jewish, but intellectually agnostic.


But, on the whole, it was a religious atmosphere, but there were these different strands of it.  It was partly religious in the sense of the solidarity of the community, to have a life within the community, being uncertain about the outside world, and in that sense, it was a carryover of the culture of the shtetl, you know, but not nearly so extreme.  But still, you'd better have your relationships within the Jewish community, because you just didn't know how welcome you'd be outside.  But certainly there was a religious component in a more theological sense, but it wasn't really a big deal.


However, in terms of observances, I went to Hebrew school throughout the elementary school years, certainly, and into some part of high school, even, I think, at least into early adolescence.  So, a good many years of going to Hebrew school every day, and Sunday school every Sunday.


My mother particularly made a big production out of my bar mitzvah.  Instead of doing the things that kids ordinarily did, I had to do the whole thing.  I replaced the rabbi, so the whole service -- it was like three hours' worth.  It was a tour de force, and she was thrilled and the family was thrilled.  To some degree it was overdone.  I mean, I did it.  I was able to do it, but that kind of thing, after a while, had a kind of alienating effect.  It was too demanding, it was too much pressure, too much conformity, so that I tended, through my father's view of religion, toward the ethical and the social, and not really the theological part of it.  They're all intermixed, of course.  I mean, the bar mitzvah was show.  It was theater.  Wrapped in a flag of theological fidelity, that bar mitzvah was actually a show for the community.  My mother was saying, "I've got this bright young son who can do anything," and I dutifully went along with it.

Q:  Let me ask you a question, off the record.  What did you do for fun as a child?

Hamburg:  Remember, this was Indiana.  I grew up playing basketball.  I doubt if there was a day of my young life, through childhood and adolescence, I didn't spend at least two hours playing basketball.  We had a hoop in the backyard, and we played at school.  When I moved elsewhere, in subsequent years, even as an adult, I realized, compared with the rest of the country, I was pretty good.  But compared with Indiana, I wasn't much good.  It was just an obsession.  But I enjoyed it thoroughly.  All sports, every kind of sport.


My parents were very good.  Even when we couldn't afford much of a house, it had to be a house with a sizable enough yard that you could play some basketball and some baseball and some football in the yard, as well as at a distance.  So that was a big thing.  I read a lot.  I had a mastoid operation when I was age seven, and I discovered the joy of newspapers.  I started reading newspapers in the hospital.

Q:  What did you read?

Hamburg:  The local paper, mainly.  My maternal grandmother read the Yiddish paper faithfully.  I never really mastered Yiddish, but I used to love to get her account.  It was a more worldly paper than the Evansville Courier was, or the Evansville Press, more international news, naturally oriented toward Jewish questions, but not entirely.  So, newspapers and magazines.  I don't think that I was a very terribly avid book-reader, actually, until I got to college, is my recollection.  I could be wrong about that.  I'm sure there was some book-reading in high school.  But newspapers and magazines, and sports and movies.  I once got tossed out of a movie because I was so cracked up.  It was a Charlie Chaplin movie, and I was with a friend, and our interaction between us -- we got so cracked up that we were tossed out.  But that to say that there was an intensity of pleasure about the movies.

Q:  Did you ever do anything to rebel?

Hamburg:  Oh, not in any really serious way.  There were a couple of little episodes that seemed serious at the time.  I'm trying to get the sequence.  I'm not sure which occurred first.  One was -- they were both probably in early adolescence, would be my guess.


One was a time we were finishing up a year's worth of -- I'm not quite clear about the date. My recollection is they were both at the end of the year, but anyhow, one involved Hebrew school, where I kind of, in a flippant way, tossed the book to the rabbi, and, I don't know, hit him in the head or something, but anyway, whatever it was, it was beneath his dignity, and he raised hell with my parents, that, you know, how could such a nice family permit this to happen?  I was mortified.  It was a playful, trivial kind of thing, but, nevertheless, it was poor judgment.


And the other thing, I know it was at the end of the school year, where we were lined up to either go out, shake the teacher's hand, or something, and leave, and I had a cap pistol, and I just shot the cap pistol off, and was called into the principal's office and my parents were called in , and this was a terrible, terrible thing to do.  As far as I can remember, those were my two rebellious episodes, at least those that were visible.


But, no, I was not very rebellious.  That's why, I must say, in later years, it's been a surprise to me that I've been kind of an independent and adventurous thinker, at least, and, to some extent, innovative and adventurous in action, as well.  And I would not have predicted that.  I really thought of myself as being a very conforming person, not only the family, but very, very careful to watch -- not to offend the non-Jewish community, how you behaved and so on.


So if you'd asked me then was I going to be in any way adventurous or innovative or highly independent and so forth, I really would have said no.  Likewise, I wouldn't have thought -- I really wouldn't have thought I would be in any way physically courageous.  It turned out later, in that hostage episode, that I was, but it took me by surprise.  I remember sitting in the airplane going over to Africa to find out who had taken these kids, and asking myself, "How am I going to react?" and being very concerned that I might react badly.  So these things are peculiar.  Some turns and twists are hard to foresee.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Q:  What was medicine like at that time, in terms of studying medicine?

Hamburg:  It's really very funny how little we really had.  I remember, when I was accepted to medical school, our family doctor said to me, "Don't let it go to your head.  You have to remember.  All we have in medicine is aspirin, morphine, and prayer."  And there was a lot to that.  There weren't even antibiotics then.  The whole incredible development of science-based medicine came almost entirely after that.


I was admitted in -- well, I started in 1944 so, as I said, I was admitted in '43.  That was the situation.  Then I remember, in the first -- we had a rather gross anatomy professor who had been a surgeon before.  He certainly wanted to get our attention and he did.  But one of the things he said in one of his periodic tirades, "They claim that surgeons don't have any great skill or any technical guidelines.  It's not true at all.  We have very excellent technical guidelines for our operating procedures.  For example, you must limit your incisions by the length of the body."  [Laughter]  But that, you know, it is true that it was more art than science.  It was more kind of compassionate dealing with patients and families than it was specific interventions.  You could relieve pain, to some degree.  There really wasn't much.


But, the other side of that coin is, the phenomenal privilege, which I feel, even in my lifetime, in the development of science-based medicine.  I actually took the terrible luxury this morning of going to a lecture over at Rockefeller University.  I'm a trustee over there.  And, you know, the great concentration of biomedical science over there.


There's a wonderful woman who's done ingenious research on brain development, and it sort of combines some of my earlier interests.  The details aren't important.  I was thinking as I sat listening to her, there's unimaginable technical capacity and insight, the knowledge and skill -- well, being at Rockefeller University, I'll tell you a story that illustrates how medicine has changed, and the underlying sciences have changed.


This genetics professor [Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M." ] was very kind to me, took an interest in me, and gave me a chance to spend a little time in and around his laboratory.  The war didn't permit much -- this wartime speed-up -- but he was very good.  I remember a day when, in 1944, when he came into the lab and told us about a very exciting experiment that had been done at the then Rockefeller Institute, the same place, now called Rockefeller University.  And it was, essentially, that three people, Avery MacLeod and McCarty, had discovered that DNA was the genetic material.


You see, up until then, a gene was a hypothetical entity.  Nobody had seen a gene.  Nobody knew what a gene was.  And he had the foresight to recognize the significance of the discovery.  It was very controversial in the scientific community at the time.  But I remember the tremendous excitement of that.  Well, that was the beginning of the era of modern genetics, which goes way beyond genetics now.  The genetic techniques affect every aspect of biology.  That's all in my professional lifetime.


Of course, early in that period, the antibiotics came in, and there there's a marvelous kind of cycle that's occurred -- this incredible ability to control most infections through the efflorescence of antibiotics that came along in those first few decades after the discovery of penicillin.  Now, my daughter deals a lot with antibiotic-resistant infections.  It's a major problem -- antibiotic resistance.  We would have been absolutely thrilled to have that problem in the forties and fifties, I guarantee you.  I mean, to have an antibiotic -- any chance whatsoever of dealing with very serious infections.


But, it's been a great source of inspiration to me.  First, when I was participating in the work, and then as a kind of observer from the trustee position, or that sort of thing, of the advances in the life sciences.  I've been very much identified with that.  So, it was a great time to come into medicine, great time.  But the challenge it puts to keeping up with the new developments, and for doctors to really make sense out of what's going on -- that's a subject to which I returned later in my career.  Anyway, it was from a very rudimentary field to a very complex field.  And, incidentally, today, I think, doctors' morale is at an all-time low, with this tremendous buzz and bloom and confusion in the health care sector, but that's another story.

Q:  How did you become interested in psychiatry?

Hamburg:  Well, it was reading Freud in the fourth year, as I mentioned.  That was the real stimulus for it.  I did, to some degree, relate it to personal and family experiences.  I was very curious about this aunt who got so depressed that she had to commit suicide.  I really couldn't understand how anything in the family could have been that awful, and I was very intrigued, both about the possibility, which has since become a reality, that there might be some genetic predisposition, biochemically expressed such that her mood regulation was thrown off in some way -- you know, swing to highs and lows.  But also, how that might interact with family troubles that could push her over the brink.


So, clearly, there was some kind of sensitization there, but the idea of -- the boldness of Freud's vision of trying to understand these issues challenged me very much.  Now, at the time, I didn't question that a lot.  Later on, I got to be questioning within the psychoanalytic framework, but, at the time, that just seemed to me to open new vistas, but the question was, how did that relate to the practice of psychiatry, if at all?


Because I had, in the senior year of clerkship, at the Indianapolis City Hospital, which was a big general hospital, taking care of poor people, and it turned out, it was sad to say, the psychiatric department was more like a prison than a hospital.  People were simply locked up, and one hoped for the best.  A little sedation, maybe they'd quiet down.  Many did, and if not, they'd be transferred to a state hospital.  So it was extremely depressing.


One had no sense of what could be done with it, and I wanted to find out how that related to practice, so, somehow or other, I don't know how I came upon it -- I came across a book called Men Under Stress -- which had just been published -- of wartime psychiatric experiences, by two men from Chicago who were in the Army.  The work was not done in Chicago, but they went back to Chicago after the war, to the Michael Reese Hospital.  So I applied there for an internship, and Roy [R.] Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  and John [P.] Spiegel XE "Spiegel, John P." -- they had done this work, and Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  was Chief of Psychiatry Services at Michael Reese, and I was thrilled when I got in.


I was accepted to Michael Reese for an internship, a rotating internship.  I remember talking to my professor of psychiatry at Indiana about how pleased I was, and he said, "Well, Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  is a genius.  I'd like to tell you to cultivate him, but it's like cultivating a buzz saw."  Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  was a very high-standards, rigorous, demanding, straightforward, critical person.  I went there, and, you know, luck enters into all of these things.  It's good to be smart, and good to be nice.  It's also good to be lucky.  We drew out of a hat, literally, what would be your first service, and my first service was psychiatry.  And the reason that's important is if you're going to apply for a residency, you have to make up your mind early in the internship year, in those days, what field you want to apply for.


So I had a chance to meet Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R." .  I was petrified of him.  But I had this very stimulating month on that service, and there I could see, it was quite different.  It was not like a prison at all.  It was an attempt to apply psychoanalytic concepts of motivation, and emotion, and interpersonal relationships, and developmental psychology to people.  And to people who were -- many of whom could actually be reached.  You could do something with them and for them.  And furthermore, there was an emerging research base.  What Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  had done on stress during the war suggested that there might be some scientific way to analyze these problems.  So that was very exciting to me that you could  -- 

Q:  What was his training?

Hamburg:  He was originally a neurologist.  As a young man, he wrote -- on the faculty of the University of Chicago -- wrote what became the leading textbook of neurology for probably twenty years thereafter, and subsequent editions.  But he also was fascinated with the same kinds of issues that I was, and he asked for permission to go and spend a year with Freud in Vienna, and they refused it to him -- the University of Chicago -- so he resigned from the University of Chicago.  Very strong man.  And went to spend this year with Freud, had some analysis with Freud, and some seminars, and came back as a kind of a -- what shall I say -- open-minded, inquiring, healthy skeptic -- healthily skeptical psychoanalyst.  He adopted the basic concepts, but he felt they should be researchable.  You should put them to use, but you should be improving them over time -- in contrast to some others who came away from the contact with Freud as dogmatists, that this was a kind of a theological revelation, and provided all answers to all conceivable questions about human behavior.  He wasn't like that.  He thought it was very important and promising, and should be developed.


So, at the end of that month, he called me in to see him, and I thought, "Uh-oh, he's going to lower the boom."  That was his mode.  But I was absolutely thrilled when he said he thought I had a lot of promise, and he'd like me to come work with him, except that he [Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R." ] had only a certain number of slots, and he'd taken in ten very superb people, experienced people, right after the war, for three years, and he didn't have a slot right away, so he wanted to help me plan what I would do, and then come back with him, and that's what I did.


But that conjunction of stimulating ideas about trying to understand human behavior, with some practical steps that could be taken to relieve anxiety, or depression, or other emotional distress -- that was a powerful conjunction for me.  And also, his scientific spirit.  I didn't have a tangible feel about how to apply that, but I went to Yale [University] for one year, with the understanding with Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  that I would come back at the end of the year.  He would then have a slot, and I would work with him.

Q:  Were you teaching there?

Hamburg:  No, this was for a year's residency training in psychiatry.  So, the first year, after internship, the first year of residency training was at Yale, and they had a then-new department chairman.  He was actually only acting chairman at the time, who had also come from Vienna, out of a background of neurology, and he grew up in Vienna, unlike Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R." , but his intellectual home was Vienna.

Q:  Who was that?

Hamburg:  Fritz [Frederick C.] Redlich XE "Redlich, Frederick C. [Fritz]" .  He later became dean of Yale medical school, and a very dear friend.  He was our matchmaker.  My wife had been in medical school there, and had admired him and worked with him, and he brought us together.  So we were very devoted to him.  We're now trying to help raise money for a Redlich XE "Redlich, Frederick C. [Fritz]"  Chair at Yale, and I gave the Redlich XE "Redlich, Frederick C. [Fritz]"  Lecture at Yale a couple of years ago, and so forth.  He lives in Los Angeles now, he's retired, and we brought him together with my son out there.  So that's a very important relationship for us.  Wonderful man.


But there was a lecture given, shortly after I got there, by a Hungarian endocrinologist who was also an émigré, moved to Canada, worked in Montreal -- Hans Selye XE "Selye, Hans" , S-E-L-Y-E.  He was kind of the father of biological stress research.  I went to the lecture because of stimulus I'd gotten from Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  earlier.  That was scientifically what really changed my life.  


A step similar to Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M." 's inspiration was this single lecture from Selye XE "Selye, Hans" .  He had, I don't know, twenty or so different stressful conditions for mice and rats in his laboratory over a period of years, all of which produced a great enlargement of the adrenal gland, not only the adrenal medulla, which is associated with adrenaline, which was known to be important, but the outer shell of the gland, the adrenal cortex, which nobody thought had anything to do with stress.  Nobody knew what it did.  Maybe it was just there to keep the adrenal medulla warm, so the medulla was the core, surrounded by the cortex.  But it enlarged greatly with these stresses.


A couple of the stresses seemed to me to be essentially psychological in nature.  One was an immobility.  You tie the rats down, or the mice down, on their back for a number of hours, so they couldn't move, and they would thrash around and so on.  And the other was intermittent sounding of loud noise, that made them jump.  You could explain those without the psychological mediating factor, but I asked him, did these rodents look like they were scared, and he said, oh yeah, they looked like they were terrified.  So I thought, well, that would really be interesting to look at in humans.  Could you see whether the adrenal cortex responded?


Well, I was naive.  The hormones of the adrenal cortex were only beginning to be discovered at that time, and there was no biochemical method for measuring them.  So I got involved in trying, at the first opportunity, trying to develop such methods, and to find out how you could actually measure, and we did.  And that's how I really established myself in the scientific community, was by measuring the hormones of the adrenal cortex, in relation to human psychological stress, both in the field and experimentally.  And, I guess, a better part of a decade, that's mainly what I did.  I made a living off steroid hormones and scared people, depressed people, whatnot.  It was fascinating.  But it was important for me that I was able to sort of tangibly translate the ideas into some scientific action that would help to elucidate the underlying problems, so I hoped.


It was interesting to me.  In this past year, I've served on the President's commission on the Persian Gulf War illnesses.  In fact, he asked me to chair it, but I just couldn't chair it, but I agreed to serve on it.  And I did chair a panel on stress, and we had some of the leading scientists, including one from Rockefeller University, review the state of the field, and it was very heartening to me.  I hadn't followed it very closely in recent years -- basically the outlines of the structure we built in the 1950s are still the shape of the field.  Lots of very important details have been filled in.

Q:  Could you elucidate that a little?

Hamburg:  Sure.  It's kind of long story, but the essence of it has to do with, first of all, the brain's control of the adrenal.  That was not known, and indeed most endocrinologists were skeptical about that at the time, but since then it's become accepted -- we got involved in trying to elucidate how that could happen.


There's a system of little blood vessels which ties a structure deep in the base of the brain to the pituitary gland that sits right under the brain.  The brain just sits over this little gland, and the gland looks like a small thumb.  Again, was it just there to keep warm, or was there some functional relationship, having it pressed there?  It turns out, there's a very important set of functional relationships, one of which is some little blood vessels that carry chemical messages from the brain into the anterior pituitary and tell it what to secrete.


In stressful circumstances, the message sets off a hormone that goes under the name of ACTH, adrenal cortical trophic hormone, and it goes from the pituitary then down here to the adrenals, which sit on top of the kidney, and stimulates secretion of cortical steroids, the cortisone type of hormone.  Then that, in turn, affects every cell and tissue in the body. And so that was one pathway, the pathway from the brain to the adrenal cortex, and hence the cortical steroids, and also from the brain a different pathway to the adrenal medulla, and hence the adrenalin class of hormones.  Both classes have been broadened, elucidated quite a bit.  There are several.  It's not just a single hormone.


But that was work in which we were able to make some early contributions, and then we brought in collaborators who helped to clarify the cardiovascular response -- what happens with the pumping of the heart, and the blood pressure, and the flow of blood through every cell and tissue in the body.  So you have the hormonal response and the cardiovascular response.  We were also interested in gastrointestinal and muscular responses to stress.


But then from time to time I tried to be kind of broadly integrative in that, as I have in other things, and basically did some papers which drew together this whole set of coordinated responses as a mobilization for intensive activity, as to the body's whole mobilization, coordinated by the brain, primarily, that's as if to say, "Look, some intensive action may have to be taken.  Some great danger is looming on the horizon."  


And so the body has a kind of energy mobilization response that's reflected both in tissues, like the circulation of the blood, and at the cellular level, in terms of energy metabolism.  But it's getting ready for intensive action, and what struck me was that in modern circumstances, we don't very often have intensive action.  It isn't that you run from a predator, or you climb a tree, or you get into some battle, but mostly you sit at your desk or you pace around the room, but it seemed to me there's an alarm system that, at least in some people and some circumstances, ringing over and over again, a rather expensive piece of machinery in physiological terms, and that it was preparation for intensive action, not followed by action.  And I wondered whether that was, in some way, conducive to illness.


It also got me interested in an evolutionary approach, which changed everything thereafter.  That is, presumably, those responses must have evolved long ago, at a time when there was frequently intensive action, when that had really adaptive value to get mobilized in advance of a crisis, be ready to go when you saw what you had to do.  So I then got into the study of human evolution, first as a hobby.  It became a very serious hobby, and we can come back to that later, but they've kidded me around here that I put everything in an evolutionary perspective, and that's true.  I, from time to time, kind of back off a few million years and take a running jump at the problem.

Q:  Wonderful.  In terms of the reception of your ideas and your research at the time that you were doing it, and this year of residency and the few years following, were there people who were receptive to trying to make the bridges that you were making between biomedical science and psychoanalytic thought?

Hamburg:  There was a small community of scholars who were interested.  We were certainly aware of different kinds of skepticism.  Probably some of the, shall I say, diplomatic skills that I learned in childhood about getting along were cultivated in this period, in trying to get acceptance for these data, let alone ideas.


One kind of skepticism at that time came from the biological scientists, many of whom were skeptical about any psychological matters, that the brain, whatever it did, didn't interfere with the rest of the body.  There was really a remarkable kind of walling-off of the brain from the rest of the body.  I mean, there's a long tradition of that, the mind/brain dichotomy and the mind/body dichotomy.


But there was clearly a biological science resistance.  Like I say, most of the endocrinologists in that time could imagine hormonal influences from down below up on the brain, but they were very resistant to the idea that the brain would tell the endocrine glands what to do.  That turned out to have been really one of the major developments in biology in the ensuing decades, that the brain has enormous integrative influence over many systems.  But anyway, that was one source of skepticism.


Another came from the psychoanalytic side.  There was this dogmatic strain in psychoanalysis, and there were many wonderful people in it, but there was a strong premature closure, in my judgment, on the part of many psychoanalysts.  And that was really the heyday.  A lot of the leaders in the field didn't believe there was any need for research.  There was nothing new to be discovered.  It was a kind of a secular religion.  Now, that wasn't the way Freud was.  They identified with Freud's conclusions, but not with his spirit.  He was constantly changing his mind, and inquiring, and looking for new data, etc.  But there was a tendency to identify with his conclusions, and he'd said it all, and what more was there to say?


So we had to deal with skepticism both on the biological side and the psychological side.  But, nevertheless, there was a small community of people, led by those like Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  and Redlich XE "Redlich, Frederick C. [Fritz]" , who had some real standing, who were saying, "Look, science ought to be useful here.  Let us explore how far we can go.  There are lots of things we can't do clinically.  If we knew more, we might be able to do more clinically.  You can say all you want about what we know, but how come, for example, with schizophrenic patients, there's so little we can do, and shouldn't we try to understand them better?"


One of the inspiring figures for me, a little bit later, coming out of psychoanalysis, was a tiny little woman named Frieda Fromm-Reichmann XE "Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda" .  She was, for a time, married to Erich Fromm, who was much more famous in the general public than she was, but she, in the field, was a legend, a tiny little woman who took on 6'4", 220 [pound] paranoid schizophrenics, in a private mental hospital called Chestnut Lodge outside of Washington.  She was a pioneer in adapting psychoanalytic approaches to these very sick people.  But her attitude was, "We simply have to try to apply what we do know now.  We also have to learn a lot more, because we can do so little."  And she encouraged me both in the psychological and biological sides of my investigations.  Quite an inspiring, courageous, amazing person.


But yeah, we had -- there was a sort of reference group, but we felt at times a bit under siege, I have to say, askind of marginal people.  But for whatever reasons, I really set out to make one of my career themes the integration of biological and behavioral science.  I've been at that frontier much of my career.  I think when I came here, I kind of scared people a little bit that maybe I was going to bring in more biology and medicine than they were ever accustomed to in this foundation, but it proved not to be poisonous.

Q:  I think we can stop there for today.

[END OF SESSION]

	TTTPRIVATE 

	Session Two

	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg
	Date:  January 22, 1997

	Interviewer:  Brenda Hearing     
	New York, New York

	
	


Q:  This is the 22nd of January, 1997, and we are at the Carnegie Corporation offices in New York for our second interview session with David Hamburg.  My name is Brenda Hearing.


Dr. Hamburg, I first of all want to thank you for a very wonderful, productive first interview session, and I'll remind us both where we left off from there.

Hamburg:  Good.

Q:  I have some ideas about where to go from there, but I do want to say that I understand that this is a time of some intense reflection for you, or at least I would imagine that's so.

Hamburg:  Yes, it is.

Q:  And I want to assure you that if there's anything you care to say about this very transitional time today, your retirement, of course -- now we have the formal announcement of your successor, Vartan Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan"  -- we'd love to hear about it.  It's something we'll revisit later.

Hamburg:  Okay.  Fine.

Q:  But any thoughts you'd like to share today.

Hamburg:  Okay.  Well, as it may fit naturally into the flow.  I would just say at the moment that it's a very good transition.  In fact, it's impossible for me to conceive of a better transition, in the sense that everything was carefully planned, worked out in an orderly way.  I think Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan"  is a marvelous human being and an ideal successor, and we have all the kind of steps in place.  He will not, however, be here for about six months.  So the transition will be more gradual than it might have been, but that's fine.  


We've had a series of very nice events, incredibly nice events, marking the accomplishments of the foundation during my fourteen years, and it's a very good feeling, a very incredibly good feeling.  As I said at one of those occasions, I feel like the luckiest guy in the world.  I am, to some extent, shifting the gears, that is, toward more emphasis on the substantive work, particularly the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.  That will become my consuming passion as soon as I can free enough time, because we aim to have our final report out by the end of this year, and it would be better if I had more or less full time to work on it, but we have a very fine staff and a good set of commissioners.  


We just had, a few days ago, a kind of breakthrough meeting of that commission.  In a kind of retreat format in Florida we spent several days basically hammering out the shape of the final report, and now I feel we can see a pretty clear path to it.  So that's very satisfying to me.  I just have to do a kind of balancing act between running the foundation and shifting to the next incarnation over these few months.  It's an interesting time, but so far, our fingers crossed, it's going exceedingly well.

Q:  Okay.  Very good.  The present may be flowing into the past here as we go, because I know we're shifting gears, very much so, right now, too.  


When we left off last time, we had pretty much taken you through medical school.  We had talked about your interest, your emerging interest in psychiatry, the excitement you had reading Freud for the first time, talked a little bit about your work with Roy Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  -- and I'd like to get us back to that time a little bit.  I would like to know more about your decision, that whole process of going into psychiatry.  I'm also interested in hearing anything about your family's response to that decision and just how your interest in stress-related research specifically might have evolved.

Hamburg:  Good.  Well, that's a very challenging set of questions.  The fascination with psychiatry, I think, had fundamentally to do with reading these lectures of Freud and getting a sense that there were people trying to understand human behavior.  That's been kind of the perennial theme or quest ever since.  I believe that, to some extent -- to some extent -- that that interest was stirred by the Holocaust in the background of our experiences.  Even though we didn't know at that time the full extent of the horrors, we were beginning to learn it, really -- yes, I guess by then.  By the time I graduated from medical school, it was reasonably apparent.  Earlier we had only inklings of it, but I do remember that, talking with my father quite a lot about this enormous paradox.  


Here was a country, Germany, that was so advanced, so technically advanced.  If American doctors or scientists wanted to really be at the frontier, they'd go to Germany to study before the war, and great traditions in music and so on.  So here was this, in one sense, highly civilized country committing the most barbaric acts imaginable, and that paradox was certainly part of what stimulated my curiosity about understanding why people behave as they do.


Certainly, with my father, there was always -- he had a very reflective historical perspective.  He had a great volume of historical books and also was very much committed to the ethical tradition in Judaism.  He was otherwise not highly religious, but in terms of the ethical orienting principles, he was very religious.  


So the notion that the power of scientific method might be brought to bear on understanding human behavior was enormously appealing to me.  


I later came to have some concerns about the adequacy of the methods being used and the solidity of the claims being made about insight into human behavior, but be that as it may, at the time there was this great excitement about it, which undoubtedly was reinforced by reading Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R." 's book, Men Under Stress, and some other wartime material, because it was very intriguing to me about the different responses that people had to the stressful experiences of wartime, the way some people rose to the occasion quite fantastically, almost beyond my imagination, with courage and resourcefulness and persistence, and others crashed under the weight of the stress, which seemed very plausible to me.  It might happen to anybody.  


The slogan or cliché that emerged from the war about "every man has his breaking point" was very meaningful.  It seemed to me plausible that every human being would be vulnerable to severe stress, though in different ways and different durations of susceptibility and so on.  But I remember a great excitement and intellectual curiosity about understanding human behavior, and the question in my mind was how you could apply that actually in practice.  Was there some way you could actually do it?  When I went to Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago to intern, I had a sort of alternate position or backup position, that is, of going into internal medicine rather than psychiatry and with special attention, perhaps, to endocrinology.  I knew that was influenced by a brilliant teacher, a man named Rachmiel Levine XE "Levine, Rachmiel"  at Michael Reese, who was a distinguished scientist and educator in endocrinology.  


So I had these sort of parallel tracks of interest and possibility.  The thing that I needed to find out was whether you could really do something about the problems in psychiatry, and the opportunity to spend the first month of the internship with Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  helped very much to resolve that.  It gave me a great sense of hope about what could be done.  


My family, I think, was respectful but ambivalent about it.  They didn't, as I recall, try to influence me strongly one way or another.  I think they were generally -- my father was very pleased about my going into medicine.  My mother would have preferred the rabbinate, but, nevertheless, she was pleased about medicine, too. Psychiatry was essentially unknown in Evansville, where I grew up, for all practical purposes.  I'm sure there was some concern about the stigma.  There was a public mental hospital in Evansville, and that would have been the only insight most people would have had into psychiatry.  But to the extent they were ambivalent about it, I don't think they conveyed it very much, and if that was what I wanted to do, well, that's fine.

Q:  I was thinking about your aunt's depression, too, and her eventual suicide, and wondered if that event had influenced your decision at all.

Hamburg:  It may well have, more than I realized at the time.  It certainly was another one of these perplexities.  How could you understand a highly intelligent, energetic, generous, warm human being taking her own life?  Another paradox on the individual scale like the Holocaust on the vast scale -- hard to reconcile, and it undoubtedly was a stimulus to this curiosity, and I'm sure other, more subtle family matters were also involved in that. 


I remember a good deal of discussion with my father particularly, my cousins as well, trying to understand interactions within the family, certain relationships in the family, which at the time were extremely important to us, on the grand scale of things no big deal, but, nevertheless, there was that kind of curiosity recurrent in different formats in family and community and the world stage.  What is it about people -- issues of motivation, emotion, and human relationships, and that's what made the psychoanalytic approach so appealing when I stumbled on to it, because it dealt centrally with issues of motivation and emotion and human relationships, and underlying that, the influence of early experience on later behavior, the factors that shape development in childhood and adolescence.  The fact that it put forward bold hypotheses about those considerations was very exciting to me, and I'm sure it tapped into all sorts of wellsprings at a personal level as well as a more broadly intellectual level.  


But once I made the decision, there wasn't much hesitation about it, except that I wanted to tie it to the scientific roots that had come from my contact with Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M."  in college and all that. 

Q:  As an interpretive framework, as a way of understanding human behavior, psychoanalysis -- how did it feel to you at that time?  In what ways, maybe, did it let you down, or were there aspects of it that you remember rejecting at the time?

Hamburg:  Initially it seemed enormously intriguing.  Freud did have this wonderful capacity to synthesize and to incisively state basic propositions.  Also, it was a very ambitious, encompassing kind of formulation.  I spent then and some significant part of my time for many years thereafter in mastering the whole doctrine -- or I shouldn't say the whole doctrine -- the large pieces of it, enough, whenever it was, ten years or so later, to graduate from the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Chicago.  


My reactions were mixed.  On the one hand, I always continued to feel that there was a very profound challenge, stimulus, that dealt with very important issues in very bold ways, issues that sooner or later we humans would have to deal with.  And in principle, the spirit of it was to bring the power of scientific methods to bear on those fundamental problems.  


On the other hand, I did get disenchanted to a considerable extent by some of the people in what you might call "the movement," looking at psychoanalysis as a social movement, who were, I would say, more identified with Freud's conclusions than with his spirit of inquiry.  He was always inquiring and changing his mind and looking for new formulations and trying to accommodate new facts, but as is often the case, the disciples, frequently, are less gifted than the master.  Those who sat at the master's feet tend to vie with each other for the power of inheriting the mantle from the master.  There was a lot of that.  But there was just a lot of sheer dogmatism, a lot of simplistic dogmatism, I felt.  


There were also some wonderful people, some very sensitive -- I learned a tremendous amount about human relationships, not only in a formal, psychotherapeutic context but in other ways from, for example, my own analyst, Gerhart Piers XE "Piers, Gerhart" , who came from Vienna, Therese Benedek XE "Benedek, Therese" , later Frieda Fromm-Reichmann XE "Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda" .  They were almost all émigrés from Europe, many of them had some contact with Freud, or the people closest to Freud.  There were some wonderfully gifted, insightful, sensitive people, partly on the basis of psychoanalytic theory, partly on the basis of their life experience carefully reflected upon, and partly on the basis of kind of intuitive perceptiveness, a mix of things, but, nevertheless, terrific people from whom I learned an awful lot, and I think that's helped me a great deal.  


Dick [Richard D.] Heffner XE "Heffner, Richard D." , on a recording and taping last week of "An Open Mind" program asked me if my psychiatric background had helped me, and I hadn't thought about that for a long time, but I said it helped me a lot, because accomplishment in most any field revolves around human relationships.  You've got to elicit cooperation, you've got to get people who are smarter and more capable than you are in a variety of ways to work together, different skills on a common mission, that kind of thing, and I got pretty good at that, and I think it didn't hurt at all what I'd learned in psychiatry, both in the theory and in the practice in that regard.  So I feel a great sense of indebtedness. 


Nevertheless, I did become a skeptic with respect to psychoanalysis.  I felt that there were very good parts to it, but that it had been, in a way, abused to some extent by simplistic and dogmatic successors to Freud and very power-oriented people and people who were quite authoritarian sometimes in their style, put down criticism, did not foster open dissent, and, perhaps above all, did not particularly foster research.  I was identified with that spirit of inquiry in Freud and others, and my notion was we ought to bring the psychoanalytic approach to settings where there could be scientific investigations.  I didn't know how far that could go, but it seemed to me that was the right spirit, to clarify what would hold up over time, which hypotheses were more or less on the right track and which were not, and relate it to other bodies of information about human behavior.  It always seemed to me that human behavior was too complex to be understood by any single discipline.  It would be miraculous if the first sort of comprehensive theory about human behavior held up so well that it would account for virtually everything.  


But I never went into a kind of an agitated rebellion against it.  I always felt what we needed was a more differentiated assessment, and as I had the chance to build, later on, to build departments of psychiatry and the like, I tried to incorporate that perspective as one among several perspectives and try to get around the contours of these great problems of human behavior.

Q:  You had mentioned your work, your relationship with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann XE "Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda"  last time we spoke, and I was interested in hearing more about her and more about that time.  Did you work with her at the private hospital in Washington?

Hamburg:  No.  Let me tell you about that.  Maybe I should back up just a little bit.  You asked about the stress-related research, and that was a steady theme, and it does lead to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann XE "Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda"  and other important experiences.  


The wartime observations, of course, turned me on to that, but when I went to Yale for that first year of psychiatric residency, the year in which I met Betty [Beatrix A. Hamburg XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A." ], my wife, we went fairly early in that year to a lecture -- I don't know if I told you last time -- by an originally Hungarian and later Canadian endocrinologist named Hans Selye XE "Selye, Hans" .  That opened up the possibility of experimental research on stress problems.  I thought about the application of his animal work to humans and set out to get the necessary collaborators to pursue it, and, in a way, pursued it for a long time.  To some degree, it's been a part of my outlook ever since.


One of the things that happened was that the Korean War broke out.  I got called into the army right away.  I'd been in the reserve.  So I went down to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, and threw myself into stress-related clinical work.

Q:  Is this at Brooke Army Hospital, Dr. Hamburg?

Hamburg:  Brooke Army Hospital.  Right.

Q:  Thank you.

Hamburg:  And also set out to do research.  I thought we had a great opportunity to study these young men being flown back from combat reactions in Korea and to learn more about these stress-related disorders, and I think we were able to more or less lay the foundation for that whole field of inquiry during those years.  I don't mean just the people I was working with, but there was -- it was a very small community.  There were only a handful of groups concerned with the problem at the time.  It was not in the least fashionable.


At the Brooke Army Hospital, a man came to visit in, I guess, late 1950, perhaps, or maybe early '51, a guy named David [M.] Rioch XE "Rioch, David M." , R-I-O-C-H.  I had only perhaps vaguely heard of him, and it's funny, very uncharacteristic for me, at the first meeting in the small group of staff there, I got into an argument with him because I was concerned about his approach -- he was obviously a brilliant man, although somewhat convoluted in his thinking, not easy to understand, but I had great respect for him as a neurologist, originally, and a person grappling with questions of human behavior.  He made, I thought, a cavalier dismissal of psychoanalysis.  I was in the process still of sorting things out, but I could see that in some ways in the dealing with combat reactions that perspective was very useful to me.  I was able to help people in the most tangible, even dramatic, ways by applying some kind of psychodynamic approaches, as I say, with motivation, emotion, and human relationships in focus.  


Rioch XE "Rioch, David M."  was very, very demeaning about psychoanalysis altogether as kind of a cuckoo fantasy land, but he was also a man to be taken seriously.  But out of this argument grew a friendship that lasted as long as he lived, actually.  I didn't realize it at the time, but he was on a scouting expedition.  He'd been given the authority by the surgeon general of the Army to organize a new division of neuropsychiatry in the Walter Reed Institute of Research in Washington, a research institute related to the Walter Reed Hospital, the same campus and same administration, and was given a very free hand, and he was out on a talent hunt, and I guess he liked the logic of my argument even if he disagreed with my conclusions or whatever.

Q:  You spent a year there after being married?

Hamburg:  I guess, roughly speaking, I was a year and a half in San Antonio and a year and a half at Walter Reed.  It was basically the beginning to the end of the Korean War.  I mentioned to him that we were going to take our honeymoon in Santa Fe.  This was in the summertime, and he asked me if I had heard of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann XE "Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda" .  Of course I had.  And he said, "Well, let me write a letter of introduction.  I'm sure she would like to meet you."  I thought he was very nice, but why in the world would she want to meet us?  But still we followed up, and she just took us in.  She had a summer house in Santa Fe, and she was wonderful to us and very encouraging.


The thing that was so admirable about her among others was that here was this tiny little woman who would take on these 6'4" 220-[pound] paranoid schizophrenics.  I mean, she was trying to see ways in which you could apply psychoanalytic psychotherapy to schizophrenic patients, which, as I recall, Freud himself thought was not possible, and, by and large, it was thought impossible in the field.  She had no grandiosity about it.  She wanted to see what kind of approaches in what ways would be useful for whom.  She had reason to believe that there would be some useful things you could do, and over the years she did more and more of it, and she wrote papers and taught, etc.  A very gifted, very insightful, very perceptive kind of a person.  So we actually remained pretty close with her in the subsequent years, and she was a really inspirational figure.  


But that's how it came about, a curious pathway through the stress research which interested Rioch XE "Rioch, David M." , and then, in turn, he made the connection.  They'd both lived in Washington for some years, and he'd been associated with Chestnut Lodge.  So when we came to Washington, after about a year and a half, about halfway through the Korean war, then we looked her up and saw a lot of her during those years.  


I remember one amusing time when our son was born in Washington, our first child, and she called up and said she'd like to come visit on a Sunday, and we said fine, not knowing that she learned to drive late, and driving was an ordeal for her.  It was across one side of metropolitan Washington to the other in heavy Sunday afternoon traffic, and she was rather shaken when she got there, but she got there.  But that's the way she was.  She would greatly put herself out to be helpful to young people. 

Q:  I imagine she was very interested in your stress-related research.

Hamburg:  She was.  She was very encouraging about it.  She was encouraging, too, about the biological aspects of it.  She said, you know, she didn't know anything about that, but she always felt if she were younger, she would want to try to connect psychological and biological factors, and that's what we were doing.  We were trying to relate the anxiety, anger, depression, the emotional experiences of responding to stress, with the now well-known stress hormones of the adrenal gland.

Q:  And trying to explore issues of coping, adaptation to stress, to difficult situations.  I remember a remark you made, not in our first session, I think it's an earlier oral history interview conducted by Indiana University, relating to a search that you made early on in your stress-related research for literature on coping and adaptation.  I know, of course, your answer to what you found.  I'd like to hear more about that, though.

Hamburg:  That was a kind of a parallel track to the stress hormone linkage.  I had a broader interest in stress problems than the stress hormone linkage and clinically had responsibility for combat reactions, but then I met a surgeon and internist who were running the army burn unit in San Antonio, which was then, and I think probably still is, the premier burn unit in the world, certainly an outstanding one, and they had a very elaborate setup whereby hospital planes could fly back badly burned patients from Korea, Japan, or anywhere in the world, bring them to San Antonio, where the maximum expertise was available.  


They were at that time trying out an open treatment of burns, leaving the burns exposed to the air, which they thought might be a better way of dealing both with the loss of fluids and with the infections than the conventional treatment of the time, but to do the open treatment, you needed a lot of cooperation from your patients, and they were concerned about getting that cooperation, and then some dramatic instances where they couldn't get it.  So they asked me, I think it was in a bar at the officers club, would I have a look in.  I had, myself, something like 210 patients rapidly turning over, so I was really, really busy, but it was intriguing.  So I said, well, I would come over sometimes on evenings and weekends and try to have a look.  I had no idea whether I could be useful or not.  


When I first saw these burn patients, I was really depressed, like out of my mind.  It was just a horrible sight.  These were near fatal burns.  In fact, many of the patients did die, and I hadn't the foggiest idea about that problem, but as I took soundings, a kind of quick overview from the nursing staff particularly, I realized that it was only a small percentage of the patients who were not cooperating.  The vast majority were.  That struck me as remarkable in itself, given the circumstances, the very painful process and very uncertain outcome.  Many of them were like charred remnants of human beings.  It seemed to me quite stunning that so many were cooperating, and I basically then said to the directors of the burn unit if I could have a month or two to just try to get around to see all the patients and any relatives that may be there and the nursing staff quite systematically and try to build up a picture, sort of get around the contours of this problem, maybe, maybe, maybe I could do something useful.  


Well, what happened was that I got just fascinated with the coping strategies.  I did find there was virtually no research literature, didn't even know what language to use at the time, but the fact was that somehow these people were managing to deal with these horrible circumstances, and so I began just trying to describe and to make an inventory of the strategies that they were using and the way they thought about it and the way they felt about it and the way they utilized the people in their lives to come to terms with it -- all that -- cognitive, emotional, interpersonal strategies for dealing with this catastrophic injury.  As I tried to sort that out, I think I was able to be useful to them with the uncooperative patients.  


For me it became a larger quest.  Besides helping those patients, it became a larger quest to understand, to take this as a kind of a laboratory, if you like, of coping with life-threatening injury, and that evolved as a parallel track for, I don't know, a couple of decades, I suppose, somewhere between one and two decades of, on the one hand, working on psychological stress and its biological correlates, particularly the endocrine ones, but also, on the other hand, working on coping strategies, first in life-threatening stress.  


After the burn study, after the Korean War, I was back in Chicago, and we did a study on polio patients in the days before the vaccine.  These were in iron lungs, you know, respirators and very elaborate, expensive, the best technology, the best medical care that was available at the time, and the same kind of questions.  How do these people maintain a sense of worth?  How do they maintain significant human relationships?  How do they maintain some basis for hope in the future?  How do they cooperate in treatment or otherwise make moves toward a better situation?  


In the course of that, Salk vaccine became available, and it was a really deeply moving experience because a buck's worth of the vaccine would have prevented all of that, and I think that turned me on to prevention in a most profound way.  I mean, I've never left it for anything I've dealt with from individual problems to international conflict.  I've thought in terms of prevention to the extent possible since then, and it also, in due course, some years later led to, for me, a very important friendship with Jonas [E.] Salk XE "Salk, Jonas E." , including a long kind of life review talk with him about two or three weeks before he died, actually.

Q:  Could we hear some more about that, Dr. Hamburg?  I knew that you were a friend of Dr. Salk XE "Salk, Jonas E." .  I know we're somewhat out of our chronology, but that's all right.

Hamburg:  Right.  That's okay.  That was a very, very significant thing.  He was a very dedicated humanitarian.  He, for whatever reason, wasn't treated very well by the scientific community, even though he was obviously treated well by the public.  I never felt he was treated very well by the scientific community.  Be that as it may, he was a very dedicated humanitarian, and I worked with him in the early days of the Salk Institute when, on the one hand, he wanted to provide optimal working conditions for fundamental biomedical scientists who were working on the molecules and cells of life, the nature of life, but at the same time, he wanted to have a kind of parallel track on the significance of the rapidly emerging life sciences for contemporary social problems.  He wanted to think about what the life sciences could contribute to social issues -- education, drugs, disease prevention, health promotion, a wide range of considerations.  He put together a council on that, of which I was a member, and I watched the enormous dedication that he had.  He would do anything, practically, including sweep the floor of the Institute, to get it going and provide good conditions for the outstanding scientists that he recruited.  


So I saw him in that capacity as an institution-builder, using the prestige and the ability to raise funds that come from the polio vaccine to create what at the time was a highly novel, virtually unique institution for scientists, not only the quality of the physical facilities and the beauty of the setting and the land, but also in terms of the way he brought in various advisory councils from all over the world of leading scientists in quite different fields who would come several times a year and enormously enrich the brew of those who were there full time.  A very creative enterprise, I thought.

Q:  Sounds very much like a model for the way you have guided the Carnegie Corporation.

Hamburg:  Yes.  He and I both were -- and so was Roy Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  and other people in my crew -- interdisciplinary people, bringing people together who bring different strengths to the table to work together to get around the contours of big important problems.  That was very much an orientation we shared, and we worked together when he came on to the board of the [John D. and Catherine T.] MacArthur Foundation in its early days.  I was an advisor to the Foundation from almost the very beginning, and I watched and worked with him as he, in a really remarkably selfless way, tried to provide the conditions under which this foundation could really mobilize the talent to address major problems, including human behavior as a very prominent part of it.  We shared that kind of an approach, the concern with big social problems, the interdisciplinary approach to those problems, the interdisciplinary approach to science itself, and the strong emphasis on the value of prevention.  Those were the kinds of themes we were discussing in what I refer to as the life-review talk, and I was just drawing him out in that talk about different phases of his career and different points of satisfaction and lingering concern about each phase of his life.  It was a very good talk.  It was fundamental values that we shared.  He could be very poetic, and that could be either touching or off-putting.  Some people found him at times too vague, or ethereal.  I always felt that he was groping, at times almost desperately groping, for more understanding and for a way to bring the fruits of science to bear on important human problems.  So even if I didn't fully understand him, I was very sympathetic with what he was trying to do.  


He was always restless, and I remember a meeting here we had when he asked me to convene some people on creativity.  He was partly asking -- a lot of distinguished scientists are interested in creativity.  They start with asking, "How was I able to do such a great thing?  How does my mind work?"  But there, also, he asked the larger question -- basically about how can you foster creativity in different fields, in arts and sciences.  


So I have great respect for him, and he agreed to serve on one of our studies here, the one on the first few years of life, the one that came to be called Starting Points.  It was very encouraging.  He was too frail by the time we had our national meeting to bring that report out to come to it, but he sent a message which I read at the outset, emphasizing the importance of this report for addressing the first few years of life from conception onward, and the preventive potential of applying these insights to that problem. 

Q:  I was struck recently in reading some of your work on coping and adaptation from the late sixties -- this was an article with John [E.] Adams XE "Adams, John E." , actually; and a couple of the themes that you two note -- common stressful experiences, war, threat of war, rapid technological and social change -- those were themes that I saw resonating this very day in your work at Carnegie, a thread running from all that time.

Hamburg:  That's an interesting observation.  You've done your homework.  Yes, the rapid technological and social change is one that has fascinated, almost obsessed, me for a long time.  I think we're in the midst of yet another industrial revolution by whatever name, advances over such a broad-front in science and technology that everything is changing and changing so fast that I think it does pose a very interesting problem in adaptation for people.  You know, "Stop the world, I want to get off" at times.

Q:  Any ideas how we're going to cope with that or how we are coping with that now?

Hamburg:  Some of the studies that we're supporting right now are trying to, again, bring multifaceted strengths to bear on that issue.  We've supported work at the National Academy of Engineering on Technology and Society and work based at the University of Texas, although nationwide in scope, under Ray [F.] Marshall XE "Marshall, Ray F." , the former Secretary of Labor, on the economic correlates or consequences of these technological changes.  There's always this paradox about those technological advances.  They offer so much promise, you know, that ordinary people could live in some ways as kings and queens could not live in the past, but at the same time massive social dislocations.


I'm very concerned right now that we find ways to monitor and assess and, to some degree, anticipate the changes going on, that there can be ways of buffering the dislocations and not produce terrible upheavals.  Remember, fundamentally, as I see it, at least as I read history, the upheavals associated with the industrial revolution brought us fascism and communism.  I mean, there was such profound fear and poverty and oppression.  Even the great long-run possibilities of the factory system in the short run produced prison-like conditions in factories and a tremendous sense of workers being oppressed and abused, and out of that kind of desperation came these extreme ideologies that had attractive social rhetoric, rhetoric about social justice, but ended up being grotesquely oppressive and tyrannical.  I do worry about massive dislocations generating widespread anxiety that can be turned to fear and hatred by demagogues.  That's been a long-running concern of mine, and some of the work that Carnegie's now supporting is trying to clarify those kinds of issues.

Q:  Okay.  Thank you.  Well, we'll try to move a little bit along in our chronology perhaps and bring you back to Michael Reese now, as associate director for the Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training.  You're still working with Roy Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  at this point, I presume.

Hamburg:  Yes.  I'd gone away to Yale, then came back, was with him for a little while, then got called into the army, then came back again. 

Q:  Right.  All of which is very interesting in itself, having had that chance to study with Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R." , having gotten the psychiatric internship, if that's the right word, at Yale by pulling a -- 

Hamburg:  Residency.

Q:  -- residency, a ticket out of the hat for psychiatry, basically. 

Hamburg:  Well, what Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  stood for was a certain kind of a vision, first of all to address the stress problems, but do it in an interdisciplinary way, bring in all the different strengths together in cooperative efforts in research and education, patient care.  That was enormously stimulating.  He had very, very good people in the behavioral sciences, primarily in psychology and several fields of psychology, which is a big broad field in itself, and, to some extent, in the social sciences.  And then he had very good people in the biological sciences, particularly in this endocrine, but to some extent cardiovascular, work as well.  So it was a very rich brew, and I learned a lot, and we were pretty much on the frontier in research and education and patient care.  He was very open to innovation.  He was kind of a stern taskmaster, although he was very kind to me.  But, in general -- he was a person with whom people had difficulty.  He had very high standards.  He drove himself very hard.  He drove others very hard.  But it was a great experience overall.  


My primary investment, really, was in the research, and the research was at an early stage, when we were kind of finding out how to do research that was as systematic and rigorous as we could make it, where possible, even experimental.  So we had to learn not only about the subject matter but how to do research on such problems.  I certainly had to personally, but I think the field was pretty rudimentary at that stage.  I think I carried away from that a deep appreciation of the contribution of different perspectives and different approaches to any problem you can select.  I came away feeling that you can't assume a kind of royal road to truth on any subject but rather that you have to try to find a sort of multifaceted approach that will get you illumination over here and illumination over there, and, to the extent possible, from time to time you draw together the different pieces that are illuminated.

Q:  Can you say a little bit more about the state of the field at this time and some more about your colleagues, who they were, and what you all were working on specifically?  You worked for many years with burn patients, and I may be out of the time -- 

Hamburg:  No, that was only the time in Texas.

Q:  Was that just in Texas?

Hamburg:  Right.

Q:  Okay.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Q:  I think I had gotten confused there because in the article you wrote with Adams XE "Adams, John E."  in '67 that I just mentioned, there's a note that you had spent the past sixteen years, that is, since about 1950 -- 

Hamburg:  Right, on different subjects.

Q:  In a series of collaborating studies. 

Hamburg:  The article with Adams XE "Adams, John E."  was a kind of a synthesis.  It's a style of mine that, after working a problem for a number of years, I will try, often with collaborators, to draw it together, to make a kind of synthesis.  What does this seem to me to add up to from a number of different discrete studies if you draw them together?  Are there any underlying concepts or even principles that might emerge?  And that paper with Adams XE "Adams, John E."  was such an effort, but it had included work with burn patients, with polio patients, with families that had children with leukemia in the days when leukemia was a uniformly fatal disease and we were studying both the children and their parents in different ways, both biologically and psychologically.  So there was that.


Then after a good many years of these life-threatening injuries and illnesses, I really decided on a kind of personal basis, it's enough of that.  It's too hard.  It's too hard.  It's like some very rugged sports that are basically a young person's game, and I decided I'd like to keep on with the coping and adaptation work, but how to do that?  It occurred to me that whatever else we were studying, we were studying major transitions.  There are times in life when the circumstances require new patterns of adaptation, and so I thought, well, couldn't you look at major transitions that were not necessarily life-threatening and therefore would not be so depressing?  Sort of like the man who was speaking prose all his life and didn't know it -- I guess that was Molière, one of Molière's characters, I think, but whatever, I decided that we were speaking major transitions, even though we didn't know it, and let's find other major transitions. 


So then, for example, the biggest enterprise was the transition from high school to college at a time when young people had much less experience going away for extended periods prior to college, and so it was a bigger gulf, being at home with parents in a familiar community, by and large, through childhood and early adolescence, and then going away some distance to college, and many implications, not just the geographic move and the separation from family, but many implications of coming toward adulthood and new demands and new opportunities and new responsibilities and, to some degree, a new way of life, and yet building on some continuities of basic values and capacities from earlier experience.  


So we did quite a number of studies looking at the transition from high school to college, students who were, by certain criteria, very effective copers, others who were at the other extreme, who broke down and had severe psychiatric problems when they went away to college or shortly thereafter.  We tried to look at the differences between those and develop various techniques, all the way from new psychological tests to visits to the campus -- spending a couple of days with the students in their first year to get a kind of ethnographic sense of how they were coping with the new situation.  So that was a long-running enterprise.  


The parallel stream of the psychobiology of stress was, on the whole, more amenable to systematic and quantitative methods and even, to some extent, experimental methods, and that was a very interesting proposition, because there was great skepticism in the biological sciences community that the brain would have a strong controlling influence over the secretion of hormones.  The brain was there to think, to perform some higher cognitive functions and whatever else, some mysterious functions, and there was even some tendency in the scientific community to kind of write off the brain at that time, either too complicated or some mind/body dichotomies, whatever.   


But the kind of thing we were working on suggested an additional aspect of brain function; we were finding elevations in certain hormones in their circulating concentrations throughout the body that could only be explained by some controlling mechanism within the brain on those endocrine glands, though we didn't know what the pathway was.  So there was a community of investigators, some of us working on the human or non-human-animal side about relating psychological stress and endocrine function, others working on possible pathways between the brain and the endocrine glands, and in the course of that time it gradually became clear what was going on.  


I don't want to get too technical about it, but there's, to me, a very fascinating, inspiring set of discoveries, not by me or my immediate colleagues, but it was part of the community of investigators that we were most identified with.  The master gland of the endocrine orchestra is the pituitary gland.  It sits right under the base of the brain.  It would be a funny coincidence if the center of the base of the brain had no functional significance, but yet sometimes we used to say, "Well, maybe the brain is just there to keep it warm."  It sort of wraps around the pituitary gland.  From the anterior, the front part of this pituitary gland, there were known to be hormones secreted that were like chemical signals to other endocrine glands, the thyroid in the neck and the adrenal sitting on top of the kidneys and the sex glands.  So if you could get the anterior pituitary stimulated, it would, in turn, stimulate the secretion of other hormones that would affect every cell and tissue in the body, or virtually so.  That was a very powerful set of relationships.  


Now, how could the brain do that?  There are hardly any nerves going from the brain just down this short distance to the pituitary gland, and therefore it seemed implausible that the brain could have a controlling influence.  Some investigators, particularly in England, discovered the very funny set of blood vessels, very large and unusual blood vessels, in that small connection, and they wondered what was in that.  They were able to show that something in that gemisch was stimulating the anterior pituitary, that, oddly enough, the brain was putting some chemicals into those blood vessels that went the short distance.  So instead of transmitting neural impulses electrically, it was transmitting chemical influences through the blood vessels to the anterior pituitary and, hence, affecting the whole body.  It was really a great discovery.  


Then some other people in this country set out to find out what was it chemically, what was in that gemisch that was carrying the message, and they eventually identified certain specific peptides.  They shared the Nobel Prize, then, I think, in something like 1977 for that discovery, although the man who discovered the original vascular network did not ever get the Nobel Prize, although he certainly had lots of recognition.  


But in any case, from the biological side, that was an absolutely fundamental mechanism which gave all of us working on psychobiology great encouragement because earlier we were saying, "There has to be a relationship.  We don't know what it is, but there has to be a relationship here, because psychological events do stimulate the adrenal cortex, the adrenal medulla and so on," and now we knew at least an important part of the mechanism.  It turned out they were different mechanisms.  For the adrenal medulla, the interior core of the adrenal gland sitting on top of the kidney, there was a straight nervous pathway, nerves that went there and fired, and so the electrical pathway was quite obvious.  But in the case of the adrenal cortex, the outer shell of the gland, it was much more subtle, these chemical messengers intervening.  


The whole story got more complex and more interesting over the years, but in any event, that went from being a very marginal, somewhat shaky, not quite legitimate field of inquiry when I started, to a rather well-accepted, well-validated, powerful area of inquiry today.  There's still lots of unknowns, but there's no question anymore, no serious question, of the brain's very strong influence over the endocrine glands and hence over every cell and tissue of the body.  


Moreover, it turned out in those years that it wasn't just the adrenal -- important as that is as the main responder to stress with, on the one hand, the adrenaline-type hormones and, on the other hand, the cortisol-type hormones -- but also the thyroid and the sex hormones, a whole panoply of hormones, were involved in different ways in stress responses.  The interest has grown over the years in the relation of that to disease.  I was always interested in that.  I always felt that that was something that needed to be investigated, but I tended to be on the cautious side about making claims with respect to disease.  I felt we were working on fundamental mechanisms, psychobiological mechanisms of response to stress, but that it would take decades, I thought, probably, to clarify the relation to disease. 


I was particularly interested in cardiovascular diseases, heart attacks and strokes and so on.  I think that has become a lot clearer over the years, and the frontiers have been pushed back, but that's still a hard subject.  Anyway, it's been fascinating to watch the field evolve, and I came back to it this year when the President asked me to serve on a commission on Persian Gulf War illness, and I headed up a panel on stress, and we convened some of the leaders in the field.  It's fascinating to me that the main outlines that we developed in those prehistoric times have held up very well indeed, but within that framework very important details have been filled in, and God is in the details.  But it's a very dynamic field now, and I was happy to see how it has evolved.  It certainly was not a dead-end proposition, but a steadily evolving set of research pathways, many of which now have clinical applications and some of which have applications in public health -- the whole business of smoking, for example, the role of smoking in relief of distress, and similarly the role of alcohol as self-medication for emotional distress.  


So as you trace out the pathways of stress-related disorders, you get into questions of prevention.  Sometimes ways of coping, like smoking and heavy alcohol intake, the ways of coping with emotional distress turn out to be worse than the distress itself. 

Q:  Listening to you, I'm wondering if you have ever missed your research life.

Hamburg:  Yes.  Unequivocally yes.  You can't do everything.  You make choices and you give up some things, but I have very much missed that.  I've had some vicarious participation in it, in the positions that I have held at the Institute of Medicine and the AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] and here, and some of the boards, the board of Rockefeller University, the board of Stanford University and the Mount Sinai Medical Center.  In various ways, I've managed to keep in touch with active investigators, not at a high level of detail, but to have the main gist of the developments.  


To me, in some ways, the most fascinating is the development of genetics because it was such a rudimentary field when Tracy Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M."  got me excited about it.  He had such extraordinary vision, and today it's certainly one of a handful of central fields in the sciences altogether, not just in the life sciences, but it has transformed the life sciences.  It has been wonderful for me to see that and, to some extent here and there, to be a patron of the arts, that is to say, to help in either science policy questions to get genetics higher on the agenda when I was at the Institute of Medicine; and sometimes in raising funds for research in these universities I've been associated with, but to watch that development -- I only wish Tracy Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M."  had lived to see it.  


I had a very happy occasion when I was at the Academy in 1970s and I had responsibility for organizing the first highly visible public symposium on the then-new recombinant technologies, the gene cloning and all that sort of thing.  There were important concerns and questions about it, and we let it all hang out.  I asked Tracy Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M."  to give the closing synthesizing remarks at that meeting, with his visionary optimism on the one hand and yet his great sense of social responsibility on the other.  It was a very gratifying experience.  Just within a few years, I forget, two or three years after that, he died, but I wish he could have lived to see what's happened, because there was such skepticism whether genetics could amount to anything, at least for medicine.  Some viewed it as a neat scientific trick but it would have had no medical significance.  And so, in a way, in my lifetime I have seen some dramatic transformation in the life sciences and their application to medicine and public health.

Q:  Okay.  That might be a good place for us to stop.

Hamburg:  That might be a good place to stop, yes.

Q:  Thank you very much.

Hamburg:  Thank you.  I greatly appreciate your interest and the fact that you do your homework and ask perceptive questions.

Q:  It's easy in your case, it's so interesting.  It really is.  We really appreciate your taking the time, Dr. Hamburg, especially now.

Hamburg:  You make me want to go back and read some of those earlier papers.

[END OF SESSION]

	TTTPRIVATE 

	Session Three

	Interviewee:  David Hamburg  
	Date:  May 8, 1997

	Interviewer:  Brenda Hearing     
	New York, New York

	
	


Q:  Today is the eighth of May, 1997, and we're here with Dr. David Hamburg for the third session of our oral history interview with Dr. Hamburg, here in his office at Carnegie Corporation.  My name is Brenda Hearing.  


Thank you again for joining us, Dr. Hamburg.

Hamburg:  My pleasure.

Q:  In light of the recent White House Conference on Early Child Development [and Learning], I was wondering if we could talk today about the roots of your own interest in child development.  You allude to the fact, in the preface to Today's Children, that your wife has been a large influence with respect to this interest of yours.

Hamburg:  Very much so.  Very much so.  There are different strands of it.  I suppose to some extent, as I indicated in that preface to Today's Children, I was sensitized, I think, as a kid in the family to the general concept of the importance of early experience on later behavior, but there's no question in my mind that the real -- well, I'll back up just a little bit.  Then that got a strong reinforcement my senior year in medical school, both from the teaching of pediatrics, which I found intriguing, and the actual contact with babies and so on, and from reading Freud's [General] Introduction to Psychoanalysis in this year.  It wasn't particularly a part of our curriculum.  I forget, it may have been collateral reading suggested somewhere.  But however that was, I did read some general introductory lectures that Freud wrote, that I found fascinating.  And the theme of the influence of early experience on later behavior, indeed the lifelong enduring effects of early experience, struck me as a powerful one.  And it was kind of tucked away somewhere, but it seemed then, and it seems to me now, one of the main strands of psychoanalysis was to look at a developmental perspective.  


But that was all essentially latent, really, until I met my wife, whose -- who had set out early to study child development and health; by the time she went to college, she wanted to do child psychiatry and pediatrics, and she did that.  She'd just graduated from Yale medical school when I got there, a residency in psychiatry.  She was also a resident in psychiatry.  And then in the subsequent years, her work in pediatrics and child psychiatry rubbed off on me, and in various ways that was a powerful shaping influence.


I didn't get to do an awful lot with that professionally until I came to the Institute of Medicine [National Academy of Sciences] in 1975, and then I tried to stimulate, as a major part of our programmatic activity, work on child and adolescent health in the larger context of the main factors that influence development, not health narrowly defined in the sense of medical care, though that was part of it, more in the sense of the experience of growing up in American society and factors that influence healthy child development.


It was certainly explicit in my wife's influence that I made a commotion, so to say, about early adolescence.  She had really delineated, I think, as far as I know, more than anyone else in any field of medicine, certainly in psychiatry, the importance of early adolescence, ages ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.  At the time when she wrote a series of seminal papers in the sixties and early seventies, adolescence sort of vaguely meant really late adolescence and boys' adolescence.  She sorted out the differential nature of the experience, say, for that young age group as compared to seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen-year-olds, and also took a broader view of poor as well as rich adolescents and the diversity of cultures within American society.


So that was an eye-opener for me, certainly, and when I got to the Institute of Medicine, I thought we ought to pursue an adolescent health interest, and we did.  And then when I went to Harvard [University], one of the six working groups that I organized -- these were university-wide working groups on health policy -- one of them was the Early Life Working Group.  It later was called Early Life and Adolescence.  Anyhow, it was fundamentally a kind of first-two-decades-of-life agenda, and it continues to the present day.  I just got a paper last week reviewing the first fifteen years of that working group and the many activities it has stimulated at Harvard and beyond Harvard.


The fullest expression of that interest occurred when I came here, because this was a foundation that had a tradition of serious interest in education broadly conceived.  It was one of [Andrew] Carnegie's passions, clearly, as reflected in the libraries and much more.  And so we set out pretty systematically to look at several phases of development: the early childhood, let's say zero to three, including the prenatal period; and then middle childhood, roughly three to ten; and then early adolescence, ten to fifteen.  We did some things from fifteen to nineteen, but not a lot.  You can't do everything, and we concentrated very heavily on the first three phases of development.  And our approach was pretty straightforward, so it seemed to me, namely to try to formulate what are the essential requirements for healthy development in this phase, say zero to three, and what does it take to meet those requirements under some transforming traditions of family and community life in this country, with both parents in the work force or only a single parent or a rapid series of separations and divorces and remarriages and whatnot -- a number of conditions of child-rearing that are difficult and stressful for the parents and for the children.


And I thought we had to look at that in a way that would ask who could meet the essential requirements for healthy development, thinking in the earliest years of all the need for protection, attachment, nurturance, stimulation, guidance and constructive feedback that shape healthy development.  It's a big, big, big undertaking.  It starts with the family, but it seemed to me it has to go beyond the family.


So we tried to look at a set of institutions that we call pivotal or front-line institutions for each phase of development: family, education system, be it preschool or school, health sector, community organizations -- youth-serving and other community organizations -- and the media because of the day-to-day impact of these institutions on kids, for better or worse.  And then we also to some extent looked at several surrounding powerful institutions that can make the job of the family, say, or the schools easier or harder; namely, government, especially federal and state government, which are big and powerful; the business community, which is big and powerful; scientific community, which provides the knowledge base for all these things; and various key professions, especially education and health professions.


So we really were trying to ask how you can formulate the responses of different sectors of society to the needs of children and, so to say, mobilize society for that purpose.  And we had a distinctive pattern of grantmaking, beginning with grantmaking to fill gaps in research for each phase of development, and then based on that research and on the most careful assessment of practices, to try to support community innovations, whether they be in schools or community-based organizations or clinics or whatever, try to support innovations that would put the knowledge into practice.  How could you actually make it work to meet the needs of children?


Then after a while, after a certain number of years of grantmaking to fill gaps in research, and grantmaking for research-based innovations, we then would try to either prepare ourselves or get prepared a major synthesis, a drawing-together of the knowledge and experience.  "Here's what we know about this phase of development.  Here are things going on in American communities that actually work.  And if you look at this evidence in these working models, how could you move that to scale for the nation as a whole?"  


So we had a number of those, but I suppose the best known of these culminating reports were Starting Points for zero to three, and Great Transitions for ten to fifteen, and then most recently filling in the gaps, let us say, with Years of Promise for three to ten.  We didn't do them strictly in sequence, in chronological sequence, for a variety of reasons.  It might have been nice.  I first had a sort of sanitary view when I came here:  "Let's do zero to three and move on up."  But for a variety of reasons that wasn't a very practical idea.


Anyway, we did get that all done, and the characteristic of these syntheses was that we tried to get them to be credible because they were based on the best available scientific knowledge and assessment of practices, and intelligible because we tried to get them out of professional or technical language into more or less everyday language, at least for a reasonably well-educated reader.  Our attempt was to really communicate with the American public, and, yes, to have it be useful to policymakers and to practitioners, but primarily to build public understanding, get the facts straight, and reasonable analysis of options and ways that we could respond to the facts about child development.


Now, that's the whole framework in a series of activities over the past fourteen years, and I've recently tried to condense that approach in writing my final annual report essay, which we'll get to you momentarily.  It's not actually printed yet, but it should be out very shortly.


But the zero to three effort embodied in Starting Points had the greatest impact clearly on the American public.  I don't know the extent to which it was a marvelous baby on the cover of the report that grabbed your sympathetic attention or what, but it did.  I'm happy that it did.  It was difficult to get done in some ways.  It slipped by some years.  Maybe it's fortunate that it came out in a more favorable context.  We were delayed internally in making the grants and getting to the synthesis over the time scale I had originally envisioned.  Also, it took us a while to shift gears from a purely cognitive orientation which had existed in the foundation before I came, to a broader one that really included in a serious way the emotional and social development as well as cognitive development, and also an approach that didn't just focus on schools, preschools or whatever, but, for example, really dealt seriously with prenatal care and perinatal care.


We were not in any way a health foundation when I came here, and I didn't mean for us to be.  On the other hand, there was no reason to have a phobia about health.  Early child development has very important health considerations.  The quality of prenatal care, how early it is, how comprehensive it is, is a very important fact, and took us a while.  We had a special meeting on prenatal care to get cranked up properly, and to this day I'm not entirely satisfied with what we said in Starting Points about prenatal care.  


One of my early slogans was, "Education doesn't begin with kindergarten; education begins with prenatal care," meaning it's kind of a learning moment when parents, especially with the first pregnancy, when parents typically are very concerned to do the right thing for this child, and it's an opportunity for parent education, it's an opportunity for health education.  How are you going to take care of your baby, take care of yourself?  How are you going to be a good parent?  What are you going to do with the rest of your life? 


So what I wanted to get at was what I first called an enriched, and I think we now call a comprehensive notion of prenatal care, which is the medical core and an educational component and a social support or a social service component, particularly for poor families.  So we put that all as best we could, that kind of concept, together with the care of the young child and family, health care after birth, plus child care in different settings, in childcare centers, in family daycare, in the home -- what constitutes quality childcare, how could more kids get quality childcare.  


There is such a revolution that's occurred even in the fifteen years I've been here in women in the work force full time, that we now are at a position where about half or a little more than half of the mothers of infants and toddlers are full time in the work force; the fathers still are.  There's essentially no evidence overall for the nation as a whole that the fathers are compensating with extra time at home for the mothers being out.  So then both parents are out.  Therefore, somebody's got to take care of the kids, that for any reasonable chance to have healthy child development, you need some decent childcare, and much of that is outside the home.  And therefore, you have to think about the criteria.  What is it that's quality childcare, and how does it get delivered, so to say?  Where are we falling short?  Which is enormously -- we are now, but, again, what's the best evidence in the working models of how we could do it and do it really well?  So it becomes a kind of a seamless web.  That is, the care the child gets at home or not at home, by parents or other people, meets certain criteria for these fundamental needs.  


So that whatever it was, we touched a nerve nationally with that Starting Points report.  I knew that Hillary [Rodham] Clinton XE "Rodham Clinton, Hillary"  had a strong interest in that subject from her prior life, and so I asked her to open that meeting, and she did, superbly, when we brought out the report three years ago, and took a great, great interest in it.  It resonated strongly with a long-term interest of hers, and to a lesser but significant extent with the President [William J. Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." ].  The day it came out, he -- I wasn't there, but he had some kind of meeting in which he took the report and waved it around and said something to the effect, "This is a model of what foundations should do.  This is the most important subject for our future," or words to that effect.  So they both were seized of it, and there was a sort of bipartisan caucus in the Congress that was seized of it, and also the National Governors Association.  There was a huge amount of media coverage.  No children's report ever had such extensive and constructive and largely accurate coverage as that had, and it kept reverberating.  This year, on its three-year cycle, in a way it came to a culmination at the White House conference, which I'll come back to.  I know it's a long answer to your question, but it really involves how did we get to this place.  


In connection with the White House conference, there was an ABC special, an hour special put on by Rob Reiner XE "Reiner, Rob" , a prime-time special of essentially a documentary nature, which is almost unheard of these days on networks, and a special issue of Newsweek with a baby on the cover, which will be on the newsstands for four or five months.  And following on from the special, there is an 800 number which in the first few days afterwards had ten thousand calls, and there's a videotape for new parents, and there's a little booklet of tips for parents.  So there's a whole national public information campaign basically on the concepts in Starting Points being amplified in many, many ways, and it's not just Starting Points, but clearly everybody involved in this says that Starting Points was kind of -- terms like "the seminal report," or "the milestone," or "powerful stimulus," or whatever.  It was all that.  Whatever it was, the time came right.


Now one piece of it that even surprised us, we put in a little bit about early brain development.  It was actually a continuing flow of information.  I had recruited to my department at Stanford almost forty years ago, a man named Seymour Levine XE "Levine, Seymour" , who was one of the pioneers in developmental psychobiology, and had another person in the department, Anneliese [F.] Korner XE "Korner, Anneliese F." , one of the pioneers of research on human infants.  It was second nature to me that you should research in humans and in animals the effects of early experience on later development, and part of that was brain development and the development of stress responses.  There was the biology as well as the psychology of early development.


So I didn't think of it as anything remarkable, except that there's been a lot of new research, it's a continuing flow of building of the research process on these matters, and some of it involved brain imagery so you could actually see to some extent the functioning brain, both structural imaging and functional imaging -- but you could see what the brain looks like and where it, so to say, lights up, and different regions of the brain light up with different kinds of brain activity.  Those few pages in Starting Points got the most press coverage.  It was the concept that the brain continues to develop after birth, and it is shaped by experience after birth, powerfully shaped by experience after birth.  The way circuits develop or fail to develop, the way the cells are connected, is in part influenced by the nature and scope of stimulation.


So that was a particular thing that both the White House and Rob Reiner XE "Reiner, Rob"  and his colleagues in the media picked up on, and they came to speak about brain development, brain development and early learning, brain development and early behavior, but in my view, that's an important part of it.  It's by no means the only part, but it's certainly good to be aware of the nature of early brain development and the fact that early experience so powerfully shapes the structure and the function of the brain.  The Carnegie program clearly recognized the importance of developmental influences beyond those first few years of life as well.


But these recent follow-up efforts, like the White House conference, have tended to put the earliest influences front and center.  Now what we did -- the President and the First Lady asked me to help them plan that conference, and what we did was divide it into two sessions that pretty much followed the Starting Points framework.  I chaired the first session, and then because of a prior commitment I had to leave.  I was very sorry to miss the afternoon session, but it couldn't be helped.  It was a really great event, I think.


The first session we had the President and the First Lady and me flanked by six people.  Three of them were contributors more to the basic science part of this, and three of them contributors to the professional services; what is the evidence about the best ways to respond professionally to these needs of the young child.  So we had one person who spoke about the earliest development from the behavioral point of view, like the formation of attachment between the infant and the earliest caregiver, and another person who spoke about the brain studies, for example, the way the visual system develops or doesn't develop, depending on the visual input.  And a third person spoke about early language development and the way in which even reading to the child in the first year, when the child is nowhere near speaking, let alone reading, nevertheless seems to have an important influence on the facility with language later on.


So then we had basically the response from an obstetrical point of view, prenatal care and such like; from the pediatric point of view, perinatal care and all that; and then finally the childcare, what is the research evidence, some new studies about quality childcare.  


It was about three hours, and the President and First Lady took a very active part in discussion, asked some very good questions.  You could see they were just on the edge of the chair, absorbed by these presentations, and they had arranged it with great interest in it.  They said it elicited more interest than any event in the five years the Clintons have been in the White House.  They had like a hundred satellite sites throughout the country where there were audiences watching.  At the White House itself, they opened up an auditorium in the old Executive Office Building, besides the people who were there in the East Room.


And there was a lot of media coverage.  I went down a few days beforehand, at the First Lady's request, to join her in meeting with the White House press corps -- not health writers or education writers or children's writers, but the White House, basically political, writers.  For almost two hours they asked us thoughtful questions, without a single one on anything except children.  Nothing political.  It was amazing.  I think she was surprised and gratified.


In any event, if public understanding is important in democracy, and it must be, then this is a rare moment when these events come together to give a level of public understanding about young children that goes way beyond anything we've had before.  I understand, for example, the television special had an audience of something like fourteen or fifteen million people.  Well, as an old professor, if I had two or three hundred in a class, I thought that was a big deal.  To have fifteen million people is beyond imagination.  And it was done in a very vivid way, and, I hope that -- I think, understandable, they had real families, and it was based on good evidence.


The rest of the White House meeting, by the way, the afternoon session was on that part of the Carnegie report, that went under the label of community mobilization.  How do you bring the different sectors in for the benefit of young children; and reach into poor communities as well as affluent communities?  And so there was a governor there and a major CEO from the business community, and a terrific innovator who'd found ways to get these functions going in poor communities in Texas.  So that whole notion of bringing the different sectors in to bear on the problem -- and they also announced some new federal initiatives.  In a way, the most interesting may have been two that I had raised with them before.  One was to have a follow-up conference on childcare, just focus on childcare.  I suggested that on the Monday before the conference, and on Thursday the President opened by announcing we're going to have in the fall a conference on childcare.  They just really were so seized at the importance of it, the centrality of that dilemma, that they decided to build on that piece of this conference and amplify it to a whole conference in the fall.


The other thing was to look at the military model.  Curiously enough, the Department of Defense has gone beyond most of American society in providing a high standard of excellence for childcare because they knew they needed it.  In voluntary armed forces, if you're going to have people volunteer and come and stay, and first-rate people be in the service, you need to think about their families and their children.  So that shows what can be done, and it's a very nice federal initiative.  All the President set in motion there was to have some, in effect, technical assistance from the military to other parts of the federal government about how to do the same.


So who knows what will come of it, but at any rate, when you work as a foundation to try to clarify important issues on a completely nonpartisan basis that would be of use to the whole country or, in some cases, to the whole world, you do always wonder, well, how will anybody but us understand this?  Can you exceed "singing to the choir"?  Can you reach the larger nation in some way while maintaining high standards, not getting into hucksterism and not getting into partisanship?  I think these recent events are wonderful from that point of view.


Another recent event was the second time in three years that I spoke to the National Governors Association on zero to three, and they had other speakers as well on zero to three, and they have a task force working on it.  It's strictly fifty-fifty, Republicans and Democrats, and all over the country.  So at least we've helped, you know, to light a fire on this issue.  And we tend to assume that good things will flow from it.


One thing that did happen quite concretely at the time Starting Points came out, the Congress was working on the reauthorization of Head Start, and they were stimulated, partly by us and partly for other reasons, to create something they called Early Head Start, on strictly bipartisan basis.  One of the leaders in this was Senator [Nancy L.] Kassebaum XE "Kassebaum, Nancy L."  from Kansas.  They provide a significant amount of money for the Head Start principles to be applied at earlier ages.  Obviously if you're dealing with toddlers or even infants, it's not the same thing as dealing with three- or four-year-olds, but the basic concepts are still useful.  So the early Head Start program is to some degree a tangible outgrowth of our work in this field.

Q:  And this understanding of the importance of those first years, which I think is something that you really brought -- in your stewardship of Carnegie Corporation, you've really brought that to the fore.

Hamburg:  I hope so.  I was going to say that one of the reasons I decided early on to emphasize this was that there was some continuity here, particularly under Barbara [D.] Finberg XE "Finberg, Barbara D." , who I later appointed executive vice president.  Barbara, before I came, had been one of the grantmakers to pay attention to supporting research on early child development before there was much government support.  It provided underpinnings for what became Head Start and preschool education.  I felt we could pick up that strand.  It was small and it was very largely cognitive, but it was important, it was pioneering work, and I thought "Let's build on that," into a broader picture of the early years.  And Carnegie has a certain standing in the field.  Let's build on that standing.  I believe that the good name of the foundation is worth as much as the money.  So I do feel good that that has been clarified on my watch.  It's fundamental stuff, it will always be fundamental, and it is timely in the sense that the nature of the social transformation -- economic globalization and technological changes and family changes, community changes -- we just have to rethink how do we meet these eternal needs of young children under very different circumstances.

Q:  Did you happen to see the Op Ed in yesterday's [New York] Times?  I don't recall the woman's name, but she was responding to some of the highlights of the conference.  Her response was that, as a working mother, "Once again I feel guilty.  I'm hearing again that having someone consistent, at home, in that primary nurturing role, preferably the mother, that's important, and yet look at me and all of my colleagues.  We have to be out in the work force.  What do we do?"

Hamburg:  No, I didn't see that, but that was certainly a concern that the First Lady had about making parents feel guilty.  Our attitude has been that this is a fact of life, it is not going to be reversed, and shouldn't be; that is to say, women in the work force.  And the task is now to adapt.  From the standpoint of the economy and the creativity of society, it seems to me personally it's an enormous boon to have women in the work force.  You have half the talent, or maybe fifty-two percent, whatever it is, of your population that was not available, now is available for the modern technical economy and for all the functions of society.  I think that greatly enriches it, makes it far more creative, not just more equitable, but more dynamic and creative as a society.  But if you're going to do that, then you have to say, "Well, how will we rearrange the care of young children?"  Their needs are there.  You can't change that, but you can adapt to them.  


It's kind of a culture change.  For example, this issue of fathers doing more.  There are a lot of good stories.  There are clearly a lot of fathers who are doing more, but over the population as a whole, the survey evidence is that there's little, if any, change in that direction.  But I think that will come.  I don't know if it will take twenty, thirty, forty years, but that clearly isn't the only change that needs to be made, and that's why we put so much focus on childcare.  What is high quality childcare in the home or out of the home, regardless of whether it's the mother or the father or a caregiver in a childcare center?  What does it take to interact constructively with the child?  So I see ourselves in the vanguard of fostering the adaptation in this new world, and very much in the interest of women, among others.  The only basis for guilt is if, so to say, the mother's walked out of the home and the father's looking the other way, and nobody's paying attention to the children.  I mean, then there's a basis for guilt, but there always was.  


But I think the vast majority of parents are not in that situation.  They want to find good arrangements for their children. I wrote in Today's Children about this.  I think there's a huge amount of improvising -- I kept using the word "improvising" -- that parents have to do now, and that will always be true to some extent, but I think that society needs to build institutions that can channel their interest and desire to get good care for their children, and everything shouldn't be left to brilliant improvising by isolated parents.

Q:  Do the discussions on daycare childcare take into account the poor?  Another concern raised by the woman in yesterday's piece was children of the poor in this country, of course.

Hamburg:  Certainly.  Our general approach, in my early days here and from time to time since, we've looked at the question, since that's so urgent, to refocus our work solely on poor communities or should we look at the whole population and then give special attention to poor communities within that?  We've decided to do the latter; we have all along, for several reasons.  One is we think it is genuinely a problem for everybody, rich and poor, genuinely a problem, and therefore it's important to respond to it.


Secondly, we felt that although it may seem kind of nebulous, it is important to have a concept of a common humanity, that when you have a child, it's a fundamental human experience, regardless of your socioeconomic status, and that we ought to try to make the case for the pooling of information and knowledge and services as part of our common humanity, that all families need help, poor families need more help, but we're all in this together, that sort of concept.


The third consideration was that if there's going to be social action, government policy or business policy or if the powerful institutions are going to pay attention and make a concerted effort on behalf of the youngest children or, for that matter, any children, that you're much more likely to get it if it affects everybody.  If the business executive thinks that his children or his grandchildren are also in this somewhat precarious situation, he's much more likely to do something about it than if it is thought of as a problem of poor children only.  There is a degree of compassion, I don't deny that, but we felt that the compassion alone is not enough, that to get concerted action you have to have a sense of direct benefit to the middle class, the more affluent sectors, that we're all in it together. 


So for all those reasons, we decided to just give special emphasis to the problems of the poor, but not to limit our work to that.

Q:  Okay.  Very good.  Thank you very much for that.  Are you game to step back into our chronology a little bit?

Hamburg:  Sure.  While my voice holds out, sure.  Why not?

Q:  Okay, that's wonderful.  We are up to what I think is your first professional engagement at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and perhaps your first professional period in Stanford.  Stanford will, of course, become very, very important to you over the succeeding decades.  I see that you were a fellow, I believe for the first time, in '57, '58 at the Center, and I know you had a couple of other stints there.  I'd be interested in knowing what you were working on, who your colleagues were.

Hamburg:  That was a very important experience for me.  I was incredibly fortunate.  The Center was first organized in 1954, and a year or two later, I guess a couple of years later, I got this invitation out of the blue.  That's the way they did it then.  There was no application process.  I wouldn't have had the nerve to apply had there been one.  You just got an invitation out of the blue.  I could hardly believe it.  It was just one of the most thrilling experiences.  I knew a little bit about it.  The idea was, when it was established by the Ford Foundation, to bring together fifty scholars a year from all over the world in about ten or twelve different fields and leave them free to do anything they want during that year.  


For me, I was quite young at the time, it seemed like a fantastic opportunity to learn.  I -- because of the way hospitals worked and all that, I was very much medically based in those days, and I couldn't accept the invitation right away.  I had to put it off a year, and then I did it for a calendar year rather than an academic year, so I was there calendar '57.  Turned out that was a very lucky thing, because, you see, the other fellows all came for an academic year, so I had time with the '56-'57 group and with the '57-'58 group.  Very lucky.  So instead of having fifty, I had a hundred, give or take a few.  


It was a fantastic educational experience.  In the first place, my own education had been in a wartime speed-up because the military needed doctors, and we wanted to get everything done as rapidly as possible.  So I really had hardly any opportunity at all to take anything in the behavioral or social sciences.  I'm trying to remember -- I don't believe I had a single introductory course in college on any of those subjects.  There might have been a teeny bit, but if so, it was minimal.  And yet here I was going into psychiatry through a medical route, but I realized, "Gee, I don't know anything about behavior, really."  It's one thing to read Freud, and that's pretty interesting, and try to apply psychoanalytic concepts to patients, that's very stimulating, but I knew there were a whole bunch of fields out there that had been devoted to understanding human behavior, and I ought to know something about those fields.


So I look back on it to this day as an enormously formative experience in which I had a lot of interaction with people in psychology and biology, behavioral biology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history, statistics.  It was very wide-ranging, from a number of different countries.  The way it worked was, nobody was required to do anything, but there were people chatting in the corner saying, "Should we try to get some people together on such and such subjects?"  If so, you'd stick a notice up and say, "We're proposing a discussion group.  We'll meet Thursday afternoon at two o'clock, on this and this subject," and some of those were just one-shot deals.  If people didn't want to do it, they went to one session and that was it.  But some blossomed.  


And I confess I was sort of an organizer, an agitator, whatever you like.  I felt, what an opportunity, and I would go around to people in several different subjects and do a little preparation beforehand, and particularly with the second group, because they came in in late summer or early fall, and I had only a few more months and I was eager to learn what I could from them.  So particularly at that time I was an organizer.


Now, what did I do?  Partly I brought with me data that I was working on.  Those were the days when I was working on psychological stress and endocrine function particularly, and to some extent coping responses to psychological stress.  So I had data from several studies with me, and I wanted to work on analyzing the data and writing up the findings, and was communicating with my colleagues back in Chicago, where I'd been the preceding number of years.  So -- and I got a fair bit done, less than I had envisioned initially, because I spent more time on the learning process and less on the analysis and write-up side, but I got a fair bit done.


I guess one particular experience I would single out was the stimulation of my interest in the evolution of behavior.  Let me say a word about that, because it goes in a way to the heart of some of my long-term interests, things that I've done unexpectedly.  I had gotten interested -- I may well have told you this already -- in 1948 at Yale, a lecture by an endocrinologist named Hans Selye XE "Selye, Hans" , on stress and the response of the adrenal gland, and I'd worked on that for a number of years.  As I worked on it, I got intrigued with a sort of recurring conundrum in the field that went back before Selye XE "Selye, Hans"  to the Harvard physiologist Walter [Bradford] Cannon XE "Cannon, Walter Bradford" .  That is, what's the biological sense of the stress responses?  Taken together, the responses of brain and hormones and cardiovascular system and more, but those at the heart of it, brain, endocrine, and cardiovascular system, it's a kind of mobilization for intensive activity, getting ready for some exertion, which Cannon XE "Cannon, Walter Bradford"  long ago had spoken about as a "fight or flight" syndrome.  That was, no doubt, too simple, but you're going to have to do something very often that requires exertion, and there probably was some kind of adaptive advantage to being ready in advance, being mobilized.  


But in contemporary circumstances, the stressful experiences that we studied mostly were not ones that were even conducive to exertion, let alone required exertion.  You're having an argument in a small room or you're stewing at your desk or whatever, and in the circumstances of modern life, in the first place, it tends to be a relatively sedentary life anyway, and the stress responses are such that it's not obvious how exertion comes into it.  These responses of mobilizing the fuel for burning throughout the body and redistributing the blood throughout the body so that it's mainly in the large muscles where you can move and so on, those are expensive.  It's like ringing alarm bells.  You bring out twenty fire trucks and race them around town and then take them back  -- 

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Hamburg:  -- into the fire station.  It's an expensive response. And there was even then some reason to believe that if repeated often or in a prolonged way, it would be conducive to some serious diseases.  


So I was very curious, well, how did that evolve?  Is it true?  Is "fight or flight" just a cliché, a stereotype?  What do we know about early human ancestors or the biological lines that led to the human species, and could that help illuminate this dilemma about stress responses?  


So when you go to the Center, they ask you -- at least they did in those days -- to write a page or two on your interests, what you'd like to look into while you were there.  So I had, I think third on my list was that the research I'd been doing was pertinent, raised questions about human evolution, I knew nothing about it, I didn't know what sort of reservoir of knowledge existed on human evolution, and I'd like to learn something.  


So I don't know, the first or second day I was there -- I came in January and they'd all been there for a few months -- a little man knocks on my door and introduces himself, that he's Sherry [Sherwood Larned] Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned"  from the University of Chicago, and he saw on my sheet that I was interested in human evolution.  Well, I didn't know it then, but he was the great pioneer in the reformulation of human evolution.  He'd just been in Africa doing field studies of baboons, and he'd really opened up the field studies of higher primates in natural settings.  How do they adapt to the problems they face?  What are the problems they face, and how do they adapt in the natural habitat?  We're not directly descended from them, but we share a lot of genes with them.  And furthermore, he had been a broadly integrative sort of intellectual person who drew together people in different fields of cultural anthropology and biological anthropology, and genetics.


So the next thing we knew --.  There was a geneticist there.  The three of us -- a man named Ernst [W.] Caspari XE "Caspari, Ernst W."  was the geneticist -- the three of us set up a biology and behavior seminar.  To our utter astonishment, all sorts of distinguished historians and economists and psychologists and what-have-you were interested in coming.  We had some of those who, I think later, I'm not sure, either then or later, won the Nobel Prize in economics.  We had several of those who were in that seminar.  People of wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, and they felt, from the point of view of behavioral social sciences, had no exposure to biology.  I felt I had no exposure to their fields.  So there was a high degree of complementarity there.  Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned"  and Caspari XE "Caspari, Ernst W."  and I carried a lot of the initial intellectual initiative and brought in some visitors and so on.


But then it really did change my life.  Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned"  is a wonderfully stimulating person.  And as a matter of fact, I just talked to him last week.  Very belatedly, I and a former student of his are bringing out a festschrift in his honor, a volume by various former students and colleagues about his transforming effect on the study of human evolution.  He was originally an anatomist, really, so he had the anatomical changes and the functional changes and the behavioral changes, and a unique synthesis of those.  


One offshoot of that was that he wanted me to come to the field and at least get some sense of primate behavior in the natural habitat.  He even put money in his grant to pay my way.  At the time I felt I couldn't do it.  My children were quite young, and I didn't want to go off and leave them for a summer, and they were too young to come with me.  I didn't go to the field until much later, actually, 'til 1968.  I won't jump ahead to all that, but just to say that the interests in trying to apply an evolutionary historical perspective, a long historical perspective, to contemporary human predicaments really gelled at that time and has been with me ever since, for better or worse.  They kid me at the annual sort of semi-roast thing, a Carnegie staff party -- for some years they've kidded me about an evolutionary perspective on libraries, an evolutionary perspective on whatever, you name it.  It's true, it has been important.  Later on, of course, it led to actual field work when my kids were old enough to come with me.  I started them each at fifteen, separately, but they each came with me at age fifteen and thereafter.  It also, of course, led to that hostage episode which, in a different way, changed my life.  So there were many ramifications to it, but if I had to pick a single thing about the Center that was important, that would be it.


The second, related to it, was that in the second group, the few months in the fall of '57, a new group came in, and one of the people was an English psychiatrist/psychoanalyst named John Bowlby XE "Bowlby, John" , and we became very good friends.  I tried to help him over the years develop the concept of attachment.  It was already developed, but to work on it in various ways.  He had an important influence on me, and I probably had some marginal influence on him.  The main influence I had on him was to direct his attention to the primate work and to think of this in an evolutionary perspective, and particularly to look at the actual data, the growing incoming data on mother-infant attachment and other attachment relationships in the nonhuman primates.  


But you were asking me earlier about the first year.  I came from an initial position of kind of distant interest in Bowlby XE "Bowlby, John" ’s concepts to a greater and greater not only interest, but belief that this was extremely important, and I tried to encourage him in something that was, I think, natural to him anyway, but I was rather close to a number of people in experimental psychology and in child development psychology, and encouraged him, if he needed any -- he probably didn't -- to interact with them in a long-term way so that they would do empirical research, which was really not his bag.  It's like, in a way, the difference between a theoretical and experimental physicist.  I mean, not at that level of precision, but he was fundamentally a clinician and a theorist, and a very good one.  He was very influenced by the ethologists, particularly Robert [A.] Hinde XE "Hinde, Robert A." , a very distinguished ethologist at Cambridge.  


So what you've seen is the ramifications of the attachment concept in developmental psychology, to some extent experimental psychology, and in ethology, an interplay.  By now a wealth of empirical research that really has good measures of attachment,  secure and insecure attachment, and some of the consequences three years, five years, even longer down the line, of secure and insecure attachment.  So it's become a rich field and I think very fundamental to understanding early child development, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if in the next ten or twenty years the techniques advance to the point that we'll understand a good deal about what happens in the brain when you do or don't get secure attachment.


But anyway, that would be on a par, the Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned"  connection and the Bowlby XE "Bowlby, John"  connection, were powerful for me, and they were, as you can see, somewhat related.  For the rest, there were friendships that I formed, people from whom I learned.  I would invite them to come give lectures wherever I was; they would invite me, reciprocally, wherever they were.  I don't mean all the fellows, but a number of them.  It was very rewarding, and to this day I involve some of those people and their activities.  For example, that stack of volumes over there, the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, one of the members was Bob [Robert A.] Solow XE "Solow, Robert A."  of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], who, in later years, got a Nobel in economics.  I got to know him at the Center, kept in touch with him over the years, and he was a very fine contributor to that commission.  So whatever else it was, it was a pool of talent that I could draw upon and exploit.

Q:  I'm really struck by the amount of movement in your professional life.  And we're still -- 

Hamburg:  Crazy.  Crazy.

Q:  -- we're still in the early years of it, you're still a fairly young man at this point.  Lots and lots of movement.  I wonder what your thinking was at that time, what you thought you would be doing in the next ten years, what you thought your career options were.

Hamburg:  I never anticipated any of this.  It's been undoubtedly, people have often said to me, one of the widest-ranging careers in medicine, and yet I didn't predict it, I didn't anticipate it.  If anybody had made some prediction to me, I would have thought it was wildly unrealistic.  I mean, there are people who have visions of their careers early.  Well, Andrew Carnegie, when he was still a rather poor young man, made up his mind he was going to make a lot of money and give it all away in his lifetime.  He had a real vision and so forth.  It wasn't like that with me.  


I was -- I had a certain, I guess, lively intellectual curiosity and a certain set of, I think, humane, compassionate, and democratic values, and opportunities would come up whereby one or both of those agendas could be advanced.  Sometimes I would see connections that were not conventionally seen at the time, but I wasn't looking for it particularly.  I would just get intrigued and pursue a certain path, and the next thing I know, I was into it much more deeply than I expected to be.  I consider myself incredibly lucky.  There are people I know and respect deeply who have taken a certain line of research and stayed with that line brilliantly, and regard it as a diversion or an intrusion to sort of get distracted with other lines of inquiry, and I respect that, the different temperaments and styles.  But if you have the kind of wide-ranging and restless orientation that I've had, then it's fantastic to have the kind of opportunities to match, and I've had those.

Q:  And I presume your wife was very supportive.  

Hamburg:  She was.  Incredibly supportive.  She always was, in the first place, very, very wise about understanding what I was trying to do and giving me good ideas and giving me honest feedback, and also very adaptable.  She had an extraordinary capacity to put herself in my shoes and see an opportunity and encourage me to take it, even when she had mixed feelings about it.  But if she thought it was really an extraordinary opportunity, then fine.  She was always very adaptable and supportive.


I, of course, increasingly tried to be, have tried to be, helpful to her, I mean both from the family standpoint and professionally.  In her early years it was still a time when there weren't all that many opportunities for women, and I tried to do whatever I could from the early stages.  For example, she had no doubt in her mind she wanted to stay home with the kids in their early years, and so I asked myself, well, is there anything I could do that would help her professionally?  It so happened I had some contacts with the leading people in a journal called Psychiatry, and I got them interested in the notion that she would be a terrific book editor, and she could do that at home, you see.  And she was.  So they'd send her the books and she would decide which ones deserved review, and either review them herself or get somebody appropriate to review them.  So it was a good learning experience and it strengthened her professional reputation, and it was easy to combine it with the children, or what she called her "neighborhood clinic," because the children all around would come down to our house.  


So those are the kinds of things.  I tried to be mindful.  I'm sure I didn't do enough, because she's been quite fantastic, but I tried to do whatever I could to be helpful to her professionally as well as in the family.  


It was a great experience a couple of years ago -- I don't think I mentioned this to you, about Harvard Medical School marking the anniversary of fifty years of women in medicine.  Did I tell you about that?  Well, they decided that they wanted for the program first a speech by the president of the University, Neil [L.] Rudenstine XE "Rudenstine, Neil L." , and then a panel.  This was an after-dinner event, in which the people on the panel were Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A." , my wife; Peggy [Margaret Hamburg XE "Hamburg, Margaret" ], my daughter, and me.  Really, it was the two of them; it was women in medicine.  Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A."  was one of the early women in Yale Medical School somewhat more than fifty years ago, and they were marking the fiftieth anniversary of Harvard admitting women.  And Peggy XE "Hamburg, Margaret" 's a much more recent graduate of Harvard Medical School.  So it was great.  I was more like at a tennis match; I sort of looked back and forth as they responded to questions and discussed their experiences as women in medicine.


But to come back to your point, Betty was incredibly helpful to me, and I'm sure I couldn't have accomplished half what I have had it not been for her.

Q:  I'm going to let you know that we've been talking for about an hour.  If you'd like to go on, I'm happy to go on.  I don't know what your time is --

Hamburg:  I'll take one more unit, if you'd like, just a few more minutes.

Q:  Okay.  Terrific.  I'm very happy about that.  Well, I have singled out your stint with the National Institute of Mental Health, actually, from '58 to '61, Chief of the Adult Psychiatry Branch.  This is going to overlap, I believe, with the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Chicago, this period.

Hamburg:  It did overlap, yes.  It did overlap.  I wanted to complete my psychoanalytic training, and I could say a word about that.  Since it was reading Freud that stimulated my interest initially, I entered it with enthusiasm.  It was, so to say, the heyday of psychoanalysis in this country, and it was important by and large for professional opportunities, and it was intellectually very stimulating.  


The Chicago Institute, I went there, I had other opportunities, but that was, in my mind, the most innovative, most progressive institute, one that appreciated the value of research, one that saw psychoanalysis as an evolving body of knowledge and practice, rather than a fixed doctrine delivered from Mount Olympus or wherever.  I valued that greatly, and there were some wonderful people there, and maybe to some extent those most wonderful people fostered my heretical views, but I came to feel that on the one hand there were very fundamental things of value, I'd say two major strands, one that I've emphasized to you already, the effect of early experience on later behavior, and secondly, the detailed scrutiny of motivation, emotion, and human relationships.  I still feel to this day those were -- they weren't invented by psychoanalysis, but it was the most systematic formulation ever made up to that point, by Freud and his associates, and I think it was an important contribution.


But my dissatisfaction grew, or at least my ambivalence, in that I felt there was too much rigidity in the field.  It was seen as a kind of received doctrine by many of the putative leaders in the field, and they simply were, in my view, repeating what Freud said, or if they joined some dissident faction, what somebody else said, [Carl G.] Jung or [Alfred] Adler or somebody, or maybe Freud, as some kind of gospel.  I never thought of Freud in that way.  I thought of him as a deeply inquiring person.  Yes, he could be dogmatic, but he was always trying to look for new evidence and changing his mind and trying to advance the field.  The people I admired most -- and there were a number of them -- in the field were like that.  Freida Fromm-Reichmann XE "Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda" , the wonderful tiny little woman who was instrumental probably in my being invited to the Center for Advanced Study in the first place, a woman who pioneered in the application of psychoanalytic concepts to schizophrenia, which had been thought to be absolutely impossible before her time, and a number of people in Chicago.  Freida was not in Chicago; she was in Washington, D.C.  


There were wonderful people, and I think they more or less shared my view that it was becoming sort of a straitjacket that Freud hadn't intended it to be.  Furthermore, there was a certain amount of, you know, the disciple stuff, people who sat at the feet of the master and claimed command of the movement after his death and fought bitterly with each other about command of the movement.  To her credit, his daughter, Anna Freud, was not like that very much.  But there was too much of that in the field, I thought.  I got very uncomfortable with it, so I tried to be judicious.  I never turned against it in a virulent way, though some people did.  I simply felt we ought to look for the best ideas and observations, like Bowlby XE "Bowlby, John" 's work on attachment, and try to apply what was useable, try to develop Fromm-Reichmann XE "Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda" 's adaptations about psychotherapy for sicker patients.


Freud once said that psychoanalysis is a wonderful treatment, especially for well people.  I mean, he himself was very perplexed about how you could make it useful for people who are more deeply troubled, and I felt we ought to try to relate some of those concepts to the then newly emerging biology.  So I did my best, in building the department at NIH [National Institutes of Health] and at Stanford later to have what I thought was a judicious mix of these psychodynamic concepts and techniques with other approaches to understanding human behavior.  But I did feel it was important to really grasp fully the psychoanalytic field, so I actually sort of commuted, after I went to the NIH, commuted from Washington to Chicago to finish that up.  The total time span was about ten years.  It was always part-time.  As one of my mentors said, psychoanalysis is a night-school science.  It was part-time, but it was a long period, and I'm grateful to those people.  They were indulgent of my frailties, and I learned a lot.


Now in that year at the Center, I felt I really should move on.  I had more or less grown up professionally in Chicago for the better part of a decade, interrupted by the Korean War, to be sure, but for a variety of reasons I thought I kind of ought to move to the next level of responsibility.  I wanted to do so amicably with my mentor in Chicago, Roy Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R." , who was very important to me, and remained so to his death.  He was a tough taskmaster.  A lot of his former students and colleagues got alienated, but I never did.  I felt he had given me a great deal, but I did feel I ought to move on, and he understood that. 


I had several offers that year, and I took the one at NIH because it offered essentially full-time research, and I really wanted to immerse myself in research full time, carry forward the strands that I had started in Chicago and even before Chicago, and they had wonderful facilities, good budgets, so you could really throw yourself into the research.  I really thought that I would stay there the remainder of my career.  It seemed to me like a terrific opportunity.  


So one strand of the work -- there was a lot of continuity -- one strand was on the psychological stress and endocrine function, the psychobiology of stress, more broadly, which had started, as I told you, in New Haven in 1948.  And I had continued in Chicago and during the Korean War, both in Texas and at Walter Reed, every way I could, I improvised to continue basically looking at behavior under stress, the reactions of emotional distress, anxiety, anger, depression, and how those reactions correlated with responses of the adrenal gland particularly and to some extent of other endocrine glands, try to work out systematic measures on the behavioral side as far as we could, quantitated to the extent possible, the degree of anxiety, the degree of anger, the degree of depression, and so forth, and to get colleagues who could develop with brand-new biochemical techniques rather than bioassays -- the distinction isn't important for our purpose -- more precise, reliable measures of a biochemical nature of the hormones we were interested in.  That was just becoming possible at that time.


So I really had the privilege to work with good colleagues and to help in opening up this area, the relation of behavior and hormones under stress.  I wanted to pursue that.  These wonderful laboratory facilities, and they were in immediate geographic proximity to clinical facilities at NIH, and the then-new clinical center which they now are rebuilding, several billion dollars, God knows how much, but they speak about it as the dilapidated clinical center, and I'm shocked because I still think of it as new -- anyway, that was one strand of the work that I wanted to pursue.


It's interesting, the continuity in these things, just to make a quick comment.  Although I left that years ago, I keep coming back to it in two ways.  This year I'm on the President's committee of advisors on the Persian Gulf War diseases, and I chair the panel of that on stress, and ran an all-day meeting in Cincinnati on what is the latest evidence on stress, and so on.  I must say I was rather touched to see that the basic framework we laid out and the basic findings, the things we discovered, some of which were very surprising and counter-intuitive in the fifties and sixties, have held up very well.  They've been elaborated enormously by the technical advances that have occurred.  For example, you can measure some of the relevant hormones now in saliva, rather than having to draw blood or collect urine or spinal fluids.  There are many technical advances, but the basic thrust of it is continuous, with stuff that we were able to open up at that time.  Very gratifying.


Last week -- no, earlier this week, I was at a gathering at the Cornell [University] medical school here in town.  I helped some of my former students and colleagues actually last year to get some major philanthropy, not from us, but from a private philanthropist, Jay [A.] Pritzker XE "Pritzker, Jay A."  in Chicago, many millions of dollars to tie together research groups on the problem of depression, Cornell medical school in New York, University of Michigan, and Stanford, and they're doing it exceedingly well.  They've gone far beyond what we started.  Some of them got their start with me at Stanford.  I'm an advisor to the project now, a reviewer at the request of the Pritzkers [William Bunney XE "Bunney, William" ], and the other reviewer who was there as an advisor to the Pritzkers was somebody I brought to NIH in that period to work with me on depression.  And he went on to do very, very good things.  He stayed with it longer than I did.  The leader of this new effort is Jack Barchas XE "Barchas, Jack" , a superb person I brought to Stanford.  He is now chairman of psychology at Cornell and edits one of the main journals in the field.


One strand of the stress and hormone work was on depression.  I wanted to focus sharply on that.  We had discovered in the Chicago years that even when people were sitting immobilized, deeply depressed, not moving, doing nothing, that there's an elevation, a marked elevation of the adrenal hormones.  That was very surprising.  We repeated it before we published it.  We thought we must be wrong.  The prevailing conventional wisdom was that it's something like hibernation.  If you're sitting frozen in deep depression, the physiological alarm systems must be damped down and subsided and so on.  But on the contrary, the alarm systems are just firing away internally while the person is sitting, suffering in silence.  So there, a very counter-intuitive finding, and I wanted to pursue that and other aspects of mood disorders.  So that was one strand, and some other things having to do with stress and hormones.


The second strand, though, was coping.  I wanted to develop the coping side further.  One opportunity there was to look at the families of children with leukemia.  Leukemia at that time was a uniformly fatal disease.  Today it's more treatable.  But they were locked into a very difficult situation for a long time as the illness would wax and wane and eventually the child would die, and we were trying to see ways in which parents and other family members, but particularly parents, would cope with the impending loss and ultimately the actual loss of a child.  So that was one strand.  


Then I had -- it was very depressing to me personally and to my colleagues -- I had earlier worked on patients with very severe polio.  Did I tell you that story before about the polio?  That was back in Chicago.  Anyway, that was very depressing, very severe polio.  Then before that was severely burned patients in the Army.  I finally decided at some point in the NIH years, it's enough.  I mean, I hope others will pick that up.  I don't want to do more of that.  But I asked myself, how do you continue to do useful work on stress and coping problems without these life-threatening or fatal situations?  And I decided, like the man who's speaking prose all his life, I think it was Molière, speaking prose and didn't know it, I decided we were studying major transitions and didn't know it.  Whatever else these were, life-threatening, yes, but major transitions.  And there are major transitions that are not particularly life-threatening.


So although we looked at several, the main one we concentrated on was the transition of high school to college at a time when kids were much less accustomed to going away than they are now, and going several hundred miles or more away from home, and where they had not had extensive experience away from home before.  We took that to be a rather stressful transition, and we wanted to look at ways in which the students and their parents would cope with the transition.  Did a number of different studies on that, all the way from kids who broke down when they went away in the first year in college, to kids who were high copers and were thriving mightily, etc.  So that was another strand of that work.


And then there was another thing.  There was some prior work at the NIH on family therapy that I thought was interesting and should be sharpened and refined and continued; that is, in treating severe psychiatric disturbances, how can you involve the family and engage not just the patient, but other family members in ways that are helpful.  There were a lot of claims that were unsubstantiated at the time.  I thought the approach was important and some of the stuff was rather overblown.  I thought maybe we could put it on a more careful, systematic, and rigorous basis.  I think it was helpful.


Anyway, those were the main strands of that work.  It was an exciting time.  I think we accomplished a fair bit, and there are continuing ramifications, as I mentioned to you, in the stress field, in all those lines.  Coping became a much bigger field, and family therapy did.  I'm not saying just due to that, but we played some part in facilitating developments in the field.  I never expected to leave, but I did end up leaving.  We can get to that next time before I get laryngitis.

Q:  Okay.  Very good.  Thank you very much, Dr. Hamburg.

Hamburg:  My pleasure.  Thank you very much.

[END OF SESSION]

	TTTPRIVATE 

	Session Four

	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg
	Date:  July 25, 1997

	Interviewer:  Brenda Hearing
	New York, New York

	
	


Q:  Today is the 25th of July 1997, and we're here for our fourth session with Dr. David Hamburg, president emeritus of Carnegie Corporation of New York, here at the offices of Carnegie Corporation.


Good morning, Dr. Hamburg.

Hamburg:  Good morning.

Q:  We were just discussing, actually, the fact that when we left off, you were telling me that there was a point earlier in your career where you thought you might stay with NIH for the rest of your professional career.  Obviously that hasn't been the case.  We can start there.  You may have some thinking, too, about this very unique moment in the history of Carnegie and your own professional career, thoughts about that.  Let me just let you begin where you want to.

Hamburg:  Why don't we begin chronologically, and we'll probably end up jumping around.

Q:  I hope so.

Hamburg:  I suppose leaving NIH for Stanford in 1961 illustrates the maxim that it's important to be lucky.  It's fine to be smart and honest and resourceful and all those good things, but it's also good to be lucky, although I'm sure -- I mean, I suppose it would have turned out fine had I stayed there as I intended, but what made the difference was the opportunity of broadening my horizons.  That's what the move did.  The NIH had, at that time -- and still does -- a mandate that restricts the scope to research in the life sciences and especially research in the life sciences pertinent to health, at least pertinent to health in the long run, and that's a wonderful mandate and one that was truly inspiring to me when I went there.


It was a magnificent facility then.  The almost new clinical center in the 1950s had this wonderful property that not only was a fine facility, a research hospital, but that was designed in a way that the laboratories were in immediate proximity, or very close proximity, to the clinical areas.  So that meant that if you had in your department, as I did, people from both basic sciences and clinical research, that they could have a lot of informal contact and could learn from each other and stimulate each other.  That was very, very good.  It also meant that you could very efficiently go back and forth between laboratory and ward or clinic.  So it was a very fine period of about three and a half years there, and I had thought that I would, indeed, stay on longer.


What we were working on, the stress problems that had engaged me earlier, there was a great deal of continuity to it.  One part of it was the biology of human stress responses, primarily the endocrinology, the hormonal responses to psychological stress, and we worked on that problem both in clinical settings, like patients who were severely depressed, and also with normal volunteers mainly from college settings, particularly Bennington College, which had an elaborate program for its students to do things off campus.  The Bennington girls were simply wonderful.  They were very assertive and full of ideas and questions and challenges, but also very cooperative.  So we looked at the day‑to‑day modest fluctuations in levels of tension and distress in healthy young women.  One unit was devoted to that.  And we also looked at the larger fluctuations of distress and concomitant hormonal changes in people who were severely depressed, among other things.  But in the biology of stress, those were the two main strands, as I recall.


Both with the patients and the normal volunteers we developed rather close relationships, and one funny episode comes to mind when, I guess it was a group of the Bennington girls, one of the normal volunteer groups, in any case, at the end of several months with us, had a sort of surprise party for the staff and presented us with a rug that they had made that had a pink background, rather garish, I have to say, with large black letters that said "Save all urine."  That was because we had, indeed, asked them (A) to save all urine; (B) to keep a diary, a day-to-day diary.  The intent was biochemically to analyze in the urine the excretion products of various hormones, adrenal hormones primarily, and at the same time to get the fluctuations in their emotional responses through the diary.  


We did some experimental work, too, with their permission, on the volunteers.  Particularly, we took them to the movies.  We showed them highly suspenseful movies and measured the blood levels of various hormones before, during, and after the movie.  Do the adrenaline-like hormones or the cortisol-type hormones, that is, hormones in the adrenal medulla and adrenal cortex, surge even when you see something as sort of modest in its significance for you as a movie, a movie which, however, is emotionally engaging, movies like "High Noon" and -- whatever -- I forget what they were, suspenseful movies.  And, in fact, it turned out that there were some modest but predictable fluctuations of that kind in the relationship between the level of engagement, the amount of tension assessed by the individual, and the secretion of the stress-related hormones.  So that was interesting.  I think that was pretty novel.  I don't believe that that kind of work on relatively low-level emotional fluctuations had been done before experimentally, and, of course, experimental demonstration of a relationship is more powerful than a correlational one.  So it was a very interesting period, without a doubt.


We also looked at the psychological aspects of stress response, particularly in terms of the coping strategies, which I had gotten into earlier but carried that forward.  One part of it that was carried forward was, again, in life-threatening situations, as I had done earlier with severely burned patients and patients with severe polio, and that was studies of the families of children with leukemia.  This was a time when leukemia was a uniformly fatal disease.  It's not today, I'm happy to say, but it was then.  The focus was not so much on the children, although we paid attention to the children.  I brought a pediatrician into the group.  But the focus was really on the parents and the great difficulty of coming to terms with the impending loss of a child over an extended period of time, and that was the point, to have a powerful real-life stress but extended over a period of time so that you could see whether both the hormonal changes associated with stress would continue to occur over long periods of time and also, importantly, to look at their ways of coping with it.  We explored the cognitive style of coping, also ways of relating to the children and to other family members and friends and other people, in other words the interpersonal or social aspects of coping.  We wanted to clarify different ways in which emotional distress could be kept within limits that were tolerable, ways in which you could maintain a sense of worth as a human being and maintain important human relationships that would sustain hope into the future, even after you'd lost your child.  So we described a number of those coping strategies in publications of that era, as well as hormonal responses to chronic stress of that kind.


The other part of the coping studies, though, were different and, I have to say, to some degree personally motivated.  I began to think that it was just extremely difficult for me and for my colleagues, time after time, year after year, to work with these life-threatening situations, in which, indeed, there were deaths, a lot of them, in the burn study, in the polio study, and, of course, the leukemia study, that that level of stress and the very vivid, poignant sense of threat and loss associated with it took a toll, at least on me, and I began to think, are there ways to continue the stress and coping studies without dealing with quite such harsh and severe and intense situations?  It occurred to me that whatever else was true of these life-threatening situations, they were major transitions in the life span and sort of like, as I said earlier it was Molière's character who was speaking prose all his life and didn't know it, I felt that I'd been studying major transitions for many years and didn't know it, but why not make it explicit and study major transitions that were, however, not essentially life threatening, and that that might be interesting in any event because you could deal with situations that large numbers of people have to deal with, to cope with, and get some better idea of the strategies.


So we picked on a particular situation for the main part of that work that, in a way, is odd today, but it was useful then:  that is, students who were going away from home to college who had not spent much time away from home, for example, who had not spent a whole summer away from home, students who'd been generally close to home and family until they went away to college, and that was much more common in the late fifties, early sixties, than it is today, that that was a novel experience, of going away.  We also had some criterion -- I think it was two hundred miles or more.  In other words, for that era it was a relatively major separation that you were going relatively far away.  It would not be so easy to pop in and out of the house, and you'd not had a lot of experience with being away before.

Q:  Dr. Hamburg, forgive me for interrupting, but a question occurred to me the last time we spoke about this.  You told me a little bit about that, and I wondered, reviewing that transcript later, why the choice?  That seemed like an interesting choice to me and quite a jump, to the transition that we make as young people going away to school, particularly given your lifelong interest in child development and particularly adolescent development.  I just wondered what the roots of that decision might have been.

Hamburg:  I think it had partly to do with the fact that one of the most powerful emotional issues in the earlier work we'd done and also in my psychotherapeutic experience were occasions of separation and loss, or separation and the threat of loss, the most extreme case, of course, being through death.  But it seemed to me this was a sort of attenuated version of separation and loss, that is, the kids saying around their departure and to some extent the parents saying also, "Our relationship will never be the same again."  Now, to some degree, I think over the long run, that is true, but also in some ways less true than we thought; that is, those were the days when people spoke about the empty nest a lot and took it seriously and when there was a premium put on independence of late adolescents, particularly from their parents.  I think, as it's played out over time, there's a lot more renegotiation of the relationship toward a more adult-to-adult basis, but nevertheless in many families a close relationship remains.  But still it was a big shift.  The sense of being able to depend so heavily on parents is diminished.  There is more physical separation.  There is some psychological sense for many of these kids and their parents that there was a loss in the sense that the intimacy we shared for a number of years will now somehow be different and maybe less significant for us.  


It was also the time, the era, when most mothers were at home, and particularly the mother's relationship with the kids was very close, and her life in many cases was really centered around the kids and bound up with them.  Today, of course, it's a very different situation, where the mother's emotional investments, so to say, are more diversified, with home and work and community activities or whatever.  So there was that element of separation and loss that was an orienting concept in that selection.


We also thought there might be a richness in the coping strategies as the kids were reaching that later part of adolescence, let's say, on the average eighteen years old, and that we ought to be able to delineate a variety of ways in which they would meet the essential requirements of this major transition, again keeping distress within limits that are tolerable and maintaining a sense of worth as a person, maintaining, one way or another, significant human relationships, and learning how to adapt to new requirements, academic requirements, interpersonal requirements, occupational requirements in that late-adolescent, early-adult period.


One of the studies we did was to go back into high school and to follow a group of students -- I forget the number, fifteen or twenty of them -- quite intensively.  We picked them out through a screening process to get those who had coped, by the sorts of criteria I mentioned, exceedingly well during high school, with the assumption being that most of them would carry over those coping skills or adapt those coping skills to the new setting.  We were, in effect, saying, "We're looking for young coping virtuosi."  And they were.  They were remarkable copers, and some of them we kept in touch with for many years.  But we would try first to understand the predominant strategies that they would use in coping with the stressful aspects of the high school experience, also in anticipating the college experience, preparing, getting ready for it, following through that summer on graduation and then through at least the first year or maybe a couple of years of college, including visiting them on the college campuses and spending a day or two with them, and going around to class with them and so on.  I and several others did that, and on the whole they were a remarkable group of young people who taught us a lot about different strategies of coping.


We were simply trying to lay out an array.  It was new ground we were plowing to a large extent.  We simply wanted to delineate different strategies that exist.  We didn't know how those strategies would play out in different cultures, for example, and we did try, to a limited extent, to look at that.  We had a similar cohort in Puerto Rico and a similar cohort in the south of India, as I had a very distinguished Indian social psychologist on the staff, George Coelho XE "Coelho, George" , chosen partly for that reason.  Here was an emerging democracy, and a very interesting one, and a very different culture, and we tried at least to begin to sketch some of the cultural influences on the selection and use of coping strategies in late adolescence in this high school-college transition.


We found, incidentally, that in the other cultures, the two we looked at, that there was much less experience than there was in the U.S. kids with being away before college, that there was a strong tendency to be tightly bound at home and therefore it was a bigger and ruder shock when you went away at some distance to college than there was in this country.  But in any event, we were trying to describe the richness and variety of coping strategies at a time when the field, at least from a psychiatric standpoint, had emphasized casualties and pathology and distortions, even grotesque distortions, in experience and had paid very little attention to ways in which people, so to say, survive.  I mean, after all, everybody lives through stressful experiences of one kind or another -- they're truly ubiquitous -- and yet most people don't break down, they don't become shattered, there are ways in which they cope, and no doubt many factors influence that, genetic and environmental factors, but we wanted at least to be able to describe some of the strategies that seemed to be useful in such coping.  We also had a special ward set up at NIH for students who had an overt breakdown, some kind of overt mental illness, severe depression being the most common, but not only that, schizophrenic episodes, manic episodes, some kind of severe breakdown when they went away to college or during the first year.  No doubt on today's market, the substance-abuse problems would loom very large.  They were present but not nearly as large in the late fifties, early sixties, as they became, actually, a decade later.  


But we had the opportunity then to contrast, at least roughly, the individual coping strategies and the patterns of interaction within families between those who broke down and those who fared well in their first year.  And while there was not a carefully matched sample -- I don't see how it really could have been -- it nevertheless was, in that era, enough to give some sense of it.  I think one of the main things that struck us was the difference in social supports between the two groups, whether it be family or friends or community organizations or religious organizations or whatever, that the kids who did well, by and large, had quite a lot more social supports before, during, and after the transition than kids who broke down. It was a crude approximation, but it was stimulating to get those insights, but always trying to illuminate factors that would tend to be supportive, encouraging, adaptive in dealing with stressful experience.


So, in short form, those were the main things.  There were some other things we did then, it was a fruitful time, and I was able to concentrate very heavily on research, which I loved, but the Stanford people were, luckily for me, very persistent.  Just before I went to the NIH, a few months before, they had offered me the chairmanship of the Department of Psychiatry, what later became Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford, and I couldn't take it.  It was too late.  I'd committed to the NIH.  They'd fixed up laboratories for me.  They'd spent quite a lot of money.  It had been announced, and I felt it would be unethical to pull back, so I went there.  The Stanford people kept in touch, and I kept telling them, year in and year out, that much as I appreciated it, it was not a feasible proposition.  


But after about three years, one of my colleagues from Stanford came.  He was a good friend and spent the night with us, and I had a cold, I remember, and he was sufficiently determined that despite my cold and excuses I was trying to make, he kept me up all night reworking the arguments, careful reasoning, how I could contribute more and so on.

Q:  What were the arguments?

Hamburg:  Well, the ones that particularly resonated basically had to do with the breadth of my interests and certain possibilities that at the time would be more feasible to implement at Stanford than at the NIH.  I can mention two.  One is, you may recall I told you I was turned on to science by a great geneticist, Tracy Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M." , and I had this strong interest in genetics at a time when genetics was just beginning to emerge as a field.  As I went along in this work on stress and hormones and coping, I wanted to see if there wasn't some way to relate genetics to that.  See, the idea that if you and I both get roughly equally upset in some situation or other, but if I have a genetic problem that inhibits my ability to manufacture the stress hormones, which are quite useful in mobilizing energy and doing what has to be done, that I might feel discouraged and even become depressed because I couldn't respond vigorously to this stressful situation.  Conversely, if, for some reason, I lacked, let's say, an enzyme that would clear those hormones from the blood, they might accumulate, and the feedback effects, the mobilizing effects of these hormones in the brain can be very agitating, like adrenaline.  If you've ever had a shot of adrenaline, it gets you very anxious and wrought up.  So if I had that kind of a genetically inherited enzymatic abnormality, you and I might get roughly equally upset but I would become really agitated because I couldn't get rid of this.  The body sort of treats adrenaline like a poison, for example, just clears it very rapidly.  When you need it, you need it, and then you get rid of it.  


So there are a number of ways in which genetically determined individual variations could influence the response to stress for better or worse.  I knew it was very early in the field, but I thought if I could bring together experts in genetics, in endocrinology, and behavior, that it would be fruitful.  I wrote a couple of background papers that were eventually published, two or three, delineating a behavior endocrine genetic approach to human stress problems.  It so happened that Stanford made a policy decision to make genetics a major thrust of the new medical school.  They were just moving it from San Francisco to Palo Alto to integrate it with the rest of the university, and the then-president of the university, Wallace Sterling XE "Sterling, Wallace" , a wonderful man who built up Stanford greatly, was open to the arguments made by a few key scientists that genetics would be a big wave of the future.  That was some foresight in the mid-fifties.  And so they invested, and they created one of the earliest Departments of Genetics in the medical school, and they brought a Nobelist in genetics, Joshua Lederberg XE "Lederberg, Joshua" , in to head that department, and he, in turn, when he visited Stanford -- I'd not met him before, but he knew Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M." , for one thing; we had that tie.  Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M."  had been very kind to him when he was a young man.  Josh was, by the way, perhaps, I think, the youngest American ever to win a Nobel Prize at that time.  He was very encouraging and helped me find people in genetics and link our two departments and so on.  


At that time, the NIH was not ready for that.  Within a decade it moved in that direction as well, but at that time it wasn't quite ready for that.  Indeed, Josh and I worked together and became close friends and remain so to this day.  He was on the Carnegie board; I was on the Rockefeller University board when he was president.  Personal and professional friends and collaborators for many years.  But it meant that I could move into genetics.  I did bring a geneticist into our department.


The NIH at that time was reluctant to have such interdisciplinary appointments.  There were some, but I had to fight every time.  They didn't want to have a single department that had many different disciplines in it.  I'd have to say that I was somewhat ahead of the time in that.  It has spread since then.  But that was attractive, to go to Stanford, both for the general interdisciplinary reason and particularly about genetics.


Another thing was that I had gotten interested in the evolution of stress responses, you see, because the stress response is a very, in a sense, wasteful response.  It's a costly response biologically, and you're getting mobilized for intensive action, but in contemporary circumstances when you get mobilized you don't very often run or fight or undertake any intensive action; you're just sitting at your desk or pacing around the room.  I was puzzled how that all came about, and I thought it would be very interesting to learn something about stress, coping, and adaptation in our closest biological relatives, the chimpanzees or other higher primates.  To do that, I wanted to be able to build an outdoor enclosure, a sort of semi-natural laboratory for chimpanzees, and to set up, if possible, a field station for the study of chimpanzees in the natural habitat.  Again it looked like that might be done over a period of time at NIH, and that sort of thing did come to pass about a decade later; I helped to set it in motion.  But the Stanford people were far more flexible, being a private institution without all the constraints of government.  Government in many ways was wonderful, but they had to move more slowly and work with the existing regulations and so on.  Stanford at that time and other private institutions could move very quickly once key people made the decision.  


So I had this great opportunity.  Stanford had a lot of land.  They gave me, I forget what it was twenty-some acres set aside.  If I could raise the money and develop the concept, we could build this semi-natural laboratory which, in due course, we did, and if I wanted, if I could find a way, to set up a unit in Africa to study chimpanzees in their natural habitat, I could do that.  So there was that greater flexibility on the genetic interests, the evolutionary interests, and the interdisciplinary approach that made Stanford very attractive, plus one other thing, it was a great university, and the whole array of intellectual activity beyond medicine, beyond health -- if you're interested in history or whatever it may be -- it's there, plus the fact that in the same geographical area is the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where I had spent the 1957 year, and I knew that it would be very easy to interact with these people, fifty eminent people from all over the world in a dozen different fields every year.  So it was enormously attractive, not to speak of the climate and the natural beauty.  


So that after I'd established a strong unit at NIH and it was up and running and there were other people there who could carry it forward, as indeed they did very well -- a number of them went on to eminence in the field -- I felt comfortable about making the move, a long answer to your question, but it was a major departure for me, and it opened vistas that became exceedingly important in subsequent years.

Q:  Including here at Carnegie, of course.

Hamburg:  Yes.

Q:  I would like to try to begin to make some links between that earlier professional experience and your Carnegie years.  We're getting close to about halfway through our interview sessions at this point, and as we said earlier, it is truly a unique moment, both in your professional career and in Carnegie's history.  So I'd like to ask you -- because I imagine these are things you're thinking a lot about these days -- how you see your role here as president over the years, how you would characterize your role, your leadership, what you think it may be like to work for you, to work with you.

Hamburg:  Well, I don't know if you've seen yet, but we'll give you my final annual report essay.

Q:  I have read it, yes.

Hamburg:  And it was done, I suppose as usual, in some haste and under pressure, and I wouldn't say it's by any means the last word on my reflections about the Carnegie years, but it does pick out what I perceive to be some of the highlights.  


But let me first respond to your question about my leadership, both in its style and substance.  When I came here about fifteen years ago now -- it is a bit over fifteen years that the appointment was announced -- and I had certain interests and concerns in mind substantively which I immediately put on the table, I did have the benefit of knowing the institution.  I'd been on the board for a couple of years before I became president, and it's very different when you're at the center of the action, but I had some sense of the traditions of the institution, and I felt it was very important to tap into those traditions and have some major continuity with the themes that had indeed been established by Andrew Carnegie, even though there was no such requirement.  His charter gave the maximum possible flexibility to his board, but I felt, nevertheless, that he had, in his own behavior and certainly in his philanthropy, exemplified certain fundamental themes of philanthropy, and it was an institutional asset and we ought to now update those themes to whatever year that was, 1982, '83.  In June of '82, the appointment was announced.


I also felt that there ought to be innovations that were contingent on the circumstances existing at the time, but very consistent with the themes.  His two great themes, it seemed to me, were education and peace, and both of those resonated strongly; indeed I wouldn't have taken the position if it hadn't been for that resonance.  So we began to work out what might we do that would be useful in the education and peace domains.


I would say also in the background, very important for him as a poor immigrant coming here at age twelve, were the issues of American democracy or democracy more generally, what is it that constitutes a viable, flourishing, vigorous democracy.  That was always in the background of almost everything we did, the strengthening of democratic institutions, and I see that, too -- I see that, too, as a Carnegie legacy but more implicit in what he did, although some of it was explicit.  So we actually, in fact, were led into education and peace themes through the strengthening of democratic institutions in this country and abroad, and then that is sketched out in this final annual report essay.


But on the style, what I felt I should do was to lay out for a highly professional staff certain major directions in which we should move, some important directions, and then work out with them and with the board just what we would do within those directions.  You know, we were sort of, say, going westward from New York, and there were a lot of different ways to do it, and which road would we take, all of which would get us to California in due course.  It was that kind of a thing.


And so we had working groups early on.  I visited frequently from Boston during the six months of transition in June to December, set up working groups with clusters of staff and with participation of some board members if they wanted to be involved, and bringing in outside consultants, experts in different areas, and try to look at the pros and cons of taking one road or another.  So in a way, I think, as far as I can make out, those were important elements of my leadership style; that is, to view the staff and board as great intellectual assets, professional resources, involve them in the shaping of policy, but to set directions within which we would consider the moves we would make, to have a lively interplay between me and them, and to be comfortable about making the final decisions.  The buck has to stop somewhere, and it should stop with the president.


I also opened it up a good deal.  There were more outside consultants, I think, during my term than there had been for a while, at least.  I believed that the problems we were addressing were so complex and so challenging that we needed all of the help we could get to figure out what to do that could be useful.  I think it's probably fair to say that the atmosphere was one of highly collegial relationships, including my relations both with staff and board, I think it had that attribute.  I mean, they knew that I was in charge and would make final decisions.  As far as I know, it would have been very unusual if people were to feel that I didn't treat them with respect, as far as I can make out.  At least I never got that feedback.  If it happened very much, then I missed it.


I also deliberately tried to bring staff closer to board.  One thing, for example, there had been a time early in Carnegie's history, in keeping with general traditions of that sort, that staff hardly came to the board meeting at all, and then a few came, a few senior people.  I opened it up arguably too much, step by step over the years, to have a lot of staff present at board meetings.  We also had frequent retreats of professional staff and board.  I wanted staff and board to know each other, to earn each other's respect.  Staff could learn a lot from board in terms of policy guidance, and the board could get a firsthand sense of the professional quality of the people on the staff.  We may have carried that farther than any other foundation, at least farther than most, and maybe too far.  I wouldn't be surprised if there's some pulling back.  I don't think it's too far.  I believe in it, and I think it worked well in my term, but I know that occasionally some board people were a little bit uncomfortable.  I think they got over it, but some of the university boards they were on and certainly corporate boards did not have that tradition of staff being in so much, but I would strongly argue for the benefit of that in this context at this time, maybe not forever and ever, but it worked very well for us.  So in that sense, I think, over all, it was a collegial, mutually stimulating, mutually respectful atmosphere that we fostered, and my belief was that those were motivating circumstances that people are more effective under those conditions than if it's a high-tension situation or a kind of exclusionary situation.


Now, in the way we operated we made some changes.  Each individual program officer, at least program officers and maybe even program associates, before my time, had a kind of specialized portfolio.  There was no fixed amount of money that went with that,  there wasn't a program budget, but it was known that program officer "A" dealt with the financing of education, for example, and then there would be whole professional staff meetings where they would kind of fight it out, and then the president would make a decision about how much money would go to what or which grants would be approved.  I guess it worked okay, but operationally it meant that each program officer was like a mini-foundation, although, as I say, not with a budget he or she could count on, but with a specialty which he or she alone was responsible for, and I noticed that people spoke about "My grant" or "My grantee."  It was a very individual kind of thing.  It would be a little bit like Andrew Carnegie sitting down at Christmastime and writing checks, only it'd be like a bunch of his brothers and sisters and cousins doing it.  


I felt that what we were to work on was too complex for that.  It was just too hard to figure out, for example, could you really make a difference about ending the Cold War?  Could you?  Not obvious at all that you could, but if you had a chance, what would be the most sensible things to try to do?  That's a very hard problem, and I wanted to have small groups, clusters of program people with a chair for each and a program budget that they could count on for a certain amount of money each year.  I would keep a substantial reserve to move flexibly as new opportunities would arise, but it seemed to me a highly professional way to work, that you'd have a small mutual aid society of people working together who could get around the contours of the problem amongst themselves with their knowledge of it and their knowledge of the field and the consultants to bring in, that they could really get a greater depth and better purchase on the problem area and help each other, prop each other up with the attitude of high-level philanthropoids, you know.  


So that's what we did.  We got these groups, these program groups, small groups, three to six per group, with some support staff, and they'd meet regularly.  In the early years, I would attend most of the meetings and participate.  In later years, my attendance was more sporadic.  They were up and running and more autonomous, although I always met regularly, pretty nearly weekly, with the program chairs.  They used to say I was my own program officer in the sense that I kept a lot of active engagement with the programs and, I hope, gave them some useful stimulation, but by and large, let them figure out what would be the best grants.  Sometimes I would see a particular grant that looked very promising to me.  Even then I would bring it to them and say, "You work on it.  Tell me if I'm wrong.  I don't want to get carried away.  It looks very promising to me."  And they would reshape it, sometimes come back to me and say, "It won't work."  Oftentimes they'd carry it forward but shape it in ways that I hadn't envisioned.  So it was an active engagement with the program groups, but they became increasingly, in my judgment, skillful and knowledgeable.  


Of course, each program group got shaken up from time to time.  We'd have a retreat every few years and ask ourselves what's new in the world, what's new in this field, would we have better leverage some other way.  And, of course, in the international situation, there were huge changes, and we made correspondingly big adjustments in our program.  So those were stylistic matters that sort of characterized my leadership: strong intellectual content, strong principles, clear directions, but also a high level of professionalism in the staff and this mutual aid philosophy, both within and across the staff groups.  And as far as I can make out, that functioned pretty well.  


Now we can come back to the big themes if you want.

Q:  We can certainly do that.  I just want to add, too, the shift to program budgeting was an important change under your presidency.  Was that something that you were strongly in favor of at first?  I understand there was some controversy about going to program budgeting.

Hamburg:  I wasn't sure, at first.  I know I was advised not to do it, and I wasn't sure, and I don't remember exactly when we started it, but after a while I felt that there really had to be reasonable predictability for each group, that they couldn't plan intelligently if they didn't have at least a sort of core budget.  By holding back a sizable reserve, it meant that we still could be flexible and take advantage of new opportunities, but I also created a special projects group that was a flexibility mechanism.  I felt it was a more professional operation if they at least knew what their core budget was going to be and could plan accordingly and work with grantees.  But there had been, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, a certain apprehension about program budgeting earlier, but in the event, as we moved toward it, as far as I'm aware, there were no fireworks, and people gradually came to see that it would be advantageous, and it, I think, worked well.

Q:  I'd like to go out on a limb a little bit here and ask you about the selection process for your own presidency.  I know, of course, that you were on the board for a couple of years.  I understand that you were on the search committee to name Alan [J.] Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." 's successor, that you withdrew from the search committee, of course, when your own candidacy became -- but I don't know anything around that.

Hamburg:  It was very strange.  It was very strange.  That is, I never had any notion at all about becoming president.  Indeed, I had tentatively, in a preliminary way, advocated that David [Z.] Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z." , who was executive vice president, should become the president.  My knowledge was limited, but it seemed to me that was a logical succession.  I had, and have, great respect for David.  


Helene [L.] Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L." , who was chairman, spent a lot of time very conscientiously and thoughtfully interviewing the staff and other board members beyond the search committee -- the search committee consisted of, I don't know, five or six or seven board members -- and talking to people in comparable foundations.  She really built an apperceptive mass of knowledge about this foundation and the foundation community, and she talked a lot with the then-chairman.  She was, I guess, vice chair at that time, and the chairman was Bud [John C.] Taylor XE "Taylor III, John C. [Bud]"  [III], a distinguished attorney in New York.  They talked about what she was learning, and he may have engaged some in this information-gathering, too.  Certainly the two of them were actively engaged.  All I know is that after one of the early meetings, they asked me if I would take a walk with them, and they basically said to me that they had concluded that I would be the optimal choice or at any rate, they were very strong I should throw my hat in the ring.  They weren't in a position to promise me anything, but it was very clear that they felt that I would be the right person to do it, and, of course, it would have to be considered by the search committee, by all the other members, who might not agree with them.  But anyway, I said, on the one hand, since the question had been raised, that I should withdraw from the search committee but that I really fundamentally had to say no, even though I was very, very appreciative of what they thought.  I mean, I was really touched by it, their confidence in me, but -- 

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Hamburg:  -- but I thought about it, both for institutional reasons, and personal and family reasons.  The institutional reason was that Carnegie had never been a health foundation.  My background was in health.  However broad my interests might be, and they'd broadened out in the Institute of Medicine and the Harvard years into health policy and the connections of health with many other issues -- still, it was health.  Nevertheless, that was my background.  This was never a health foundation, and there were very strong -- a lot of foundation money was going into health.  There was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation totally devoted to health and the Commonwealth Fund totally devoted to health and several others who had a major health component like [W.K.] Kellogg [Foundation].  I felt they didn't want to make this into a health foundation, and so that seemed to me an institutional problem.  


And then, for myself, at that time that they raised it, I'd only been at Harvard for a couple of years, and, yes, I had this university-wide division of health policy up and running and had terrific people in it, a very, very fine, distinguished, eminent deputy, Dr. Julius [B.] Richmond XE "Richmond, Julius B." , who had been the top health guy in the [James E.] Carter administration and earlier, before that, he was the father of Head Start, and people of the highest caliber heading each of the six divisions of the program.  So there was no doubt about that, but still, it was only a couple of years.


Moreover, my wife, Betty had been a very, very good sport about moving with my career changes -- and a fantastic person.  Now here she was a professor at Harvard, liked very much what she was doing, had been working with me hand-in-glove to build a health policy division, and she was doing other things.  I felt, you know, this is not sensible to uproot her or myself, and so I said no.  I said no more than once, and I have to say, in retrospect, it was kind of stupid.  I can't remember the exact detail, but they said, "Well, in effect, meet with the committee, then, as an outsider.  You drop off the committee, but tell us about how you see the institution, what we should look for in a president, and that kind of thing," and then, once there, they did ask me to discuss "Well, if you were president, what would you do?" or "What would you want somebody to do as president?" -- that kind of thing.  I don't remember with any precision.  Clearly I was beginning to get intrigued, but still, it was quite some time before I saw it as a feasible proposition, either for me or for the institution.


One of the things that they did, I guess it must have been Helene who did it, was to talk to Betty about it, and she's a very open-minded person, in addition to her other virtues, and she said to me at some point, "You really ought to think about this."  The same thing had happened exactly with the movement from NIH to Stanford.  She was the one who said, "Look, you really ought to think about this.  Open your mind.  Don't be rigid about it."  So my recollection is that after I did open my mind, I met a second time with the search committee, I think, but at some point, I then said to them quite seriously, "You know, look, this is what would be involved if I became president."  It would be in some ways a marked shift from the recent past, and some of it would be high risk.  This was the Cold War stuff.  This was in the depths of the Cold War, shortly after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and there were all kinds of reasons to think that there was a genuine danger of nuclear war, the greatest since the Cuban missile crisis.  It wasn't clear that a foundation could do anything useful, or if you were able to do something that looked promising, you might become very controversial.  Is this the business of government?  What's a private foundation doing in this field?  


So I tried to lay out for them both why I thought it was important and perhaps an approach that would be promising, and yet the risks inherent in it, the risks of failure, the risks of controversy, and their reaction was very positive.  You know, this was arguably the most important problem in the world, and if a foundation can make a difference, even at the margin, it's very worthwhile.  You can think of this in public health terms as the last epidemic.  I don't know what went on internally in the committee, because I had dropped off by then, but they were very forthcoming about tackling that very hard and risky problem as a part of our new activity.  


It was not a departure from Andrew Carnegie himself, who was obsessed with war and peace questions, but it was a departure from the recent past.  For decades, Carnegie had not been heavily engaged in war and peace issues, and I thought that might be a no-no for the institution, but that isn't the way they reacted.  I think it probably was a plus that the people on the board knew me and had confidence, although I hadn't been on awfully long, but we did know each other.  So it was a great surprise.  I would say that primarily Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L."  and, secondarily, Bud Taylor XE "Taylor III, John C. [Bud]"  really had this vision, that it would be invigorating for the institution to make certain shifts and that I was the person who could do that -- and I would think that within the committee they probably exerted a lot of leadership, although I had very good relationships with the others, but it was an unconventional choice at the time.

Q:  Do you recall what arguments or persuasions Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L."  and Taylor XE "Taylor III, John C. [Bud]"  and other people were using with you at the time to help you open up your mind to the possibility of taking on the presidency?  

Hamburg:  I think it was essentially a point that Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J."  made at his final board meeting, when we passed the baton in December of '82.  Alan said to the board that essentially the great thing about foundations is their scope and flexibility, that you can move into virtually any kind of problem area and you can try novel approaches, you have a minimum of bureaucratic or political constraints.  Maybe it's not a lot of money by government standards, but it's enough money that you can be light on your feet and try things out and so on.  I think that's basically the argument that they made, and they may have learned a lot of that from Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." , but in any event, they said to me, essentially, "You're a wide-ranging person, creative thinker," or something of that sort, and you can have the scope and flexibility for those interests in the foundation, that foundations are structured in a way that the president does have a lot of say in what happens.  It's a big responsibility, but it's a huge opportunity.  If you work well with your board, you can chart new paths and so forth.  That was the kind of argument that was very attractive to me, plus the fact that the education and peace themes of Andrew Carnegie himself mapped very well onto my current interests, so that it did make sense, rather than pulling back because I wasn't intending to make it a health foundation.  All I wanted to do was -- I would include a health component, but there had from time to time in the past been a health component.  That wasn't revolutionary.  So those were the kinds of arguments they made, and I could see that they were right.

Q:  It looks to me that the board was really looking to make a very big change, too, in the foundation by selecting you as opposed to Dave Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z." , for example, or another internal candidate.

Hamburg:  I suppose so.  I guess that was part of their reasoning, that they wanted to make a bigger change, that the continuity, though perfectly okay, was not somehow what they were looking for, that it would be more invigorating for the institution to have a more drastic change.


I must say I always emphasized continuity and change, that we ought to build on the great strengths of the institution, you have comparative advantages there, but that there were distinctive opportunities that would involve considerable change, and I thought the mix of continuity and change was very important.  You oughtn't to pretend that this wasn't going to be drastic for the institution.  Why should you, a very highly respected foundation?  So they got some of each with me.

Q:  Do you think that Carnegie lost anything in the programmatic changes?  Did Carnegie lose any focus in, for example, its position in the field of higher education?  I think with any major changes like that, you're going to make some gains and maybe have some losses.

Hamburg:  Right.  Right.  You give up something, and that was very much on my mind.  My background and experience had been in higher education, and that was the most natural thing in the world to me.  It was a rather difficult decision to make.  It was part of this terrain-mapping exercise in my early months here that I came to feel that that strand of Carnegie's work which was there, of K to twelve [kindergarten to grade 12] and even pre-K [pre-kindergarten], that rather small strand was terribly important.  I was very surprised to find that the foundation activity in K to twelve or pre-K was minimal in other foundations at that time, that the foundation community as a whole was far, far less active in that field than now.  I came to feel that the problems were far more serious in the pre-collegiate than the higher education, and that a foundation with our excellent reputation and standing in the education field ought to tackle the hardest problems.  My general philosophy -- at the first board meeting, I said, "The only thing I'll promise you, I'll bring you intractable problems," and I kept that promise.  


So it was a hard decision for me, and I recognized that we as an institution were giving up something and I personally was giving up something by not focusing very much attention on the institutional problems of higher education, but my feeling was, and still is, that, on the whole, institutions of higher education and particularly the research universities of my own background, the Indiana, Yale, Harvard, Stanford institutions, are among the very greatest institutions in the world, and the tangible evidence of that is the way people vote with their feet.  You have, I don't know what, about 10 percent of the student body now at those universities comes from other countries, and lots more want to come.  The people with the best opportunities all over the world want to come to American universities.  Why is that?  Because they're really very great institutions.  Yes, they have their problems, but I felt if we could get K to twelve, or pre-K, to sort of half the level of problem that the universities had, we would be in great shape.  So it was a kind of chancy decision.  


We did give up something, the kind of thing that Clark Kerr XE "Kerr, Clark"  had so brilliantly done on higher education under CC [Carnegie Corporation] auspices.  I regretted to have to give up a lot of that.  What I tried to do to compensate and very importantly was to involve the universities in every substantive program area, everything that we did.  In human conflict, in education, in child and adolescent development, and developing countries, all had strong involvement of U.S. and some non-U.S. universities.  So in a substantive way we had that.  


Also as a sub-theme within the special projects, we had a small university and society program which had to do with ways of enhancing the role that universities could play in major social problems.  So we didn't leave it entirely, but, yes, you have to give up something to get something.  Resources are finite, and I guess that would be the main thing or the main price we paid, and it may be sensible now in the next era to come back to some of the institutional problems of higher education.  That is Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" 's background, and those problems in some ways are more difficult now.


One thing that's quite clear, the relationship between universities and government is far more stressed than it was fifteen years ago, so that might be something to pursue now.  But I have no regrets about the decision that we made, and I think that most people who know what we've done feel the same way.  We really did some path-breaking work in K to twelve and pre-K and, more than that, putting that in the context of all the factors that influence learning in and out of school, not just being class-based, school-based, but really looking at the growing child, the experience of growing up in America, and how that bears on education in and out of the classroom, I think that was a very important perspective that we brought to it and implemented.

Q:  Do you have any expectations right now about how much of the programmatic changes you made will stay in place under Vartan Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" ?

Hamburg:  Well, he's committed privately and publicly to continue the peace and education themes, which I think is wonderful.  That's the kind of continuity we want, the broad thematic continuity.  It's what this foundation stands for, what Andrew Carnegie stood for.  Within that, I think there's ample room for major variations on those themes, and I'm very comfortable.  I could, and have, made a whole slew of suggestions about major shifts in direction or changes in emphasis that would still be consistent with the peace and education themes, and I expect there will be both, as there was with me, a lot of continuity and a lot of change.  I'm very comfortable with that.  


It's a good time, when you have a presidential change in a foundation, to do what my predecessor once removed, John [W.] Gardner XE "Gardner, John W." , described as "institutional renewal."  It's a time for institutional renewal.  It's important to recognize the assets you have and not to throw those away, and I think the board feels strongly about that.  For example, we've carved out a unique position in the earliest child development, from prenatal care through early childhood education, those early years, and I think something is bound to continue in that field because there is a comparative advantage to Carnegie, but it doesn't have to be the same things we've been doing.


By the same token, I think Carnegie uniquely highlighted early adolescence, this ten to fifteen age period where we, I believe it's fair to say, made a very important contribution and stimulated a number of other foundations to come into it.  You could argue, "Well, we've done enough and others should take it over," but I think it's such a distinctive asset and so identified with Carnegie, and my guess is that some way or other, some work -- maybe less work but some work -- would continue in that phase of development, but I think there's likely to be a shift to more focus on higher education.  But yes, I think continuity and change both will occur in significant ways, and it's a good time to make changes.  Indeed, if I were staying on for, let's say, another five years, I'm absolutely certain I would have proposed some major changes, as I did periodically during my term of office.

Q:  You've given me a little bit over an hour at this point, and I don't know if you can go on for a bit more or if you have to -- 

Hamburg:  You want to take another ten or fifteen minutes?

Q:  Absolutely.  Absolutely.

Hamburg:  Why not.

Q:  I understand that you had plans actually to leave the presidency a few years ago.

Hamburg:  I did.

Q:  Can you tell me about that, please?

Hamburg:  Yes.  It’s always been my preferred position -- for example, when I went to Stanford to create and shape a new department, indeed a new kind of department, I said I would do it for not less than five or more than ten years.  There were two considerations; one is personal.  I did not want to lose my substantive involvement.  It's just part of my self-image that I have to be engaged seriously in the problems addressed by the institution, not simply presiding over an institution or managing it.  I understand that management is important, but some mix of the management and the personal substantive involvement, research, teaching, synthesis, whatever -- I didn't want to drift so far away from the subject matter that I could never come back to it.


The other thing, I felt that it was institutionally renewing to have new leadership.  So my notion of the Stanford time was I would do between five and ten years, then leave the chairmanship but stay on as a professor, do my research and teaching, but allow the opportunity for somebody else to shift the emphasis and provide a different style of leadership or whatever.  As it turned out in the Stanford case, a group of outstanding young people, I think all of whom are leaders in the field, came to me and said, in effect -- I'm oversimplifying -- "Please stay on at least until we get tenure."  So I did that, and they got tenure, and they are leaders in the field, but I ended up being chairman for eleven years instead of ten and then remained on for several more years as a professor.  Indeed, if that hostage episode hadn't occurred in 1975, I probably would have been at Stanford today, in all likelihood.  


But anyhow, that's been my orientation, that you do a task for a certain number of years, not a fixed aliquot but some sense of what's long enough to get something up and running or to make major renovations, but not so long that it becomes ossified or rigid and you don't notice it.  I felt, in this case, a few years ago, that I wanted on the personal level to draw together several strands of my experience and write a series of books and do some other activities that would basically try to say all I could legitimately say about certain subjects in which I'd been involved for many years, try to illuminate certain problems to the extent that I could, and do that while I was healthy and vigorous and so on, and, on the other hand, to turn the reins of leadership over to somebody else for the freshness and vigor that that could bring.


There were a couple of points.  First, I forget how old I was when I came here, however old it was, but I assumed that somewhere around age sixty-five or -- somewhat arbitrary but somewhere around there it would be sensible to step out, and the board took the initiative to say, "Don't do that.  Stay a while longer, for a few additional years.  Don't be in a hurry.  You can decide later about that."


Then when Newt [Newton N.] Minow XE "Minow, Newton N."  became chairman and Warren [M.] Christopher XE "Christopher, Warren M." became Secretary of State and Minow XE "Minow, Newton N."  was asked to become chairman, he said, "How about you stay until I complete -- let's do it together," and that added another couple of years to what I had in mind.  So there were two points at which this vaguely formulated image of "retirement" was moved ahead, and so it's now perhaps six years or so more than I'd originally envisioned and maybe two or three years more than the secondary assessment, but that was the notion.  I particularly didn't want to go on so long that I might not notice that things had gotten too rigid, or some slippage had taken place that I hadn't noticed.  People, of course, kid themselves.  One of my main principles is never underestimate the power of wishful thinking, and that my own wishful thinking might lead me to fail to see that we were not innovating as we should or not adapting to new circumstances.  I took out certain insurance policies to get the input to make that unlikely, particularly in these wonderful task forces, commissions, councils where you have all kinds of high-powered, strong-minded, brilliant people from different backgrounds and different perspectives sort of raising hell with me and my colleagues, saying, "Have you thought of this?" and "Have you thought of that?"  So there wasn't much chance to get complacent.  


That process goes on right now with this Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.  You couldn't find a more powerful group of people who are rattling the cages every time they get together.  I think that is a very useful device institutionally for the vitality and renewal of the institution in an ongoing way.  But anyhow, that's how it got extended.


So I don't regret it.  Luckily my health has held up, and my vigor has held up, and I think I can do whatever I'm capable of doing in the years ahead, and some things are a bit unexpected, that this commission will carry over in a rather booming way for the next couple of years, and the report will be out, but the dissemination of it worldwide is going on for a couple of years.  So it's all come together in a good way, I think.

Q:  Good.  You say that if it hadn't been for the hostage situation in '75, you might have stayed at Stanford?

Hamburg:  Yes, I think so.

Q:  Can you elucidate that a little bit for me?  I know as much as I can know about that from the written record, of course, and it may not be something you feel like speaking about.

Hamburg:  No, I can.  It may be a good way to wrap up.  It was a profoundly moving experience and an experience in such personal depth that it changes your way of looking at the world.  Again, I didn't realize that at first.  The short version of it is this, that during the two and a half months of trying to sort this out, to find out first who had taken them and then how I could make contact with the hostage-takers, and then how I could find some negotiating leverage to get them freed, in that time I was exposed first-hand, vividly, to some of the worst problems of the world: hatred and violence and extreme poverty and ignorance and disease.  Just had my nose rubbed in these terrible problems and a vivid sense of how much of the world was living.  This was in the interior of Africa, one of the poorest parts of Africa, therefore one of the poorest parts of the world.  The case itself was a derivative of the civil war in the Congo that followed independence, and the mastermind of the hostage-taking is the man who in recent months has become president of the [Democratic Republic of] Congo, Mr. [Laurent] Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent" .  So it was an enormous relief to me when we were able to get them all freed under conditions of great adversity.  


When I got back to Dar es Salaam at the end, when the fourth and final hostage was released, I found a letter from the then-president of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Philip Handler XE "Handler, Philip" , who had approached me in early May of 1975 about the presidency of the Institute of Medicine.  I had turned it down flat on the grounds that I loved what I was doing at Stanford and would spend the rest of my career there.  I had no hesitation whatsoever.  I didn't go to visit or look at it or anything.  Much as I was flattered by it, I felt that it was just simply out of the question.  But when I got this letter from him, whenever it was, in late July, I think, he said essentially, "I thought an experience like that might make you want to reconsider what you do with the rest of your life," and it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that he was right.  I didn't know whether that was the right move, to the Institute of Medicine, but he was right, I needed to rethink.  


The essence of the rethinking was, I guess, at least twofold.  One was, could I devote my career, the remainder of my career, to positions where you could, however slightly, have an impact on those terrible problems?  Could you deal with policy questions and practices in great professions or great institutions or great countries that would have some impact on hatred and violence and abject poverty and horrible diseases and the like.


Secondly, in working out that problem, I became aware of some capacities that I had that I didn't know I had, hadn't really been tested in that way before.  The then-ambassador of the United States to Tanzania, a huge black man named [William] Beverly Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  [Jr.], a wonderful man, died some years ago, he sort of sat me down at the end of it and said, "You ought to do something on a larger scale or paint on a larger canvas than you have," and he laid out what he thought were the capacities that I'd shown in this crisis.  I was very touched by that because I had great respect for him, and others said similar things.  I realized that it was possible that I could do some things that would go beyond the role of a perhaps innovative professor, a role which I revered and still do, but it made me think maybe it wasn't crazy to try to do something that would tackle these bigger problems on a policy level.  


So, on reflection and visiting the Institute of Medicine when I got back, talking with people at the National Academy of Sciences and various friends, I decided okay, that would be an opportunity to do more than I could do at Stanford.  So it really changed my whole life, and it was by no means a given that it would work out.  I mean, every one of these major transitions, I said, are stressful, and I wondered how it would work out.  


The most dramatic instance was on the airplane, thirty-plus hours going from San Francisco to Dar es Salaam in May of 1975 when the kidnap occurred.  I kept wondering on the plane, how will I react?  I had no confidence that I would know what to do or that I would react well, and I was very concerned that I might react badly.  In a less dramatic way that's been the case with each of these transitions, but particularly this whole move from research and education as an organizing principle to the wider arena, that I had doubts and misgivings, but it seemed to me well worth trying, do your best and see what comes of it.  So that was undoubtedly a major watershed in my life.


The other moves, the Institute of Medicine, Harvard, Carnegie, were much more consistent.  They were all broad, policy oriented, big picture, large issue, tough problems that brought together many disciplines.  That was my predilection before, but going much more widely than before.  So it was a very important experience for me.

Q:  That might be a good note for us to close on today.  Thank you, Dr. Hamburg.

Hamburg:  Thank you.

[END OF SESSION]

	TTTPRIVATE 

	Session Five

	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg  
	Date:  December 2, 1997

	Interviewer:  Brenda Hearing     
	New York, New York

	
	


Q:  Today is the second of December, 1997, and this is our fifth session with Dr. David Hamburg, for the Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project.  My name is Brenda Hearing.


I thought we would start today by picking up, perhaps, on a remarkable year in a remarkable career.  1975 really seems to be a time of a lot of transition and very important change and choice in your life.  We ended last time by just alluding to the hostage crisis in Tanzania, and you told me that you had learned a great deal from that, for example, that you had capacities that would enable you to "paint on a bigger canvas" and that that situation "really changed my life."  What can you tell me and tell a future reader of the oral history about the situation in Tanzania, your responses to it, and how it changed your life?

Hamburg:  Well, I'll fast-forward twenty-two years for just a moment.  It's a most curious thing that the whole thing has come back to life because the mastermind of the hostage episode was Mr. Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent" , who is now "king" of the Congo, and the four students who were held hostage have been re-activated by the experience.  They've been very quiet all these years, but they have been doing all kinds of things with our government and with the U.N. [United Nations] and with the Dutch government.  One of them was a Dutch citizen.  And there was a big story about them in the Washington Post a few weeks ago, an interview with these students.  The deep feeling that they harbored about the indignity, the human rights violations, have come back as they are concerned that Mr. Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent"  is again carrying out human rights violations on a large scale in the Congo.  


There had been hope that almost anybody would be better than [Sese Seko] Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , but it's not clear whether this is a variation on the theme of human rights violator, so forth.  So it's kind of vivid and poignant.  Myself, I hadn't realized the extent to which the students held hostage, still, all these years later, felt -- the depth of feeling that remains and the way they've been energized with a sense of mission to inform the world, basically, what this man's history was and to be exceedingly careful about treating him as a liberator, to make him demonstrate that he has newfound respect for human rights.  Unfortunately, it seems not to be the case.  So far, the evidence seems to be that he's very much the same kind of guy.  But anyway, that's a whole other story of African politics, but it's a poignant insight into the psychology of those who participated.  They, of course, were the ones who suffered the greatest hardship.


In any event, for me, it was a shocking development, and the nineteenth of May, 1975, I was on leave that year.  I was a professor at Caltech [California Institute of Technology] and came back to my office and found my door that evening plastered with messages, a couple hundred messages, which I thought initially was a practical joke, that some of the faculty there or the students were having fun with me.  Instead of my usual two messages, I had two hundred.  But it was all about -- various inquiries about the kidnap.  


So, I immediately went back to Stanford to see maybe the key people and decide what we should do, and I determined in my own mind that I would go over there and see if there was anything useful I could do.  We were getting essentially no information from the State Department, basically bland reassurances, but it was quite apparent that the State Department had no basis for reassuring anybody, since nobody knew where they'd gone or what had happened, for forty heavily-armed men had come in off the lake, swept up these four kids at night, disappeared, some shots were heard, and nobody knew who they were, whether they were alive or dead or what had happened.  So, there was no basis for reassurance at all.  


So, the Stanford University president decided that, since I was going anyway, to designate me as a formal representative of Stanford to see what, if anything, could be done.  It was a very strange experience, because it was a very long trip, of course, thirty-some hours, I suppose, from San Francisco to Dar es Salaam through London.  Much of the way, I was deeply troubled about how I would respond.  I had no basis for knowing.  I'd never been in any situation remotely like that, and I didn't feel particularly confident that I would respond well.  I tried, I suppose, to offset my anxiety about it by doing some contingency planning and trying to figure out what it might be, and making notes about what if it were this or what if it were that.  


Before I left, I set in motion the wheels to bring one member of each family to Tanzania, if at all possible, and in at least one case that involved raising some money, because it was a poor family.  I felt that it was quite possible that I might have to be making fateful decisions about the lives of these kids if they were alive, who had them and what did they want and so on, and I felt that I would want the families to be able to participate in that.  So that was all hastily set in motion, and I went over.


The long and short of it is that when I got there, it still wasn't clear what was going on, but about the time that I got there, perhaps the next day, I forget exactly, but about the time that I got there, a letter was delivered to President [Julius K.] Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  from the kidnappers, and the demands were really on him, as the president of Tanzania.  It turned out that there had been a secret supply line a thousand miles across Tanzania, from the Indian Ocean to the interior, to this Lake Tanganyika, and across Lake Tanganyika was the Congo.  These demands were brought by a group calling themselves the People's Revolutionary Party of the Congo.  


Their complaint was that Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  had made a trade deal with Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , the long-time president of Zaire, as he called it, and that deal involved rolling up this secret supply line so that the vital supplies that had been trickling through to this unknown rebel group entrenched in very high, steep mountains, 10,000 feet or something, across the lake from our camp, that they felt greatly threatened by the loss of those supplies, and one of their key leaders, one of Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent" 's lieutenants, had been operating that supply line and was arrested by the Tanzanians as part of their closing of the supply route.  They wanted him back, other people back.  To some extent, I don't know, intellectually, they viewed Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  as -- had earlier viewed him as one of the fathers or patron saints of their movement, someone ideologically sympathetic with their liberation struggle, as they saw it, so that it was therefore a particular betrayal.  They addressed him as "stooge of the stooge," meaning he was a stooge of Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , who, in turn, was a stooge of the West or the United States.  


So, they were very insulting in their communication to him, and he was quite furious with them in his response, and he washed his hands of the whole affair.  He evidently permitted Tanzanian radio to broadcast for five consecutive nights that this was probably a CIA [U.S. Central Intelligence Agency] plot to begin with.  So I arrived in a hostile environment, with the Tanzanian government, on whose soil this had occurred, unwilling to help.  


As it turned out, our own government was largely unwilling to help, too.  Unknown to me until later, this was a time when [U.S. Secretary of State Henry A.] Kissinger XE "Kissinger, Henry A."  was trying to crank up the then-secret Angola operation and viewed Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  as a bulwark in the cold war against the Soviet influence in Angola, that we could have bases and perhaps troops, or whatever, draw some strength from Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" 's role, and therefore, the last thing in the world that Kissinger XE "Kissinger, Henry A."  wanted was to have Americans dealing with rebels against Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" .  Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  was our ally, our strongman, and all that.  It was an odd perception of Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , in my opinion, but, be that as it may, that was our government's perception.  


So, some very good people at the embassy in Dar did everything they possibly could to be helpful despite that.  I give them great, great credit, particularly the late ambassador Beverly Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  and a colleague of his that he assigned to the case, Lewis MacFarlane XE "MacFarlane, Lewis" , since retired from the Foreign Service years later.  They did the very best they could to be helpful.  They are wonderful human beings, but fundamentally they were in a very difficult situation.  So that, to a large extent, I was almost in business for myself, to figure out who these people were and how to make contact with them and what to do.  


We tried various things that turned out to be false leads.  We'd get, I think, the best information we could from our own intelligence community about groups in that part of the world, and they knew very little.  There were some Catholic missionaries who knew a little bit more.  But we had various false leads and did a fair amount of traveling.  I had to charter a plane with a bush pilot to take me out, to go back and forth from Dar es Salaam, the capital, where the political aspects were, to the interior.  


The Tanzanian secret police were bugging my phone in the hotel, albeit rather clumsily, but they were.  They didn't like my being there, and they didn't like our getting into this at all.  The Tanzanian representative, official representative, had been known before to be strongly anti-American and otherwise a very difficult personality, and he pretty much shielded us from contact with President Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." , who, himself, is a very decent man, who, in the end, was helpful to us, but that was months later.  But we were cut off from him in the initial effort to get his help.  

Q:  How did you begin?  I'm trying to imagine your arrival there.  Who did you approach?

Hamburg:  On the first night of arrival, I went out to meet with the students who were staying at the home of my collaborator, Jane Goodall XE "Goodall, Jane" , the English zoologist who'd been a pioneer in this kind of research or, rather, her husband's home.  She'd recently remarried, and her husband was an Englishman who had become a Tanzanian after World War II.  He was this official representative of the Tanzanian government I was referring to.  So it complicated matters enormously that he was not cooperative, and he did not want her to cooperate with us, and therefore that was a great disappointment to the students and the families and to me, that she was, in effect, immobilized, I think, under terrible stress with her husband, to whom she was devoted, taking a very strong position that everything would be all right, we shouldn't worry, we shouldn't do anything.  One of the parents referred to his description of it as the "picnic-on-the-lake scenario."  It was totally rubbish, totally meaningless, but the idea was to give empty reassurance that would keep us from doing anything.  So, it was a complicated situation emotionally for all of us.  It was clear that we were not able to get help there.


I urged the students to leave and go home and get out of there, but I was wrong about that, and most of them would not. They wanted to stay and try to be helpful, and it turned out that I then basically picked a couple of them, a couple of outstanding young women, to work with me, and they were very helpful.  

Q:  In what way did they help?

Hamburg:  Well, I had to try to get information as best I could.  I had some Tanzanian friends that I'd made over the years, and it was important to keep in touch with them.  The students also helped in thinking through various options.  My wife was coordinating the U.S. side of it.  With my phone being bugged, somehow or other I made that clear to her, and we improvised a code.  I must say we're rather proud of that.  Our relationship was such that, without saying anything explicitly, we were able to improvise a code, partly using American idiomatic language and slang and shared experiences.  You know, it took some groping, but we did get a code for essential elements.  


Then the embassy tried, through the State Department, through the intelligence community, to get me some information.  It was very frustrating.  In a week or so, maybe ten days, we really weren't getting anywhere.  Our leads were false leads.  I decided that I would fly to Nairobi, where I could talk in the clear without the limitations of this improvised code, and try to see what else we could set in motion, perhaps through other countries, perhaps through potentially friendly intermediaries.  I was asking myself who, perhaps in Europe, who would have known these people.  For example, Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent"  had spent considerable time in Belgium and France, as I recall.  One of the things you figure out in a situation like that, are there friends of your adversaries who might be intermediaries in some way.  


So, I was just headed out of the hotel to the airport when a frantic messenger came racing over from the embassy saying that Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  needed me to come right over immediately, and the reason he did was that several representatives of Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent"  had turned up in the U.S. embassy, which was really a tour de force.  The Tanzanian police were looking for them.  They'd come a thousand miles covertly, and there they were.  It was a terrible embarrassment for Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  that he should be keeping rebels against Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  in the embassy, yet if he turned them loose, they would probably be arrested.  


So, we kept them over a weekend when we could have some serious discussions with them, and then it was clear that we had to go back to the area around Kigoma, this little town near our camp, a thousand miles away.  We chartered a plane for Monday and flew back there with them.  And then, fundamentally, we were all hiding out. It got to be rather complicated, because, on the one hand, we were hiding out from the Tanzanian secret police.  On the other hand, we learned from the police chief in Kigoma, whom I had befriended years earlier, a very nice man, that Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  had suddenly set up a consulate in Kigoma, never had one before.  He had sent forty or fifty heavily-armed men as their consulate, and they were looking for us, and the idea was that they would -- first of all, they believed we had a lot of money, and, in the second place, they thought they'd kill us all in the bush and blame it on these Communist rebels.  


So, we were hiding out from Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" 's people and hiding out from the Tanzanians at the same time and trying to find out whether there was any negotiating leverage.  Fortunately, I had a radio -- it didn't work very well, but a radio from the embassy to communicate back to the embassy, and sometimes the static was too great, but sometimes I could communicate.  


What followed was, first, my sense of an appraisal of where there might be some negotiating leverage, where if anywhere, and then a kind of a shuttle diplomacy:  I would fly back periodically to Dar es Salaam, then come back out there.  Because it was an African political problem fundamentally, I had to try to see what could be done politically or otherwise.  Their attitude was very simple.  The kidnappers, Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent" 's people, had the attitude that we would be very powerful.  After all, I was an American professor.  These were four "European" students, meaning whites -- one was Dutch, three Americans -- and that these were very valuable and that Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  could be pressed to do anything we wanted him to do, basically a very naive point of view.  


So, anyway, a great blessing, in a way, was that one of the students, Barbara Smuts XE "Smuts, Barbara B." , got very sick, and it was a blessing because they did not want her to die in captivity, so they released her.  She was a brilliant person to begin with, was and still is, and very courageous and very dedicated, and she had been with them, so she was able to tell me a lot about them.  She was really gravely ill, and I finally insisted that her mother take her back to London, and I arranged for the Hospital of Tropical Diseases in London to treat her.  It turned out she had a very serious worm infection, strongyloides, that she'd acquired in their camp.  But while she was in Dar, she was able to give me more of a sense of who these people were and what they believed in and what they stood for, and that was helpful, very helpful.

Q:  Can you tell me a little bit about who they were and what they stood for, the sorts of things that she told you at the time?

Hamburg:  They were remnants of the group that had been headed by Patrice Lamumba XE "Lamumba, Patrice" , who had lost the civil war in the Congo, in all likelihood with considerable CIA help on Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" 's side, and probably the French were involved, too, in that.  In any case, with Western help, Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  defeated Lamumba XE "Lamumba, Patrice" , Lamumba XE "Lamumba, Patrice"  was killed, and these young men went into these virtually impenetrable mountains and set up pretty disciplined villages along more or less Maoist lines, Maoist ideology, and their idea was to periodically make raids on Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" 's troops, who never were very good, and get weapons and kidnap people and get ransom and other things to sustain themselves, the belief being that if they sustained themselves over the long haul, that different groups would arise in the country against Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , that these groups could coalesce and some day overthrow him, which, in fact, is pretty much what happened.  I don't think they envisioned that they would be getting a lot of outside help as they did from Rwanda and Uganda, but, nevertheless, the basic point, a coalescence of anti-Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  groups, as it turned out, both inside and outside of Zaire, overthrew him twenty-two years later.  


But that was their attitude, that they would have to be patient, it would take a long time.  They would, in their view, hold to their principles.  Now, their principles included a lot of human rights violations on the grounds that the end justifies the means.  This higher calling of overthrowing Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  and freeing their country justified a lot of bad stuff, but they were, nevertheless, proud of their ideology and of their courage and of their organization, their discipline, and they resented the fact that they were unknown in the world.  They wanted some recognition.  So that was the first bargaining leverage I had.  I made some headway with that.

Q:  The fact that they wanted recognition?

Hamburg:  Yes.  I thought I might be able to get some of the world's press to tell their story.  I told them I could not endorse it, of course.  I could simply say, "They say this.  They say that.  This is who they say they are and what they've done and what they believe in.  That's what they say, as reported to me.  Obviously, I can't endorse it."  So, I did that, and we took a lot of hauling and tugging and phone-calling.  


As an example, the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] world service, Africa-Swahili service, quite rightly said, when I contacted them through friends in London, "We're not a message center.  We're a news service."  But then, you know, after some discussion, they said, "Well, if you can cast it for us in a way that would constitute news, maybe we could do something."  And then they did.


There was a similar German service that was helpful, and I think the Voice of America carried something, and then I actually was able to bring them clippings from some of the world's newspapers.  That's why I had to go back and forth from Dar es Salaam.  They were out in the bush.  So that was helpful.  


Then there was no alternative but to provide some ransom, which we had to raise privately.  We -- my wife simply signed for it at a Palo Alto Bank.  It was wonderful of them to do that, because we didn't really have the capital to back it up.  Then some friends of ours were arranging some skullduggery, something called a "rat line," which turns out to be covert ways of sending cash around the world.  There were some other details that aren't important.  But we did get some money over there, which we, of course, urged them to use for food and medicine, but we had no control over how they would use it.  In all likelihood, they, I think, used most of it to buy arms.  We couldn't control that, but we did the best we could to build that into the negotiation.  


Anyway, the recognition in the world press was step one, and the ransom was step two, and the establishment of a diplomatic point of contact with the Tanzanian government was step three, and for that, they were to release the remaining three.  But in bargaining with them, I could tell, I could just sense that this was not a trustworthy bargaining relationship, that they were going to try to trick me if they could, and I arranged a very complicated mid-lake transfer, which they resented and tried to avoid, and I was simply adamant, consulting with the parents all the time, that we would not give them the money except in the middle of the lake under certain conditions, you know, we get the kids first and so on.  


Finally they agreed to that, but, unfortunately, when we got out on the lake, in the meantime, Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  had located where we were, and he had some heavily armed gunboats, I think American-made and Israeli-modified, very powerful gunboats that were lining that portion of the lake, and it was impossible to get across in daytime.  So that hard-won plan fell through.  There were so many steps that I can't even remember them now.  I have some notes somewhere.  For example, I, through some friends in Sweden, I got the Swedish Embassy to intervene to help with the mid-lake scenario.  We got a U.N. fisheries boat to be helpful, all kinds of neutral intermediaries in the international community to give legitimacy and whatever, but it all fell through.  


This time it was not the kidnappers, but it was Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  who blocked that off.  Then they said they knew the lake very well, they were very skillful, and I didn't doubt that, and that if we were willing to do it at night, that we could still do it, they could get through between the gunboats, but it would have to be on their beach; it would not be mid-lake.  So, after discussion with the parents, it was clear that that was our only option.  It was a lousy option, but it was done, and when it happened, you know, then under their guns they gave us not all three, but two of the three and kept one.  So, they had now given us the three women, but the one man they kept, male student, and his life was in great danger.  


I don't think they were actually bloodthirsty.  They were certainly unreliable as negotiating partners, but I didn't have a sense that they were eager to kill anybody, but I also had a sense that they were perfectly willing to do if they thought it had political advantage.  The political advantage would have been -- the idea of what they said was, they kill Steve Smith XE "Smith, Steve"  and drop his body in front of Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." 's house in Dar es Salaam, and the message would be, "Look, Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." , we can get you or any of your people anywhere.  We can go anywhere," as they had just done in coming there a few weeks before to the embassy.  This was all stretched out over a period of about two and a half months.  


So, I finally felt that there was no way to do this last piece to save his life unless we could get Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  to do something, and by a great, great piece of luck, I learned that this man who had been our obstacle, the official Tanzanian representative, was out of town, and so the ambassador made an urgent plea for a meeting with Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." , which was readily granted, because it turned out that this man had been the obstacle.  He had mislead us.  He had lied to us about Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." 's role.  Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  said then, "I had always told you that I would help.  Didn't Derek convey that to you?"  


"No.  He conveyed just the opposite."


Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  was very surprised.  Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  had always said that although he was very angry with them, he wasn't angry with us, and assumed we were trying to save lives, and if it were necessary for him to intervene, he would do so.  I had formulated a set of sort of minimal proposals that I thought would be adequate to get Steve freed.  As it turned out, Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  did more than I had asked.  I mean, he was quite determined to get Steve freed.  So he did that, only he asked us for at least ten years not to describe what he'd done.  He did not want it known that he had made a major concession to these people.  He could not give them back their leader because he'd been killed by the Tanzanians, and I had found that out and had leveled with them, by the way.  It turned out to be useful.  They had suspected that to be the case.  I had a terrible turmoil when I found it out, whether to tell them, to be the bearer of bad news or to level with them, in the hope that perhaps they would find me a more trustworthy interlocutor, and the latter proved to be the case.  I told them.  They had kind of thought it was true.  I confirmed their suspicion, and they seemed to have some sense that at least I was an honest man.  Anyway, they couldn't get all that they wanted, but at least they got something out of it.  It wasn't a total loss for them.

Q:  Can you give us any details about the concessions that Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  made?

Hamburg:  Fundamentally it revolved around the opportunity for them to have a continuing relationship with the government of Tanzania, at least an opportunity to see what advantage they might eventually get.  He also returned a couple of people that were being held, not the high leader, but a couple of people who were being held, and so that combination was enough for them.  He did not promise to reopen the supply line or anything like that, and I don't know what happened later.  I don't think he did, but I don't know that for a fact.  


I later had occasion a couple of times in New York in recent years to thank him publicly in a general way for his role in it, for his humanity and compassion.  So, as a matter of fact, it was really very nice -- about a year ago, the International Peace Academy gave several simultaneous awards.  It was their twenty-fifth anniversary, and they gave awards to Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  and to me and to Gro [Harlem] Brundtland XE "Brundtland, Harlem" , the prime minister of Norway.  I felt very honored to be in such company, and it did give me a wonderful chance to tell those people in short form the story of his humanitarian behavior.  


Anyhow, it's gotten pretty hazy over the twenty-two years, but that was the gist of it -- making contact with them, finding out what they stood for and what they believed in, where we might have negotiating leverage, what we could do to free the students, and to hang in there long enough to do it.  Toward the end of that two-and-a-half-month period, about a week before the end, my wife came over.  She had sensed, though I had not said it to her, she had sensed that I was considering going to their camp across the lake.  There was a journalist in that part of the world at the time who knew the area and who talked with me and said that if I'd be willing to go, that he'd be willing to go.  He had had some contact with them in the past, and he thought he could find the location, and, you know, he thought if he got the story, it would be a very dramatic story, but he thought it would only make sense if I would go and that the two of us might be able to do something to get Steve Smith XE "Smith, Steve"  out.  I was planning to do that, but only as a last resort.  It was obvious that it gave them the opportunity, if they wanted, just to hold us hostage and have two more hostages that might, in some sense, be of greater value to them than the one that they were still holding, and that was, of course, a very real risk.  But if I had no other options, I was going to do that, and she sensed it, and I don't recall how.  She's a very, very sensitive person. 


So, what happened then?  Oh, yes.  One final episode.  When Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  did what he did, he just went ahead and did it.  He didn't make it an exchange or anything.  He sent these two guys back and sent the message, and he was convinced that they would then release Steve Smith XE "Smith, Steve" , but there was a day or two of great tension, and then we got the call.  I was back in Dar es Salaam at the time when Steve appeared in Kigoma, and we sent a plane out to pick him up.  It was a great reunion.  When he got to the airport, the Tanzanians, the same guy who'd been a problem to us all along, arranged for the Tanzanian secret police to suddenly arrive.  I went out to the tarmac to greet him.  We had a lot of troubles in the airport itself.  Our ambassador was misled and kept out of the way.  All kinds of dishonest stuff went on.


But I was there, and I went out to the tarmac, and suddenly this jeep full of troops came up, knocked me down, took Steve Smith XE "Smith, Steve"  off, roaring away.  I didn't know who they were, but they were the Tanzanian secret police.  They were getting a sort of pound of flesh.  The idea was to interrogate him before we brainwashed him.  So, they interrogated him.  By that time, the ambassador got out there, and we were making a tremendous international howl.  The ambassador called Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." , and I don't know if he got through to him or not, but he got through to somebody, and so in a couple of hours they released him, but that episode was an unpleasant coda to the whole affair.  


So, when it was all over, that night we had a big party down at the hotel, and the kids gave me, just on some shabby pieces of paper, the best they had, an "Honorary Degree in Contingency Planning."  It was from Kasakale University.  Kasakale is a valley where the chimps had very rich fruit to feed on, so they invented Kasakale University, and somewhere in my papers I have that treasured honorary degree.  I have a lot of other honorary degrees, but that's the best one.  I can never forget the courage of the four hostages:  Carrie Hunter XE "Hunter, Carrie" , Emilie Bergman XE "Bergman, Emilie" , Barbara Smuts XE "Smuts, Barbara B." , and Steve Smith XE "Smith, Steve" .


Anyway, you see what that experience did.  For those two and a half months, I was immersed in those dreadful problems of hatred and violence and deception and abject poverty, cruelty, disease, all of it, and it just left me with a sense that if I could contribute anything, even the slightest contribution at the margin to some of the great problems of that kind, that I would like to try to do so.  I didn't fully realize it, actually, until I had a letter in Dar es Salaam from the president of the National Academy of Sciences.  I may have mentioned this to you before.  He had the perception that an experience like that might change what you'd want to do with your life, and so he renewed an offer that I had turned down in May. 


I did wrestle with what was the best way to do something that would be strongly policy oriented and could address such great problems, or that there might be something more sensible than the Institute of Medicine presidency, but then I decided not, that that was really a great opportunity and I should take it, so it did change my life drastically.  But there was this total immersion quality -- in the depths of degradation, and at the same time it also did impress me that it brought out the best in some people, some wonderful people like MacFarlane XE "MacFarlane, Lewis" , and Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  that I mentioned, and some of the students, for example, Michelle Trudeau XE "Trudeau, Michelle" , who now broadcasts for National Public Radio, and Barbara [B.] Smuts XE "Smuts, Barbara B." , now a professor at the University of Michigan, who was so gravely ill.  Courageous, wonderful people.  Stress tends to do that.  It tends to bring out the best in some people and the worst in some people, but it certainly did give me an impetus to tackle bigger problems.  


Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  was a wonderful man.  He was one of two black ambassadors that we still had in our ambassadorial corps at that time.  We were down to a very low ebb at the ambassadorial level.  He said to me at the end something to the effect that, had I ever thought about doing other things, that he'd known a lot of people who'd dealt with difficult situations, and he was impressed that I could really do that and I should think about larger problems, etc.  


Did I mention to you about the fight we had to save his career after the kidnap?

Q:  No.

Hamburg:  Well, it was a very dramatic experience, and I guess it added something to this whole thing.  We stopped off in London on the way back, my wife and I, to thank our British friends who'd been very helpful, particularly with Barbara Smuts XE "Smuts, Barbara B."  when she was so ill, and in other ways, getting information that we needed, getting to the BBC and so on, we wanted to thank them personally.  Then after a day there, then we went on home.  We dropped off the students at this hospital in Britain that's so good for tropical diseases, to have them thoroughly checked out.  I had lost a lot of weight.  I had a diarrhea and lost a lot of weight, but I thought I'd go back home and get medical care at Stanford, but I thought they should be checked for exotic tropical diseases just in case.  This London place was tops.  


So, we said goodbye to them and then went on home.  To my utter astonishment, it was a great homecoming.  There were hundreds of students at the airport and so on.  We all went over to our house, and out in the yard they had set up a microphone, and I explained to them what had happened, etc.  Got to bed about midnight or so, and an hour or two later I got a call in the middle of the night from Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr." , who was back in Washington.  He'd been called back to Washington, and I thought, naively, maybe, that they were going to honor him for his contribution, but, no, he'd been fired.  His career had been ended on the grounds that he'd violated U.S. terrorism policy.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Hamburg:  That was a lot of nonsense.  There was no terrorism policy really, and he'd been very careful to keep within the limits prescribed.

Q:  Why do you think he was fired?

Hamburg:  Kissinger XE "Kissinger, Henry A."  did that sort of thing periodically.  A couple of times a year, he would show his authority in some really flagrant way, and Kissinger XE "Kissinger, Henry A."  was upset about this Angola problem.  That, no doubt, inflamed him further, but in his view, this man had been insubordinate or something like that.  It was done in a very public way.  Kissinger XE "Kissinger, Henry A." 's style was to denigrate ambassadors generally to flaunt his authority in flagrant ways from time to time.  I can't read the man's mind, but he had done it, and it was, of course, in our view, all of us who knew him, just an outrage.  


He [Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr." ] called me, six-foot-eight, powerful, composed, got through a few sentences, and broke down.  His wife had to come on the phone to explain to me what had happened.  All he wanted was for me to come to Washington in a couple of days and stand with him at his resignation press conference and say that he was a decent human being.  I said, "Well, those kids were held hostage for some time, and, in my view, you are now hostage, and I'd appreciate it if you'd give me a chance to get you freed.  Let me work on it now."  


He said, well, he didn't feel he could do anything himself.  He felt it was professionally inappropriate.  He was a very disciplined person.  But if I wanted to do that, he would hold off any public announcement and just wait.  So I then devoted the next six weeks to trying to find ways to get him reinstated.  This was another part of the experience of getting into new territory far beyond any of my prior experience.  We first tried all the proper routes, talked to the person that Kissinger XE "Kissinger, Henry A."  had designated at the State Department, and although the man was personally sympathetic and I've gotten to know him in later years, he said there was nothing to be done; it was finished.


So, having tried the proper routes, I decided the only real possibility would be through media pressure, particularly on the President, if we could manage that, if we could manage it.  I had a friend, luckily -- it was a very good piece of luck -- named Fred [M.] Hechinger XE "Hechinger, Fred M." , who for some years was the education editor of the New York Times, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, who, oddly enough, in later years was on the Carnegie board and then he was on our staff after he retired from the Times.  He just died a year or so ago.  


But Fred Hechinger XE "Hechinger, Fred M."  -- and I told him the story in the morning or at lunch, said he would think about it and get back to me.  He got back to me that afternoon, and he read me a draft of an editorial -- and then he ran it, the next day.  It's odd, I'm meeting with the New York Times editorial board tomorrow about our commission [Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict].  Anyway, they ran it, "Humane Diplomat,” and they said it was an outrage to fire a man who'd done what he'd done throughout his career, a man in his mid-fifties and so on.  That was very, very useful.


Then Carl [T.] Rowan XE "Rowan, Carl T." , the columnist, who knew Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  and who himself had been a black ambassador, one of the few, Carl Rowanthen got interested.  I talked with him, and he wrote a column about it and made various calls.  The State Department was very leaky, and Rowan was able to find out a lot, and some other people were -- Daniel Schorr, who was then with CBS, was also a friend, was helpful.  So, we got some media coverage.  


Then we got one of the networks to do a little bit on the evening news about one of the families, the family of the student who'd been held the longest.  So with that, with several indications that I wasn't just some long-haired professor, but that we had the capability to mobilize media, I asked for an appointment with President [Gerald R.] Ford XE "Ford, Gerald R."  I didn't get that, although I later got to know President Ford.  He helped us on the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government.  I had a very interesting conversation with him later about all of this.


But anyway, his then-chief of staff I did get to talk to, and essentially my message was, "Look, here is the New York Times editorial, here's the Rowan XE "Rowan, Carl T."  piece, here's a summary of the ABC piece.  I have had invitations to go on the air with these students, very sympathetic, appealing students.  We've turned them all down," the "Today Show", the "Tomorrow Show", the something-or-other "[Tom] Snyder Show"", I forget, but these were morning shows and evening shows, the talk shows of the day in 1975.  "We've turned all these down, but unless Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  is reinstated, we simply will have no alternative but to go on the air and tell the whole story, and the whole story is a nasty story in which American lives were put in jeopardy by the American government, not just the ambassador's career, but this is what we would say."  And I outlined for them what I would say.


His response was -- at first he was very cool, but when I laid out the media stuff, he got rather agitated.  In fact, he misunderstood me.  He thought that I was going on the air today, I would speak on the "Today Show".  I said, "No, no, no."  


He said, "Put it off.  Please put it off a day.  Give me a chance to look into it.  It's probably all a misunderstanding."  


So I said, "Fine.  Of course," but I said that in order for us to feel confident -- he'd already been replaced in Tanzania; they had quickly appointed another ambassador -- that he would have to have a choice of several positions so that he could have an appropriate one.  We weren't going to have him reinstated in the lowest possible position.  It would have to be acceptable to him.  Anyway, he got back to me in a few hours and said it was all a misunderstanding and the President certainly never knew about this.  And it was legitimate.  The President was in Helsinki in the great -- what led to the great human rights initiative vis-à-vis the Soviets and so on.  I doubt whether the President knew about it.  He had a lot of other things to worry about.  


In any event, that's what he said, "The President didn't know about it, and once it was called to his attention, he said he certainly wants to be fair about this, and Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  will be offered a choice of positions."  That was all done, and he was reinstated. 


To jump ahead on that story, about a year later, when Cyrus [R.] Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  became Secretary of State, I didn't know Cyrus Vance then, but I wrote him a letter explaining, in rather restrained language, but clear language what had happened and saying that I thought it would be really a public service if he were to find a good position in the new adminstration for Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr." , and he did.  Little did I know that Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  and I later would become fast friends and collaborators for years.  But he did, he actually created a special position for him.  


But that additional bit, you know, made me feel that it did make sense to try to do things that would deal with big issues.  I didn't have great confidence that I could, but at least I had some encouragement toward it.  Then, for example, when I got to the Institute of Medicine, I laid out a program.  It was early in the history of the Institute, and I was able to lay out a program for dealing with major issues, including diseases of poverty.  We created an international health program, which primarily was the diseases of developing countries.  So, there was some direct carryover, both in the spirit and in the substance of what I did in the ensuing five years.  But it was a transforming experience, there's no doubt.

Q:  Thank you so much.  Thank you very much.  This might be a good time for us to stop.  You've given me nearly an hour.  Thank you, Dr. Hamburg.

[END OF SESSION]

	TTTPRIVATE 

	Session Six

	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg     
	Date:  May 19, 1998

	Interviewer:  Brenda Hearing     
	New York, New York

	
	


Q:  Today is May 19, 1998, and we're here with Dr. David Hamburg for our sixth session for the Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project.


Good morning, Dr. Hamburg.

Hamburg:  Good morning, Brenda.

Q:  We're here in the offices of the Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict here on Madison Avenue, and I'm hoping, as we discussed before, that we can talk about the commission today, talk about the response to the final report, talk about the roots of your interest, the roots of the commission.  Maybe you want to just begin and let me come in with some follow-up questions.

Hamburg:  Well, in a certain sense, the commission is a kind of culmination of the long evolution of my interests and activities over just about my entire life.  With respect to the commission -- let me ask you, Brenda, I don't recall the extent to which we've talked about the Carnegie programs during the Cold War on issues of conflict, the avoiding nuclear war [program], and so forth.

Q:  We have not gotten into that yet, you and I.

Hamburg:  Well, maybe I ought to sketch that briefly as background for the commission.

Q:  Terrific. 

Hamburg:  What I would say, just to connect with the earlier discussions about some of my prehistoric interests, in and out of my mind since I was a kid, was this puzzlement about how you could reconcile the human tendencies toward aggression, hatred, violence, destruction with, in my view, the equally prominent human tendencies to attachment, tenderness, love, devotion, loyalty, all that.  It was always underscored for me by the fact that such horrendous events could be generated in Germany, which in some ways was a very highly civilized, advanced country, and even in terms of the earlier history of our own country, which I viewed as the quintessential land of opportunity and freedom, nevertheless, how we had dealt with the Indians and how we dealt with the blacks.  So my sense was that even countries that are exceedingly advanced and, in some ways, very civilized, nevertheless, seem to have it within their capacity to inflict terrible cruelty on groups of people.  That interest sort of waxed and waned, but always remained at least in the background and sometimes in the foreground in my thinking.


As opportunity presented itself professionally, I tried to get different windows on that problem area.  At one time in the context of psychiatry I was very much immersed in conflict at the individual and small-group level, family and other small groups, and then extended it to the community level and gradually found opportunities to learn something about broader, larger intergroup and international conflict.  There was a book we put out based on work done in the latter phase of my time at Stanford, which had glimpses of these different levels of conflict, and so I viewed it as a great opportunity to at least have a look at ways of understanding conflict at different levels, from the smallest to the largest human groups.


Along the way, I got very interested in how you might get some insight into that from an evolutionary historical perspective, a very long run up to where we are, how did we get to be the way we are.  I think one of part of that bears fundamentally on reconciling the hateful, violent tendencies with the attachment, loving, loyalty kind of tendencies, and that has to do with group membership.  Looked at from an evolutionary and historical point of view, I came to believe and have written some about the evidence for group membership as fundamental in survival, as being part of a group amplifying the capacities of any individual.  [Interruption from assistant.]  So that is a thread that has run through my writing and teaching in later years.  [Interruption from assistant.]


Basically, we need so much to have a sense of belonging in a valued group, that is so much related to survival that we then end up justifying our worst atrocities in the name of loyalty to that group, some higher calling, some holy war, whatever.  I think children have been raised as far back as it's possible to reconstruct with an attitude that, in effect, says, "You must belong in order to survive."  Whether that's primarily the immediate family but also the extended family and whatever group it is with which one is taught to identify most powerfully, whether that's in terms of religion or ethnicity or nationality, whatever, the group membership is key to survival.  And that lends itself particularly to the siren song of demagogues in terms of this is what we must do to some other, some outgroup, in order to survive ourselves.  Many, many variations on those themes and they become enormously elaborate, but my belief is that at the core is a sense of group membership equals survival, and other groups may jeopardize that, that survival belonging.


In any case, the Cold War, for me, brought all those considerations to a head in the sense that it was so enormously dangerous.  Now, no matter what our conflicts had been in the past, we really didn't have it within our power to destroy the whole species, and now, at last, thanks to these technological advances, we were capable of probably wiping out the entire species, maybe even wiping out life on Earth.  It was an incredible responsibility beyond any that leaders or peoples have had to bear before.


I began to get into that professionally before I came to Carnegie.  I guess the most vivid example would be that, in 1978, under the auspices of Pugwash, I convened a small group of U.S. scholars and Soviet scholars and West European scholars in Geneva for the better part of a week to look at what had been learned, principally by American scholars studying the Cuban missile crisis and other crises, to learn what had been learned about crisis management, because there was no way to know whether we and the Soviets might have to manage other crises of such enormous danger as that one.


In the course of that week, as we examined the requirements for effective crisis management of a nuclear confrontation, I tried to shift the emphasis, with the help of terrific scholars like Alexander [L.] George XE "George, Alexander L."  of Stanford and Graham [T.] Allison XE "Allison, Graham T."  of Harvard, who had studied such crises, to shift attention toward crisis prevention; in other words, saying to the Soviets, "Look.  It's so terribly hard to manage a crisis of this magnitude with the enormous stakes and risks of a nuclear confrontation that it borders on the edge of human capacity, not just in terms of the judgment of the leaders, but all the many, many moving parts of what they have to control and how difficult it is for them to control that and how accidents can happen of enormous consequence."

Q:  Was this emphasis on prevention new?  Was that a new way of thinking back then at the time of the Pugwash conference?

Hamburg:  Pretty much.  Yes.  There had been very, very little focus on that.  I mean, to some extent, in an implicit way there was an interest in prevention.  A certain element of diplomacy had always been concerned with preventing rotten outcomes, but I do remember at that Geneva '78 meeting the element of surprise for all of us in thinking in terms of crisis prevention.  I think an explicit effort to apply prevention principles to international or other large intergroup conflict was not unknown but certainly not prominent and, in practice, fairly rare, at least in an explicit and systematic way.  It was more common in a sort of vaguely formulated background way, that, you know, we oughtn't to get into worse messes than we have to.  But now we tried to make it quite explicit and systematic, and we said, in effect, to the Soviets, "No matter how high the level of hostility between our governments, no matter how wide the disparity between our ways of life, no matter how high the level of weaponry, that it's simply not in our national interests to go to the brink of nuclear confrontation because it's too hard to manage, too many things that can go wrong.  It's prudent for us to stay back a step or two or three from the brink of nuclear confrontation, and we should try to work out ground rules for doing that, ways of thinking and procedures that could help us."  


Up to that point, probably the most vivid example during the Cold War was the establishment of the hot line between Moscow and Washington, and we tried to think in terms of other procedures and arrangements that could reduce nasty surprises, that could keep each side mindful of the truly vital interests of the other side, not to press too hard on very painful nerves, not to blunder into situations which could be explosive.  Over the years, a good deal of work was developed by us and by others on ways to do that.


After the '78 conference there gradually evolved -- rather quickly evolved -- a pattern of interaction between some of us and some of them about how to learn more of what to do in preventive terms with respect to crises.  We weren't at that point talking about more fundamental issues like is there a way out of the Cold War.  We were just thinking about avoiding a nuclear confrontation in the context of an ongoing Cold War.


So that all had to be improvised until I came here at the end of '82, and the very first thing that I did -- one of the first things, at any rate -- was to put that approach on a more systematic basis, because I had some funds and more resources that we could move to implement the crisis prevention approach.  But then with the great help of the staff and the board here and consultants, outside consultants, we began to think through what a broader program might look like in terms of avoiding nuclear war, reducing the nuclear danger, and there were several strands to it.  One strand was, how can a nuclear war actually happen?  So we challenged a number of scholars and some other experts, primarily scientists and scholars of major universities, to think about that.  We offered them grants to work on that sort of problem if they could bring together people from different backgrounds, like physicists who knew the weapons and their uses and social scientists who knew decision-making processes in the Soviet Union and here, other people who knew Third World flashpoints, other people who knew a lot about the historical origins of the Cold War particularly in relation to Eastern Europe.  So there were different bodies of knowledge and different skills that in my view needed to be brought together in a continuing way.


The situation at that time was that people of those different competencies were more likely to meet occasionally in Washington or Paris than they were to work together in a continuing way on the campus.  So we developed, as rapidly as possible because we felt a sense of urgency, a few places that had great capacity in terms of their human resources and their knowledge and skills, to come together at the same place and work together.  As I say, the very early question was, how could a nuclear war actually happen?  What are the different pathways?  And then to think about what sort of preventive actions could be taken on each pathway, what could you do to put some block to the slippery slope into crisis and war.


We also felt that there ought to be a special branch of study on understanding the adversary.  As a matter of fact, George [P.] Shultz XE "Shultz, George"  told me early in his time as Secretary of State that one of the most difficult things for him was to really understand how the Soviets thought and how they made their decisions.  So we supported experts on that who had devoted their lives to studying the Soviet system and the leaders of the Soviet system, understanding the adversary, feeling that you could negotiate more effectively with them, you could sort out problems, avoid crises better if you understood more of their history and culture and thought processes and decision-making structure.


So it was really the broad formulation of paths to nuclear war and preventive interventions in each path plus some particularly in-depth exploration of crisis prevention and understanding the adversary that constituted a program that we started very rapidly.  Why the sense of urgency?  Well, it was not so long after the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, which had greatly worsened the Cold War, and it seemed to me if they could do something that stupid and that dangerous, that they might make other terrible decisions that would be truly catastrophic.  They had, of course, then triggered a very harsh reaction in this country, and there was a certain amount of talk in government circles and elsewhere in both Washington and Moscow that perhaps a nuclear war was inevitable or one could prevail, was the cliché at the time, didn't quite say "win," but "prevail."  Somebody could be left standing, survive, in a little better shape than the other.


But we were getting toward, it seemed to me, a very dangerous threshold of thinking the unthinkable, drifting into higher and higher risks with respect to the nuclear danger.  So, after we got these interdisciplinary groups of U.S. scientists, scholars, other experts working together in several foci, we pretty quickly tried to connect them with Soviet counterparts, particularly through supporting joint study groups, one on arms control and one on crisis prevention.  Later there were others, but the first two in the early eighties, mid-eighties, were arms control and crisis prevention.


The pattern was to meet twice a year, once in the Soviet Union, once here, and to have a certain amount of preparation between meetings, and press very hard on the Soviets to get counterparts of a similar stature as far as we could, to persuade them not to load up their study groups with KGB-types or political hacks, apparatchiks, but rather with the best scientists and scholars that they could mobilize.  In certain fields, like physics, they had a lot of strength, and in other fields, like the social sciences, they were much weaker because of ideological distortions, but to get the best we could get from each country and to try to find ways to think about these problems together.


We also moved quickly to get our American independent experts together with American policy-makers and policy advisors, both in the executive branch and in the Congress, set up more or less systematically, as well as we could, contacts between independent experts with leaders of  our own government.  Then I guess the next landmark would be that, when [Mikhail S.] Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  came to power, it turned out that he was far more receptive to the kinds of ideas we were working on than previous Soviet leaders had been.  Furthermore, some of the people on the joint study groups had very good access to him, virtually walk-in access, in his first couple of years in office.  So it made it possible for us to serve a kind of a brokerage function for getting Western people, ideas, and information to Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  and his closest advisors.  Therefore we were in a position where we were able to support and facilitate a certain amount of linkage between independent experts from this country both with our own leadership and with the Soviet leadership, which was quite astonishing, and not something that anybody had predicted; once we saw the opportunity, we really jumped on it.  The way was paved for the opportunity because we had these joint study groups already in existence.  They had people in whom Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  had great confidence.  So that was a remarkable experience in his early years in office, and he has said publicly as well as privately that these kinds of contacts helped him to shape his new thinking and to move toward more accommodative international policies, more democratic outlooks, and so forth.


So, to the extent we were able to do anything useful in that, I feel the stakes were so high, the issues so important, that even a marginal and modest contribution would be worthwhile.  So that program of ours was kind of rare and special during the Cold War years, and others have said that it was one of the outstanding philanthropic efforts of that era.  I would like to believe that that's true, but in any case, it was a remarkable adventure.


Now, when the Cold War ended, there was a period of great hope in the world that the big dangers had gone away, and then suddenly policy-makers and publics were blindsided by these fierce ethnic and religious conflicts.  I had written and taught some about that sort of issue in the past.  It didn't surprise me all that much.  Those conflicts had been there, to some degree suppressed by superpowers during the Cold War and to some degree overlooked because of the immense dangers of the Cold War.  I think my second annual report essay here had a title something like "Prejudice and Ethnocentrism in the High-Tech Era," something like that, but I was concerned, and had been for a long time, with ethnic and religious animosities and a wide range of intergroup animosities, not simply international, let alone super-power animosities, but I had chosen to focus our program on the super-power animosity because that's where the greatest dangers were.


We then adapted, I think, quite quickly to focusing on ethnic and religious and other intergroup conflicts after the Cold War ended, while continuing to try to make contributions to winding down the Cold War.  And so our program was a mix of the old and the new in the immediate phase after the Cold War ended.  


The Bosnia experience was particularly sobering because here we were in the heart of Europe with another genocide, with the most primitive attitudes and beliefs and behavior.  After all Europe had been through in the twentieth century, particularly centering around the Nazi experience, it seemed strange, bizarre, and singularly disquieting that this outbreak could occur in that way.  As Cyrus Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  got involved in that, he and I had many discussions about how to understand the problem, about what was happening and what could be done about it.  I was more and more impressed that in his role on behalf of the U.N. and in the roles of other people trying to do something about that conflict and, shortly thereafter, the Rwanda genocide, that the typical situation was that excellent people like Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  were drawn into a conflict situation at a late stage with a weak hand, very few levers to do anything about it at a time when so much savagery and so much revenge motivation had been stimulated and governments had so broken down that there was not an awful lot to be done.  I related that to my more or less career-long interest in prevention, the growing interest in the medical side of my experience with prevention, on the one hand, the immunization experience, on the other hand, the changing behavior for health experience in respect to smoking and exercise and alcohol and other drug intake and all of that, dietary patterns, etc.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Hamburg:  I felt that these situations like Bosnia and Rwanda had some rough comparability to a situation in which all of the emergency rooms and intensive care units in the world were put together in a few places.  We had learned in medicine that we do need emergency rooms and we do need intensive care units, that indeed they get more sophisticated and capable, but nevertheless you ask, where are these patients coming from and to what extent do we know how to prevent these diseases?  A large fraction of patients and the expenditures involved in health care, we came to understand more and more in the seventies and eighties, were preventable and more and more would become preventable as scientific knowledge advanced so that there was a very serious effort in medicine and public health not only to advance the knowledge of the mechanisms of disease but to feed back routes to prevention, as we learn how can we feed that back not only into medical practice, but into public understanding so that people can change their behavior for health wherever we know enough to do that.  I suppose the smoking case may have been the most vivid one, but there are many others, as you know.


So, medicine has taken on more and more a preventive medicine and public health aspect, and I thought that kind of conceptual framework ought now to be applied to a broad range of intergroup conflict.  What really triggered the commission was the thought that maybe the time has come to undertake a kind of comprehensive array of what we know about preventing mass violence in intergroup conflict situations.  We had learned to do that more and more in medicine.  When I was president of the Institute of Medicine, '75 to '80, we worked with the then-Surgeon General Dr. Julius Richmond XE "Richmond, Julius B." , and Joseph [A.] Califano XE "Califano Jr., Joseph A."  [Jr.], who was Secretary of HEW [Department of Health, Education and Welfare], and others to put out a fairly comprehensive set of volumes that had to do with prevention in the medical public health context.  What did we know about smoking and high-fat diet and sedentary patterns of life and intake of alcohol and other drugs and high-risk patterns of behavior involving vehicles of various kinds and, of course, weapons?  And how could we translate that into useful knowledge both for policy-makers and for the public at-large?  


So, having had that experience, it seemed to me something analogous now, a comprehensive sort of compendium of the tools and strategies of prevention as applied to intergroup conflict.  Now, the assumption was -- my assumption -- that this is a very contentious species, there will always be intergroup conflicts, they will often be serious, and the critical issue is to have mechanisms to work them out at a low level of violence, or preferably without violence, to avoid crossing the threshold to mass violence.  That was the critical issue.  We weren't assuming that any time in the foreseeable future that humans were not going to hassle each other or even fight each other, but that we ought to look beyond that to find ways to sort out our differences, if not altogether amicably, at least at a very low level of violence.  That was the aspiration.


So, in a certain way it was a culmination of my more or less lifelong interest in the subject, and I think the same was true for my co-chair, Cyrus Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R." .  We brought different approaches to it.  Mine was more out of scholarship and trying for deeper understanding through the scientific community.  His was more through deep experience in dealing with very hard conflicts as a policy-maker, as a diplomat, as a troubleshooter, as a mediator, as a negotiator, etc.  And in a way, there was a high degree of complementarity between our experiences.  So that's what the commission fundamentally was in its origins.


I'll shut up for a minute now so you can ask -- but I just wanted to be clear that it wasn't any magic bullet, it wasn't any single lever; it was trying to formulate from the world's experience a lot of different levers that could be grasped.  The only further thing I'll say for the moment is that we decided to distinguish between two broad kinds of preventive measures, one we called operational prevention, which means -- it's a derivative of the crisis prevention I talked about before, a little bit broader.  As you're coming toward a crisis, as an emergency is arising, as a hot spot is getting hotter, there are some steps that can be taken rapidly to head off the danger before it explodes into mass violence.


The other category, distinct from operational prevention, is structural prevention, which is how you can provide conditions conducive to peaceful living for the long term, how you can get at some root causes of mass violence, how people can learn to live together more amicably in the long term and be less likely to get into the emergency or crisis situation.  Under each of those, operational or structural prevention, we tried to lay out an array of tools and strategies that might be helpful.  So that's a long background to it, but a commission, I think, that arose kind of naturally, not as a sudden departure but as a kind of organic growth of my interests in Carnegie's activities over a long period of time.

Q:  I think you gave the interview the best possible preface yourself when you said that the commission was in many ways a culmination of your professional interests and work over these many years.  I have found myself, in reading the essays, reading the report, going back over our interviews, thinking so much not just of the public health model, that's so powerful, but your psychiatric background, your psychoanalytic background, and I wanted to remind you of something you'd said in an earlier session that has really struck me in light of the commission's work: the realization you had, even in your early family years, that "rationality only went so far [unclear].  It is a very desirable way to deal with human problems, but one must also take into account powerful motivational and emotional forces that mess up rational problem-solving."


I guess in a way you've answered this question, but I've long wondered how your awareness of the constraints on rationality and the powerful emotional forces that affect judgment, how that awareness has guided your work here at Carnegie in this area.  I think you've spoken at length -- and quite wonderfully -- to the preventive and public health model.  What about the roots in your psychiatric training and psychoanalytic training?

Hamburg:  I think you're right about that, and it came up in many ways.  I think one powerful strand where it came up over and over again in the work of the commission and in Carnegie's work before the commission was on leadership.  Time and again the work of the commission, members of the commission in different parts of the world and different disciplinary backgrounds would say, "Yes, but you have to have effective leadership to make most of these things work."  Indeed, what I mentioned earlier about the different levels of human aggression that I've been concerned with in my career, one of the many connecting points among the levels is leadership.  That is, the characteristics of an individual in a leadership position can be powerfully amplified over a very large group, even affecting many millions of people.  The irrational aspects certainly come into that with respect to mass violence.


Take, for example, what happened at the end of World War II.  We Americans were willing to include the Soviet Union in the Marshall XE "Marshall, Ray F."  Plan, and Stalin wouldn't have any of it.  We sought some ways to have international control of nuclear weapons.  Stalin wouldn't have any of that either.  He had to have his own nuclear weaponry.  He had to keep his country and his bloc apart from the rest of the world.  He was, by that time, in all likelihood, quite paranoid, a very disturbed individual.  He'd had paranoid tendencies for a long time.  I'm not saying it's the only factor of relevance, but it's certainly a very important one.  Had he not been such a paranoid individual, it's conceivable to me that the whole Cold War could have been avoided.  I'm not saying that his paranoia was the only factor that contributed to the Cold War, but it was certainly a very important one.  Of course, we had seen that earlier and vividly with Hitler XE "Hitler, Adolf" , his deeply irrational and fanatical attitudes, enormously distorted the course of world history, did so much damage to so many millions of people.


Actually, right now I'm working on a paper having to do with leadership, and the commission report has some things to do about leadership, but what we tried to do in the commission report is to say some things about how you can bolster the most rational, pragmatic, problem-solving capacities of leaders, how you can organize the small group advisory functions and the larger institutional setting in ways that give leaders the best possible information, ways of sorting the information, and emotional support to sustain them through the very difficult decision process that is involved in crises and the like.


So anyway, the leadership theme, I think, is one important place where my long-standing concern with motivation and emotion and the irrational factors of behavior came into it.  Now, it also entered into the dynamic interplay between leaders and their followers, ways in which demagogues can inflame their publics.  I've tried at various points to understand the motivational and emotional aspects of human experience that make people vulnerable to inflammatory orientations of their leaders, more vulnerable at some times than at others, more vulnerable with some cultural histories than with others.  These things are very complex, but, for me, an attempt to integrate the rational and irrational components of human behavior, to integrate the cognitive, motivational and emotional aspects of human behavior is something very much worth striving for.  I don't pretend for a moment that I've achieved it, but it's been an aspiration that I've sought consistently in my work.

Q:  Thank you.  Am I correct in understanding that the program on avoiding nuclear war shifted or evolved into the program on cooperative security at the end of the Cold War with a feeling, presumably, that the urgency of that threat was no longer there?  I was struck by the article in yesterday's [New York] Times on India detonating a hydrogen bomb, if I can inject a little bit of the immediate day into this interview for people reading this many years from now.  It brings up a lot of questions for me.  One question I had was, is there not a high-ranking representative from India on the commission advisory council?

Hamburg:  On the commission itself.

Q:  On the commission itself.  Excuse me.

Hamburg:  An Indian and a Pakistani on the commission itself.

Q:  Did you have any awareness that this was coming about?

Hamburg:  Well, yes.  Actually, early in the history of the commission, Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  and I explored the question of whether the commission could in any way be useful vis-à-vis the conflict in India and Pakistan.  We didn't succeed in that.  This has been an interest of mine for a long time.  I was, since the late fifties or so, fascinated with India as the largest democracy, and the enormous size and diversity of India.  Could it hold together as a nation?  Could it maintain its democratic society?


But then, with that in the background, several years ago at the Defense Policy Board, which is a function of the Department of Defense, it was clear that there was great concern in our government about the potential of yet another India-Pakistan war principally over Kashmir, a long-disputed piece of territory.  The then Secretary of Defense Bill [William J.] Perry XE "Perry, William J."  asked me if I could do something like I had done vis-à-vis the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War; that is, mainly having independent experts and people of good will from the two countries trying to explore the conflict in ways that might be more flexible than their governments could do, that the governments might be more locked into nearly fixed positions for political reasons or whatever reasons, and maybe you could find the most free-thinking and creative scientists or scholars or whoever to meet very informally and begin to think of different conceivable solutions to the Kashmir problem.  I tried to do that through the commission, but that didn't work.

Q:  Why not?

Hamburg:  Our Indian member felt it wasn't feasible, it wasn't appropriate.  I think he felt we were overestimating the likelihood of conflict and we were underestimating the capacity of the Indian government to manage whatever might come along, that any outside intervention, not just American, but any outside intervention was unnecessary, unwise, might be presumptuous, might be perceived as hegemonic within India.  The Pakistani representative was much more amenable, but we decided that wasn't a feasible way to go.


I did end up with a different avenue.  About a year ago there was a meeting jointly sponsored by Carnegie and the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm of life scientists from India and Pakistan, people of outstanding stature with a high level of mutual respect going in to think about regional problems, problems particularly of health and of agriculture, to think regionally. Are there problems that could be a menace to the region that could be solved far more effectively, perhaps solved only by joint efforts?


That followed something that I started in the mid-seventies, the Mideast Health Initiative, which brought together Israeli and Egyptian life scientists and which continues to the present day, and it's turned out to be more successful in agriculture than in health, although it was useful in both, but the concept was the same, a kind of superordinate goal: Can we achieve something we both very much want, like avoiding some terrible infectious disease outbreak that would decimate the region, or to be able to have a better food supply for our peoples, can we do that together far better than we could do it alone?  Or in some cases, it would absolutely require regional cooperation to be done.  That's a concept that's been attractive to me for a long time.


So anyway, there was a certain amount of utility to the Mideast Health Initiative.  It began in almost a clandestine way before Camp David.  It became much more feasible after Camp David.  It more recently has expanded to include Jordanian and some other participation.  There's been a little bit of Turkish participation along the way.  It was mainly Israel and Egypt.  But with that model in mind, we undertook, as I say, this exploratory meeting on India and Pakistan, which went very well, and it may be continued.  I, of course, am not in the grantmaking business anymore, and I don't know whether Carnegie will continue it, but I think that there's a pretty good chance that the Nobel Foundation and perhaps the World Health Organization will try to keep that going, at least as a regional health initiative that would build trust and cooperative relations among leading scientists and professionals.  So it is so-called track-two diplomacy, a kind of what you might call a soft track-two diplomacy, in the sense that it doesn't deal directly and immediately with the big fights, with security concerns in the narrow sense, but at least it's a step in that direction.  But most of these situations like the Indian one are to some extent foreseeable.


One of the commission's special monographs done by Jane [E.] Holl XE "Holl, Jane E." , the executive director, and Alex George XE "George, Alexander L."  of Stanford, who I mentioned to you is one of the creators of the whole crisis prevention concept, they did this monograph for the commission on early warning and early response, in which they essentially conclude that, more and more, early warning is not so much the problem as is early response, as we have more and more sources of information to know that a situation is very dangerous; and you may not know exactly which month, let alone which day, there'll be Indian nuclear tests, for example, or something like that, but you have abundant reason to know it's a dangerous situation.  But it's hard to mobilize action, and what our commission is about is to say to policy-makers, "There are tools available.  There are things you can do.  There's no need to wait for disaster to occur.  Wishing it won't happen is not enough."


There is a tremendous amount of wishful thinking in all of these matters.  There's even a lot of wishful thinking, I believe, in our government about this Indian situation.  The Indian leader who came to his office, with a hyper-nationalist program is very much pro-nuclear, building India's nuclear capacity.  He said so.  He flashed that warning all over the place, and people didn't want to believe him.

Q:  And here we are.

Hamburg:  Yes.

Q:  Interesting, too, that India, so many Indians, I'm presuming, take great pride in this achievement of their country.

Hamburg:  That's right.  Again, back to your question about motivation and emotion.  One of the aspects of nuclear weaponry or any kind of visible, manifestly powerful weaponry, is that it does afford pride to many people, not to all, but many people in many countries.  The more powerful the weaponry, the stronger you are, the more likely your group is to survive, the more you feel you've earned respect in the world.  It's an ancient attitude and, I think, an attitude that clearly becomes more and more dangerous as we go along.


I've said in a number of speeches about the commission that it's my belief that by somewhere around the middle of the next century every group everywhere in the world will be able to inflict enormous damage on every other, there'll be no people too remote to have a capacity to inflict great damage on others.  So it's a kind of world that we're coming toward where everybody can destroy everybody else, and that's why I think that in due course the significance of this commission will grow, or at least the type of thinking reflected in the commission will grow.  It'll be improved, no doubt, but we just have this highly weaponized world with so much pride in the weaponry and so much desire to enhance the weaponry, it's so widely distributed.  It's a highly weaponized world.  The likelihood is that it would get harder and harder to manage all that weaponry without inflicting enormous damage at various times in various places.  

Q:  It seems to me that the commission is trying to promote a fundamental shift in thinking and in awareness.

Hamburg:  That's exactly it.  What we really hope for is not so much any sort of gimmick as a way of thinking.  We would love to make it a pervasive way of thinking, to challenge people all over the world, not just experts.  "How can we really prevent this?  Are we drifting towards some disaster?  Must we?  What can we do to prevent it?"  I think the more that would become pervasive, the better off we would all be.


I love discussing this with students at universities.  I've given a lot of lectures in recent months, seminars and whatnot, and they get it.  By and large, they get it.  They have their lives out ahead of them, and they don't see why folks my age should destroy their lives in the name of some higher calling or some great group pride or any of that.

Q:  Can we talk a bit about the Judith Miller XE "Miller, Judith"  piece in the New York Times Book Review from the middle of February, 18 February, 1998?  Highly critical of the final report.  Were you aware that this was coming out?

Hamburg:  No.  There's been worldwide press coverage, and that's the only highly negative piece in the entire world so far.  It's been since December.  I don't know what motivated her.  She didn't talk to me beforehand.  She had alerted me that she would like to talk to me, and I had stayed by the phone one whole weekend, and then she never called.  She didn't talk to me; she didn't talk to Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R." ; she didn't talk to Jane Holl XE "Holl, Jane E." .  So there was no serious effort to check basic facts.  She, as I recall the story some months ago, I haven't read it since it came out, she said that there was no press coverage, and that's just wrong.  There was worldwide press coverage.  She did not recognize the fact that it was not only this so-called final report, but a set of about forty reports with more to come and a set of worldwide meetings before, during, and after this final report.  So it was a comprehensive effort, both to document the tools and strategies, and to stimulate, as you said, prevention as a way of thinking.  She picked out this one piece of it and said therefore it's extremely expensive to do this report, whatever it cost per page or something.


So she had it wrong about the nature and scope of the enterprise, she had it wrong about the level of media interest, and she had it wrong about the level of policy interest.  We've been run ragged by policy interest.  She didn't want to know that.  The day it came out, when she asked a hostile question at the meeting, then Jane Holl XE "Holl, Jane E."  called her right after the meeting, said, "Can I clarify anything for you?" and she basically was very attacking.  Judith Miller XE "Miller, Judith"  was attacking -- I don't know why -- to Jane Holl, but she didn't want any further clarification, but Jane told her – and I think sent copies to her that afternoon of press releases that had been put out by the government of Japan and the government of Britain, and there was also one from the government of Canada.  I can't recall which came out the same day and which came out the next day, but in any event, there'd been very high-level meetings in the United States, Japan, Canada, Britain, others to come in Germany and Russia, and several top-level occasions at the United Nations with the very active engagement of the Secretary General [Kofi A. Annan XE "Annan, Kofi" ].  So that she gave a kind of cavalier dismissal of policy-maker interest, media interest, public interest, as well as criticizing the cost.  So she clearly had some kind of agenda, some kind of hostile agenda, which I don't understand, I don't understand at all.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO; BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE]

Hamburg:  She, by the way, tried to get that printed as a news story and failed.  The Times would not print it as a news story, so she put it in the back of the book review as an opinion piece.  I've never talked to her about it.  I've never had any encounter with her, so I just don't know.  Nor has Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R." .  Jane Holl XE "Holl, Jane E."  had this one reaching-out effort to clarify and got slapped in the face for it.  It was our sense, and there are a number of very responsible journalists who have been interested in this, some in considerable depth, who said this was highly unprofessional conduct on her part, but I don't know what you can do about that.  In the media -- there's a more and more confrontational attitude in media, as you well know.  Hostility is the name of the game.

Q:  It's interesting, isn't it, the way it mirrors the activities that we're talking about.  It is a confrontational world.

Hamburg:  Absolutely, and I think the trend of the media, in my lifetime, has been more and more to put gasoline on the embers.  If you see some potential for a conflict, try to make a big fire out of it.

Q:  I was a little surprised that there wasn't a formal response in the Times to this.  Is that naive?  Or maybe I was just hoping to see‑-

Hamburg:  We considered whether to do it or not and decided not to.  Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  felt particularly that it was a very irrational piece and that we oughtn't to dignify it by a response.  Whether that was wise or not, we just felt we don't want to get into a continuing fight with her.  She's had her say, and we have lots of opportunity to have our say all over the world in other forums.  We decided to just let it go.

Q:  Could I ask you specifically about her criticism regarding the omission of the Middle East in the final report?

Hamburg:  Wrong.  Factually wrong.  One of the earliest international meetings was held in Jerusalem.  One of the first monographs, called "The International Security Architecture of the Middle East" [Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East], co-authored by an Israeli and a Jordanian, two brilliant guys, unprecedented, a major statement on Middle East security, collaborative between an Israeli and a Jordanian, so a major publication and a major meeting in the Middle East, as well as other things.  Jane Holl XE "Holl, Jane E."  had planned and has since done a week-long follow-up in Israel.  Furthermore, a very distinguished Israeli scientist we had commissioned to do a worldwide study -- these are all listed in the report, Alex [Alexander] Keynan XE "Keynan, Alexander" , a report on efforts in the Middle East and during the Cold War, the role of the scientific community in preventing deadly conflict.  So that there are a whole bunch of Middle East connections.  She has covered Middle East and evidently had a chip on her shoulder about it, but it was an atrocious error and could have been checked so easily, either by more carefully looking through the book or asking Jane Holl XE "Holl, Jane E."  or calling me, "What are you doing about the Middle East?"

Q:  That would have been an interesting formal response to have made, perhaps, on that point alone.

Hamburg:  Probably.  Probably.  It might have been sensible.  In that format of the book review section, if you get a response in at all, it's very brief, and then the author of the article has the last world, so that given the level of distortion in the article earlier, Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  and I felt that the chances are that her last word would again be some kind of distortion.  And what do you do then?  You can try and go back and back and back and back and back.  We decided when somebody is so sort of angry and capable of distorting as she was, that there isn't really the opportunity for a very meaningful exchange.  It may be the wrong judgment, but that's what we decided.

Q:  As one of the themes of this project, I'm interested in exploring criticisms of foundations and foundations' efforts.  I was struck by her remark that it seemed that at the conference where the report was launched, there were few, if any, challenging questions and that she herself had a difficult time finding critics of the commission, she feels because so many of the people there have a stake in Carnegie and in grants.  This is one of those criticisms that floats around foundations.

Hamburg:  I know, and yet the criticism was a grotesque distortion.  Very few of the people there had any Carnegie connection.  There were many experts on international relations, and there were, I don't know, a small proportion at some time or other had a grant from Carnegie.  In any case, I was leaving office, so I would have nothing to say about making grants.  The idea that they would be there fawning over us because they were grantees or probable grantees, in the first place, it puts the worst possible construction on the people who were there, a very distinguished audience.  In any case, it's simply inaccurate with respect to the vast majority of those people, who had no Carnegie connection at all.  You know, that's a kind of cliché, it seems to me, that people can easily say about foundations.


I think she was trying to establish herself as a critic of foundations.  Can that phenomenon occur?  Of course.  Are people overly nice to foundation presidents and other foundation officers?  Yes, they are, if they hope to get grants.  But she had no evidence for that.  It was an assumption on her part about that particular occasion.  There were several hundred people there, and we have a list of who they were, and a small Carnegie commission.


But it is a problem that I've long been aware of and discussed with staff frequently.  But when you put out something like this, however, having foundation support for something like this is in no way a protection from criticism.  It just isn't at all.  There are just so many points of view and so many sensitivities and so many gunners out there that there's virtually no protection from criticism by virtue of foundation sponsorship.

Q:  Have you received, yourself, any criticism about the final report or any of the reports generated by the commission?  "Criticism" in the most positive sense of the word, actually.

Hamburg:  Wherever we've had meetings on it, there have been really good discussions.  You can't give lectures at places like Berkeley and Stanford and MIT and Harvard and the University of Michigan, and so on, and not have very serious, probing, hard-hitting questions, comments.  I haven't seen it to be particularly different here.  I'd say overwhelmingly the sense I have in these meetings is, this is something we have to think more about and we have to work on.  It's very important in principle.  It's very hard to do.  How can you do this?  How can you do that?  How can you do the other?  The practical implementation of an orientation that most intelligent people recognize has been neglected and needs to be addressed, but there's no dearth of criticism.  It's mostly been very constructive.


An interesting feature is that her article elicited no hostile letters.  I thought sure that we would have hostile letters, "How could you do this?" you know.  None.  Zero.  So that it didn't resonate.  I had a number of calls and letters from friends who were very supportive and kind, but I guess that's what you expect from your friends.  I was really surprised that it didn't strike a chord.  She appealed to several, I would say, strains of prejudice against foundations or against the prevention approach, and it didn't resonate.  Neither Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  nor I nor the commission officers got a single hostile letter.  Although Jane's not mentioned it to me, the office in Washington may have gotten a few.  Nor did Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" , as far as I know.  So it didn't touch that chord out there.


Her piece is mainly nasty.  It's not a serious piece, in my judgment.  It doesn't raise fundamental issues.  We've had really fundamental issues raised in meetings at the Foreign Policy Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, these various universities I've mentioned.  I mean good thoughtful responses.  Positive.  The response is overwhelmingly positive, but how can you do this or how can you do that, or aren't there dangers of well-meaning actions being counterproductive.  Really serious, thoughtful.  Hers simply isn't like that.

Q:  Are any of those discussions being videotaped?  I'm wondering about the further dissemination of the work of the commission.  It would be fascinating to view or at least to read some of that give-and-take discussion that's going on around the world.

Hamburg:  I'm not aware of any videotaping.  There may be some later on.  I think probably some of these sessions are audiotaped, I would guess, but I'm not aware of any videotaping.

Q:  What is the commission up to these days?  Did you receive something like three and a half million dollars or so for the next year?

Hamburg:  For the next two years.

Q:  For the next two years.

Hamburg:  For the next two years to complete it.

Q:  What are the plans?

Hamburg:  We are having a sort of mini-retreat on Thursday of this week -- that is, the commission staff and a few of the New York staff and me -- to make our priorities for that.  There will be a continuation of meetings in different parts of the world to explain what we've said and why, and try to stimulate better ideas.  Of course, I mentioned to you already, the highest priority is to complete these forty plus books and reports.  About half of them are published.  There were three, actually, came out last week in a sort of spurt, but the other half are being edited or aren't quite finished.  So we have to finish that set, most of which will be commercially published by Rowman & Littlefield, and in any case will be available for many years to come.


I don't think policy will change so fast.  My guess is that for the next twenty years or so, that this sort of two-foot shelf of commission publications will be a major, perhaps the major, resource on preventing deadly conflict.  So we want to get the publications out.  There will be a number of events on particular publications.  Like I was at Stanford last week planning an event.  We don't know where we'll hold it yet, but it was a report on environment and conflict generated by a group of, on one hand, environmental scientists at Stanford, on the other hand a group of international security, international relations experts at Stanford.  So I was talking with them about what would be the best way to get their rather complex set of messages understood.  So some of the individual reports will have separate meetings, as we have had, on that Middle East report that I mentioned to you and one on power sharing and some others.  There will be some general meetings in different parts of the world, on the report as a whole, and some special meetings on salient topics, and then there will be a lot of op-ed pieces and other articles, assuming anybody would be willing to publish them, short versions.


There's one in the mail this week having to do with India.  One of our special reports called The Price of Peace [: Incentives and International Conflict Prevention].  It's on inducements.  You know, the carrots and sticks.  The carrots are inducements; the sticks are sanctions.  We had a special report on each, sanctions and inducements.  There are case studies in the inducements chapter, and one is about India.  So in view of that timeliness, there is an op-ed piece that's being submitted to some major papers about that case study in that report, and we'll do more of that sort of thing, particularly as they are timely.  A number of the reports have case studies, and you can take the concepts and techniques of prevention and apply them in a particular case.


It's very hard to boil it down to op-ed length.  I mean, all these things are complicated and multifaceted.  It's not a magic bullet.  It's not like saying, "Go get your immunization."  Of course, that was complicated, too, in its origin.  I remember well the origins of the polio vaccine, and it takes a lot of complicated stuff to get to the point where you finally have a straightforward application.  But anyway, those are some of the kinds of activities that will be going on worldwide.


There are a lot of meetings with units of government, our government and others, and units of nations and regional organizations to encourage them and help them institutionalize.  Like we have a meeting coming up, I think it's week after next, with one of the key units in the State Department that's concerned with policy planning.  Madeleine Albright XE "Albright, Madeleine"  has asked them to look at this and see which strands they might want to pursue in the next couple of years, and to the extent we could be of any help to them, we will try to do that.  So that's another kind of activity.


There are many different kinds of activities.  The final one that I want to mention, which is of great importance to me, is to create a university network, a network of cooperating universities, at first probably just about ten or twelve, but at least one on each continent, a worldwide network, electronic communication.  Probably the first couple of years, an annual meeting of a representative from each university so that they can help each other.  The ticket of entry would be to teach a course on preventing deadly conflict.  But there's been so much interest that I think the attractiveness of this would be a worldwide cooperative effort.  They do a lot of teaching anyway, and why not a certain amount of focus on this set of critical issues?  So I hope that will come to pass.  In addition, we are trying to institutionalize this viewpoint by encouraging government, the UN, and NGOs to set up small dedicated units or special programs on prevention.

Q:  Dr. Hamburg, you seem as busy as ever.  Are you enjoying this phase of your career?

Hamburg:  Yes.  I think I'm at least as busy as I've ever been, and I do have a sense of mission about this and am enjoying it very much.  The balance that I've not achieved, which concerns me some, is between other activities and the commission follow-up, which has been all-consuming -- there's been so much interest, both at the governmental level and in non-governmental organizations and universities -- there's been so much interest that it's been all-consuming.  Cy Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  is in China now, partly to talk with them about the commission.  We're trying to divide up, he and I and other commission members.  We don't all go everywhere.  We just have a few people who go to any particular place, certain ones go to Japan and certain ones to Britain.  There are certain governments that are particularly strongly interested, and we have to figure out -- for example, last week I had a very good meeting with the ambassador of Sweden to the United States.  It's clear that the government of Sweden is one that wants to pursue this theme.


So I have to figure out how much travel I do in that connection and how much energy I've preserved to do writing of a more idiosyncratic sort.  I have a plan to write a personal book on human conflict.  I don't know if anybody will want to publish it, but I've written bits and pieces of it.  I have a book-length set of papers that I wrote five years ago.  Some of those I channeled into the commission.  A lot of those are still unused, and I have to decide what I want to do with them.  It would take a lot of work to make it a real book and not just a book-length manuscript.  But I want to do that.


And then my wife and I want to collaborate on a book about certain aspects of children and youth, which probably will also bear on these issues: education for conflict resolution and learning to live together, violence prevention in youth, those kinds of issues.  That's probably a book that we'd do together.  And how I balance that out with the commission follow-up, I really don't know, but I'm going to try.

Q:  I just know that you will.  I know that you will.  I would like to ask you -- it's a little bit of a shift in gear, not much -- any thoughts about the transition from your presidency to Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" 's?

Hamburg:  Well, it looks like, so far as I can tell, the major themes will continue, with major variations, to be sure.  There will be a lot of innovations.  But he has publicly and privately committed himself to continue Andrew Carnegie's great themes of peace and education.  The peace theme had diminished some before I came, from Andrew Carnegie's time.  It had waxed and waned, but the education part had been pursued more vigorously, the peace part less so.  In my time, the peace and education themes have been roughly co-equal.  He's committed himself to that kind of roughly co-equal follow-up to peace and education, which I think is wonderful.  I believe at the June board meeting, which is about a month from now, they will sort out the policy guidelines and move ahead.  I have high hopes.

Q:  Thank you very much, Dr. Hamburg.

Hamburg:  Well, my pleasure.  Thank you.

[END OF SESSION]

	TTTPRIVATE 

	Session Seven

	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg     
	Date:  June 17, 1998

	Interviewer:  Brenda Hearing     
	New York, New York

	
	


Q: Today is the seventeenth of June 1998, and we are back with Dr. David Hamburg for his seventh interview session for the Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project.

Hamburg:  Wow.

Q:  Yes, indeed.  Back in the offices of [the Carnegie Commission on] Preventing Deadly Conflict, here at Carnegie.  Good morning to you.

Hamburg:  Morning.

Q:  We talked about the possibility today of looking, at least in part, at Carnegie's activities in Africa during your tenure.  I must say that I think that anyone looking at your career is going to be very interested in your interest and involvement in Africa for many years now, in all different kinds of ways.  I mean, it's fascinating to me.  From the primate research to the hostage crisis, to Carnegie's own philanthropic activities in Africa.  So that's my preface.  You want to just -- 

Hamburg:  Well, I came to Carnegie, of course, with an interest in developing countries, generally, particularly Africa, but developing countries generally.  I can't pin down exactly when that began, although certainly I was active in the World Health Organization [WHO] in the sixties and seventies, I guess concomitant with the work in Africa.


But anyway, it came to be a worldwide view of most of the world's population living in developing countries, and most of those countries being, at that time, really very poor, and it seemed to me then, and still does now, that we in the affluent and technically advanced countries could not afford to ignore the great majority of the world's population living in poor countries and struggling to find ways to develop. How they developed seemed to me very important, not only their economic development, but their social development as well.  Would it be a democratic development?


We talked before about the hostage episode.  I came more or less straight from that to the Institute of Medicine, and established at the Institute of Medicine an international health activity which continues to the present day there, and tried generally to strengthen the Academy's role in international matters, particularly with respect to developing countries.  It's fascinating, just a few weeks ago, the current president of the Academy, Bruce Alberts XE "Alberts, Bruce" , a really great president of the Academy, asked me to come and make a presentation to the governing board of the National Research Council about expanding further the international activities at the Academy, and I'm now going on a committee at the Academy to help them do that.


So all I have to say is that it reverberates over much of my adult life, and is still very much the center of my attention.  So when I came here with a head of steam about those matters, I thought that -- basically my view, Brenda, has been that, you know, we humans are a single, highly interdependent worldwide species, getting more interdependent all the time, and in a way it was a biological view, you know, how we evolved as a species, spread through the world, but still tied together, and now getting, with the advances in transportation, communication, getting more tightly bound together than ever before.  And so it seemed to me, both for humanitarian and for self-interested reasons, that the United States ought to be very attentive to the developing countries.


Now, when I came to Carnegie, there had to be choices and priorities, and so I felt that we should do a little something in Mexico and perhaps somewhat more in Africa.  And maybe I'll say why.  I thought both Mexico and Africa were important intrinsically, but also for us in this country because we had large minority populations.  Our two largest minority populations at that time, and probably still, are Africa and Mexico, although, of course, the Asian influx now has changed that mix somewhat.


Now, on Mexico, there was a book around that time by Alan Riding XE "Riding, Alan"  of the New York Times called Distant Neighbors [: Portrait of the Mexicans], and I thought that title captured the essence of a peculiar neglect that we had had, in terms of understanding Mexico, and I was trying to find ways in which we could take just a couple of activities at Carnegie that could make a contribution toward American understanding of, and collaboration with, Mexico.


Now, in making those priorities, I was guided by the view of development that had evolved for me in what I think was then a somewhat idiosyncratic view.  I think it's more widely accepted now.  I think of it as knowledge, skill, and freedom, as the essential ingredients for development, and that the knowledge comes primarily from research and development, the skill comes primarily from education and training, and the freedom comes through building democratic institutions.  Now, many of the developing countries were weak on all of those at that time.  Very little R&D, very little education and training, and rather fragile, if any, democratic institutions.  So I thought we ought to do what we could to at least symbolize the significance of those three frontiers, and select a few ways of fostering knowledge, skill, and freedom in Mexico and a few African countries.


We had a retreat, and in my early years, we had board retreats every year, the board and the professional staff.  I think it was 1985, we met in San Antonio, Texas, and my notion was that we could try to do two things.  One, to give our board and staff some insight into the Mexican-American community, which, in some ways, was more fully developed in San Antonio than anywhere else.  Henry [G.] Cisneros was the mayor.  The Mexican-American community had developed a middle class.  There was still a great deal of poverty, but many of the leaders, professional communities and business communities, were Mexican-American.  So I thought it would be a very interesting mix to see that.  We would do some site visits.  And I may say, parenthetically, that some grants evolved at that time that continued over ten or fifteen years, to develop some key functions in the Mexican-American community there.


At the same time, I thought we would try to get some insight into Mexico, our distant neighbor, just a short distance from San Antonio, and toward that end, I invited my friend, Guillermo Soberón XE "Soberón, Guillermo" .  Dr. Soberón was at that time the Minister of Health in Mexico and a leader in the World Health Organization, highly respected internationally, had been on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin medical school for some years, and went back to Mexico.  A good scientist, a proud public health person, and a fine human being.  He came, despite huge responsibilities as Minister of Health and worldwide responsibilities, he came and spent several days with us, the full retreat, and interacted wonderfully with Carnegie board and staff, as well as the rather touching fact that the Mexican-American leadership at that meeting had not met the several Mexican leaders we invited, and it was a lovely encounter.


While Soberón was still Minister of Health, he began to plan a Mexican foundation for health.  Part of his rationale was to bring back Mexican citizens like himself who were in the United States, or some in Europe, mostly United States, to help them come back to make contributions within Mexico; in other words, to mitigate somewhat the effects of the brain drain.  This is a serious problem for virtually all the developing countries, that a lot of their most talented and well-educated people go abroad and don't come back.  So that was part of his rationale, and part of it was to do that by stimulating research and research training within Mexico, because the kind of people he wanted to get would be attracted by that opportunity.  Those opportunities had been very lacking in Mexico up to that point.


So we did some thinking together of how that might go, and then he invited me to come down and keynote a big meeting in Mexico City, in which he got the then-President of Mexico, [Miguel] de la Madrid [Hurtado XE "Hurtado, Miguel de la Madrid" ], and a number of business leaders as well as government leaders, intellectual leaders.  I don't know, I would guess there must have been a thousand people there for a lunch and afternoon meeting, to unveil the concept of this foundation.  And I gave a keynote.  My only regret was that I didn't speak Spanish.  President de la Madrid spoke and Soberón, of course, and it was a way of getting Mexican leaders across different sectors engaged in the significance of this foundation.  But not only this foundation; he also wanted to stimulate the idea of creating foundations in Mexico in other fields.  He felt that the business community and government acting together could give a big boost to philanthropy in Mexico, and some of that has happened.  Indeed, the Mexican Foundation for Health has become a model for developing countries all over the world.  Pat [Patricia L.] Rosenfield XE "Rosenfield, Patricia L."  has followed that with great interest.


So then after that event, we convened a meeting at Carnegie of foundation presidents and other foundation officers, in which Dr. Soberón and his colleagues could explain what they were trying to do, what kind of internal support was being generated in Mexico, and why they also would need U.S. help to do it.  Out of that meeting several of the foundations did take an interest and contributed in the early years, and I believe some are still contributing.


But anyway, it was certainly a big boost for American foundations to get that going, and it has been a source of modest but quite significant grantmaking in Mexico to stimulate research in biomedicine and public health, to attract Mexican scientists and health professionals back, and it also is a kind of integrative force within the scientific and health community of Mexico to have this foundation that makes grants to different institutions.  At first, someone else, a very able man, was running it for him, and then unfortunately he died, and when Soberón left the Ministry, when the president finished his term, he then became the president of the foundation himself, and he remains so to the present time.


One odd story about the meeting we convened here of the foundation executives with Dr. Soberón.  When I left the meeting, feeling quite good about it, I went back to my office, and somebody said, within a few minutes, that there had been a gigantic earthquake in Mexico City, and I went racing out to find him, to see if I could let him know and be of any help.  I knew he would want to go back immediately.  That was the day of the great earthquake.


But anyway, just to be brief about it, the other main thing we did vis-à-vis Mexico, because we couldn't do much, was a border health project, and it was border health that really involved education.  It involved institutions on both sides of the border.  What we tried to do, with a modest amount of grantmaking activity, was to tie institutions on both sides of the border together, and a lot of our theme was education for health, getting the population to understand, first of all, in respect to maternal and child health, to the health of children and youth -- a very, very young population there -- but also some of the problems of environmental toxicity that are very severe along the border.  We got that up and running and interested other foundations, some of which I think are still involved.  At least there was a period of years there were several major foundations involved in border health activities that had the tendency to tie education and health together.


So those two Mexican activities essentially constituted a program for us.  I think they were intrinsically interesting and worthwhile.  They led to a number of useful publications, and they did draw other American foundations into it and they got some cooperative activities between U.S. colleges and universities and counterparts in Mexico.  So it was a small program, but I hope it had some strategic value.

Q:  That's terrific.  Was the activity in Mexico, am I correct in thinking that was a first for Carnegie, to be operating there?

Hamburg:  It was.

Q:  Were there any concerns on your part about the charter of the Corporation itself?

Hamburg:  There was a problem that arose initially: could we work anyplace outside the British Commonwealth?  So I asked Joseph Califano XE "Califano Jr., Joseph A." , who I had brought in as our attorney, to interpret the charter, to look at it and see how it would apply to anyplace in the developing world, such as Mexico, which, as far as we could tell, had never been a British colony.  He gave us a long, thoughtful legal opinion, which essentially said we couldn't do direct services in places that had not been part of the British Commonwealth.  Of course, we had no intention of doing direct services, but as long as there were feedback loops to the United States and/or British Commonwealth countries, for the benefit of the people of the United States and British Commonwealth countries, it was consistent with the charter.  So long as that was the case, that we were indeed justified in working anywhere.


The same considerations applied to the Soviet Union vis-à-vis the Cold War.  Although we never made grants to institutions in the Soviet Union, we certainly made grants to American institutions that worked with Soviet counterparts.  In that case, it was just laughingly easy to say it was in the interest of the people of the United States not to be destroyed and not to blow up the world, so that was rather simple.


In a case like Mexico, we felt it was very important that the results of the work be available widely in the United States and in the British Commonwealth countries.  Well, a lot of it was published in scientific journals, which are inherently worldwide, so that was very simple.  But we also stimulated a certain amount of other publication of broader interest, beyond the scientific community or the health professional community in this country, so that was the way the problem was tackled.  But if we had tried to, if we'd wanted to do direct services in Mexico, we simply couldn't have done it.  But this way, with the publications and all, it was not really a problem.

Q:  Your comment about the keynote address, that your only regret was that you didn't speak Spanish, reminded me that Avery [B.] Russell XE "Russell, Avery B." , I believe, did a lot of translating of some of the work of this foundation, Mexican Health Foundation, from Spanish into English, to advance the -- 

Hamburg:  Avery Russell XE "Russell, Avery B."  did wonderful work on that and also on our African [program].  She was very, very contributory to clarifying for people in this country what we were doing in Mexico and in Africa.


Well, shall we move to Africa?

Q:  I was just going to say, let's use that as our entrée.

Hamburg:  Okay.  Well, when I came here, the Corporation's earlier activities in Africa had been largely closed down by my predecessor, Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." .  He explained to me that he was very disappointed that the African countries, by and large, had not made the transition to democracy in the way that he had expected after independence, and that he found it very frustrating.  But he concentrated on South Africa, and his only request to the board in his final statement to the board when I took on the presidency was that in some way we continue in South Africa.  I thought that was a very reasonable and constructive suggestion, because South Africa had not only the intrinsic substantive importance of an enormous amount of human suffering as well as human potential, but it had the symbolic significance, as I said later in a number of speeches and writings, that if a democratic transformation could occur peacefully in South Africa, that it could occur anywhere, that this could give great hope throughout the world, to those who were watching South Africa.  And I thought we ought to pursue that.


We had two main points of entry.  One was the development of public-interest law, which had been fostered by a staff member, David [R.] Hood XE "Hood, David R." , under Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." 's tutelage.  David stayed a while during my term and then went on to other activities.  But it was a very interesting effort to create public-interest law.  There was particularly one center in a university, under John Dugard of University of Witwatersrand, and then one more practice-oriented center, and these were run by distinguished white lawyers.  Then later there was a rural one run by a distinguished black lawyer.  It was, in effect, an effort to test how far would the judicial system go in protecting the rights of nonwhite South Africans.  The protections afforded to the whites, could that be stretched, could you push at that frontier?  And it turned out that to some degree you could, that some of the more farsighted and courageous judges interpreted the law in ways that would broaden its protections to a wider range of South African people.


So I think that was fruitful, and was pursued on a larger scale by the Ford Foundation, and, of course, much larger assets, and headed by Frank [Franklin A.] Thomas XE "Thomas, Franklin A."  at that time, who was an expert on South Africa in any event.  And Ford did very good work there.  But my impression is, it was Carnegie's stimulus to the development of public-interest law, prior to my time, that we continued for some years during my presidency, that was, in fact, fruitful.  For example, one of the Carnegie grantees, Arthur Chaskalson XE "Chaskalson, Arthur" , is today, I believe, the equivalent of a Chief Justice of our Supreme Court.  That, by the way, is a general story, that people involved in Carnegie activities, many of them are today leaders in the new democratic South Africa.


The second thing was the Inquiry, the Carnegie Inquiry [into Poverty in Southern Africa], which was really a big effort.  One of the issues that was partially resolved before I came on board, but got definitively resolved in my time and with my strong backing, was the question of whether you should place the Inquiry to the extent possible in the black community from the outset, or whether you should do it in the white community with a certain amount of -- as much outreach as possible.  These are not really dichotomous choices, but there was a matter of difference of emphasis in that.  There were some who felt that it just wasn't practical to have a deep engagement of black South Africans; it would make it too vulnerable to the government shutting it down.  And others who felt that we had to take that risk because for the long term it would have a much greater impact if black South Africans were a part of it from the start.

Q:   Let me ask you, who were you consulting with at this time to make these kinds of choices?  Were these internal discussions --

Hamburg:  Working a lot with our grantees and friends in South Africa.  Francis Wilson XE "Wilson, Francis" , the initial director of it, who did a superlative job, was extremely significant for me, and then, later, Mamphela Ramphele XE "Ramphele, Mamphela" , who now is the vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, became extremely significant.  And other South Africans.  Desmond Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond"  was, and still is to this day, an extremely important guide to that territory and to other territories for me.  We've become close friends over the years.  I'd say those were the three South Africans that I consulted the most.


We had some U.S. experts on South Africa.  We convened some early meetings of consultants.  We had one very interesting meeting in which I got a group of  in-depth experts on South Africa together with a group of in-depth experts on the principles of conflict resolution and violence prevention, in about a fifty-fifty mix, and we met here for a day and tried to see how could you take the concepts and themes of conflict resolution and map them onto the South African situation.  But that was the kind of thing we did, and so there were both American experts and South Africans involved in making those decisions.


But Francis Wilson XE "Wilson, Francis"  was the guiding spirit.  I trusted his judgment very, very much.  I went there in 1984 for a sort of preliminary airing of the Inquiry.  It was an international meeting, but primarily oriented toward explaining to South Africans what the Inquiry was trying to do, and I took, I think, a group of seven of us went, board and senior staff, and Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." , who was emeritus.  It was a very intensive experience, as we went not only to the conference, bringing out the first phase of the Inquiry, but also we went to a forced resettlement camp, one of their sort of concentration camps, where they dumped vast numbers of people in utterly marginal conditions.   There were no gas chambers and the like, but these were conditions in which the hold on life was so tenuous that the death rate was palpably extremely high, and the gross malnutrition and disease was visible to the naked eye.


There was some effort by the South African embassy here to intimidate us from going to that awful place.  They called me in advance and basically warned me that they couldn't guarantee our safety.  I said to them I took it as a threat from the government and would immediately notify the Secretary of State.  Having dealt with some African, shall I say, terrorist situations before, I felt a little more secure than I might have otherwise about that.  And I did notify the State Department, and the South Africans then backed off, but it was a scary experience.  It was a horrible place.


But we tried to get out in the country.  One of the things we did was to visit a village to which Ramphele XE "Ramphele, Mamphela"  had been banned, and that's where I first met her, and was tremendously taken with her ingenuity and dedication.  I mean, just with no resources, she'd made child care and health care facilities in that community, and I could see she was highly intelligent and courageous and very much backed Francis Wilson XE "Wilson, Francis" 's efforts to get her to the university, at first in a very modest role, to reassure the government, and then, of course, she rapidly rose to co-chairmanship of the Inquiry with him.


But all that to say the '84 experience was very important.  Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L." , who was then the chairman of our board, submitted a beautiful written report, a very moving report, of what we saw and what our impressions were.  I gave a speech at that conference, which I wrote while we were there, which I found was a very emotional speech to give, but we were trying to clarify the significance of this enormously important activity.  There was an earlier Carnegie Inquiry in the twenties and thirties on poverty in South Africa.  It benefited greatly the Afrikaners, and then they became the dominant group.  We said they need to consider the rest of the people in South Africa.  And the Inquiry showed concrete ways in which that can be done.


A very good move that Francis Wilson XE "Wilson, Francis"  made was to organize task forces that involved leading blacks.  There was a task force on religion and poverty, chaired by Desmond Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond" , and there were task forces on education and poverty, health and poverty, commerce and poverty, you name it.  But every one of those task forces had black, white, brown, a whole gamut of skin colors that the South Africans made such a to-do about.  You know, all their elaborate racial classification and so on.  But it did give distinguished, gifted, black South Africans like Desmond Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond"  an additional forum, and it gave younger black South Africans an opportunity for research training, particularly in the behavioral and social sciences, but to a certain extent in other fields as well.


So there were many publications that came out of it.  Avery [Russell XE "Russell, Avery B." ] did a great deal to help with those publications, and then the final volume, Uprooting Poverty.  And with that, we undertook a very active dissemination program in the United States and Europe and in South Africa.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Hamburg:  Along the way, as the Inquiry work became available, I tried to link Francis Wilson XE "Wilson, Francis"  and Desmond Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond"  and others from the Inquiry with American leadership, particularly in the U.S. government.  One of our trustees, John [C.] Whitehead XE "Whitehead, John C." , became the Deputy Secretary of State in the [Ronald W.] Reagan administration, and he had been interested in South Africa, to a certain extent, from his Carnegie experience.  In any case, he and I were good friends, so I kept him well informed and he took the initiative to organize a government commission on South Africa.  It came to be known as the Shultz Commission, because George Shultz XE "Shultz, George"  was the Secretary of State.  He persuaded George Shultz to set up such a commission.  I think it was an attempt to get the Reagan administration to reconsider its policies, which had not been terribly sympathetic with the democratic movement in South Africa, and I think it was very effective in shifting the attitude of the Reagan administration toward a more sympathetic interest.


I helped John Whitehead XE "Whitehead, John C."  put that commission together.  He asked me to serve on it, but I thought it would be better if the foundation president on it would be Frank Thomas XE "Thomas, Franklin A." , who is much more expert than I, and that Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L." , our board chair, should be on it, and she was, and she was a very active, conscientious, superb member.  So, indirectly, I think Carnegie's experience was helpful to our government in the establishment and conduct of the Shultz Commission.


Then with the Congress, I tried to foster contact between these leading South Africans and the information coming from the Inquiry with leaders in the Congress, in both houses and both parties, and there were members on both sides of the aisle who took a sort of growing interest.  I remember that on the Democratic side, Senator [Edward M.] Kennedy XE "Kennedy, Edward M."  took a great interest.  On the Republican side, Senator [Richard G.] Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G."  took a great interest, and Senator Kassebaum XE "Kassebaum, Nancy L." , on the Republican side, took a great interest.  I tried to see to it that people who really knew that situation in South Africa would meet with them or their staffs in a continuing way and tried to be a catalyst.


I recently was reminiscing with a man named Greg [Gregory B.] Craig XE "Craig, Gregory B." , who is now the chief of the Office of Policy Planning in the State Department.  I met with him a few weeks ago about the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.  But he was Senator Kennedy's man for Africa at that time and came to visit with me in New York and tried to understand what was going on and how the Congress could be helpful.  So we tried to help them get the facts straight not only about what was wrong, but what were the opportunities for constructive change in South Africa.


So, on the dissemination side, besides the publication, we had various conferences on uprooting poverty.  We put out Carnegie Quarterlies.  Then we had a photo exhibit, in which Avery was instrumental, photographs that had first been shown at the 1984 conference in Cape Town.  I must say, by the way, that University of Cape Town was terrific.  They provided a wonderful base.  Stuart Saunders XE "Saunders, Stuart" , who was then the vice chancellor, protected the Inquiry, connected with his own government about it.  They were able to work with remarkable freedom, given the circumstances.


I sometimes say I had the honor of being denounced by P.W. Botha XE "Botha, P.W."  in the Parliament, but that isn't exactly right.  When I made that speech at the conference, he made some remarks in Parliament, I guess, the next day, that were in the papers, to the effect that, "Dr. Hamburg probably means well, but he doesn't understand the situation in South Africa," and basically saying, in whatever language it is, "Outside agitators don't help the situation.  We have our own problems to face and we'll do it in our own way," and so forth.


But I think there's no doubt that in the end, the ideas and constructive suggestions of the Inquiry gave a sense of hope within South Africa, a sense of concrete paths that could be followed.  Also that the Inquiry plus grantmaking by Carnegie and Ford and the U.S. government, too, helped in building a civil society in South Africa and made a big difference in the transition.


One other point about South Africa, then I'll stop on that, before we go to the rest of Africa.  There was a time -- when I went in '84, I met Reverend Allan [A.] Boesak XE "Boesak, Allan A." , who was a young, brilliant young leader, kind of a firebrand in a way, but unquestionably a person who had some of the attributes of Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond"  and even some of the attributes of Martin Luther King [Jr.].  He later, in later years, had some difficulties, but he was an inspiring speaker and courageous man.  He got arrested.  I guess it was a year or so -- it must have been 1985, I would guess.  May have been '86, but a year or two after the conference in South Africa, when I first met him.  After that, I saw him when he came to the United States and kept in touch.  He got arrested, and that was a time, you know, when very bad things happened to people like that in South African jails.  They slipped on a banana peel and fractured their skull, you know.  People died or disappeared.


So I got quite alarmed.  I called down there, spoke to his wife and some others, and there was no organized effort to get him free.  So I asked my colleagues, I guess primarily Barbara Finberg XE "Finberg, Barbara D." , to take over the running of the foundation for a little while, while I devoted full time to organizing an international network to get him free.  What I did was to get a set of distinguished university presidents and foundation presidents to agree on a joint statement.  I needed some kind of platform, more than what I could say alone.  I drafted a statement, which we worked over.  My recollection is, it was the presidents of Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia [University], Princeton [University], maybe a couple of others.  I forget exactly.  And the presidents of the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.  I think those were the only two, besides us, who were active in South Africa at that time.  And I made various calls.  As luck would have it, we were able to get excellent editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post, based on the statement we'd put out, and a fair amount of press coverage in the international press about Boesak's case.


It suddenly became an international concern.  It lit up the sky for the South African Government, that the world was watching, and if anything bad happened to him, they would be held responsible.  It was the same principle as when they tried to threaten me about our visiting this forced resettlement camp, the notification to them that they would be held responsible for anything bad that happened.  He was shortly thereafter freed, and he thought that our intervention had something to do with it.  I'd like to believe that it did.  At least it didn't do any harm.  It may have done some good.


I was impressed when that happened, and we had a group of outstanding university and foundation presidents.  It seemed a pity to just let that drop.  So I organized, for a year or two, a foundation-university consortium on South Africa, and we had a series of meetings in which I brought counterparts from South Africa, like Stuart Saunders XE "Saunders, Stuart"  from University of Cape Town, and Jake Gerwal XE "Gerwal, Jake" , who was then the vice chancellor of the University of Western Cape and is now, I believe, [Nelson] Mandela's chief of staff.  We went right away, of course, into the black community.


So we had leading educators from South Africa meeting with American university and foundation presidents.  We enlarged the group, and the result was that some additional foundations, like Kellogg and [Henry J.] Kaiser [Family Foundation], moved into South Africa, and some additional universities became engaged in educational activities for South Africans, beyond anything that had been done before.  That was a very gratifying experience.  It was done in a very low key and, I think, very professionally.


I was rather touched when Norman Brown XE "Brown, Norman" , the outgoing president of Kellogg, a couple years ago came to visit me -- this was years after the event -- to thank me for facilitating their entry into South Africa.  They did it very thoughtfully.  They're continuing to do superb work in South Africa.  Once they made up their mind, they really moved in.


At a later stage, I also facilitated the entry of the [C.S.] Mott Foundation, which is a large foundation based in Flint, Michigan, into South Africa and also into the former Soviet Union.  They even had a board meeting here in New York, in which I spoke to them and Frank Thomas XE "Thomas, Franklin A."  did about international activities, particularly South Africa.  So that was one of the things that we tried to do to help other foundations move into crucial international arenas.


Carnegie had an historic role of trying to facilitate the interest of other foundations in critical issues.  So the Boesak case became an opportunity to do that, and a number of programs were established that lasted for some years.  Some of them have continued.  Bill [William G.] Bowen XE "Bowen, William G." , who was the president of Princeton at that time, now the president of the Andrew [W.] Mellon Foundation, brought that interest to Andrew Mellon with him and has done some very good things at the foundation.  So that, in a few minutes, is what we tried to do in South Africa.

Q:  That's quite a brilliant compression, Dr. Hamburg.  I have a question.  Did you have any doubts, when you attained the presidency here at Carnegie, about continuing the Corporation's activity in South Africa?

Hamburg:  I did.

Q:  Tell me about that, please.

Hamburg:  I think they were similar to my doubts about what we could do with the Soviet Union.  How can you get a foothold in an essentially closed, highly authoritarian society?  Is there anything useful you can do?  There was no question in my mind it was highly desirable.  The question was, was it feasible?  And I thought we ought to explore it actively enough in both cases for a couple of years, to see if we could get a handle anywhere.  Particularly when we made the trip in 1984 and were engaged with that conference and read a number of the early papers, and talked a lot with and met many more people in South Africa than I ever met before, I began to feel that, yes, we really could probably make a difference.


I would say both South Africa and the Soviet Union were largely terra incognita for American foundations.  How do you work in highly closed authoritarian and often violent societies?  What can you do there as an outsider?  Even the question, do you put your collaborators in those countries at great risk?  I'd have to say, in all candor, it worried me very much, the latter.  I think, to some degree, we did.  The strategy in both cases was to work with democratic reformers, but they were in some danger in their own societies.  Those were some of the concerns I had, but I finally felt, if these oftentimes brilliant and certainly courageous people wanted to push on with it, that we should help them.

Q:  Terrific.  How about the rest of Africa?

Hamburg:  The rest of Africa -- I revisited Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." 's judgment, and to his great credit, he never pushed me hard on it, although he made it clear why he got disillusioned with the rest of Africa.  My feeling was that the proper metric for the emergence of democracy in Africa, in South Africa or anywhere else, was not years, but decades or generations, and to measure from the time of independence, that it would certainly, it seemed to me, be decades or generations.


The great scholar of democracy, Robert [A.] Dahl, at Yale, says that the consolidation of democracy from the time of tangible beginnings is about twenty years, that you just cannot expect to see consolidation sooner than twenty years, and, of course, in many cases, it's taken much longer than that.  So that influenced my thinking, and, undoubtedly, my own experience in Tanzania and Kenya influenced my thinking, that where we saw evidence of thoughtful, dedicated people, trying, however slowly, to build democratic institutions, we ought to try to help them.


Now, I have to say, in all candor, there was some internal tension about that, when we moved away from South Africa, that is, when we extended beyond South Africa, because there was a curious, very well-meaning sensitivity, widely distributed, in the international community, particularly in the development community, that people with white skins didn't want to be in the position of pushing around people with black skins.  There had been all too much of that, and therefore maybe it was improper for us to urge sub-Saharan African countries to go democratic.


I never accepted that, and I used to say, "If it's good enough for us to urge white South Africans to go democratic, why shouldn't we urge black South Africans to go democratic?"  It seemed to me it was in the interest of the people of the sub-Saharan African countries to have some say in their own lives.  Why should it be good for black Africans to suffer from the tyranny of black leaders?  It didn't make any sense to me any more than it was for black Africans to suffer the tyranny of white leaders in South Africa.


In any case, we worked out, fundamentally, three strands of our involvement, because you do have to focus.  One was to help build democratic institutions in any way we could, although I confess I think that moved rather more slowly than I would have wished because of this internal concern about the propriety of it.

Q:  When you say "internal concern," internal here in the Corporation?

Hamburg:  Yes, in the Corporation.  Partly reflecting stuff that they were getting from African countries.  I mean, the African tyrants would hide behind this sovereignty issue, you know.  "We don't want outside interference from anybody, including other African countries, and we certainly don't want outside interference from sanctimonious whites."  Well, sure, but in that way, people like Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , who did enormous damage to their own people, were able to justify their position, and to some degree to scare off the development community.  The idea was, if you were going to help with development, just give the money to the government and walk away.  Well, that meant people like Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  would rip off most of it.  So it was a well-meaning but misguided history of the development community in general, in my opinion, of being not very explicit about building democratic institutions.


Our approach was very similar in South Africa and in the Soviet Union and in black Africa, that in their own way, not necessarily on a precisely American model, but in their own way, that we'd like to help them work toward the building of democratic governance for the well-being of all their people.  And so we would relate to democratic reformers.  So that was one strand.  What you would do would differ from place to place, depending on the opportunities -- who arose as a leader in the democratic community and what did they see as some way to get a handle on the problem in a particular country.


The second strand, which actually emerged very early, was the status and opportunities of women in Africa.  And when I say, in Africa, there were a few countries where we could work more or less effectively.  A particular point of entry was maternal mortality.  Early in my term, I'd been interested in that problem from my experience with the World Health Organization, and there was a certain ferment, and I don't remember what the sequence was, but we were one of the early parties, and UNICEF got interested, under Jim [James P.] Grant XE "Grant, James P." , who'd been involved with me at an earlier time when I was at the Institute of Medicine.  He was on my International Health Committee.  And WHO, of course, under Dr. [Halfdan] Mahler XE "Mahler, Halfdan" , who was a great leader, and somebody I had worked with many years.  And then they got the World Bank interested to help finance it.  So those were the main players: UNICEF, WHO, the World Bank and some foundations, and we were certainly early and active players in that.


We formulated a plan for reducing maternal mortality in Africa, which is horrendous, and way more than Asia or Latin America.  Yes, maternal mortality rates are high in developing countries, but nowhere so high as Africa.  So that was the point of entry, although I was always in some ways uncomfortable with it; that is, to take it as an end in itself.  Yes, it is important.  Of course you don't want women to die in childbirth, when most of it's preventable, but it seemed to me it was one branch on the tree of the low status and minimal opportunities provided to women in Africa.


That was also, at one time, sort of a delicate thing to talk about.  Maternal mortality, okay; that was the women who were dying.  But the larger issues of the subjugation of women in Africa, that was considered impolite to say.  But it was very severe.  It was wonderful when some distinguished black Africans, like Desmond Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond"  and General [Olusegun] Obasanjo XE "Obasanjo, Olusegun"  in Nigeria spoke out about the point.  Obasanjo, by the way, who was released the day before yesterday from prison in Nigeria, was a major grantee of ours.  He led something called the African Leadership Forum, and that maybe is a good illustration of how we could broaden the horizon.


I forget exactly how I met Obasanjo XE "Obasanjo, Olusegun" , but it was in the early eighties, shortly after I came here.  It may have been at an international meeting, but in any event, I was very impressed with him.  He was commanding general during the Nigerian civil war, at a time when a real genocide was expected, and he, far from that, not only restrained the forces that wanted to do genocide, but he showed great leadership toward reconciliation.  Then he became president and voluntarily stepped down, the only Nigerian leader, I believe, who's done that, stepped down to make way for civilian leadership.  So, an authentic democrat, in a deep sense.


So I helped him formulate this African Leadership Forum, whereby he would invite young emerging democratically-inclined reformers, democratically-inclined reformers from various countries, to his forum in Nigeria for a week-long seminar and a lot of interaction.  Some people from outside, but mainly a within-Africa, international democratic development kind of forum is what it was, and continued until he was arrested a couple of years ago and jailed by the tyrant who died a few weeks ago in Nigeria, [Sani] Abacha XE "Abacha, Sani" .  I'm very happy that he's freed.


But that was an example of the kind of grant that was really wonderful to make, because it fostered democratic reform, but it was primarily from inside Africa.  But anyway, people like Obasanjo XE "Obasanjo, Olusegun"  also spoke out on issues of the status of women in Africa.


You know, on our maternal mortality initiative, there was a very good model that I think can be useful for other problems in other places, and that was a university consortium.  We had some very fine people at Columbia, led by Dr. Allan Rosenfield XE "Rosenfield, Allan" , the dean of the School of Public Health, who knew a lot and cared a lot about these problems.  It was really his field.  He came out of an OB/GYN background, reproductive health, and so maternal mortality was familiar you know, he put together an expert team and they worked very, very well with the consortium of West African universities over about a decade.  A lot was learned and published and some put into practice in Africa.  So, operational research on maternal mortality, the factors that contribute to it, led to useful sound action in public health.


But as I say, I think that kind of consortium of U.S. and African universities, or, more broadly, universities from technically advanced countries and developing countries, can be quite fruitful.  But in that, as in most things, it takes leadership, and Allan was terrific in providing very sensitive leadership, very respectful of his African counterparts, certainly never demeaning or anything of that sort.


The third strand of our activity, besides building democratic institutions and enhancing the status of women, was science and technology for development.  What we wanted to do was to get the concept more widely understood in Africa about the need for a modicum of technical competence to participate in the emerging global economy.  At an earlier time, some Africans, quite a lot, had thought, well, that kind of stuff was a kind of a luxury, an expensive luxury of the technically advanced countries that they couldn't afford and didn't need.  But it seemed to me then, and now, that this kind of techno-economic globalization is taking place, that some way or other you'd have to have at least a decent minimum of technical competence in your population to participate, and some countries like India and Israel bet on that when they were very poor developing countries, right from an early stage after independence.


Well, I had an experience when I was working in Tanzania with my friend Professor Abdul Msangi XE "Msangi, Abdul" , who had been so helpful to me in developing our research there and in the hostage episode.  He was dean of science at University of Dar es Salaam, a wonderful man, who remains a good friend.  He wanted very much to have a marine biology institute.  There was no marine biology research unit on the Indian Ocean, on any side of the Indian Ocean at that time, and he got President Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  interested in it, and I tried to help him.  This was pre-Carnegie, of course, but I tried to help him with it any way I could.


There came a time when there was a vote of the Tanzanian cabinet on whether to support this marine biology institute, which, in all likelihood, could have been fully funded from outside for at least a decade.  And the cabinet split fifty-fifty, and Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  decided not to go ahead.  Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." 's a very decent man.  He felt he should not force something like that through if the cabinet was so divided.  The cabinet was divided, at least in part, on this rationale I mentioned to you, that it was an expensive luxury that they didn't need.


So, what we did mainly in that field was to support some centers or institutes that did analysis of science-related policy, be it health policy or economic policy, science policy.  In other words, for some of the African countries to have their own scientists and scholars who would think through, "What do we need here and how could we build the capacity that we need?"  It was that analytical capacity we tried to foster because we didn't have the money to build research institutes or make a green revolution, but we thought we could help with the intellectual capital necessary to build their institutions in the future.


We did a lot of that in collaboration with others, particularly the IDRC in Canada, on whose board I served for some years.  A marvelous institution, the International Development and Research Center, I would say probably the world's premier institution for supporting science and technology in developing countries.  A number of our grants were done jointly with them and some were done jointly with other foundations.


So those were the strands: building democratic institutions, enhancing the status of women, and building an analytical foundation for science and technology in development.  There were different configurations for different programs, but, in essence, a few countries in West Africa, a few countries in East Africa, wherever the opportunities were.

Q:  I really ought to know the answer to this question, but I'm not positive.  Did you appoint Pat Rosenfield XE "Rosenfield, Patricia L."  to head the HRDC program?  The African program is under the purview of the Human Resources in Developing Countries program, for the record here.  But was Ms. Rosenfield an appointment you made?

Hamburg:  Yes.  She was first the deputy director of it.  I appointed Dr. Adetokunbo [O.] Lucas XE "Lucas, Adetokunbo O."  from Nigeria, who I knew well from the World Health Organization.  He created and brilliantly ran the tropical disease research program of the World Health Organization for about a decade.  I was conducting a search, and I thought it would be very good indeed if I could find a distinguished African.  I wasn't hung up on it, but all things being equal, I thought it would be very desirable.


Initially I thought he wouldn't leave, but he was ready to leave.  He was actually a possibility, a very plausible candidate to be director of the World Health Organization when Mahler retired, but the African countries couldn't get their act together.  They never did put forward an African candidate.  Even Nigeria -- he was a Nigerian -- couldn't agree on a Nigerian candidate.  So we lucked out in that sense, and he came here and, I guess, ran it for about five years.


But Pat had been with him at WHO, and I had known her there, too.  He was biological sciences, public health, and she was social behavioral sciences, public health.  Different strands of contribution.  She ran the behavioral social science part of the tropical disease research work and had a marvelous international network in that field.  So she came here as his deputy, and then when he left to go back – no, he left to go to Harvard and then later retired to Nigeria.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO; BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE]

Hamburg:  Then I appointed her to succeed Lucas.  Their contacts from WHO and their knowledge from WHO was quite useful, although they had to adapt to a broader intellectual horizon than WHO.  However, WHO had sort of a broad view of what factors influence health.  It wasn't a huge jump.  It was bigger for Addie Lucas XE "Lucas, Adetokunbo O."  than it was for Pat.


It does also lead me to make an incidental remark that some of the existing staff -- perhaps board, but I think more staff -- were a little bit concerned that maybe I was going to try to convert this to a health foundation.  I thought that there should be a legitimate health component, both for children and youth and for developing countries, there's no serious question about that.  But I never intended to convert it into a health foundation, because there are several of those that do a very good job, and have large resources as foundations go.

Q:  You know, that reminds me, too -- you came to the presidency with such a clear set of concepts and directions that you wanted the foundation to take, and this, to me, is an interesting contrast in a way to the most recent transition from your presidency to that of Vartan Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" .  I was thinking about that this morning.  Not to say that one is better than another, to make a judgment about it, but it's another interesting evolution, I think, in the history of Carnegie's programmatic direction.  I don't know this for sure, but you may be a little unusual in coming into an office such as this, with such a very well formulated set of goals.

Hamburg:  Probably so.  Probably so.  It was a curious twist, for whatever reason.  See, I'd been on the board for a few years before I became president, and fundamentally, my colleagues on the board -- bless them -- drafted me.  I was stupid enough initially to say no, but partly because I thought, with a medical background, this is not a health foundation and it seemed inappropriate, and partly because I was deeply committed at Harvard, and my wife had a very good position there and I didn't want to uproot her.  A variety of reasons.


But part of their incentive to draft me was that they knew something about my interests and, for whatever reason at that time, they found those interests attractive.  They wanted me to pursue a certain kind of agenda.  Now, mind you, Brenda, I didn't have a high degree of specificity about how we could do what I thought was important to do, whether it was in developing countries or it was about the Cold War or it was about children and youth.  I had general directions, but I immediately set up working groups of board and staff and outside experts, as consultants.


We had like a continuous seminar my first year, and I did give a general direction to each of those.  For example, one of the early meetings that happens to be on my mind today, and I'll explain why, one of our early meetings was a group of board and staff and consultants on the potential contributions of behavioral and social sciences to avoiding nuclear war.  I had a feeling, for various reasons, that there were certain things that could be done that were potentially useful, and I set those out at the outset of the meeting.  I then had the meeting written up and we distributed it rather widely and got feedback.  I was trying to sharpen our approach.  Okay, if you think the behavioral social sciences could help to avoid nuclear war, what would be some of the most promising paths to go down?


The reason it's on my mind today is, we're having a visit at Carnegie.  Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" 's asked me to join him and some staff with Andrei [A.] Kokoshin XE "Kokoshin, Andrei A." , who is today the highest ranking civilian defense official in Russia.  He was the first chairman of the Russian committee on that subject.  We organized, through the National Academy of Sciences, a committee on contributions of behavioral social sciences in avoiding nuclear war, with a U.S. group and a Soviet group, and they would meet twice a year, once here and once there, like the arms control group did and like the crisis prevention group did.  In that group, Kokoshin XE "Kokoshin, Andrei A."  was the first chair, and he has risen through the ranks to be very close to [Boris N.] Yeltsin and a major contributor to the leadership of democratic Russia.  So that's why it's on my mind today, but that will be an illustration.


Yes, I thought that was an important way to go.  I thought it had something to do with crisis prevention, I thought it had something to do with leadership, but I didn't want to be, and didn't feel I could be, dogmatic about just what those contributions might be, and therefore wanted to get a mix of experts with our board and staff to think it through, and if -- we might have come to the conclusion -- in fact, with some cases we did -- that there was a blind alley, but in other cases, those activities in the first year, highlighted by a retreat of several days during the first year, helped us really to crystallize our thinking.


So, yes, I had an agenda, but to really work out how that agenda could most effectively be pursued was very much a joint effort of board, staff, and outside experts.

Q:  The Soviet Union brings to mind a question I've had for a while.  I am really interested in your relationship with Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .  Believe it or not, I think there was some discussion here a couple of years ago about the possibility of including him in the oral history project,  Now he is not, and I won't have the opportunity of a lifetime to meet this man, so I think I want to meet him through you, and know more about your working relationship and your personal relationship with him.

Hamburg:  Well, it has been certainly a very important experience for me, and I think it augmented the contribution that Carnegie could make during the Cold War, the fact that a relationship did form and continues to the present time.  It emerged through these joint study groups.  Part of my strategy early, as you may recall, was first to get clusters of U.S. scientists and scholars and other experts to work on avoiding nuclear war, and then once those were up and running, to establish or strengthen joint study groups with Soviet counterparts, mainly working very largely through their Academy of Sciences.  It was the only sort of decent shot we had.


I've mentioned the three most important of those already; that is, the arms control one and crisis prevention and then the behavioral social science one.  Later, there were others that dealt with Third World flashpoints and Eastern Europe, where the Cold War began, but that was after Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .  But these three were up and running before Gorbachev. 


The first one was the arms control one, in which I was very active personally from the beginning.  I had helped to get that going when I was at the Academy, still at the Institute of Medicine, in 1980, and had served on that while I was at Harvard, and then continued here.  After a while, I withdrew from it, because it looked like we might need to support them, and if we needed to support them, I ought not to be on it, and there could be an independent decision made whether they merited our support.


But anyway, that pattern we established with that committee, from 1980 onward, was to meet twice a year, once here, once there.  I made it a practice to meet with the chairman of their group privately, sometime during the meeting, to ask the question, "Are there other things we could be doing that would be useful?"  And particularly after I came to Carnegie, it struck me that there would be a real scope and latitude of other activities.


So it happened.  This was a piece of luck, really, that the arms control group met in Moscow just a few months after Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  came into power.  I knew virtually nothing about him, but the Russian chair -- I was not chair of the American group, but I was a member.  The Russian chair, Evgeniy [P.] Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P." , a distinguished physicist, he and I met during a break, or at the end of the first day's session, whatever it was, and I said to him something like this, that "I know you have a new leader.  I have no idea whether he is sympathetic to arms control or not, whether he is committed to the cause of peace or not, whether he's potentially friendly to the United States or not.  I hope he'll be all of those things, but I don't know anything about him.  For all I know, he might be a setback.  But I do know this, that new leaders like to have some distinctive contributions, sort of a distinct ecological niche that they can carve out, that, 'I as a leader have made this contribution.'"  And I said, "Perhaps while he's new in office, is there anything we could do, either through this arms control group or in some other way, that would be helpful?"


So Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  seemed quite interested.  He said, essentially, "Let me think about it and I'll get back to you tomorrow."


Now, what I didn't know then at all, was that he and his friend [Roald Z.] Sagdeyev XE "Sagdeyev, Roald Z." , also an eminent physicist, who is now a member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, that they had walk-in access to Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .  I didn't know that.  Gorbachev had had a set of advisors before he became the supreme leader, and utilized them very intensively afterwards.  What Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  did was to contact Gorbachev that evening, and when I came in the next morning, he was looking for me.  He was very excited.  He didn't tell me that he'd talked directly to Gorbachev at that time.  That he told me only later.  But in any event, he said he had a good idea and he had reason to believe that it would be well received and so on.


What grew out of that was the so-called Velham Project -- Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P." -Hamburg, later VEGA.  It had two phases.  The first phase was on how children learned to use computers in elementary school.  Later on, some years later, it sort of naturally went over into building electronic communication within the Soviet Union, among their behavioral science people and educators, and also their communication with counterparts in the United States, electronically, and became more methodological after a while.  But the focal point in the early years was how young children can learn to utilize computers in education.


I told Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  quite frankly that I would need to run it by the people in our government because I didn't want in any way to get into a hassle where people might say we were transferring technology, that it was inappropriate and so on.  But he said, no, we thought of that.  He said, "You know, it's the simplest possible technology, the youngest children --.it's hard to think that that would be subversive in any way."


But I came back and ran it by Jack [F.] Matlock XE "Matlock, Jack F." , and I think John Whitehead XE "Whitehead, John C." , too, but Matlock was then the Soviet expert in the White House.  He later became, of course, ambassador to the Soviet Union.  He was very supportive, very sympathetic about it, and urged me to go ahead.  So that was one project that was of interest to Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .


Then there was another project, and this time Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  came -- it was in Washington, it was actually a special trip.  It wasn't a meeting of the arms control group.  But he asked me to meet him, and he told me that it was something that came from Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .  This may have been some months later.  Gorbachev was interested in creating an international foundation that would be a vehicle for lots more contact with the outside world, that wouldn't go through the Foreign Ministry or the Defense Ministry or the Communist party, but would be a way of widening their contacts, and quite possibly enhancing his stature in the outside world.


The three key people initially in forming that, the International Foundation for Humanity, or something like that -- it had some grand title -- were Jerry [Jerome B.] Wiesner XE "Wiesner, Jerome B." , who was the president of MIT, and had been President [John F.] Kennedy's science advisor, Wiesner and Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  and I, I guess, were probably the three principal architects of it.  The actual drafting of the charter and bylaws was done here in Carnegie's offices, when Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  and Sagdeyev XE "Sagdeyev, Roald Z."  were here.  We had lawyers looking at it and tried to do it in a way that would strengthen the hands of democratic reformers in the Soviet Union.


We later used that foundation as some leverage to help get [Andrei] Sakharov XE "Sakharov, Andrei"  brought back from internal exile in Gorky, and then we were able to host his first-ever trip outside the Soviet Union.  He came to New York under the auspices of this foundation, and we hosted a lunch here at the foundation and then I introduced him at a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It was a great experience when Sakharov XE "Sakharov, Andrei"  came to visit.


But in any case, those were two examples of special projects that engaged Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." 's interest, and somewhere along the way, Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  introduced me to Gorbachev.  I was astonished in the first meeting.  I don't know, perhaps he'd been in office a year, at the time.  He gave a remarkably frank critique of the problems in the Soviet system, as severe a critique as I'd ever heard, and it was astonishing.  At the same time, he was clearly proud of the history and culture of his country and his people, and he said, "We have great mathematicians.  We're not stupid, you know.  We've had a system which has warped our development, but we have to reform, we have to become more democratic, we have to have much better international relationships, and all that, and that will happen.  But you've got to help us."  For example, he said, "Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  tells me you're a leader of the American scientific community."  I was president of the AAAS at the time, American Association for the Advancement of Science.  He said, "You should be actively supporting social science.  How can we make rational policy when we don't have any social facts we can believe?"  It was all distorted by ideology and so forth.  He said, "You have a great scientific community.  You should set an example.  You should help our people develop serious data collection in the social sciences."


I was stunned.  I was stunned, and I didn't know how to interpret it.  I did feel that he'd have to be an extraordinary actor to be playing the part.  When we got to talking about nuclear weapons, I mean, he was trembling.  He basically said, "Nuclear weapons are insane and don't serve any useful military purpose.  What kind of aim could be fulfilled by destroying our two countries and much of the world?"


Now, you could argue that a leader of the Soviet Union talking that way was play-acting.  One of the first people I talked to about him was Senator [Sam] Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A." , who had also met him and had a very similar impression, you know, how to interpret this.  But anyway, I was fortunate to meet him early.  He was very interested in the arms control work and he was interested in the crisis prevention work, and he was interested in opening up all kinds of channels of communication.


I don't remember, it wasn't the first meeting, but probably the second time I met him, I said, essentially, "You seem to be a person who's very eager for outside people and ideas and widening your horizons.  Could I be helpful in that regard?"  And he was very positive.  "Of course you can," he said.  "It would be wonderful if you would send your people to Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  and Sagdeyev XE "Sagdeyev, Roald Z."  and to meet with me," and he was very encouraging about himself and his advisors.


So I began much more actively encouraging individuals and delegations to go, and sometimes went, of course, myself.  I think the most striking occasion was a time in March of 1988, when I took a delegation of five members of the Senate -- Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A." , [Alan K.] Simpson XE "Simpson, Alan K." , [Alan] Cranston XE "Cranston, Alan" , [Carl] Levin XE "Levin, Carl"  and [William S.] Cohen XE "Cohen, William S." , who's now Secretary of Defense, and five people from the scientific community -- Charles [H.] Townes XE "Townes, Charles H." ,, Nobelist at Berkeley, a physicist in arms control; Sidney [D.] Drell XE "Drell, Sidney D." , a great physicist from Stanford, arms control person; Bob [Robert H.] Legvold XE "Legvold, Robert H."  from Columbia, the great expert on the Soviet Union; Donald [B.] Rice XE "Rice, Donald B." , who at that time was the head of the RAND Corporation.  I forget, but there were five people from the scientific community and five senators, and Dick Clark XE "Clark, Dick" , who handled our linkage activities, from the Aspen Institute.  Deana Arsenian XE "Arsenian, Deana"  from our staff, myself.


We had essentially a week there in half-day blocks, meeting with his defense chief and his foreign minister and other leaders, leaders of the scientific community and so on, and then finally a half-day session with him.  Among other things, we were able to bring up, I think with some sensitivity, very delicate issues like the loosening of the yoke on Eastern Europe, and why that might be in the Soviet interest, would be in the Soviet interest to do so.


In any event, I have a particular episode in mind.  As we were at the end of that session, he would have a chat for a few minutes with each of us individually or in a pair, and Senator Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and I chatted with him together at the end of the process.  I said to him something to the effect, "If you keep on the path you're now on, the Cold War could be over by the turn of the century."  Of course, it was essentially over by a year later, or two years, depending on what landmark you take.  Nobody anticipated it that soon.


When I was walking out, I said to Sam Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A." , "Do you think I got carried away by the occasion?"  And he said, "No, you're exactly in the right direction, even though you might have been a little optimistic in your time scale."  [laughter]  And of course, that's what we all thought -- maybe if he could stay in office long enough, maybe by some time early in the century, it could be over.


So I tried to be, in a way, a broker for Western ideas and Western people, directly and indirectly, and to his advisors and to him personally.  And then when he would come here, he would see to it that I would get invited to events at the Soviet embassy or wherever it was, and I always had at least a brief encounter with him.


Then when he left office, I urged him to visit the Carter Center, to see what President Carter was doing and to set up some similar functions.  He did that.  Carter XE "Carter, Jimmy"  was very good with him.  Carter invited him to come and spend a year there if he wanted.  He tried to emulate some aspects of it, and we gave him some support, because here's a man who had played an enormous role in ending the Cold War and bringing freedom to his own people, bringing freedom to the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet empire.  I knew he would have a difficult time after leaving office, and I felt we should keep his ideas and his persona active on the world stage, because he's enormously respected throughout the world.


His political stock is low in Russia, but the rest of the world recognizes, you know, what he did.  So I do view him as a friend.  We visited when he was here, I guess, a few months ago and I asked Vartan Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan"  to come over with me.  We visited him in his suite at the Waldorf [Astoria Hotel] and had a very good discussion.  I may convene some people to meet with him next time he comes to New York.


But I think, no question, it was an amplifying factor.  How much, I don't know in what we could contribute.  He gave a speech at Stanford while he was still in office that was really quite a glorious occasion, and that was not the only time, but he said essentially that the new thinking didn't arise just in the Kremlin, that outsiders were enormously helpful, and he pointed to people like Sidney Drell XE "Drell, Sidney D."  and George Shultz XE "Shultz, George"  at Stanford, who had been helpful in different ways.


In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, he specifically referred to Carnegie's contributions.  I wasn't there, but a bunch of friends called me up that afternoon to say, "God, did you hear what Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  said today?" and so on.  So, you know, he does feel that we were helpful and played a role, and you can't evaluate how much, but at least we did the best we could.

Q:  Thank you very much.  I think that's a marvelous note on which to close today.  Thank you.

[END OF SESSION]

	TTT
	Session Eight

	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg     
	Date:  September 25, 1998

	Interviewer:  Brenda Hearing     
	New York, New York

	
	


Q:  Today is the twenty-fifth of September 1998, and we're here for our eighth interview session with Dr. David Hamburg, here at Carnegie Corporation of New York.  


I would like to start, if it's all right with you, I'm curious about the most recent event related to the Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict that took you away from a previously scheduled interview we had a couple of weeks ago.  I'm sorry not to be more specific about what that was.

Hamburg:  I, myself, am hazy -- there's been so many things.

Q:  Well, what's going on with the commission these days?

Hamburg:  The situation is, the reason it has a kind of preemptive quality is that in the first year after we brought out the so-called final report, which really isn't a good term, it's perhaps the main report or the synthesis report, would be better.  Actually, in speaking at a meeting at the U.N. yesterday, I used that term "synthesis report," because, in fact, the so-called final report came out before most of the other forty-plus collateral publications, a number of books and reports heading towards fifty.  The latest one just came in this morning.  But we've been working on those.


From the time we brought out the synthesis report last December at the White House to now, the main emphasis has been on governments and intergovernmental organizations.  So, for example, I spoke at a U.N. meeting yesterday, which the commission co-sponsored, initiated by the government of Sweden, wanting to time it with the visits of the heads of states this week to the U.N., and try to get as high a level of group as possible.  The governments of Sweden, Canada, U.K. [United Kingdom], Japan particularly, Germany to a considerable extent, and our own government, have taken much interest in it.  In the U.N., Kofi Annan XE "Annan, Kofi"  has adopted it with great emphasis, done a lot on behalf of it.  He sees it as fundamental to the mission of the U.N., which began half a century ago with prevention and now comes back to it, but with a difference being that at that time they were thinking only about wars between states, and we deal also, and primarily, with wars within states.  That's what the U.N. is trying to adapt to now.


So anyway, those events have a kind of preemptive quality, yet a prime minister or Secretary General of the U.N. or a foreign minister, etc., if they say there's an urgent need to meet on such and such a date, you try to accommodate them.  We've got a meeting with the president of the World Bank coming up shortly, and other things like that.  


We thought, roughly speaking, the first year we'd concentrate on the policy community, both at a high level and also at a kind of intermediate level, the people who actually have to do the work, and then the second year we would shift our attention more to the long-range, meaning primarily colleges and universities.  I started that part this year.  It complicated my life.  I had a lot of invitations at major universities to speak, so I did that, and it added a lot to my schedule, but it was enormously encouraging.  The level of interest among students and faculty is remarkable.  I'm particularly heartened by undergraduates who are interested in this subject.


So we were trying to struggle with that balance between what might have a near-term impact on the policy community and a long-term impact on young people, and gradually we'll shift that balance.  But I have had a lot of things knocked out because some high-level policy-maker wanted to do something at a certain time.  You can't tell how useful it will be, but you can hardly pass up the opportunity.  We are talking about fundamentally a kind of long-term culture of prevention, but if you can get some short-term thoughtful attention by leadership people, that's great.  It's quite clear, for instance, that the Secretary General's strong, visible, thoughtful interest in this has activated a lot of people at the U.N., who might have been interested anyway, but they are certainly encouraged because they know the Secretary General thinks this is so important.

Q:  That's great.  I really like your remark about the undergraduate students, too, in your travels, blending your interest in youth and in conflict resolution.

Hamburg:  I was, for example, blown away at [University of California at] Berkeley.  I spent a week giving some lectures at Berkeley.  Started out to be three and ended up as thirteen, because there was so much interest.  I didn't realize they have a peace and security major, with over 100 students who major in that subject through their undergraduate careers, and these students were knowledgeable and sophisticated, as well as idealistic.  So I ended up that week totally hoarse, without voice, but it was exhilarating to be with these students.

Q:  We have wondered, in the Oral History [Research] Office, Mary Marshall [Clark] and I, specifically, have wondered what the origin is of the phrase "conflict resolution."  We thought, well, you know, why not ask Dr. Hamburg.

Hamburg:  I really don't know about the origin.  As it plays out now, it's kind of a term of art which needs to be distinguished from the prevention terminology we're using.  The resolution tends to be used in the context of an ongoing serious conflict or recurrent serious conflict in which the issues underlying it have not been addressed and you finally get around to addressing them.  It's so hard to do that some people in the field prefer to speak about conflict management, rather than resolution, because they're rather pessimistic about getting the fundamental issues resolved.  But maybe it's a different time scale, management in the shorter term and resolution in the longer term.


We, of course, picked this term "preventing deadly conflict" and the operative word, as I said at the U.N. yesterday, is "deadly," because sometimes people think of conflict prevention.  That really isn't what we're talking about, because conflict is ubiquitous and I don't see it, from my background, as likely that the human species would ever be conflict-free.  What I think is, you try to prevent crossing the threshold into mass violence, so it's really deadly -- preventing deadly conflict, or, back to your question, early conflict resolution, trying to see what's possible to address the sources of a grievance at an early stage, before the hatred and violence have become simply pervasive, they consume the society.


But there is this distinction, which I've tried really to keep in focus about prevention, using the public health analogy to primary prevention, so that before there's a real conflagration or an established disease process, that you do some things that make it much less likely that disease will occur.

Q:  What sorts of things are you suggesting, is the commission suggesting, to prevent conflict, to deal with these early stages?  Do we need other sorts of human mechanisms in place?  I'm almost thinking about mini-United Nations, in a way.  In sum, what are you talking about?

Hamburg:  We make a distinction between operational prevention -- our terminology -- operational prevention and structural prevention.  Operational prevention means there's a crisis looming on the horizon.  You're getting into an emergency situation, and try, then, to get outside help for the parties before it's too late.  Outside help may very much include strengthening the moderates and the pragmatic problem-solvers in the society, or helping to build capacity within the society to deal with ongoing conflict.  But in any event, early as you can see the dark cloud on the horizon, you try to do some things.


The main label, term of art, there is "preventive diplomacy," which primarily deals with setting in process some negotiation, whether it's directly between the conflicting parties or mediated by a third party, but some kind of negotiation, looking toward mutual accommodation and realistic compromises.  But there are also economic aspects to preventive diplomacy, sanctions on the negative side or inducements on the positive side, creating a package of economic benefits and losses that they can look at.  If they're anywhere near rational, they might prefer to give up the conflict in order to get the economic benefits and bypass the losses.


There is, interestingly enough, and we've emphasized this, and it’s been surprising to some people, also a military aspect to preventive diplomacy; that is, a rapid response force either through the United Nations or in some other way, usually a multilateral rapid response.  You can go in and separate the hostile parties before they begin fighting each other, and provide space for negotiation when you've separated them.  So in that sense, the military is not a last resort, maybe an early resort, only to provide space for the political and economic processes to go on.  But that's operational prevention.


Structural prevention is conditions conducive to peaceful living, getting at the root causes: severe discrimination, egregious violation of human rights, economic free fall, a great variety of serious conditions within societies that frighten people and can be played upon by political demagogues to put gasoline on the embers and make a huge conflagration.  But that's long term.  In essence, if I had to take two words for it, I would say "democratic development."  That is, economic development but also social, political development.  Democratic institutions for sorting out the ongoing problems, and that importantly includes building mechanisms within the societies to deal with conflicts as they occur and without having to go to violence.  So it's a very ambitious agenda.


What we've done in this enterprise is a comprehensive overview of the tools and strategies for prevention, and there's no really short way to state them.  Forty or fifty volumes will be an enormous compendium, a resource compendium for policy-makers and for students.  What we're really trying to do is get the preventive orientation into a variety of institutions and intellectual leaders so that people have better ideas that we were able to put forward, and are thinking preventively.  


Just to take one concrete example, we've suggested that whenever there are summit-type meetings like the G7 or G8 or G-something, some high-level meetings, that they have a couple of hours on the agenda each time about dangerous situations, thinking preventively.  Is there something coming up that might really turn sour?  What can we collectively do to help out before it gets to be too late?  That's the kind of thing we mean, just building in a kind of pervasive orientation toward prevention at a leadership level.


We would like very much to have public understanding of that.  We think there are analogies in the public health domain.  People have learned it's important to get immunized.  They've learned it's important to stop smoking or not start smoking.  In my lifetime, in my medical career, I've seen a huge change in the public understanding of, and sympathy toward, preventive measures.  Our hope is that that kind of thing could occur in this domain as well.

Q:  I'm having that thought, listening to you speak, and thinking about someone reading this in fifty years and a hundred years, just as you were surprised at Berkeley by the presence of that program and the number of people interested, I think you're talking about new concepts and ways of thinking, that hopefully will become more institutionalized, integrated into our society -- leadership and institutions.

Hamburg:  Yes.

Q:  You wanted to talk a bit about creating and strengthening institutions.

Hamburg:  I'd be happy to do that.  It's one of the things that gradually came to perplex and trouble me in the course of the Carnegie years.  There was a time when the large foundations of that era, like Carnegie and Rockefeller, back in the twenties and thirties and so on, had large enough funds available that they could really make major shifts, major strengthening in institutions or could create institutions.  That became harder and harder as the foundation resources were much more modest in relation to the total economy, and the scope of the problems and complexity much larger.


An example would be, from the earlier time, when Carnegie, very early on, supported the famous Flexner report on medical education.  Dr. [Abraham] Flexner XE "Flexner, Abraham"  really laid out an agenda for a forum to bring medicine into the scientific era.  Then Rockefeller joined in and put up enough money that a number of medical schools -- I forget how many, but of the order, I think, of ten or twelve of the most influential medical schools -- that they would get these grants, large grants in the terms of that era, if and only if they implemented these reforms.  And, indeed, they did. From the standpoint of the medical schools, it was a huge incentive.  It got their attention and they thought seriously about it.  I'm not saying they did it just for the money, but the rationale that might have been very slow to move forward moved much more rapidly because there was money to implement it.  That kind of thing is harder to do in this era.  


Furthermore, I think we here felt that we didn't want to be presumptuous about existing institutions.  Our first inclination was to find ways to strengthen existing institutions for an important purpose if we and they shared a vision of that purpose, but sometimes, albeit on a relatively small scale, it seemed really necessary to help create an institution.


I'll give you two examples.  In the field of substance abuse, drugs both legal and illegal, including smoking, alcohol, and illicit drugs, as they affect young people.  There's more to the problem than adolescence, but our particular interest was in adolescence, especially early adolescence.  So we were groping for what, with our relatively modest resources, we could do that would be useful.  We weren't particularly getting anywhere over a period of several years.  Then it occurred to me that there were a couple of opportunities that involved fundamentally betting on people.  I think foundations, at their best, are really sort of people institutions.  You bet on people's talent and dedication to move an agenda.  


The one case, the most visible case, involved Joseph Califano XE "Califano Jr., Joseph A." , who had been secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare when I was president of the Institute of Medicine.  I became, I guess it's fair to say, one of his principal outside non-governmental advisors, because the Institute of Medicine had a wonderful window on the whole world of medicine and public health and biomedical research.  I worked rather closely with him over a period of years, and we also became good friends, and the friendship continued.  We would get together from time to time.  He also, when I came to Carnegie, became our principal lawyer.  He was by that time in private law practice, and a very astute lawyer.  


He and I would have breakfast periodically, or whatever, and I knew that he was restless to continue his tradition of public service.  He'd been in the [Lyndon B.] Johnson White House and he'd been in the Carter cabinet.  I knew that making money in the private practice of law, while satisfactory, was not really the be-all and end-all of existence for him.  I also knew that he felt frustrated that he, in looking back, thought he'd missed an opportunity to create a national institute on addiction or take other measures when he was in government to address this problem.  I had discussions with him, when he was a cabinet secretary and I was at the Institute of Medicine, about this problem area, especially in relation to smoking, but other problems as well.  


So it was a piece of unfinished business we both had, and I don't know exactly how it evolved, but we began talking about the possibility of his creating some kind of freestanding but academically affiliated center on substance abuse here in New York.  I helped him explore some possibilities, Mount Sinai and Columbia [University], and he worked it out with Columbia, where he has a meaningful affiliation, but an independent organization called the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, CASA.  We gave major support.  Fortunately, Robert Wood Johnson [Foundation], which has much more money than we do, came in with really super major support.


I would say that -- I think he would tell you that conceptually and operationally that I played some role in encouraging and facilitating his development of CASA and then I had the staff look at it, and some independent consultants, and then we came in with grant support.  I think it's probably fair to say it's the most respected independent institution in the country, possibly even in the world, today on matters of substance abuse.  He's done a phenomenal job with it, built up a very good staff.  He's been very skillful in getting public attention to the various reports they put out.  I was very touched, a year or so ago, when they dedicated to me a report on adolescence, on drug use in adolescence.


In any event, I think that we were able to encourage and foster the development of a new institution there that has the independence and the integrity that's so important in addressing substance abuse problems, and has provided a major resource of information and analysis and ideas about how to cope with that problem. 


A second example in that field, also an attorney, named Mathea Falco XE "Falco, Mathea" , she had a position in the State Department with Cyrus Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R." , in the Carter administration, that involved drugs in an international perspective.  She was called to my attention by Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L." , who was then our board chairman.  I was very impressed with her, and I asked her to do a paper for the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, in its early days, and I encouraged her to make what I think was a critical shift.  I encouraged her to build on the knowledge base she had about interdiction and other international aspects of drugs, to consider drug treatment and prevention of the uptake of drug use in adolescence.  She got terribly interested in that, and with some guidance from me and others here, went to interview leading researchers in that field, and she did an excellent paper for the Carnegie Council.  She became, with this broad base from the remote jungles of Colombia to the school clinics in Harlem, whatever, she was more and more seized with the importance of this problem and promising approaches that she hadn't been aware of before.


So we then -- I forget whether it was a chance encounter or whether it was at a Carnegie meeting, but I remember I encountered her again in Florida.  Maybe she was participating in a Carnegie-sponsored meeting.  I'm not sure.  Whatever it was, I suggested to her that she write a book, take this paper she'd done for the council and develop it further into strategies for prevention of the uptake of drugs in adolescence.  She went ahead and did it, a book that became a very successful book, and that, in turn, gave her credibility nationally so that she proposed setting up a small institution called Drug Strategies.  We made a grant to help her, a series of grants, and then she got support from a number of other foundations.  If these things are really good, they're able to attract support, as Califano XE "Califano Jr., Joseph A."  did, Falco XE "Falco, Mathea"  did also, from a number of foundations.  I do think it's valuable for them to have an arm's-length relationship from government and take little, if any, money from government so they don't get caught up in the politics, the messy politics of substance abuse and the polarization involved in that field.  


So, those are two examples.  That became our program.  I mean, with one or two minor exceptions, not intellectually minor, but dollar-wise, that was really our program, those two institutions, and I think it was a terrific program in the field and helped to stimulate other foundations and heighten national awareness and get the facts straight about drug problems.  So, those are examples of really creating institutions.


Another one that we did jointly with the Ford Foundation, that Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien"  deserves a lot of credit for working on, from our standpoint, with Ford people, was the Center for Children and Poverty, which also came to be associated with Columbia University.  It is a part of the school of public health.  With a sympathetic dean, Allan Rosenfield XE "Rosenfield, Allan" , we helped in the search for a director, Judy [Judith E.] Jones XE "Jones, Judith E." , and I think that's been valuable.  Again, the same kind of thing.  Getting out the facts to the American public about children in poverty, also being a resource on useful interventions, especially preventive interventions.  How do you prevent damage to children in poverty?  And developing a cadre of experts who could provide technical assistance to poor communities.  So, that, too, is an institution created by two foundations, and I think it has multiple sources of support now.


There are moments when you see an ecological niche that's essentially vacant.  There just isn't any institution doing it, yet I believe it's valuable, where you can, to tie it into an institution like Columbia University and have the resources, intellectual and technical resources, available to be helpful.


Now, on the other hand, let me give you an example of things that we tried to do to strengthen already strong institutions.  We felt here -- I, David Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z." , Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien" , and a number of trustees, like Joshua Lederberg XE "Lederberg, Joshua" , for one, thought that it was important to get major scientific institutions more focused on the problems of children and youth.  To a large extent, we focused on the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  They're both umbrella organizations for the scientific community.  The academy has great prestige and, like other scientific academies, is honorific, but unlike most other scientific academies, the American academy, the National Academy of Sciences, is very much a working academy.  Primarily it was in wartime, the Civil War when it was created, had a surge of activity during World War I and World War II, but after World War II it became a working organization more and more in an ongoing way, addressing great problems of American society.  The AAAS has somewhat different functions.  They overlap some.  But taken together, they really cover the strength of the scientific community.


We thought we would like to enhance what they do with respect, first of all, to science education as a very strong entering wedge for education reform, a vital component in terms of the technical economy of the future, but also, so to say, that the science education could run interference for more general education upgrading and reform.  And the scientific community at a high level did not have a very strong tradition of engaging in pre-collegiate education.  There are times when I have said in speeches in these organizations, "What, do we think it's beneath our dignity to roll up our sleeves and get in and mess around with young children and pre-collegiate education?"  But there has been a sea change over the past ten or fifteen years.  I think Carnegie played a role in it.  I by no means would say that we were the only, or even the sole, factor in it, but I think they would tell you we've played a significant role in that.


When the National Academy of Sciences gave me its Public Welfare Medal this year, which is what they characterize as their highest honor, which I was thrilled to get, part of the citation had to do with these efforts for children and youth in and beyond the scientific community.  In the case of the AAAS, there were two branches.  One was major support of a project called "2061," which fundamentally was to lay out the content in some detail, what it is that people would need to know and be able to do in science and technology by the middle of the next century, kind of a visionary enterprise, at the same time provided a lot of intellectual guidance vis-à-vis intellectual reform.  It wasn't a detailed curriculum, but it was the intellectual framework for a curriculum in science and technology, and it's, I think, been very influential and useful throughout the country.


The other part was to support AAAS activities on extending opportunities in math, science, and technology to women and minorities.  Minorities had the classical kind of deprivation problems, and women simply -- there's a cultural assumption that women somehow weren't meant to be able to do math, science, and technology, a totally unwarranted assumption.  So the AAAS was quite significant under the staff leadership of Shirley [M.] Malcom XE "Malcom, Shirley M." , who later became a Carnegie trustee, really groundbreaking work in opening up educational opportunities in math, science, and technology for those who had not had the opportunity before.


With respect to the academy, particularly under the current president, Bruce Alberts XE "Alberts, Bruce" , who had a prior commitment to science education, they've become a major player, for example, in developing the science standards for education.  But also we took some initiative in going to the academy, before Bruce came, under his predecessor, Frank Press, and suggesting what is now called a Board on Children, Youth and Families.  I think it earlier had a different terminology, a Forum on Children, Youth and Families.  But our proposal to them was that if they would create such a locus of attention in the academy on the general problems of not only education, but all of the factors that influence learning in and out of school, in family and community and so on, if they would do that, that we would support it and we particularly urged that it be a joint venture of two parts of the academy, the Institute of Medicine, which, of course, I had led myself at an earlier time, and the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.  So that you had really a broad spectrum of the sciences brought to bear on problems of children, youth, and families, and it continues to the present time.  Most recently one part of that is a Forum on Adolescence at the academy, which, since retirement, I now chair.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Hamburg:  That's a good example, I think, with the NAS and the AAAS, of our providing a certain amount of stimulation, encouragement, and money, to broaden their horizons, enhance their activity in a critical field, where they'd given some attention, but now are giving much more.  So, in a sense, we've tried to strengthen already strong existing institutions for a purpose which, however, had not been terribly strong in the institution before.  Those are different variations on the theme of institution-building or institution-strengthening, and what I've told you about is all in the domain of children and youth.  We've done similar things in the domain of international relations and conflict, but maybe less so than in this field.

Q:  I don't know that we've covered this before, but it occurs to me to perhaps ask again if you're aware of the criticisms that have been leveled, or were leveled, at the corporation during your presidency for this kind of focus on strong institutions, established institutions, elite, so-called elite, institutions -- Columbia, Stanford, MIT, etc. -- that they were receiving so much money.  Are you aware of that, and do you have any reaction to that now?

Hamburg:  Yes.  I don't think, actually -- my perception is, it hasn't been a strong criticism.  I think that it's been fairly limited, and there are some personal elements in it.  But, yes, let me tell you what our thinking was.  First of all, it's exaggerated.  If you look at our portfolio, we've also taken some criticism for supporting a lot of innovative organizations in poor communities and at the street level and so on, and how do you know they spend the money well.  Of course, what we've done in Africa, how can you be sure that that's used for the intended purpose, and how can you be sure there's enough competence in poor communities to do it?  So it's actually quite a distortion if you look at our whole portfolio.  


What we did varies with the particular problem we were working on and where you could get leverage to make a real contribution.  If you want to do something about math, science, and technology education, you have to look to the highest level of competence in math, science, and technology.  Now, you also have to look to how that gets out into the schools and in poor communities and, so to say, on the street, and that's where, like I mentioned about the AAAS efforts -- but where you need a high level of knowledge and skill and technical competence, you have to go to where that is.  Now, you may want to try to build that elsewhere, as we've tried to do in Africa under the science and technology for development program.  We tried very hard to build it where it isn't very strong.  


But I think the clearest case of where we moved to elite institutions quite rapidly was when I first came here, with respect to avoiding nuclear war, and with absolutely no shame and no regret at all.  The Cold War, as in our earlier discussion I think I said, was in a very dangerous phase at that point.  Some people in both Moscow and Washington, non-trivial people, were talking about maybe a nuclear war could be won after all, or at least you could prevail, and maybe it was inevitable and stuff like that.  So we wanted to get the most knowledgeable and able people in highly respected institutions quickly, quickly, to work on these problems, and we wanted to do so by drawing together people who would know different aspects of the problem -- the weaponry and the decision-making in Washington and Moscow and third world flashpoints.  


There were a number of different facets to it where you wanted people all the way from physicists and engineers to political and other social scientists, and you wanted them to work together to a considerable extent, and you wanted their reports to be at a very high level of quality and to be credible for policy-makers and for the public at large.  So, yes, you do go to institutions like Harvard and MIT and Stanford and Michigan and Berkeley and Columbia, where that kind of strength existed and you could quickly mobilize it.


The National Academy of Sciences we worked with a lot in that period on those issues.  And I'm happy to say we really were successful.  The activities of the National Academy in that field, I mentioned to you earlier, linked up with the Soviet Academy and got us in touch with Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .  We wouldn't have got to Gorbachev through less distinguished institutions.


So it all depends on what your purpose is and what your time scale is, but for certain purposes you simply need to mobilize outstanding talent and knowledge and skill, and do it quickly.  And if that's the case, you do it.  But oftentimes we would try to marry up those strong institutions with counterparts in Africa or in poor communities in Ohio or Indiana or wherever, so it was by no means a primary or exclusive preoccupation with the leading institutions, but it was recognizing what they can contribute and the credibility they have earned by their high quality.  If you take MIT, MIT made huge contributions during World War II, arguably as strong a contribution to the war effort as any institution in the world, and that credibility that MIT had built in the international field was something that was very useful in relation to Cold War issues.  Its then president Jerry Wiesner XE "Wiesner, Jerome B."  was a leader in the field, and a lot of their faculty had great knowledge and so forth.


So that's why we did it, but I think you have to be differentiated about what circumstances and for what purpose, and I think you should neither be preoccupied with elite institutions nor shy away from them because they're ostensibly elite.  I say ostensibly elite because no institutions have made more serious efforts to, for example, bring in minorities.  There's a new book out by Derek Bok XE "Bok, Derek" , the longtime president of Harvard, and Bill Bowen XE "Bowen, William G." , who was president of Princeton, about affirmative action and the like, showing better than we've ever seen before the long-term benefits from activities of "elite universities" that gave preferences to intelligent minority students who otherwise wouldn't have been admitted.  So it's a kind of prejudicial stereotype just to speak about them as elite institutions and, for the most part, at least in this country, they've earned some kind of elite status by being absolutely first rate.  


There are two kinds of criticism that have come to my attention in that.  One is very personal, that I don't want to go into at all, but another is from people in institutions that wish they had our support or more of our support than they had, but that's a general problem.  In every field, not just elite institutions, in every field it's a problem.  There are a lot of good people who get turned down and some of them will say, "If they didn't give so much money to A, B, and C, then they'd give a lot more to X, Y, and Z."  You know, it's a true statement.  You have to make priorities.  Unfortunately, in the foundation business it's kind of a "no" business.  You turn down a lot of good people and good ideas just because there isn't enough money to go around.

Q:  I don't know if you've ever heard this:  Carnegie Corporation, under your tenure, has occasionally been described to me as a "shadow cabinet" for the Clinton administration.

Hamburg:  Well, that was only because a number of Carnegie-related people were chosen for the cabinet by the President.  Warren Christopher XE "Christopher, Warren M." , who had been our board chairman, was chosen to be Secretary of State.  Bob [Robert E.] Rubin XE "Rubin, Robert E." , who had chaired our finance committee, was chosen first to head the National Economic Council, then to be Secretary of the Treasury.  Dick [Richard W.] Riley XE "Riley, Richard W." , who had chaired our zero-to-three activity, what became the Starting Points report, was chosen to be Secretary of Education.  Donna Shalala XE "Shalala, Donna" , who had just come on our board, for one meeting, I think, was then snatched up to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.  I may be forgetting one or two.

Q:  Sheila [E.] Widnall.

Hamburg:  Sheila Widnall XE "Widnall, Sheila E."  was Secretary of the Air Force.  That's right.  Actually, I did play an active part in her appointment.

Q:  I'd like to hear about that.  I've heard you were instrumental in that appointment.

Hamburg:  I think it's a credit to the caliber of people we had, that so many were chosen, but I would say we had a very active interplay on international matters with the Reagan administration and a very active interplay on both international and domestic matters with the [George W.] Bush administration; that is, I personally and our grantees and some of our board members.


To give you just one example, with President Reagan, I planned, with his principal advisor on the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock XE "Matlock, Jack F." , who later became the ambassador to Russia, planned a conference to look at cultural exchanges, broadly speaking, primarily scientific and scholarly exchanges with the Soviet Union.  When were they any good?  When were they no good?  A lot of them were very frustrating.  Could we sort out conditions under which it was useful to have such exchanges?  They were pretty well frozen at that time.  Matlock, as I recall, was the initiator of it.  He was very interested in looking at that question.  We made a grant to the Smithsonian [Institution], the Wilson Center, then headed by Jim [James H.] Billington XE "Billington, James H." , later appointed by President Reagan, I think, or maybe by President Bush, to be Librarian of Congress, which he still is.  


So, Billington and Matlock XE "Matlock, Jack F."  and I planned this conference.  Matlock got President Reagan interested in it, and then got him interested enough that he decided to invite the whole group over to the White House and give a speech.  So I sat up on the platform with Reagan and George Shultz XE "Shultz, George" , one or two others, and Reagan gave this speech in June of 1994, I think.  Spring of '94, anyway.  The most forthcoming, probably -- one of his most forthcoming messages to the Soviet Union, saying he was going to revive the exchanges and not only wanted to revive some of the scientific exchanges, but also his own idea to extend it to the arts.  He was very courteous with me.  He said, "Doctor, you don't mind if I add the arts."  With his own hand, he put in some phrasing about arts exchanges.  He said, "That's my field."  So that was a very meaningful interaction with President Reagan and his administration.


Another one was on South Africa, where we had this program.  I helped primarily the deputy secretary, John Whitehead XE "Whitehead, John C." , who had been a board member at Carnegie, to plan a commission on South Africa, later called the Shultz Commission, for George Shultz XE "Shultz, George" , and suggested to him that Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L."  serve on it, which she did very ably.  So we had these kinds of interactions with the Reagan and Bush administrations.  Indeed, quite a lot with the Bush administration on education and some on international relations.


If you have in your grantees excellent people and good ideas -- grantees, boards, staff, whatnot -- and if you're somewhat oriented to public policy, and also if you have a good name like Carnegie, a century of a good name, then there's likely to be interplay with the government at different levels and in different ways.  But I suppose the total volume of business was greater with the Clinton administration, largely because so many of these people went into significant cabinet or immediate subcabinet positions.

Q:  Did you have something to do with that?  I was struck by your recollection of advising Joseph Califano XE "Califano Jr., Joseph A." , in pre-Carnegie years.  I'm quite struck by your outside advisor relationship and its evolution through the years.  Very important.

Hamburg:  I did have that.  It began with President Ford XE "Ford, Gerald R."  when I was at the Institute of Medicine.  He, by the way, later was very helpful with the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, as was President Carter XE "Carter, Jimmy" .  They both were.  My presidential contacts began with Ford XE "Ford, Gerald R." , and to my great surprise -- I never, never would have predicted or anticipated, couldn't have imagined it, that I'd have meaningful contacts with Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." .  It's really quite astonishing to me.  I view that as a great privilege, and I've tried very, very hard basically to put them in touch with the best knowledge available in the country, but, to some extent, even beyond the United States.  The best knowledge available on whatever issues they were working on, in which they thought I might be helpful.  I view it as a great privilege and something that I certainly would try to respond to seriously.  That was both pre-Carnegie and Carnegie.  It grew over the years.  There was a cumulative effect, I guess, partly because of the Carnegie aura and partly because I had a larger network and came to be better known, perhaps more respected.  


But in terms of the Clinton appointments, well, yes, you see, Warren Christopher XE "Christopher, Warren M."  was our board chairman, and he and I were friends of long duration -- decades.  We worked together in other contexts.  As it happened, President Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  asked him to chair the search for a vice president.  President Clinton was very happy with the result of that, so then he asked him to help with the cabinet selection.  There was a small group of them -- four, five, six people in Little Rock [Arkansas], right after the election and up to the inauguration, working on cabinet selection matters.  


Then as it happened, totally by chance, I had no idea, when we asked Dick Riley XE "Riley, Richard W."  to chair the Starting Points, it was because he had been a very good governor for children in South Carolina and made a very positive impression around the country, his dedication to and knowledge of children's issues.  So then it turned out that he was asked to head the personnel selection at the subcabinet level, so he was set up in Washington with a group working on that, and Christopher XE "Christopher, Warren M."  was part of the team with the President at Little Rock during that period from the election to the inauguration.  So both Riley XE "Riley, Richard W."  and Christopher XE "Christopher, Warren M."  would ask me questions about people, and we would talk on the phone from time to time.  I did have a pretty good network.  I knew people, not only in the Carnegie family, but beyond.


So I can't evaluate how useful my comments to Christopher XE "Christopher, Warren M."  and Riley XE "Riley, Richard W."  were.  I tried to be as helpful as I could be on a completely nonpartisan basis, just who had what kind of knowledge and skills that might be pertinent to this or that job.  In some cases I took an initiative.  On Sheila Widnall XE "Widnall, Sheila E." , I did.  Sheila Widnall was on our board and I had worked with her before in other contexts.  I have a very high regard for her.  There never had been a woman Secretary of the Air Force.  I knew that she'd been very active with the Air Force Academy in Colorado.  She'd been on their advisory council or whatever it was.  She was a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.  So I thought not only was she conceivably the first woman Secretary of the Air Force, she might also be the first highly technically qualified Secretary of the Air Force, which is not such a bad thing.  She certainly was not politically qualified, if that was important.  But I did get her name into the process, and I'm very happy that she got selected.  But I can't really evaluate how important my suggestions were, but I certainly tried to be helpful.

Q:  I would think it might be a very interesting thing for someone to trace out, perhaps, at some point.  I've asked you in earlier sessions to describe your leadership, the qualities of your own leadership, and I and others are also looking at these extraordinary relationships that you have.  I mean, you're truly a player on the world stage and have been for a long time.  This is why I wanted to get some sense of what that means for you and who you've helped along, actually.  I'm very interested in power, your sense of your own political power.  I'm interested in knowing if you even think about yourself as a politically powerful individual.

Hamburg:  No, no, I don't and I really never have.  One aspect of it has to do with the fact that I came into leadership positions at a young age and I didn't expect to, and really didn't want to.  What I wanted was to concentrate very much on research.  Associated with that, I wanted to do some teaching and some clinical work.  I did not want to do administration and I didn't think of myself particularly as a leadership person.  But I got sort of thrust into leadership positions at an early age.  


I suppose the first -- my mentor, Roy Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R." , the psychiatrist who had done so much in the study of stress problems, I guess I was still in my twenties when he offered me the position of being associate director of the then new institute that he had created in Chicago.  It sort of automatically thrust me into a leadership position.  I, of course, was very honored and pleased to do it.  The position was one in which I still could concentrate a lot on research, and my priorities were implementable in that context, because Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  was a very strong leader, and as long as he was the director of the institute, he would be the manager.  


But after the years in that position, when I went out to the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences in 1957, I thought the time had come to move out on my own.  Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  was a very powerful, sort of dominating figure, and it seemed the time had come.  I remained close with him right up to his death and spoke at his memorial services and all that.  But nevertheless, we sort of agreed I should move out on my own.  But that's when I decided to go to the NIH, because I thought that would permit me to concentrate almost full time on research.  


The agreement I had with the NIH leadership people who recruited me was that they would find an administrator for this new unit that I would create.  It would not only be a new unit, but a new kind of unit, a new kind of psychiatric research entity.  And after a few months' time, I knew they'd put a very serious effort into finding an appropriate administrative head for the unit and they'd put a lot of money into constructing laboratories and so on.  A wonderful man, Bob [Robert A.] Cohen XE "Cohen, Robert A." , who was clinical director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, called me -- I was still in California -- called me and said, essentially, "We just can't find anybody.  You have a different vision, and we can't find an administrator who grasps or shares your vision."  And he said, "At least for a couple of years I think you'd better run it yourself in order to implement the vision."  And I could see the logic.  I think what we had in mind, at the time I thought I would stay there for many, many years and that gradually I would find somebody to take over the administrative reins, but that wasn't very realistic.  


But in any case, I became at that point an institution-builder, constructing a novel kind of psychiatric research enterprise.  Without walking back over the territory we've already covered, as I went from one position to the other, I was in that institution-building mode primarily because to some degree I had, again, a novel vision of how it is that this institution might accomplish certain things, and it was up to me to see if that could be made to work.


Well, what that meant was, among other things, that I was attracting people into these organizations who were my own age or older.  I was a mentor to people who were in every way my peers or, in some cases, as I say, senior to me, but for whatever reason, it seemed to come naturally to want to foster the careers primarily of young people, peers or not peers.  We were all young together.  But that was something I enjoyed, and I got into that mode and tried to think of ways in which I could help people bring their talent to fruition.  That's something I've really enjoyed a great deal.  And to some degree it was helping them to do things I wished I could do myself, like to work full time on a research problem that I thought was very important, and get them started and so on.


An example that came to mind this week, because in a forum on adolescence at the academy we were talking about a workshop on sleep research in adolescence, sleep and its disorders in adolescence -- adolescents have big problems with sleep -- and other interesting things about the biology of adolescents that are associated with sleep.  So I cited two major sleep laboratories, one at the NIH and then one later at Stanford.  I recruited terrific people to run those laboratories, and for many years they were among the small set of the leadership laboratories of sleep.  I didn't do the research myself.  I tremendously admired what they were doing and tried to help them do it.  But that would be an example.  There was a lot of that kind of stuff that I did, and I got a kind of wonderful vicarious participation in being able to identify and recruit and foster good people to do important work and research and teaching and clinical medicine, whatever.  


And I never, until quite recently, have thought much, even recently, not a lot self-consciously about my role as a leader, but it's come up a lot toward the end of my term at Carnegie.  That's one aspect of it: facilitating the careers of outstanding people.  That was to a considerable extent in the grantmaking mode at Carnegie and in earlier times had been in other ways.  But I try to see to it that people get the opportunities and the recognition for their work that they deserve.  As I said, the grantmaking business is a people business, and I got great satisfaction in helping excellent people, some I knew before, most I didn't know before I came to Carnegie, helped them along in their work.  So I think that's an aspect of leadership that may not apply so much in other contexts, but for me it was very important.


One of the things that's always worried me is I moved more than I should have moved.  I remember there was a point at which Betty said to me, "Okay.  If you move once more, people will conclude you can't hold a job."  [Laughter]  But it worried me that I might lose touch with people I'd worked with earlier or that I might not be sufficiently helpful to them when I could be.  I tried really hard -- probably not hard enough -- to be in touch with and helpful to people from earlier stages, former students, colleagues, whatever.  But anyway, for me that's an important aspect of leadership, facilitating good people to do what they can do, and trying to bring out the best in them.


They're doing a history of the Institute of Medicine.  A professor and chairman of the department of history at George Washington University is doing the history, and he sent me a draft of the chapter on my term as president, and I was surprised, he keeps referring to me as "a charismatic leader."  I don't know exactly what that means.  But I do think that an important part of it was to get people interested in or enthusiastic about a mission.  I came there with a certain vision of what the Institute could do.  There were competing visions at the time.  My vision was actually consonant with that of the original founders, but in the meantime there had been a lot of controversy about competing visions.  Should it be primarily for the medical profession?  Should it be primarily for biomedical research?  Should it have a broader view of all the factors that influence the health of the public?  I chose the latter as the founders had done, but it had not been implemented and it was up to me to lead an effort to implement it if that was what I thought was right.  And it was not without controversy in the medical community or within the academy.


I think what he meant by the "charismatic" part was that I was able to identify extremely able people who more or less shared that vision.  Either they did in an exclusive way or in a latent way they were sympathetic to it and I could kind of get them stirred up.  But the capacity to communicate the vision, get people excited about it, and, above all, get terrific people to work on it.  The idea that any one leader can do very much him or herself, I think, is farfetched.  If you're talking about a big mission, you've got to kind of mobilize a lot of people to work on it, and that's an important aspect of leadership.


Now, it can be quite horrible.  I've spent a lot of this summer reading in greater depth.  I periodically cycle back to the Nazi period and the origins of World War II and the Holocaust, and I was doing it this time with respect to, could that have been prevented.  It's arguably the greatest missed opportunity in human history, if you could have prevented World War II and the Holocaust, more than fifty million lives.  But Hitler XE "Hitler, Adolf"  had this capacity, obviously, to get the German people activated for a dreadful mission, fanatically, hatefully activated for a dreadful mission, so it's complex about that aspect of leadership, but it is there, somehow to activate people to work on a mission that they come to believe in.  And I think, by and large, in a democratic society there are enough checks and balances that it's not like to be a juggernaut that rolls over lots of people, but I've been very mindful of the responsibility you have with those great opportunities.  


The Institutes of Medicine and Carnegie both turned out to be president-centered institutions.  That is, the president gets a great opportunity, scope, and latitude to move things if -- and I think only if -- you can activate your board and your staff and your constituents that these are pretty good ideas and they're worth pursuing.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO, BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE]

Hamburg:  But it always has worried me to a degree that since in both institutions the board and staff were willing to back strongly the president, about whom they felt largely enthusiastic, that there could be an abuse of power.  You could do things that would be supported that were rash or unwise or so on.  So, for example, in the Carnegie years I would ask certain key staff with great experience, like David Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z."  and Barbara Finberg XE "Finberg, Barbara D."  and Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien" , to mention a few, to check out independently, if I thought something was a good idea, rather than just roaring into it, telling them why I thought it was a good idea, but ask them to check me, get independent experts, get peer review, think it though, give me straight feedback.  If I'm being carried away, tell me before we make some serious blunder.  I don't know how the balance worked out, but I tried to get that balance into it.  But it is certainly an aspect of leadership to get people enthusiastic about a mission, and to do that you've got to articulate some kind of vision of what the institution could be, what it could become, etc.


You know, Brenda, it's interesting, the Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict got five distinguished world leaders to do essays on leadership for preventing deadly conflict.  Now, this was a case where I utilized my own network.  I mean, people that I knew and respected, I asked to write these essays.  Could have been a lot more, of course.  Five, as it turned out, filled a reasonable-sized volume.  The five were Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." , [Boutros] Boutros-Ghali XE "Boutros-Ghali, Boutros" , Desmond Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond" , Jimmy Carter, and George Bush.  And they did a lot of work.  These are remarkably thoughtful essays done by these individuals.  Some of them had help and some didn't, reflecting on their own experience vis-à-vis preventing deadly conflict.  


We've recently, with President Carter XE "Carter, Jimmy" 's help, persuaded CNN [Cable News Network] to do a program with these five leaders, maybe a couple of hours of them talking to each other in different parts of the world, with a CNN anchorperson as moderator, to talk about what's in these essays and, of course, wherever they might go.  The essays are very different, but, taken together, they more or less get around the contours of the leadership question.

Q:  I'm just wondering if there's any particularly significant way in which they are different, if anything would jump out.

Hamburg:  Take, first, two or three cross-cutting themes: vision, courage, ability to articulate a mission, ability to stimulate others to share that vision.  That's kind of cross-cutting.


Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond" , more than the others, places emphasis on the leader's attributes of having suffered, having been through the experiences that characterize the lives of their constituents.  He talks about Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa as two people he knew well, who had that attribute, that the fact of their suffering and the fact of their sharing the plight of their constituents gave them an authenticity.  I think not all leaders have that, although it probably is a widely shared attribute that they at least have a capacity for empathy.  If they haven't directly experienced the plight of their constituency, they, nevertheless, have a real feel for it, can put themselves in the shoes of their constituents.  That sort of thing.


Carter XE "Carter, Jimmy" 's essay emphasizes the ability to communicate sort of empathetically about very difficult problems and very difficult situations that he particularly -- he makes the case of communicating with pariahs, that you may not like pariahs in the international community and you don't like what they do, but if you want to try to influence their behavior or bring them back toward more moderate or mainstream behavior, you need to communicate with them.  I think he thinks of it in an analogous way of communicating with the widest range of people -- rich or poor, different fields, different social backgrounds -- that it's an important attribute of leadership to be able to communicate with people, even if you don't come into it sharing very much with them, but to somehow grasp their common humanity.  That's certainly an element of Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond" 's essay as well.


Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." 's is distinctive, although it has commonalities with the others, but he was terribly impressed with the historical tendency of leaders, particularly national leaders, political leaders, to see their ultimate validation in what he calls brute force, at least the credible threat of brute force, if not the actual use of brute force.  To him it seems a primitive conception, exceedingly dangerous, now more dangerous than ever, and one that has to be transcended.  He grew up in a tradition in which, in the Soviet Union, there was enormous amount of weight placed on brute force, and he had at his disposal this incredible armory of destructive power. 


He's not a pacifist, but his feeling was you had to flip the coin over, that the real validation was restraint and prudence in the use of force, and really not to use force unless it was absolutely, absolutely necessary.  He illustrates that with many of his own experiences where a lot of his colleagues, for example, wanted him to crack down on the satellites in Eastern Europe.  On the contrary, he gave the signal that the Soviet Union would not use force again as they had in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in earlier times.  


So those are some of the similarities and differences in the leadership essays.  They're quite interesting and rather personal documents.  Bush puts emphasis on the ability to get people to cooperate.  In his case he talks about the coalition for the [Persian] Gulf War, first, the hard decision that you had to go to war to stop aggression, and, somewhat like Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." , how you have to really think very, very hard about when you have to go to war, but if you must do so, both for ethical and prudential and practical reasons, to get a coalition to do it.  And what's involved in communicating, again, your vision of, in this case, stopping aggression and getting the cooperation of an unlikely coalition, actually, that he built up for that purpose.


One thing that's not treated very much in there is helping leaders make decisions.  There is research literature on that.  This summer I did, together with Karen Ballentine XE "Ballentine, Karen" , my research associate, and my old friend Alex Gerge, an essay.  We were invited to do an essay in some way growing out of the commission for the Archives of General Psychiatry, which I think is the most widely distributed journal in the field.  I decided to focus on leadership, which is a recurring theme in the commission's work, and then there's this volume that I've been talking about.  But the commission report only said a little bit about the institutional arrangements that can help leaders make better decisions.  


Fundamentally, leaders have to process a wealth of information.  They have to assess the relevance of the information, the different policy options.  They have to consider a wide enough range of policy options so they don't jump -- ZOOM -- to some deadly conclusion.  They have to overcome some of the leader's own biases or dogmatic preoccupations, ideally.  And there is some research literature, both from studying real live leaders and from some experimental, quasi-leadership situations, about that.  


I've been fascinated with that, partly the small advisory group around a leader and partly the institutional arrangements that get the leader the information and help to digest the information and also cope with information overload sometimes.  I guess for myself, as it's applied in my own case, I've tried to get around me, both in terms of staff and board and outside advisors, people who seem to me very wise, very open-minded, very broad-gauged, who would be likely to be able to get to my attention the policy options that I wouldn't otherwise have been aware of, and also to give me straight feedback and say, "This is probably a mistake," or at least, "Don't go too far down that path unless you find out A, B, and C.  And here's how you can get more information about A, B, and C."  


It's an intriguing balance, on the one hand, not to jump to conclusions, not to be overwhelmed by my sort of prior preoccupations; on the other hand, not to become indecisive, because you're so busy going on collecting more information that you can never come down on anything.  I do think that's an important subject, of how we strengthen the capacity of leaders at every level, from presidents to, say, department chairmen at universities, to make better decisions by virtue of their ability to process information in a small-group setting that's not sycophantic, not dogmatic.  I think that's extremely important, and also to have, in terms of the larger institutional arrangements, to have procedures that are likely to get adequate information and a fair-minded consideration.  


For instance, our procedure, which would have a certain amount of peer review, get independent experts on a subject to look at proposals for us and to give us feedback, convene meetings where we would bring together people from very different backgrounds, strong-minded, well-informed people of different perspectives.  Those would be two examples -- the automatic peer review and the frequent convening functions that would be built into the institution as part of the traditions of the institution, that would tend to ensure better consideration of proposals of ideas, or programs, and grant applications.

Q:  Terrific.  I'm going to take a little chance now.  I must say that Bill Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  has been very much on my mind.  I would hope and trust that a future reader of your transcript will be putting what you've had to say today about leadership in context of what may be a real crisis in leadership in our country.  The President is in the city this weekend.  I decided on my way over here this morning to risk asking you about your feelings about Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." 's predicament, our country's predicament, how we're being perceived.  Is there any danger in that?  And I'll even go so far as to say that I've been told you're very close to Hillary Clinton XE "Rodham Clinton, Hillary" .  

Hamburg:  Well, I'm happy to say what I can about that.  I don't have any great wisdom about it.  Hillary and Betty  XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A." served together on the board of a small foundation in the late seventies, early eighties.  So to a certain extent we got to know her -- not well, not as a close personal friend, but we certainly respected her intellect and her humane and democratic values.


Then -- I didn't know him, but in our education programs, one of the strategies that we employed was to try to connect with governors.  We felt that if you were going to be serious about education reform in the country, that so much of the action is at the state level, that we would like to both benefit from the counsel of education-minded governors and also provide a certain amount of encouragement to them, that they could find help in the foundation world and elsewhere.  So we were very careful to get governors, both Democratic and Republican, and from east to west and midwest, involved in our activities.  One of them is currently our board chairman, Tom [Thomas H.] Kean XE "Kean, Thomas H." , a Republican from New Jersey, who was involved in a number of our activities.  We invited him to come on the board and now he's the board chairman.


Bill Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." , when he was governor of Arkansas, was clearly an education-minded governor.  So we invited him to serve on the panel that became the Turning Points report, the middle-grade school -- the middle-grade school initiative was something actually I got straight from Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A." .  Back in Palo Alto [California], Betty had had a program in junior high and was very insightful about the difficulties of American junior high and middle schools.  It stimulated my interest, and so was a high priority for the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.  By the way, have we covered the council in the past?

Q:  I believe that we have, but let me check, because if we haven't, we certainly need to.

Hamburg:  It's important.  I'd appreciate it.  It's a decade-long activity, and I think was really unique in the history of the country.  I don't want to do an injustice to that activity.  So many good people contributed, one being Bill Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." .  David [W.] Hornbeck XE "Hornbeck, David W." , who was chairing our study group, knew Clinton from some educational activity.  Hornbeck was a professional educator.  It fitted our philosophy of involving education-minded governors, so he was asked to be on the panel.  Tony [Anthony W.] Jackson XE "Jackson, Anthony W." , our staff director for the project, worked with him and Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien" , to some extent, and I, to some extent.  He was a good contributory member.  Like all governors, he didn't get to a lot of meetings, but it was very clear that he was a man of great intellect and a very serious commitment to education.  


So when the time came to put out the report, it was part of our strategy to really try to make these reports meaningful to the American public, not just to talk to the education community or to any community of experts, but rather to get an informed, concerned public aware of what the facts were with respect to the problem and what options existed for improving the difficulties.  So this report on middle-grade schools, which I think it's fair to say was a very important, substantial report, Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  contributed to it.  When we thought about how we could get this understood by the American people, we asked him to take a lead role at the meeting itself where we brought it out.  We had many luminaries at that meeting, senators and governors and whatnot, Democrats and Republicans across the country, and experts in education.  It was a big extravaganza, a two-day meeting, in bringing out that report.  I guess it was the spring of 1989, I think.


But I asked Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  if he would represent it on television, and he did several shows, "The Today Show" and "McNeil-Lehrer Show," several television programs, as well as newspaper interviews.  He did them superbly.  He was a very effective communicator, without a doubt, and he understood it and grasped it extremely well.  So our relationship began with that, and I think that was a rewarding experience for him both substantively and in terms of the national leadership role that he played, moving now beyond Arkansas into national leadership in education.  I think he felt grateful for that opportunity, and he certainly contributed.  We've talked already about his cabinet, etc., that came later on.  


Hillary had this broader interest in children and youth, not only education, but all the way from prenatal care on up through higher education, the real spectrum, which was very much a Carnegie concept.  One of her first gainful employments was with the old Carnegie Council [on Children], before my day.  But as a consequence of her interest in these issues, I asked her to open the Starting Points meeting, the zero-to-three national meeting.  I think she opened another one, too.  Maybe it was the Great Transitions.  I'm not sure.  But anyway, she took a great interest in the various Carnegie reports on children and youth through childhood and adolescence, and my interactions with her have very largely been around that.


Actually, to my surprise, she asked me to meet with her on their first visit to Washington.  I believe it was in late '92, after the election but before the inauguration.  I remember I met with her at Blair House, and she wanted to talk about an agenda for children and youth.  I laid out what I thought she could do, both some of the content and the modalities that she could do as First Lady.  


I also made a suggestion to her at that time, which I think was somewhat surprising to her -- she's referred to it later -- that she should have an international agenda, that the First Lady of the United States could speak effectively to issues of women and children and families around the world, something like the UNICEF agenda, that she could speak to a UNICEF type of agenda.  I thought very highly of Jim Grant XE "Grant, James P." , who was the head of UNICEF, who'd been an old friend of mine. He was on my International Health Committee at the Institute of Medicine, way back when.  So I thought that would be a good role for her, and she, of course, has taken that up brilliantly.  


In later times I've also had interactions with her around international matters.  For example, she hosted our coming-out event for the commission at the White House last December.  So, you know, we haven't been close personal friends, but there has been a substantive agenda both on children and youth and international matters with the President and First Lady, more with her than with him.  Then, of course, with some cabinet members -- Christopher XE "Christopher, Warren M." , obviously, in a major way, and the other cabinet members, too.  I mean, I think they respected what Carnegie had done, so there was some involvement, as there had been with Bush.  Bush, for example, asked me to be part of a group of "education leaders" to meet with him as to whether he should have a summit on education, and, if so, how, how to proceed with it.  So there was that kind of interaction, but more with the Clinton people, I guess.


Now, I think that Hillary is a very dedicated person, with strong democratic, humane, compassionate values, who certainly saw the presidency and the White House as a chance to advance that kind of an agenda, both directly and through her influence on the President or elsewhere in the administration.  So I have frequently called to her attention people or ideas or programs.  I've made a number of suggestions about places she might visit, many of which were Carnegie grantees -- not all -- to see what people were doing, for example, for young children in poor communities.  She's done a lot of that.  She's gotten to be quite expert.  She doesn't need my advice or guidance on that anymore.  She's become very expert.  But I also sometimes convene groups of experts for her occasionally so that she can get -- I didn't want it to come through my mouth, but a different perspective of people who were doing the work on different problems.


Now, about the President, my formal link with him, I've been a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology [PCAST].  I'm very proud of that and pleased to have served in that role.  I've chaired two panels.  The first one was on preventing deadly conflict, for obvious reasons.  And now the last couple of years, a panel on education, also for obvious reasons.  So I've been a fairly active member of PCAST, and they appointed a very good group, several Nobelists and similar people, and people from diverse backgrounds.  I've been very pleased to be a part of it.  In point of fact, [Albert A.] Gore XE "Gore, Albert A."  meets with us almost every time we meet, and Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  more occasionally.  Although it's the President's committee, he has, to a large extent, delegated that to Gore XE "Gore, Albert A." , who has a long-standing interest in the uses of science and technology, and even to a certain degree in basic science.


So, other than that, my contacts have been informal.  I don't presume to have any great wisdom about him.  I think that it's a kind of tragedy.  I think he's a brilliant man.  They both are extremely smart, very high intelligence.  They both have a great deal of knowledge, he and Hillary.  They've studied and they've worked and they've visited and they've absorbed things.


Fascinating, about a year ago, a year ago spring, I helped them plan and co-chaired with the President and the First Lady a meeting on zero-to-three at the White House, and it was very interesting -- I just opened it and sort of got it launched -- to see their interaction, particularly his, with the scientists we had who had worked on brain development in early life and so on, the intellect and the interest, the intellectual curiosity.  Very, very impressive.  


But clearly he's had a problem in his life which was worrisome to me at an earlier time.  I had no first-hand knowledge, but I had heard enough of the rumors and so on.  I had a kind of intuitive feeling that there probably was something to it, and it always worried me.  I fervently hoped that when he came to the White House, that that aspect of his life would be put behind him.  Obviously he couldn't do it.  


I think it is a kind of almost Greek tragedy, because my belief is that he could have accomplished a great deal in his second term, and I think it will be much less now, particularly -- and I did have an opportunity to say this to him -- I served on his committee -- I forgot about this -- the committee on the medical consequences of the Persian Gulf War.  He asked me to chair it, but I simply couldn't chair it because I was so over-committed.  I did suggest a chair, Joyce [C.] Lashof XE "Lashof, Joyce C." , the dean of the school of public health at Berkeley.  I agreed to serve on it.  


When we met in connection with our final report, I had a chance for a few minutes alone with him, and I did say that I thought in his second term that the Theodore Roosevelt model was a very good one, that he could have an agenda that he could lay out, as Roosevelt did, and some of it could be worked out with the Congress and translated into legislation, probably a lot of it could not, and if not, some of it he could probably do by executive order, as Theodore Roosevelt had done, like creating the national parks by executive order.  And then a large part of it, that he could be an educator for the American public about issues that we have to address sooner or later, if not in his presidency, then later, important issues of children and youth, for example, of science and technology, very future oriented, of how democracy adapts to economic globalization.  Gave him those kinds of examples and said that as educator, that he could do a lot that his successor or successor twice removed or thrice removed could perhaps implement more fully, things that would be implemented in the private sector.  But his current leadership is greatly undermined.  Yet here is very resilient, gifted, and dedicated to the nation, so has still a great deal to contribute -- during the presidency and afterward.


I don't think I used the term "moral authority" with him.  I might have.  But it does involve a kind of moral authority, that the President is the one person who is charged by the Constitution for thinking about our whole population, not just rich, not just one sector, but everybody, and, at least by implication, is charged with thinking ahead, a longer-term future.  That aspect of his presidency, I think, is probably weakened a lot.  But I don't have any insight into the personal foible.  It's there.  I do think in a general way -- I've never read a lot about him or talked to him or discussed it with him -- but he had a very difficult childhood, he certainly did.  You know, it would be almost miraculous if he came out of such a difficult, turbulent, uncertain childhood without having some marks, some scars.  I'm afraid that this behavior with women is one of those that carried over, terribly unwise and unfortunate.  The strain of it is just palpable.  The President's Committee of Advisors met last week or week before.  He wasn't there, but the strain of it was in the air, and so forth.

Q:  I appreciate that very much, very much, Dr. Hamburg.  I've kept you for an hour and a half.  It's been another fascinating session.  Is this an okay time for us to close?

Hamburg:  It's fine.

Q:  Thank you so much.

Hamburg:  Thank you very much.

[END OF SESSION]

	TTT
	Session Nine -- VIDEO

	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg     
	Date:  December 10, 1998

	Interviewer:  Mary Marshall Clark
	New York, New York

	
	


Q:  Dr. Hamburg, thank you so much for being with us today.

Hamburg:  It's a pleasure to be here.

Q:  Thank you.  I'm very much intrigued by the ways in which your early life [experiences] have influenced your evolution as a thinker, as a scientist, and as a director of the largest foundation in this country, really, general all-purpose foundation.  Could you tell me a little bit something about your grandparents, your parents, where they came from, what were the important things about your identity that you gleaned from them?  Start anywhere you want.

Hamburg:  My grandfather came here -- it's a classic immigrant story -- in 1900 or 1901, I'm not sure.  Pushcart peddler.  Came first to New York, where there were too many pushcart peddlers.  Went on to Cincinnati, where he had a cousin.  That was better, but, still, there were quite a few.  So he heard about a town up the Ohio River called Evansville, Indiana, and he went there.  I believe he was the only pushcart peddler at the time.  


My father had been born, as his first child, shortly before he left Latvia, so he was very eager to bring his wife and baby to the United States as soon as possible.  So he got established in Evansville, Indiana, having really no formal education and knowing no English.  It's an irony that the way he got established was that his Yiddish meshed with the German spoken by a lot of German Americans in Evansville, and he made enough money to bring my father and his mother over about a year after he came.  So that was part of the family legend, the courage.  Put yourself in his position, a man without knowledge of the culture or the language, and no obvious way to make a living, and yet such ingenuity and dedication to do that.


So he was a very important figure for me, that whole story of how he came, and his commitment to bringing relatives.  His belief was that Europe was not going to be a good place for Jews in the twentieth century, at least the early part of the twentieth century.  He had this wonderful classic vision of America as the land of opportunity, so he made a few bucks and brought some relatives, made a few bucks and brought some more.  He brought fifty-some to Evansville before World War II finally shut it down.  It was a very moving occasion, I remember, at his funeral.  They all came together, and I think they had a real sense, literally, they might very well not be alive, and certainly not in the United States, had it not been for him.  So that was very important to me in a number of ways: I think the sense of what this country would stand for at its best, the opportunity, the democracy.


Then another corollary of it was the sense of family solidarity.  I mean, they were all together in this small town and there was a very strong mutual support and mutual aid ethic.  I grew up with that.  My grandparents had a place on Second Street in Evansville, which was known in the family as just Second Street.  You never used any names, it was just Second Street.  And it was an open house, in effect.  We would drop in a couple nights a week, and there would be some set of relatives there, a different configuration every time, but there was never any question that there would be people there who were interested in each other and would help each other in any way possible, and a lot of humor and news of the day and so on.  


My grandmother would hold forth about the news of the day.  She got it from her Yiddish newspaper.  I think it was a little bit behind, a few days behind the actual news, but in any case, that family solidarity certainly sensitized me to the value of social supports in life and later on in medicine and public health, child development, adolescent development.  That certainly became kind of a red thread running through much of my work -- the value of social supports.


At a much later time, my wife, when she was Director of Studies for President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, working in the White House, got some colleagues together to put together a really first-rate scholarly paper on social supports, research evidence of what social supports did in relation to health, and really gave that whole field a big boost.  But in any event, that's part of my heritage that was important.


Then I think another aspect of that was the premium on education, again a classical sort of belief within the immigrant culture.  But it was real and vivid, that the way to get ahead was to get education.  Everybody in the family, lacking formal education, had great intellectual curiosity.  My father's claim to fame was he was the first member of the family to go to college.  He was a rather shy and not altogether healthy child, but a perceptive teacher saw that he was gifted and helped him get a scholarship to the University of Chicago, and that, too, was part of the family lore.  It sensitized me to the significance of the teaching profession.  When I got to Carnegie, I finally had a chance to do something about that, take some steps that might tend to strengthen teaching as a profession.  But I'm sure that story about my father's experience, and some of my own personal experiences with teachers, influenced me very much in that orientation.


So those are a few examples of ways in which my early life sensitized me to certain themes that became important professionally.  I guess I should add a couple more.  One had to do with the status of medicine.  There was a respect bordering on awe for the profession of medicine in the family, even though medicine really didn't have much to offer in those days.  When I got accepted to medical school, to jump ahead a bit, our family doctor said, "Don't let it go to your head.  All we have to offer is aspirin, morphine, and prayer."  That was pretty much true.  But despite that, there was this great respect for medicine.


My father himself had wanted to be a doctor, but my grandfather needed him to come back and help in the family business, to make money to bring the relatives over.  They never accumulated wealth appreciably, but to bring more relatives, that was the passion.  And my father did that.  He always regretted that he hadn't had a chance to pursue medicine, so there was a sense in which I grew up with that and was going down a path that he had valued.


The other thing I would say is about intergroup relations in Evansville that was quite interesting because clearly the Jewish community was very sensitive to discrimination.  It was still the era of, for example, quotas for medical schools and other quotas too.  But, nevertheless, we were, on the whole, well treated and well accepted in Evansville.  It gave me some sense of what was possible, despite intergroup tensions.  


It cut two ways.  One was, it heightened me to the meaning of social depreciation by virtue of any kind of intergroup categorizations, the whole ingroup/outgroup problem which became very important to me professionally later in my career.  No doubt there was sensitivity to that by virtue of growing up with the emerging Holocaust in the background.  But there was also the sense of what was possible, how people could learn to live together amicably in this relatively small town and, in some ways, a tough industrial town which was not short on intergroup tensions, but, nevertheless, there was, on the whole, a kind of accepting climate.  So those are some of the strands of early experience that bore on my later professional interests.

Q:  When you talk about intellectual curiosity and the kind of intellectual curiosity that was manifested in your family, can you trace the development of your own intellectual curiosities and how it meshed with those?  What did you discuss around the house in terms of what was happening in the world, what was happening in Evansville?

Hamburg:  Certainly my father and his side of the family, generally, certainly my father had very strong intellectual curiosity.  My father had lots of books.  Even during the Depression, he had minimal income, he would always add to his book collection.  I've been the same way, only more so, throughout my life.  My wife says that I don't understand that there are libraries.  After the Andrew Carnegie connection, I understand there are libraries.  But I think if a book is worth reading, it's worth having and underlining and writing in the margin and so on.  Anyway, I'm sure I got that from my father.


The part of it that really changed and was totally unexpected was turning on to science, and that came in college, with a busman's holiday.  Well, I should explain.  I was in a wartime speed-up program.  I was in college during the war, headed toward becoming a doctor.  The government wanted as many doctors as rapidly as possible.  There was a speed-up program, and the Army had a program, the Navy had a program.  I was in the Army program, where they would pay for your education and, in turn, you would be available to be called up as a medical technician or, if you got through, called up as a doctor as soon as possible.  In that wartime speed-up program, I in some ways felt I was missing the richness of the university education, because I had to concentrate on the pre-med courses so strictly, and I wanted very much to branch out.  


But the busman's holiday was, I took a course in genetics, more biological science.  But I heard such wonderful things about the professor, a man named Tracy Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M." , who was one of the pioneers in modern genetics.  It was a non-field at the time.  It was not recognized at all.  It's hard to realize today that it's become such a preeminent field, but it wasn't then.  Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M."  was one of the people who made it an exciting field.  In sensing the enthusiasm as well as the content, I got turned on to science, and that direction of intellectual curiosity was unexpected, and, again, shows at a higher level, a more advanced level, what teaching can do.  It changed my whole life.

Q:  Looking back a little bit, though, when the Holocaust was beginning to happen, what did you think about it?  How did you respond to it, both intellectually and emotionally?  How do you think that characterized your work later on?

Hamburg:  It certainly influenced me probably much more than I realized at the time.  There was a great perplexity to it, because I perceived Germany as one of the most advanced and civilized countries in the world.  If you wanted to do advanced work in medicine or in many of the sciences, you went to Germany.  There was a great tradition in music and in many fields.  So there was this enormous perplexity.  How could a country that was in some ways so advanced be so incredibly barbaric in other ways?  It's been a conundrum for me throughout my life.  Oddly enough, this summer I came back to some reading, with the guidance of some of the leading historians of Germany, in order to try to say, could World War II and the Holocaust have been prevented?  This is in the spirit of our Carnegie mission on preventing deadly conflict.  But it led me to explore more deeply what did happen in Germany and some of the factors that were conducive to that awful turn of events.


But I guess I felt at some stage that if it could happen in Germany, it could happen anywhere.  I simply couldn't believe that that was unique.  It somehow was a part of human propensity that certain conditions would bring out, could bring to the surface.  But it certainly influenced my interest in aggression and conflict and conflict resolution, heightened the awareness of the dangers basically of the historic paths of humanity, where there is so much slaughter and all that, that in the future we were going to have to find ways to deal with.  It's a practical matter that as the killing power would increase, that we’d simply destroy each other unless we could find better ways to deal with ubiquitous tendencies to human conflict.  I think that was a legacy it left me.  I can't give the landmarks at which various things happened, but it was certainly a powerful shaping influence on my interests and my attitudes, I'm sure.

Q:  So you went to college and then medical school.  What led you into psychiatry, given that you had also this interest in genetics and certain kind of very specific issues in science?

Hamburg:  Right.  The evolution of my interest in psychiatry was in the fourth year of medical school, in a course in psychiatry.  In connection with it, I read Freud's general introductory lectures.  I don't recall, it was probably on an optional reading list for the course.  It certainly wasn't central to the course by any manner of means.  But I found it quite fascinating that he was dealing with issues of motivation and emotion in human relationships, and he was also dealing with the influence of early experience on later behavior.  That seemed to me just so fundamental, so fascinating.


I should say that the family was, to a certain degree, introspective.  I think it's not altogether surprising that I would have been interested in psychological matters, because, for whatever reason, the family was kind of oriented that way.  People tried to understand why others behaved as they did and so forth.  


But then I got very intrigued with the concepts that Freud put forward.  I didn't have the foggiest idea of how that would actually apply in practice in the field of psychiatry, and, indeed, what little I saw of it in Indianapolis City Hospital was not very attractive.  In some ways it was more like a jail than a hospital.  There wasn't very much that could be done at the time.  Like I was saying about medicine in general, psychiatry had very little to offer.  This was 1946 or so, maybe '47.  


But then I read a book called Men Under Stress, by Roy Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  and John Spiegel XE "Spiegel, John P." , which was their wartime experience, trying to understand the dynamics of emotional reaction to stress in combat.  I found that really fascinating, and it suggested ways in which you could deal with the stress of combat, help people overcome the traumatic reactions they were having.  So that added a kind of dimension of hope about the therapeutic side of the field.  


I made up my mind to try to get to go to intern at the Michael Reese Hospital, where Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  was working.  He came back there after the war.  I was lucky enough to get to go there and to get to know him, and he became a great shaping influence on me, and we became good friends until he died a few years ago.  But that sort of translated into action the kind of concepts that I had come across in Freud's writing.  Now, it all got very much more complicated later on, certainly, but in any event, that's how the interest evolved, I guess I'd say some sensitizing to psychological issues through the family, through introspection, and then the concepts of Freud and then the operational procedures and therapeutic interventions that Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  and Spiegel XE "Spiegel, John P."  had pioneered during the war.

Q:  How did you move into an intellectual interest in stress itself?  Can you talk about your own work, your own scientific pioneering work in that regard?

Hamburg:  I had been turned on to science by genetics, as I said, and I wanted to hold onto that if I could.  I had gone through a kind of transition of interest during the medical school years, from genetics -- this was single-cell genetics -- to cellular physiology, to general mammalian physiology, and then to behavior.  And as I got into the field, I was looking for some way to connect those, and eventually did.  For whatever reason, I've always had a kind of broadly integrative turn of mind, wanting to draw together ideas and information from different sources, from different disciplines, whatever, and see if I could try to make a coherent picture.


Now, in psychiatry, during the internship year, Grinker XE "Grinker, Roy R."  encouraged me to go to Yale [University] for a year.  He had no openings.  He had a certain number of slots, and he didn't have any slots for that year, but he encouraged me to go to Yale for a year, then come back to Chicago.  And that's what I did.  Early in that year at Yale, a very interesting Hungarian emigre to Canada, now Canadian, endocrinologist Hans Selye XE "Selye, Hans" , gave a lecture in which he showed that a variety of conditions -- I forgot how many, fifteen or twenty -- different highly stressful conditions caused a great enlargement of the adrenal gland in rodents.  Many of them were fractures and burns and so on that were clearly severe physical stress, but there were a couple that could be interpreted as psychological stresses, an immobilization condition which simply tied the animal down for a number of hours, and periodic sounding of loud noises, what appeared to elicit alarm responses on the part of the animals.


Those two conditions intrigued me very much, the question of whether psychological stress could have an impact on the adrenal gland.  There was already a fair amount known about that with respect to one part of the adrenal gland, the adrenal medulla, which secretes adrenalin and other adrenalin-like hormones, but there was essentially nothing known about the other part of the adrenal gland, which is biochemically quite independent, the adrenal cortex that secretes the steroids, the cortico steroids, such as cortisone, the cortisol type of hormone.  


So we set out to investigate that, to see whether psychological stress in humans could stimulate both the adrenal cortex and medulla.  I spent some years then working on that sort of problem.  It turned out, to my surprise, that there were not precise, reliable biochemical methods for measuring those hormones at the time.  There were bioassays, which, although highly sensitive, were not so specific.  So we spent years trying to get better methods both on the biochemical side and the psychological side to measure quantitatively different reactions to stress, first doing it in naturally occurring circumstances and then in experimental situations, and, eventually demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that the adrenal gland in both of its parts, the medulla and the cortex, respond strongly to psychological stress in humans.


Along the way, we made what I suppose was the most striking or dramatic discovery I was ever associated with in my career, and that was the discovery that the adrenal cortex also responded very powerfully when people were depressed, even if they were sitting, huddled, not moving, in psychomotor retardation, as the jargon went at the time, where you'd think it's almost like hibernation.  But the alarm systems of the body were clearly responding physiologically, biochemically, under those conditions.  It was counterintuitive.  We actually repeated it in a different way before we published any of it, because we didn't trust our own findings.  The prevailing conventional wisdom at the time was that, if anything, the alarm responses were dampened in that kind of depression.  But it turned out that regardless of whether the person was overtly agitated or not, that the depressive emotion was associated with the powerful stimulation of the adrenal cortex.  


A lot of very good people have made a living on that over several decades in elaborating and tracking down the implications of that discovery.  The technical capacity to evaluate these systems has improved enormously since we made that discovery in the 1950s.  Basically it wouldn't be too much to say it's filling in details, very important details, but the fundamental fact of the alarm systems being mobilized in depression, as well as other conditions of emotional distress, was something that we were able to establish.  


It was an exciting time, and I did some of that work in several different places over a couple of decades, with a variety of colleagues.  It was all interdisciplinary collaborative work, but I perhaps provided a certain intellectual spark and a certain cohesiveness.  One of the things that I've always enjoyed doing, and got to be pretty good at, was to elicit cooperation in people who bring different skills to the table, and getting a good collaborative enterprise going where people work together to get around the contours of a complex problem in a way that no individual could do alone.

Q:  Along those lines of multidisciplinarity, didn't you go back and do some further research in psychoanalytic theory, at the Chicago School?

Hamburg:  Well, yes and no.  The role that I played there, I guess, mainly had to do with coping.  I was called in the Army again when the Korean War broke out, and I spent the whole Korean War in the Army, roughly half of it in Texas, Fort Sam Houston, and the other half at the Walter Reed Army Research Institute in Washington, which was then new.  At least it was undergoing a phase of expansion and, for the first time, had a neuropsychiatry part to it.  


Anyway, during the part in Texas, the Army had then, still now, today, the Army Burn Center was located at Fort Sam Houston, and it was always -- it has been, to the present time -- right at the cutting edge of research and treatment in the burn field.  A surgeon and internist who were running that burn center asked me if I could see some of their patients, to help them clarify the problem they were having.  I was not assigned to the burn center.  I was running a big psychiatric service, in fact, at any given moment, 200-plus patients, so I was kind of running myself crazy at the time.  But I was fascinated with this.


Evenings and weekends, I would go over there to the burn unit, the burn center, and try to make sense of it.  The point was, they were at that time pioneering an open treatment of burns which required a lot of cooperation by the patients, and some of the patients were not cooperating, and that was the problem they wanted me to look at.  When I looked at it, the thing that astonished me was that most of the patients were cooperating and were somehow coming to terms with this terrible injury that they had, second- and third-degree burns over much of their body surface.  Some of them were like charred remnants of human beings.  But yet most of them were adapting, were cooperating in this treatment.  That was the most interesting part.  I had no idea how to understand the situation. 


I asked their permission to interview all the patients and all the staff over a period of time, to try to build up some context for getting at least a modicum of insight into this question of cooperation or non-cooperation.  It turned out I was able to be helpful to them.  I'm very happy about that.  But mainly it led me to try to do some fairly systematic studies of how was it, in fact, that people come to terms with such severe injury.


I first went to the literature, the research literature, to try to get guidance.  In a way, I hit the panic button.  There was virtually no literature.  Whether you took it from the standpoint of coping, adaptation, problem-solving in highly stressful conditions, or whether you took it from the standpoint of burn patients, there was a little here and there, but not much.  So I really feel very lucky that I was able to play some role over a period of years in developing a field of coping studies.  We even, I remember, had considerable hassle about what to call it, what term to use.  Should we use coping, should we use adaptation, sometimes we used both, whatever term it was, to try to understand some of the psychological mechanisms by which people could come to terms with life-threatening situations or otherwise highly stressful situations.


So I was engaged in that over several decades, and I think it had some interest for people in the psychoanalytic field, particularly those concerned with what was called ego psychology, but I think it had a broader interest in psychiatry, in pediatrics, in various other parts of medicine, eventually in public health.


The series of studies on really life-threatening situations -- indeed, many of the patients died -- the burn situation, and then later patients with severe polio, before the vaccine, and then later studies of the families of children with leukemia at a time when leukemia was a uniformly fatal disease.  It isn't today, happily, but it was then.  


We tried to work on both biological and psychological aspects, but primarily in those studies psychological responses, how is it that people could maintain a sense of worth as a person, and maintain significant human relationships, and mobilize some hope for the future and come to terms with the immediate requirements of the situation, and think about some ways of getting out of this terrible box they were in and move ahead.  So we tried to delineate a lot of strategies cognitive and emotional and interpersonal strategies, by which people would cope with very severe life-threatening situations.


Then I got to a point, really, on a personal basis where I didn't want to do that anymore.  It was just too draining emotionally.  It occurred to me that in a way what we were dealing with was major life transitions, and there were major life transitions that were not inherently life-threatening, but, nevertheless, difficult, almost required some new adaptive patterns.  So then in later years, I spent considerable time studying those situations and every so many years would try to do a synthesis that would draw together the strands of research on coping and adaptation.  We put out one multi-author book on that, which had about a twenty-, twenty-five-year life in graduate studies and whatnot, I'm happy to say.

Q:  What was it called?

Hamburg:  It was called Coping and Adaptation.  I had some very distinguished contributors, like Erik [H.] Erikson XE "Erikson, Erik H." , for example, in that book.  But that was an important part of my life, which was totally unexpected.  But it seemed to me you couldn't really study biological responses to stress without getting interested also in psychological responses.  And to the extent that we could link the two, we tried to do so.

Q:  Partly what I'm fascinated about is, you've spent all these years in a medical environment, particularly, for studying almost maladaptive stress responses.  I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about that in terms of your later views and insights into evolutionary perspectives, particularly after your time at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences.  Then, on the other hand, you study what are the capacities, extreme capacities, of human beings to operate under conditions of extreme stress.  How do you put those two things together, and how much did you begin to see human development, in particular, in these two ways, or did they ever compete with each other?  Did you begin to see the world in these terms?

Hamburg:  The different strands of my research interests were interrelated.  Certainly the thing that struck me about the coping observations, one of the important things, against the background of the field, was that, understandably, medicine was very pathology oriented, and psychiatry inherited that tradition of pathology.  You see symptoms, you see disease, and you try to understand how the disease came about.  I'd say it's largely in recent decades that medicine, generally, and psychiatry, in particular, has come to pay more serious attention to the body's own responses for adaptation.  Take the enormous development of the field of immunology in medicine.  There was really almost no immunology when I went to medical school.  A little bit.  And we've learned something about the very rich, complex capacities of the human body to deal with foreign agents, threatening influences at the microbial level.


So, too, I think that when I came into psychiatry, at first what we were really taught was to focus on breakdown of function, maladaptive behavior.  Then as I began to make the coping observations, I sort of turned the thing on its head.  In fact, I believe I started one of my papers with a sentence something like this: "Why doesn't everyone break down?"  This listed many of the ubiquitous stresses of life, and if you went by the earlier tradition that emphasized so much the pathology and the vulnerability and the breakdown, you would think that there would be no way to escape it; sooner or later we'd all disintegrate.  But we don't.  I mean, we suffer, and by and large, we cope, we adapt, we solve problems, make the best of situations, transcend difficulties.


But both aspects, two sides of the coin, are real and significant.  I did feel that I was able to maybe add something to the outlook of the field by pursuing the coping and adaptation in a serious way.  Now, I may have been influenced in that by the early exposure to biology, including evolution.  You have to bear in mind that adaptation is perhaps the central concept in evolution.  I had been exposed to that kind of thinking as an undergraduate at Indiana University.  One of the teachers of evolution in my day in Bloomington was Alfred Kinsey XE "Kinsey, Alfred" , who is known for the sex studies later, but was a great teacher of evolution.  Kinsey, Breneman XE "Breneman, William R." , and other professors were very stimulating, no question about that, on the evolutionary perspective.


That came into my own life again in the stress work, because as we went along in that with a variety of collaborators and following the general research literature, it became very clear that the stress responses were a kind of mobilization for action, without action, in most cases, in contemporary circumstances.  The energy metabolism of stress, cardiovascular responses of stress, the role of these hormones in stress, all pointed in the direction of the body's getting ready for some intensive exertion.  Walter Cannon XE "Cannon, Walter Bradford" , years earlier, the great Harvard physiologist, had characterized that as the "fight or flight" response.  


I got really perplexed about that.  It seemed to me that must have served adaptive functions over a very long period of time, under the conditions in which we evolved, there were millions of years that the human organism and its predecessors must have been able to take the actions they had to take, and there would be a real value to anticipatory mobilization -- getting revved up and ready to go in the face of danger so that you could do whatever you had to do to survive, but that clearly didn't apply much to contemporary circumstances where stress does not often lead to exertion..  


The people we were studying were mostly in more or less sedentary situations and, for that matter, largely lived sedentary lives.  And all the drastic transformation essentially since the Industrial Revolution, just a moment of evolutionary history, you know, a hundred or two hundred years of time in which these things have taken place compared with millions of years in which we've evolved, so that it seemed to me that we probably carried over these responses from an earlier time, and they might no longer be adaptive.  In fact, that became a general orientation of mine, certainly about aggressive behavior, that much of what was adaptive earlier was no longer adaptive in contemporary circumstances.  That led me to then actually get into some evolutionary studies, which I never in my wildest dreams thought I would do.  That's what took me to Africa.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Q:  I think we wanted to back up a little bit, and you wanted to talk about the relationship between genetics and endocrinology in terms of you linking those two things and establishing a new area.

Hamburg:  The interest in genetics and evolution were closely related, as they are conceptually and indeed operationally in the field of biology.  Having gotten that bug as an undergraduate, it really never left me.  


Now, with respect to genetics, as the stress research evolved, I got more and more intrigued with the question of individual differences in response to stress situations.  They were very manifest on the psychological level, but then it seemed to me that given the enormous biological variability on almost any dimension that it's possible to measure, that there probably were big individual differences biologically in stress response.  Let's say, for example, if you and I had an argument and we both got approximately equally upset, it might be that my level of adrenalin circulating in the blood would be three or four times yours, or it might last three or four times longer than yours.  I really wanted to investigate that kind of possibility.  There was reason to believe that that might well be true.


There are a lot of places in which the individual differences could be genetically determined.  It might be in the rate of synthesis of the hormone in the adrenal gland, it might be something about the way it's transported through the blood to reach all the tissues of the body, it might be something about the way it's excreted in the kidney.  There are a number of places where a genetic variation could influence an individual's biological response to stress.


So I recruited into our department at Stanford, when I went there in 1961, people with backgrounds in genetics and biochemistry and evolution, and brought the different disciplines together and began to develop what I came to call a behavior endocrine genetic response to stress.  The acronym was BEG -- behavior endocrine genetic.  We simply tried to get at that kind of question.  It had to be done mostly in animals, where you could really look at the synthesis and transport and the metabolism of the hormones.  


So, all that to say that we did manage to open up that field that's gone far beyond where it was in the beginning, but at least we were able to show that there were, in fact, major genetically determined variations in the way the body processed the stress-related hormones.  I'm very pleased with that.  It would have been fascinating to go on with it myself, but as in much of my career, for whatever reason, I would tend to stimulate very good people to get going on a line of inquiry, and they would carry it far beyond what I had done myself.  Jack Barchas XE "Barchas, Jack"  and Roland Ciaranello XE "Ciaranello, Roland"  pursued this line of inquiry very effectively.  They both went on to become leaders in neuroscience and psychiatry.  Then, of course, the field as a whole, if the work was any good, would pick it up.  Genetics has become very important in the stress field and in psychiatry generally at the present time.


On the evolutionary side of that, the way it was manifest was in trying to understand how human stress responses evolved.  In 1956, I guess it was, '55, maybe, I got a letter out of the blue, it invited me to spend a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located at Stanford, but an independent institution.  It had been created by the Ford Foundation and it had its first operation in 1954.  Real giants in the field were invited.  I was very young, and certainly not a giant in the field.  I almost felt like it was a mistake when the letter came, how they could be inviting me to come there.  But turned out they wanted some young scholars of promise, and I was very lucky to be in one of the early groups.  And doubly lucky because for reasons of the hospital and clinical responsibilities, I had to go, instead of for an academic year, for a chronological year instead, that meant I spanned two groups.  Most of them came in September and left in September, but I came in January and left in January, so I spanned two groups.  So I, therefore, got to know almost a hundred distinguished people in perhaps a dozen fields from the biological and the behavioral sciences to the social end, from all over the world.  


Many friendships were formed and professional relationships that continued to the present day.  For example, when I mentioned earlier that I had this summer spent time on German history, part of my guidance for that came from Fritz [R.] Stern XE "Stern, Fritz R." , professor of history at Columbia, who I met at the Center in 1957.  


I put on the informational sheet that they asked you to provide them with at the Center about your interests, I put down, "I'd like to learn something about evolution."  I didn't know anything about evolution, really, about human evolution specifically.  But I wanted to learn something about that in order to try to understand the evolution of human stress responses.  So, the first or second day I was there, a wiry fellow appeared at the door, introduced himself.  His name was Sherwood Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned" , and he was one of the great -- I didn't know it at the time, but he was one of the great pioneers in modern study of human evolution.  It's an irony that just this week I received in the mail from the Johns Hopkins [University] Press a volume in tribut to Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned" , for which I was one of the co-editors.  It's called The New Physical Anthropology  belatedly, we should have done it years before, but a wonderful former graduate student of his, Shirley C. Strum XE "Strum, Shirley C." , was the driving force behind it, and that volume shows the intellectual history of Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned" 's work and his stimulating effect on his students and others, and certainly on me.


So there began, then, a collaboration review with Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned"  on many facets of human evolution bearing on stress and aggression and attachment and child development.  But what that eventually led me to was to go to Africa.  Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned"  had begun the new wave of primate studies in the natural habitat, just in the early fifties, and it really caught on.  I got interested, after a few years, in whether it would be possible to learn anything about chimpanzees in the natural habitat because of their very close biological relationship to humans.  The new work in genetics and biochemistry was showing that over ninety-eight percent of the genes of chimpanzees and humans are identical.  In fact, it's, in a way, hard to figure how we could be so different from chimpanzees, since we share so many genes.  But be that as it may, it seemed to me a great advantage if you could learn something about chimpanzees.


Stanford had a lot of land, and they were wonderful to me and gave me, I think it was, twenty-seven acres set aside to build a semi-natural laboratory for chimpanzees.  They could live in groups, except that we knew very little about how they lived in the wild.  What's a day in the life of a chimp?  Nobody knew at the time.  


At first I was going to try to find a young zoologist to go out, and would set up a field station to do that, and, indeed, a medical school classmate of mine, who was a medical missionary in the Congo, had identified an area that seemed very promising.  Then the civil war in the Congo broke out, and that clearly wasn't a feasible proposition.  I wasn't going to ask anybody to go and do something like that.


Within, I don't know, a year or so, somebody brought Louis [S.B.] Leakey XE "Leakey, Louis S. B."  around to see me.  This is before I moved to Stanford.  I was still at the NIH [National Institutes of Health].  Leakey told me that he had started a young woman named Jane Goodall XE "Goodall, Jane"  on studies just a few months before, or a year before, whatever, in Tanzania, on the other side of Lake Tanganyika from Congo.  So I started corresponding with her.  Then she came for a visit to the United States, and we became friends.  She and her husband, a great photographer, Hugo von Lawick XE "Lawick, Hugo von" , had a marvelous treasure trove, even from an early point, of chimpanzees in their natural habitat.  


So, to fast forward, I eventually got out there.  In the earlier years I didn't go because my kids were young, and I just felt to go away for a long time wouldn't make sense.  But I guess it was 1968, my wife said to me, "Why don't you take Eric with you?"  He was the older of the kids.  That would transform the situation.  So I began -- 

Q:  How old was he?

Hamburg:  He was fifteen at the time.  Then Peggy, our daughter, when she was fifteen, went with me.  I began this pattern of going there more or less a couple of times a year.  When I first went out there, Jane was about to have to leave.  She had finished the work for which she would get her Ph.D. at Cambridge [University], and it didn't seem a practical proposition to stay.  Hugo needed to do filming elsewhere on other subjects.  But it was clear that they really wanted to stay.  They had no support for doing it.  So I offered to try to get funding and some organizational support and make a relationship with the Tanzanian Government that would give them an official blessing.


So we made a real research station out of it, and it was a wonderful collaboration that lasted the better part of a decade, was active from '68 to '75.  I think that's right.  So we then were able to get graduate students and very good undergraduates and postdoctoral fellows, so at any given time we had perhaps twenty or so people working there from Stanford, from Cambridge University in England, and from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.  I felt it was very important that it be international and interdisciplinary and that Tanzanians be included in it.


A lot was learned.  It became much more systematic and, to the extent possible, quantitative observations of the behavior of chimps in their natural habitat, and moved from studying a single community to studying two adjacent communities so the interaction between the communities could be studied.  That turned out to be extremely illuminating because of the violence between different communities.  


But anyway, then we also built this semi-natural laboratory at Stanford, where we wanted to be able, for example, to train the chimps to hold out their arms to have blood drawn, which it's possible to do.  So we had the semi-natural laboratory at Stanford and the natural habitat studies -- we informally called them Gombe East and Gombe West.  People went back and forth, students working first at one place, then the other.  There are different things you could do in a laboratory than in a natural habitat.  Each has its own limitations, each has its own strengths.  It was, I think it's fair to say, unique in the world at that time.  


It came to an end with a hostage episode in 1975.  That's perhaps a great irony.  We came back to the Congo.  It was Mr. Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent"  who last year became King of the Congo, is at the moment Chief of State of the Congo, who masterminded the hostage episode.

Q:  Can you describe it for those who don't know about it?

Hamburg:  Well, I was at the time spending a year at Caltech as a visiting professor, and my wife was a visiting professor at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] that year.  We were living in Pasadena.  I gave a lecture at University of California in San Diego, came back to my office at Caltech to check for messages toward the end of the day.  The system they used at Caltech was, they would put up on your office door, they'd stick any messages there that you had.  Normally I'd come back after a day or two away, I'd have two or three or four messages.  This time it was a blizzard.  The door was covered with, I don't know, sixty or eighty messages, so I thought it was some Caltech nerd's idea of a practical joke, you know.  But it wasn't that at all.  These were emergency messages that four of my students had disappeared in Africa.  There were calls from the State Department and the press and families and so on.


All we knew was that about forty heavily armed men had come in off Lake Tanganyika into our camp on the lake shore, taken four people, disappeared on the lake.  A few shots were heard, and nobody had any idea.  Were they killed and dumped in the lake?  Who was it?  Who took them?  What was it about?  We knew nothing.


So I decided I immediately would go over there and see if there was anything I could do.  I hadn't the foggiest idea if there was anything I could do.  We were all quite scared.  It was just a fantastic experience, the kind of thing that you may read about, but doesn't happen to real people.  


So it turned out, somewhat later, I guess it was some days before we found out that these were rebels against the government of Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , the longtime dictator in Congo.  He renamed the country Zaire.  Now it's Congo again.  But the reason we knew that is that they had sent a letter of demands to President Julius Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  of Tanzania.  It turned out when I got there the story had been very secretive and complex, that these people, these rebels against Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , lived very high in almost impenetrable mountains, nine, ten thousand feet, rising dramatically out of Lake Tanganyika on the other side of the shore.  Lake Tanganyika is a lake about the size and shape of Lake Michigan, about thirty miles across, three hundred miles long, very deep mountain lake, rather dramatic, aesthetically appealing in some ways.


But anyhow, they'd come from across that lake.  Nobody knew that they were there.  They'd taken these kids and were holding them hostage.  The point was that they had had a secret supply line for a thousand miles from the Indian Ocean at Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, across Tanzania to Lake Tanganyika, and they had been getting supplies that way.  They were derivatives of the old Lumumba crowd that lost the civil war in the Congo, lost to Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , and they were getting some supplies from a few Communist countries, China, North Korea, and Cuba, so we came to understand later.


That supply line had been shut down by Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  in a trade deal with Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho" , so they were furious with Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." .  We were pawns.  We were pawns in it.  We were meant to bring pressure on Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K." .  They saw us as very powerful quote Europeans, meaning white, and they attributed great power to me as an American professor, very amusing.  American professors not thinking of ourselves as very powerful.


We were somehow supposed to get their people back who were operating the supply line, get the supply line reopened, or something.  So it was quite a fantastic experience.  All the way over on the long plane trip, I was very apprehensive about how I would react in the situation.  I had no great confidence that I would have the foggiest idea what to do or that I would hold up well or any of that, but I was determined to do whatever I could.


It turned out that Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  was furious with them because they were very insulting in their note to him, in their demands on him and so on.  Our own government, unknown to me, our own government was negotiating with Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  to be our strong man in Africa vis-a-vis the Angolan operation that was about to begin in Cold War fashion between us and the Soviets.  I didn't know that at the time.

Q:  [unclear] program?

Hamburg:  [Unclear] program, yes.  So our own government had very little sympathy for the exercise.  The last thing they wanted was for Americans to be talking to rebels against Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  when they were cultivating Mobutu XE "Mobutu, Sese Scho"  as our great asset in Africa.  I won't comment on the irony of that situation.  


But anyway, so we did not have a sympathetic response from the host country, Tanzania, nor from our own government, nor, of course, from the government of Zaire/Congo, need I say.  So I was in business for myself.  There were some wonderful people in our embassy in Dar es Salaam, then Ambassador Beverly Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  and one of his staff, Lewis MacFarlane XE "MacFarlane, Lewis" , who were very resourceful, courageous people, who helped me, as it turned out, at the risk of their careers.  So we set out to do whatever we could, first of all to find out who had taken them, and then to make contact with them.  We didn't know how to do that.  Eventually we made contact, and then to see if we had any conceivable negotiating leverage.  What kind of leverage could we actually have?


It turned out it was possible to figure out different strands of negotiating possibilities, and that led, over a period of a couple of months, to three of the four kids were freed.  But they were still holding the fourth one, and he was really in grave danger.  Then President Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  helped us.  That was absolutely vital.  He helped us with that.


I was very happy, just two or three years ago, on multiple levels I was happy, but the International Peace Academy, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, gave awards to President Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  and Prime Minister Gro Brundtland XE "Brundtland, Harlem"  of Norway and to me.  I was flattered beyond imagination to be part of that company, but it also gave me a chance to pay tribute to him.  He had asked at the time of the hostage episode that for ten years we would say nothing about it, so we honored that.  But I was able, on that occasion, to say what it meant that he would make that intervention.  Anyway, so after two and a half months, they all four were free.  It was a very important experience.  It was the end of our work in Africa, and it certainly influenced the rest of my life.  


Those years were extremely stimulating, and an opportunity to get some insights into human evolution, and I wrote quite a number of papers alone and with Goodall XE "Goodall, Jane" , and with Washburn XE "Washburn, Sherwood Larned"  and with others, and, more importantly, stimulated students, some of whom are now professors at Harvard and Michigan and Minnesota now, and making very good contributions to the field.  So I view it as a very good time and a fantastic set of experiences of a kind that I never would have dreamt.  I never dreamt of going to Africa in the first place.  I never dreamt of doing primate research.  I never dreamt of dealing with a hostage problem.  But there it was.

Q:  I have two questions about that period.  One, I read somewhere that your wife, Beatrix, was convinced -- and rightly so -- that had Nyerere XE "Nyerere, Julius K."  not helped you out in the end, you were prepared to go to the camp yourself -- 

Hamburg:  Right.

Q:  -- for the sake of becoming a hostage, to release the student.

Hamburg:  It's a fascinating story.  That's right.  

Q:  Could you tell the story?

Hamburg:  It's a great tribute to Betty's ingenuity and sensitivity.  We've been terrific collaborators for fifty years.  We met fifty years ago this year and have, in many ways, personally and professionally, worked closely together ever since.  She's an extremely resourceful person.  


During the hostage episode, when I first got to Dar es Salaam, our ambassador told me that the Tanzanian Secret Service was quite up in arms about this whole thing, and they were going to bug my hotel room, which they did, in a very clumsy way.  They came in repeatedly to, quote, fix the light in the bathroom.  But anyway, what I could say on the telephone connections, which were tenuous at best, was extremely limited by that fact, because we were going to do things that clearly the Tanzanians didn't want us to do.  I was going to do whatever was necessary to save the kids, if I could.


So somehow or other, Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A."  and I were able to improvise a code.  From our relationship, partly out of U.S. idiomatic language and partly out of some shared experiences that nobody could know about but us, we were able to get certain key symbols for the code to communicate what I needed her to do.  Since it was an African political problem, then the U.S. side of it was very important in a number of ways, and she took charge of the U.S. side.  But over a period of time, she did figure out -- and I didn't intend to tell her -- but she did figure out that I was considering going over there.  There was an American journalist who – 

Q:  That you were considering, I'm sorry – 

Hamburg:  -- going over to the other side of Lake Tanganyika if necessary, as a last resort, to try to bargain for the fourth student.


There was an American journalist who knew that area very, very well, and had a number of scoops in the area.  He told me that he thought he knew where the camp was.  He was willing to go himself, but he didn't think it would amount to much.  He thought if we went together, we would have a chance, and that was plausible.  But there was also the chance they would simply take us hostage.  


In my negotiating with the Kabila XE "Kabila, Laurent"  people, there was nothing that engendered confidence.  I mean, they were not trustworthy negotiating partners.  I wouldn't say they were bloodthirsty, but neither were they trustworthy.  So it wasn't a congenial proposition.  On the other hand, if that was all I had, the only card I had to play, then I would do it.


So she sensed that and got on an airplane and came over to sort of sit on me and prevent me from going and doing what she thought would be quite foolish.  She thought they would simply take us hostage and they would have more bargaining power with us than with the student.  And I suspect she was probably right about that.


Anyway, it did work out.  It's a tribute to her as an individual, but it's also an interesting commentary on close human relationships, that you can invent, under great duress, you can invent a code and sense each other's responses over thousands of miles.

Q:  I was also very intrigued by your response to the fact that Beverly Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  was fired summarily by Kissinger XE "Kissinger, Henry A." , is that right?

Hamburg:  Yes.

Q:  Could you talk about that?

Hamburg:  Yes.  That was very disturbing.  Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  was only one of two remaining black ambassadors in our ambassadorial corps at that time, and was a giant of a man, six-eight, very smart and very resourceful, and had a career in the Foreign Service.  He was called back to Washington after the fourth student was released.  I was coming back, too.  I was going to drop off the students in London at the excellent tropical disease hospital, to make sure that they were healthy, and then go on back to the States.


  Betty and I were coming back to Stanford.  He was going back to Washington.  I, in my naiveté, thought maybe they would honor him for his resourceful help in this situation.  But the first night back, after a marvelous, incredible reception at Stanford, where there were hundreds of students and others at the airport when we got back and so on, in the middle of the night I was awakened by a call from Beverly Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  in Washington, who got through a few sentences and then broke down.  His wife came on the phone to tell me that he'd been fired, public humiliation, his career was over, ostensibly for violating U.S. terrorism policy, which hardly existed at the time.  So all he wanted me to do was to come in a day or two and stand with him at a press conference and say he was a decent, honorable man, as he resigned his post and explained his situation.


I asked him to wait.  I remember saying something to the effect that, "Those kids had been held hostage for several months, and now, Bev, you're hostage.  Let us see if we can get you out."  He felt he couldn't do anything himself.  Somehow his code of conduct was such that he was just going to have to stay out of it, but that obviously if we could help him restore his career, he would be grateful.  


So I spent the next six weeks trying to restore his career.  We first went through the normal standard channels -- State Department proper.  There were a number of sympathetic people in the Department, but we weren't getting anywhere.  I came to the conclusion that if we could mobilize some media support, there might then be a chance to really put pressure on the President, because these kids, after all, were objects of great sympathy and great interest.  We had been declining press interviews and all public commentary up to that point.  


But I was able to get some help first from a friend, a much beloved friend, Fred Hechinger XE "Hechinger, Fred M." , of the New York Times, who died a few years ago.  Fred, to make a long story short, put an editorial in the Times about the case, and it was a very good editorial.  Then Carl Rowan XE "Rowan, Carl T." , who was a columnist who knew Beverly Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  and had great respect for him, Carl Rowan and I talked.  Carl Rowan did a column about him, and a few other things.  So that was the background.  It, in itself, didn't move much, but it gave a certain credibility that we could get media coverage. 


Then finally I got to President Ford's Chief of Staff, highlighted the Hechinger XE "Hechinger, Fred M."  and Rowan XE "Rowan, Carl T."  pieces, and said that we had invitations to go on "The Today Show" and "The Tonight Show" and a number of the TV interview shows, which we had been turning down, but there was great interest in these kids.  Jane Goodall XE "Goodall, Jane"  was well known and so on.  I explained that if the ambassador didn't get reinstated, that we would have to go on the air, and said what we would say about the administration and its role in this whole thing, and that it's putting American citizens at risk through the action and inaction of the United States Government, and I would much prefer not to say that.  I personally believe that President Ford XE "Ford, Gerald R."  didn't know about it.  All I asked was that he call it to President's Ford attention and either give me a chance, directly or through an intermediary, somehow to explain to President Ford our side of the picture.


When I mentioned the media stuff, there was a very dramatic response, and within a matter of hours he got back to me and said, "You are right.  It was all a misunderstanding.  President Ford XE "Ford, Gerald R."  didn't know about it."   I think it was legitimately true.  President Ford was in the great Helsinki negotiations that led to the human rights landmark and all that during the time of our case, and I don't believe President Ford knew about it at all. 


By the way, I left out there had been a short news piece on "ABC News" about these kids, too, and that was very helpful, just a vignette of the case, not about the ambassador, but about the students.  So we had a certain credibility.  I later got to know President Ford XE "Ford, Gerald R." , and we had a talk about all this, and he couldn't have been nicer.


But anyway, suffice it to say that President Ford XE "Ford, Gerald R."  decided that the ambassador would be reinstated, he would have a choice of positions, because we were determined that he shouldn't have some Lower Slabovia kind of position; it had to be something decent.  And he was reinstated.


Then a further irony.  When President Carter was elected, I wrote a letter to Cyrus Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  which a mutual friend delivered to him.  I didn't know Vance then.  We later became great friends and collaborators.  I explained, in delicate language, what had happened, and asked him to be considerate of Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr." , and he did actually create a position for him.  Beverly Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  was a really wonderful human being.  We all used to get together for the first few years after the episode, on the anniversary of it, students and some of the parents and Ambassador Carter and his wife.  We'd all get together and have a little celebration.  So, another bizarre twist on that episode, but it did, I guess, lead me to my first serious experience with the media and the power of the media in American society, including the influence on Presidents.

Q:  It turns out that a university professor does have some power, after all.  [Laughter]  I think it was Beverly Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  that challenged you, after that event, to think about using your mind and using your influence and using your creativity in spheres beyond the university.  Is that correct?  To take your work and try to put it in a larger, more global scope.

Hamburg:  Yes.

Q:  How did the hostage crisis affect you?  How did it change you?

Hamburg:  Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  did make a rather powerful statement to me just before he left Dar es Salaam at the end of the episode, that he thought that I had capacities that I had really used, that this episode had brought out capacities that he thought I ought to pursue in the future, maybe in some domain relating to public policy or whatever.


Now, I had had an invitation early in May to become president of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences.  Or to put it another way, the search committee, looking for a president, wanted me to be the lead candidate.  It would have had to be approved by the academy system, but they had taken informal soundings that, in fact, there was support in the academy system, and in all probability, if I said I would be interested, that I would be president of the Institute of Medicine, which is the medical part of the National Academy of Sciences.  The academy is a very special place in the American and, indeed, world scientific community.


I was enormously flattered and pleased and delighted, but I said no on the spot.  It was a luncheon.  My wife was there with me.  It was in Pasadena.  We were on leave that year.  I can just remember the place and everything about it.  I felt I couldn't leave Stanford, I couldn't leave the work in Africa.  I had developed a configuration of responsibilities that was unique to me, and I thought if I pulled out of it, you know, it probably wouldn't be sustained.  In any case, I loved what I was doing.  Our kids had grown up on the Stanford campus.  I never envisioned leaving at all.  


That was early in May.  May 19th, the students were taken.  Two and a half months later, it was over.  When I got back to Dar es Salaam at the end of it, there was a letter from the president of the National Academy of Sciences that essentially said something to the effect that, "An experience like this can be a deep experience.  It can affect your whole life.  It can make you rethink what you want to do.  We're asking you to rethink.  Would you like to consider the Institute of Medicine?  Please come and visit and let's talk about it."


It rang a bell.  I wasn't sure that that was the right thing to do, but that, combined with what Ambassador Carter XE "Carter, William Beverly Jr."  had said, made me rethink.  See, I had been immersed in the worst problems of the world during those few months -- of disease and abject poverty and ignorance and deception and violence.  My nose was rubbed for months in all these dreadful problems.  I had some feeling that maybe, maybe in some way, if I could turn my energies to settings and institutions that could do something about those problems, the tiniest little bit, could affect policies that would have some kind of ameliorative or preventive effect on terrible problems of that kind, that maybe that would be a good thing to do.  I wasn't quite sure how best to do it.  I thought maybe to reconstruct something at Stanford different than what I'd been doing.


But I did go to visit with the president of the Academy and others, and decided that, in point of fact, that that was a very strong institution, had worldwide standing, was policy oriented, it basically had ways of bringing the strength of the scientific community to bear on great policy issues, policies within the scientific community and beyond the scientific community.  So I was, in a way, a changed person, and from then on, both in that position and later at Carnegie, I was fundamentally trying to find some way to do the least little bit on these great issues.

Q:  We can begin to fast forward a little bit towards Carnegie.  If you want to talk substantively about what your work was at the National Institute for Medicine, you were focusing on health, in general, in developing countries, is that right?

Hamburg:  We had several strands to work at the Institute of Medicine, and then later for a few years at Harvard when Derek Bok XE "Bok, Derek"  asked me to develop a university-wide health policy program modeled on the Institute of Medicine.  So there was a total of about eight years at the Institute of Medicine and at Harvard where I was basically putting together sets of people who could bring great strengths from different angles on health policy issues.   


Some of it had to do with innovations in health care, basically the application of the burgeoning life sciences to health care problems.  Part of it had to do with disease prevention, health promotion.  Part of it had to do with health in early life, in childhood and adolescence, which was the main part that carried forward to Carnegie.  Part of it had to do with the emergence of an aging society, health care and disease prevention in older people.  And part of it had to do with health in developing countries, the immense disease burdens carried in developing countries, which I'd been exposed to, and there I had the great opportunity to create a Division of International Health in the National Academy of Sciences, and in recent years have been working with the academy on broadening the international functions at the academy, in health and other matters.


So that was very satisfying.  In fact, we had the opportunity to bring the strengths of a variety of sciences to bear on clarifying policy issues and formulating policy alternatives on important fields, and some of that carried over to Carnegie, mainly the part on children and youth and the part on developing countries.

Q:  You were focusing specifically at Harvard on children, is that right?

Hamburg:  No, that was only one strand.  We had six different categories, much like at the Institute of Medicine, of which one strand was that.

Q:  How did you first come to be invited on the board of Carnegie?  Because that's the way that you came.

Hamburg:  Right.  I think they wanted a health person, or at least they wanted somebody out of the scientific community, and I think to some degree preferred that it be in the health arena, and made some inquiries.  At that time I was at the Institute of Medicine.  I think I was still there.  I'm not certain.  I may have been at Harvard already.  In any case, it was that background of a broad-gauged interest in health.  They didn't want to become a health foundation.  They didn't want a deep specialist, however brilliant.  They wanted a broad-gauged person in health, who could think about the relevance of health matters to the Carnegie agenda, whatever it might be.

Q:  Had you been a Carnegie-watcher?

Hamburg:  No, not particularly.  I had a vaguely positive impression about it.  I associated it with education.

Q:  What were your perspectives on philanthropy at that time as opposed to research universities?

Hamburg:  Hardly any, in point of fact.  I mean, they couldn't have picked a less well-informed, less well-prepared board member.  Maybe that was an attraction.  I don't know.  I certainly had no biases about philanthropy.  See, when I was building the department at Stanford in those wonderful fifteen years there, it was government support.  It was primarily the National Institutes of Health and, secondarily, the National Science Foundation and the Veterans Administration that provided our support.  Within that, in my own department, the bulk of it was at the National Institute of Mental Health -- and they sometimes used to speak about us as NIMH West because we very rapidly built up major support.  The universities lived on soft money, fundamentally a federal government enterprise.  It still is, to a very large extent.  


It's hard for me to imagine how that's grown.  When I started out in medicine, there was, for all practical purposes, no National Institutes of Health, and today the budget is over fifteen billion dollars a year, and most of that goes into supporting research, university-based research.  So that's what I knew.


We did not appreciably turn to foundations, with one major exception.  I should say that the work in Africa, the chimpanzee work, did not have a natural niche for support in the federal government.  There was some from the National Science Foundation, but I did turn to foundations for that.  We had wonderful support from the Commonwealth Fund and the W. [William] T. Grant Foundation.  It's a funny story, my wife later became president of the W.T. Grant Foundation, much later.  They gave us wonderful support.


So, my little experience with foundations was very encouraging, that they had that kind of scope and flexibility that the government didn't have to support research in Africa of a very offbeat character; something they'd never done before but they were betting on people, an interesting idea.  So to that extent, I had a sympathetic disposition toward philanthropy in terms of its scope and flexibility.

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO; BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE]

Q:  We are at Carnegie now.  You're on the board.  Can you tell me some of your impressions of Carnegie under Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." 's leadership?  What was he like as a leader?  What were the roles and expectations of board members?  How did the board relate to the staff?

Hamburg:  Well, I wasn't a terrific trustee.  I wasn't as deeply engaged as I probably should have been.  But I had a very positive impression.  I thought it was very interesting.  I learned a lot.  


Alan was deeply committed to the issues of poverty and racism, the social agenda which had really come to the fore in the 1960s, and he was determined that Carnegie would do whatever it could to improve opportunities in education and the like.  Those were values that I admired.  The issues were quite interesting.  They had a good deal more on elementary and secondary education than I'd been exposed to before, and I didn't have any problem with it. 


There were, however, some problems in the board.  There were members of the board who felt that the board had too little to say about the agenda, and so I guess Alan appointed a few of us to a committee to consider what to do about that, and we came up with the notion of an Agenda Committee, which has continued, as far as I know, to the present time, at least throughout my term, that is a combination of board members and senior staff who would keep rolling forward the agenda of future meetings, what did we need, what would be helpful, and so on.  I thought that was a constructive response on his part to a certain discontent in the board.


There were some board members in that time who were, I think, rather controlling, who wanted to dip into management or, at any rate, didn't understand very well the distinction between policy and operations, that I think is appropriate, you know, where the board really does set policy, but that the operations are left to the chief executive and the staff.  I was very sympathetic with the position of the president and the staff, and felt we oughtn't to be too intrusive.  We had ample opportunity to say what we wanted to say at board meetings.  But the Agenda Committee was a good innovation.


It's also true -- I didn't realize it at the time, but Alan had had a nasty injury in falling from a ladder, so he wasn't as deeply engaged in those last few years as he had been earlier.  There was a certain amount of problem connected with that.  I must say I wasn't aware of that at the time.  


But from my standpoint, it was a well-functioning educational foundation that dealt with important issues, and I was happy to be a part of it.

Q:  Were you surprised when they asked you to become president?

Hamburg:  Yes, I was very surprised, and I thought it was inappropriate.

Q:  Could you say that, phrase it so that you were surprised when they asked you to become president.

Hamburg:  Yes, I was very surprised when they asked me to become president, and I at first said, almost reflexively, no, both from their standpoint and mine.  That is, from the standpoint of the foundation, I felt that it would be odd to have a person of a medical background as president of the foundation.  It really had never been a health foundation, though it had health components.  It didn't intend to be a health foundation.  The perception might be wrong, my background might be wrong.  


Furthermore, I was getting increasingly concerned about the dangerous situation with the Cold War, and I felt that if I were to be associated with the foundation, that I would really want to do something about the Cold War.  It was nowhere then near the current agenda of the foundation, and it seemed to me that would be kind of a wrenching transition to make.  


From my own standpoint, I had only been at Harvard a couple of years, and Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A."  was very well established as a professor at Harvard, and I was building a program.  Although I had very good people with me and it was clear that somebody could take over, that wasn't so much the issue.  But I didn't myself feel right about leaving after what would only be a three-year stint.  So I felt, on both counts, from the standpoint of the foundation and my standpoint, it wasn't very appropriate.  


The then vice chair of the board, Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L." , later the chair of the board, was chairman of the Search Committee.  Luckily for me, she was quite persistent, and at some point talked to Betty about it.  She understood my reasoning was that -- part of the reasoning was, I didn't want to uproot Betty again.  She'd been an awfully good sport about moving with me wherever I went, and being enormously supportive and helpful and collaborative, and I felt, "Enough already.  She's got a very good position."  Furthermore, by that time our daughter Peggy was a medical student at Harvard, and I loved being with her.  The whole thing didn't seem sensible.


But Betty was the one who said, "Well, you really ought to think about it.  You ought to open up your mind to the possibility."  She wasn't recommending that I do it necessarily, but I really should think about it, particularly when the response of the search committee, or at least of Helene and Bud Taylor XE "Taylor III, John C. [Bud]" , the chairman, was, "Why not do avoiding nuclear war?  Why shouldn't we?"  Andrew Carnegie had a passion for peace.  I mean, I knew that, too, but for a long time the foundation had gone away from that.  Indeed, to a very considerable extent, the foundation left that when he died.  Although it came back from time to time, as far as I could make out, it was really not  central to the agenda of the foundation after Andrew Carnegie's death.


So I didn't really know whether it was appropriate or not, but the then trustees seemed to feel that, yes, the Cold War was the greatest conflict in history, the most dangerous conflict in history, and indeed was a threat to humanity, and why not see if there would be something useful to be done?  So that was very significant to me, because that opened up a possibility to move into an area which I had otherwise no way I could do anything useful.  So that was very exciting.  I guess Betty's reaction plus the opportunity to tackle Cold War issues were the pivotal factors for me.

Q:  When you came to Carnegie, what did you find in terms of the morale of the staff, the functioning of the staff?  What did you observe about how people worked?  You'd been mostly -- well, you'd been at the Institute, you'd been in university environments.  Was it any kind of shift for you or transition for you to move into a different kind of world?  And could you describe what it was like when you came in?

Hamburg:  It was a shift.

Q:  Your first impressions?

Hamburg:  Coming to the foundation was a big transition for me and for the staff.  Remember I mentioned earlier that major transitions are inherently stressful.  For myself, every time I made a move, I always had doubts as to whether I really would be able to respond well in the new situation or take advantage of the opportunities.  And for the staff, I think they were a little apprehensive about me, though it helped that I'd been on the board and they knew me.  I wasn't so threatening as an individual.  I think there was some question whether I was going to medicalize the foundation.  None of them had a background in the health field to speak of.  


There was some apprehension about it, but I think we all threw ourselves into it very enthusiastically.  I had certain issues that I wanted us to address, which had a lot of continuity with Carnegie tradition, and I put them on the table.  We organized mixed staff and board groups, working groups, to look at these issues and to do as I'd done at the Institute of Medicine; that is, to get what I call terrain maps, papers that would in some depth examine a problem area and see where you could maybe find sort of a hot spot within the map, where you had an opportunity to make a contribution.  Everybody, I think, got engaged.  


We had a lot of outside consultants.  I opened up the foundation quite a lot to outsiders to come in and tell us what they thought about these issues.  I think it was stimulating.  I think there was a zest to it that people got caught up in, and the staff could see they were going to have an input.  


I had no feeling that I needed to make big changes in the staff.  I felt that there were a lot of devoted people who were knowledgeable and good in philanthropy.  I felt it might be necessary to move some of them around.  They might have to change what they worked on, test their adaptability, but I certainly didn't feel that I had to clean house to get my staff.  I had some advice from the board, particularly from corporate members of the board, to do the corporate thing and get my own staff; that was Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." 's staff.  I just didn't feel any necessity for that.  I thought I would look at it one by one, case by case, first year, second year, and there were some changes I made, very quietly, not blood on the floor.  But most of the people were very smart and very experienced and very adaptable, and threw themselves into it.  So there was that part of it, I think, was reassuring.


I guess operationally we did make a change.  I organized program groups.  I felt that the topics we were tackling were sufficiently complicated that we would need to have several people working together.  That was my style anyway, from way back, as I mentioned to you.  Rather than to have each staff member be a mini-foundation, we would need to have groups that would work out together the priorities for grant-making and the evaluation of specific grant proposals.  And that's what we did, so we came to the working group system.  I think that, on the whole, has been very fruitful.


So there was some transitional stress, but I don't think it was a very big deal.  There was a lot of continuity and there were some changes, but the changes were worked out together.  Now, the biggest change, of course, was in the Avoiding Nuclear War program.  That was strange to everybody.  I must say, I'm very, very glad, from the standpoint of tradition of the foundation, that we did that, not only in terms of the contribution we were able to make, but just in terms of what had been important to Andrew Carnegie.  I mean, he didn't require that the foundation follow in his footsteps.  He gave the broadest possible mandate.  It's extraordinary what he did.  He invented the concept of the general-purpose foundation, and he said, in effect, "Nobody can be wise enough to know what will be important in thirty years or fifty years or a hundred years, and the greatest tribute the board can pay me is to decide what's important at a given time," etc.


Nevertheless, it's very clear that he had deep commitments to peace and education, and those problems have hardly gone away.  It certainly seemed to me that it made a lot of sense to pursue these great themes.  But how we were going to do it in avoiding nuclear war was not obvious at all.  I didn't know if we could make a contribution.  All I knew was that the Cold War had a relapse, the Soviets had gone into Afghanistan, and the feeling was, if they could make that stupid and dangerous a decision, who could tell what might happen?  There was a certain amount of talk in both Washington and Moscow in those days that perhaps a nuclear war was inevitable and maybe somehow you could, quote, prevail.  Nobody talked about actually winning, but you could prevail, maybe just 100 million dead or something like that.  Just beyond imagination.  One of the big arguments at the time was whether, in the case of a nuclear war, the human species might actually become extinct or not.  Well, that's some argument to have.  


So it was a dreadful situation.  But how could a private foundation make any difference?  Wasn't this a function for governments?  So we had to figure out what we could do.  And that was, I think, the most innovative thing.


The other thing for me that was a complex transition, I made the decision that we were going to focus on pre-collegiate education very largely.  We were going to use the universities to help clarify those problems, but we were not going to concentrate on the well being of universities.  We were going to try to concentrate on the well being of elementary, secondary, and pre-elementary.  I used to say education doesn't begin with kindergarten, it begins with prenatal care.  We were going to go from conception through high school, because I felt the most serious problems were there.  The foundation had a track record in that field, had some expertise, and very little was being done in other foundations on pre-collegiate education at that time.  In fact, it scared me, because I asked the staff to do a little round-up, who's doing what in this field.  The answer was, next to nothing at that time.  I felt, well, maybe they knew something I didn't know.  Maybe this was a poisonous field to enter.  


Anyway, that's what we did.  We developed fundamentally a sort of zero-to-fifteen strategy on the education, child development, adolescent development side, and a program in avoiding nuclear war, which later got just slightly modified into preventing deadly conflict.  It's all of a piece.  And then a developing countries program, in which Carnegie had some up-and-down, in-and-out history, but a serious interest in Africa.  And I felt that suited me, of course, and we could build on that and pursue a development countries program focused primarily on Africa.  Those were the main strands of what we did.

Q:  Those three priorities are very clear in your introductory essay, "New Contexts for Grants," that you wrote, I guess, in 1983.  How did you think of those three things together, those four things together, really?  Especially avoiding nuclear war and the emphasis on development in education.  Did you see those two things working hand in hand in terms of the education, the more serious education of the public?

Hamburg:  I saw certainly points of contact.  I didn't think of them as a single integrated program.  I thought that was too much to handle.  So they were separate and distinct programs, but with a lot of informal interplay.  And certainly on every level education of the public seemed to be fundamentally important.  In a way what evolved was, in effect, a fourth program, a democracy program, the building of democratic institutions both in the United States and abroad.  Very different problems in different places.  South Africa, one problem. Russia, another problem.  United States, another problem.  But still, that fundamental commitment: the democratic institutions.  And as a part of that, an informed public.  An informed public.


So, for instance, vis-à-vis the universities, in all of our program areas we got major involvement of outstanding scientists and scholars in universities, and one of the things we tasked them with was what I called education beyond the campus.  Why must education stop at the boundaries of the campus?  If there is elucidation of an important problem, whether it be in arms control or crisis prevention or disadvantaged minority education, or the role of women in development, whatever the topic may be, if there's something to understand, why not explain it insofar as we can, in an objective, clear, and cogent way, at least to the American public and to such other publics as we might have opportunity to do?


One of the big struggles was to try to get access to the Soviet public in the bad old days, and we actually did get some, not nearly as much as we would have liked, but we got some.  But anyway, that commitment to broad education of the public was a cross-cutting theme probably in the history of the foundation, but certainly during my time.

Q:  Tackling a problem, let's just begin with, we'll talk about each of these areas, but beginning with avoiding nuclear war, I'm interested in how you brought in your own thinking to this set of issues which you were sort of bringing yourself up to speed on, particularly some of the writings that you've done on group survival, tendencies of groups to do anything to protect their own identity.  Could you talk a little bit about where that comes from in your own thinking and how that fit into the avoiding nuclear war concept?

Hamburg:  Well, I had been very interested in intergroup relations from an early time, no doubt as a personal and family matter in the first place.  But professionally it was very striking to me.  In the primate work, I wanted to try to clarify relations between primate groups, and in some respects those are very menacing and even lethal relations, including relations between different communities of chimpanzees.  You would see many indications of positive feeling and affiliation and proximity and all that in the higher primates, but you also saw that there was a condition of great risk and even lethality in the crowding of strangers in the presence of valued resources.  That was a particular conjunction of deadly circumstances for primates.  


It led me to do a lot of inquiry, starting with the year at the Center for Advanced Study in the fifties, the first time I was there, and going on after that, about research in a variety of behavioral sciences, particularly, I would say, in social psychology, but to some extent in other fields, about ingroup/outgroup relations and this remarkable human propensity to form distinctions between one's own group and other groups very quickly.  


In fact, experimentalists in that field have found that even when they are neutral or want to avoid any negative implications, it's hard to avoid.  Once you get a group forming, even a short-term transient group, the members begin to make invidious distinction between their group and other groups.  And where you have more enduring groups, it seems to be rather a pervasive human attribute that is very easy to learn invidious distinctions between my group and others, between me and others.  Egocentrism and ethnocentrism go hand in hand.  Mind you, there's a very positive side, affiliative side, loving, tender side to human nature, which has also been important to me, but I think there's no gainsaying the fact that we have this propensity to depreciating other groups.  


A fundamental question in human adaptation for me is, can we get the sustaining quality of identification with our own group, without severely depreciating other groups?  I think that ought to be possible.  But the fact is that human cultures have mostly taught kids to grow up to some degree ethnocentric.  Education everywhere is to some degree ethnocentric.


A particular case of that, that made a powerful impression on me was from Swedish friends and Finnish friends telling me about how Finns in Sweden are the object of some depreciation in Swedish society.  It's a very tolerant society, but, nevertheless, that small difference gets amplified.  I think humans have a tendency to amplify small differences and to find a basis for depreciation of others.  Of course, that was carried to the nth degree by Hitler XE "Hitler, Adolf" 's maniacal attitude toward the Jews particularly, though not limited toward the Jews, but especially toward the Jews.  It simply showed that there's almost no limit to which this human propensity can be carried.  I don't think it dooms humanity or necessarily should be taken as a pessimistic note, but, rather, something we have to take account of.  That's part of the human reality, and we have to learn how to cope with that tendency, which is more and more dangerous as our capacity to destroy is enhanced.


I felt that was a background feature of the Cold War, but there were many other aspects to it.  And always in these situations it's an activated leader, a zealot, an ethnic entrepreneur, a pyromaniac who will put gasoline on the embers of intergroup hostility and cause a great conflagration, whether it's Hitler or Stalin or Milosevic or you name it, but a political leader to activate people on the basis of these differences and to use the intergroup hostility for his own diabolical purposes.  That's a very important part of it.


In any event, I felt we had to take that as a background for what, if anything, we could do about the Cold War issues.  To make a long story short, what I set out to do was to get the maximum possible expertise on Cold War issues and to bring people together from different backgrounds to work on it.  So I felt a great sense of urgency, and together with the staff, people like Fritz [Frederic A.] Mosher XE "Mosher, Frederic A." , we went to major universities and research institutes and tried to identify people, some from my prior knowledge and some not, who knew a lot about nuclear weapons, who knew a lot about arms control, who knew a lot about nuclear crises and confrontations and how we got out of them, people who knew a lot about decision-making in the Soviet Union and security decision-making in the United States, people who knew a lot about Third World flashpoints, people who knew a lot about Eastern Europe, where the Cold War began.


So when we faced up to it, there were different bodies of knowledge and skill and expertise that you needed to address Cold War issues.  So, in effect, we went to mainly some major universities and said, "If you can get people who have a number of these competencies together, to work together in a sustained way, then we'll make a grant, a sizable grant by foundation standards, to get that kind of conjunction of talent brought to bear on Cold War problems."  


So we had these interdisciplinary groups working at a number of universities and research institutes, and then pretty quickly moved to get some joint study groups between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, mainly through their Academy of Sciences, the only chance we had to have some stature of independence beyond the political control of the dictatorship, not to have KGB hacks who would be controlling the process, but distinguished scientists and scholars.  That was our only chance, and it worked pretty well, actually.


So, the U.S. Academy and the Soviet Academy, U.S. universities and the Soviet Academy, we got working groups starting with arms control and crisis prevention.  Those were the main ones during the dark days.  Later on, after Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  came to power, it was possible to broaden out into joint study groups on a wider range of issues, and ultimately toward concentrating on building democratic institutions in the Soviet Union in its last phase, and then in Russia and Ukraine after that.  So, the joint study groups then were a second strand.  First were the interdisciplinary groups in the U.S., then the joint study groups.  These groups were primarily scientists and scholars.  Some other kinds of expertise were represented.


Then we moved toward what we called linkage, linkage with policy-makers, getting independent experts together with policy-makers in our own country, in both houses and both parties in the Congress and with the administration -- Reagan, Bush, on up -- and then after Gorbachev came to power, with policy-makers in the Soviet Union.  Through some members of our joint study groups, scientists, I was able to meet Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  early and form a relationship with him, could see that he wanted to have access to Western ideas and information and analysis, and to some degree I became a broker, to bring or send people to meet with him and some of his closest colleagues, to discuss arms control and crisis prevention and then the winding down of the Cold War altogether, what they might do about Eastern Europe and so on.


It was a fantastic opportunity which I never expected to have, but the upshot of it was, we not only had policy linkage with our own government, which we thought would be possible in our democracy, but also with the government of the Soviet Union, which had seemed, I must say, like a very long shot before Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .  


So those were the three main strands of that program: the interdisciplinary study groups generating a wider range of policy options in this country, the joint study groups between us and the Soviets, and then the policy linkage with our own government and the Soviet government.

Q:  Did you have any obstacles from the U.S. government in going over and doing this?

Hamburg:  There were some obstacles all around.  They turned out to be less severe than some had anticipated.  There were one or two people in the Reagan administration early on, in his first term, who were not friendly to any kind of non-governmental involvement, be it foundations or universities or the National Academy of Sciences.  They thought this was a governmental task and we ought not to be involved in it.  We were basically outsiders in that perspective.


But it turned out that President Reagan himself didn't feel that way, and Secretary Shultz XE "Shultz, George"  didn't feel that way, and so we had some pretty significant allies, as it turned out.  By the spring of 1994, I must say, to my surprise, President Reagan himself was engaged in one of our activities that involved restarting the scientific and scholarly exchanges with the Soviet Union, so that was, of course, very reassuring.


In terms of the Congress, there had been people who anticipated there might be some resistance, but it turned out not at all.  On the contrary, members of Congress welcomed having a chance to be with independent experts, and we began a much deeper engagement, particularly in a retreat format, of independent experts with members of Congress, than I had ever anticipated.


I must say that John Gardner XE "Gardner, John W."  had told me, when I took the position, that he thought there was potential for that sort of thing, and he encouraged me to pursue it.  And he was right.  It went even beyond what either he or I had envisioned, partly because members of Congress were so concerned about the Cold War, very concerned.  Both parties, in both houses, they were really impressed with the danger and wanted to play a role.  They didn't feel that it should be just the executive branch that had something to say about that.  So we had pillars in both parties, like Senator Simpson XE "Simpson, Alan K."  on the Republican side, and Senator Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  on the Democratic side, who were deeply engaged with this all the way through this program of policy linkage.

[END TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO]

Q:  Dr. Hamburg, we're still on the subject of avoiding nuclear war.  We were just discussing, actually, the Pugwash Conference and its implications for you in terms of how you think about crisis management.  Could you describe that, Graham Allison XE "Allison, Graham T." 's work and how it influenced you?

Hamburg:  It was a turning point for me.  In 1978, when I was still president of Institute of Medicine, I was keenly aware of the dangers of the Cold War, partly because the academy in which we were embedded was trying very hard to save Sakharov XE "Sakharov, Andrei" 's life, and was very much aware of the pressures under which the Soviet scientific community was operating, and the dangers of their build-up of weapons of mass destruction.  


What was particularly concerning is that there seemed to be an inclination over there, at least of some people, to take the nuclear issue right up to the brink, right to confrontation, like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the earlier Berlin situation.  They were very, very, very resentful of the United States going on nuclear alert during the 1973 Israeli-Egyptian War.  That was an unexpected development, and very dangerous.  Nobody knows -- to this day, nobody knows for sure about the interacting effects of nuclear alerts on the two sides, and the possibility that it could get out of control in such a way that each side would have to fire, even though neither head of state wanted to do it.


So I felt we ought to get some people together who were expert on nuclear confrontation, on crisis management, and get them together in a pleasant, neutral setting, and talk about it, first of all, as a kind of technology transfer.  We had learned something from the studies of excellent scholars, great scholars like Graham Allison XE "Allison, Graham T."  at Harvard and Alex George XE "George, Alexander L."  at Stanford, on crises, above all, the Cuban Missile Crisis, but other crises of the Cold War, and, to some extent, earlier crises like the interaction of mobilizations in World War I that led inexorably to the start of the war, even though the leaders were in a great muddle about whether they really wanted to start the war.


So we had a body of knowledge, and I thought we ought to explain to the Soviets what we've learned.  There were principles of crisis management that Alex and Graham had formulated.  So we got together a few Americans, a few West Europeans, and a few Soviets under Pugwash auspices in Geneva, spent the better part of a week there.  I was the chair.  We started out with a docudrama on the Cuban Missile Crisis that Graham Allison XE "Allison, Graham T."  had adapted from an earlier docudrama made in this country, which was historically accurate to the extent possible, but also condensed and dramatic, and conveyed a sense of how close we were to having the whole thing go wrong.  We were apprehensive how the Soviets would take it.  Indeed, they were very perplexed.  Were we trying to put them down?  Because, in the end, they had backed down fundamentally.  We weren't trying to put them down.  We were trying to get across a sense of how dangerous and difficult these crises are to manage.  So we spent two or three days on that.


And then we began to make the transition from crisis management to crisis prevention.  I said to them at the turning-point day in the middle of the week, "Let us begin anew.  Let us recognize how hard it is, when you get to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe, to prevent some accident, some inadvertent development, from leading us into a nuclear war.  We don't really want one.  So let's think.  Could we prevent the crisis?  We don't need to assume that the nuclear weapons stockpiles will be coming down soon.  We don't need to assume that the level of animosity between you and us will come down soon.  All we need to say is, we've got to be smart enough to keep back a few steps from the brink.  We don't want to fall into the brink.  The slope gets very slippery at the edge of the brink of nuclear confrontation.


"What could we do to avoid that?  Could we strengthen the hot lines so that communication in urgent circumstances would be easier?  Could we develop other mechanisms like the Incidents at Sea Agreement -- rules of the road at sea so that our vessels don't crash into each other, so that we don't inadvertently shoot at each other?  Could we have some rules of the road in the air, on the land?  Could we move toward notification about troop movements or vessel movements so that it would minimize nasty surprises?  Because in a nasty surprise, the decision-maker may panic and hit the button.  Things like that.  Let's begin thinking about preventing the crisis, even if we remain locked deeply into the Cold War."


  Well, I should say in that week I thought we failed, although it was a very good, substantive meeting.  By the way, toward the end of that week, we had an expert on Iran -- the Shah was still in office -- an expert who had been a consultant to Iran for many years, a Swiss scholar.  We took Iran as a case in point.  If the Shah falls, must we and the Soviets go to nuclear confrontation?  There's a lot of oil there that we both care about, etc., a strategic position.  We tried to look at ways of managing a crisis over the Shah's fall that would not lead us into a nuclear confrontation.  But it was also very illuminating to me that this expert from Switzerland on Iran put it to us, "There's really no need to discuss if the Shah falls, it's when the Shah falls.  He will fall within the year.  I'm very sympathetic with the Shah.  I've counseled him for fifteen or twenty years.  He's finished."


That was news to me, to all of us.  We were astonished.  I came back and tried to get that word to President Carter XE "Carter, Jimmy" , but I essentially failed.  It got to him, all right, but not in a way that it was persuasive to him.  That was a failure.


But the more fundamental part, from my standpoint, was that we need to continue this discourse, and it didn't look very promising.  I thought we'd failed because the Soviet guy, the head of their delegation, was quite a nasty character.  He wanted to talk to me in the evenings, as was the style during the Cold War.  The chairmen of the delegations would meet privately in the evening.  And he wanted to know why we were so hostile to the Soviet Union.  It was clear that his picture was of Jimmy Carter XE "Carter, Jimmy"  and Cyrus Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  as almost maniacal fiends who were looking for a nuclear first strike, and it was so crazy.  If you knew Carter and Vance, you couldn't think of more peace-loving, reasonable people.  I realized this is really dangerous, that these relatively sophisticated people have grotesque distortions in their understanding of our leaders and our country.  So the crisis prevention need was greater than ever, but it looked to me like we'd struck out.


But about ten days after that, I got a cable from a man named [Georgy A.] Arbatov XE "Arbatov, Georgy A." , who headed their Institute of USA and Canada, which was their main scholarly institute that interfaced with the United States, saying would I come and spend a week or two there and talk more about crisis prevention.  Well, that made me know that they were interested, but I didn't feel that I was the big expert on the subject, and furthermore, I had a very demanding job at the Institute of Medicine.  But I did persuade Graham Allison XE "Allison, Graham T."  and Alex George XE "George, Alexander L."  to go separately -- we had no money -- on their own money, their own good nature.  They went and spent time and began to arrange meetings in different places.  There was a professional meeting of the Political Science Association, where they would meet with some Soviet counterparts.


At least a discourse got going, erratically, on crisis prevention, and that was one of the things that went through my mind.  If I had some money at my disposal and some legitimate organizing capacity, I could make this crisis prevention stuff really go.  We'd already had a very good thing under way at the academy, on arms control, which I personally helped to start and participated in, from 1980 onward.  And so the Carnegie option was very appealing.  


As soon as I decided to take the job, which was in the middle of '82, I sat Graham Allison XE "Allison, Graham T."  down.  I was then at Harvard.  I sat him down and said, "Graham, you're a very successful dean of the [John F.] Kennedy School [of Government, Harvard University].  You've built it up wonderfully.  You cannot do that anymore, not just that.  You've got to get a good deputy.  You've got to get help administratively.  You've got to come back to this crisis subject.  You know more about it than anybody in the world.  You've got to spearhead a joint crisis prevention group."  I hadn't even moved to New York yet, but I felt it was such an emergency, that if I could get him committed to it, as soon as I got to New York I could persuade the board to make a grant.  And that happened.  


So the crisis prevention group got going, and then it was steady.  It was twice a year formally meeting, once here and once there, and a lot of flow back and forth of younger scholars in between to prepare for the meetings and exchange materials.  It got to be a broader discourse of not only crisis prevention, but ways to wind down the Cold War.  That's what evolved from it.  I think it was a significant part of the mechanism, with feedback to Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  years down the road.  We started before Gorbachev.


So that Pugwash '78, which was kind of improvised and which had no obvious follow-up, grew into this joint study mechanism and major follow-up in crisis prevention in other fields.  And it gave me great encouragement that maybe I could do something when I got to Carnegie that wouldn't be just damn foolish.

Q:  Would you lay out the structure of the Avoiding Nuclear War program in terms of what your major efforts were, and, following on that, the concrete results that came out of the work?

Hamburg:  We wanted to play a role in the analytical underpinnings for major reductions in nuclear weapons and the missiles that would carry nuclear weapons.  We wanted particularly to focus on the first-strike capability.  We wanted both sides to cut back on the capacity for first strike, because that's so enormously threatening.  The more you build up first-strike surprise capability, the more I have to build up to match it.  So we simply wanted to get the ablest people we could anywhere in the world to do the analytical work that might be useful, if and when the political leaders wanted it.  


Now, it's interesting that in our early arms-control ventures it was not uncommon for me to say to the groups we were supporting something like this, "I don't know when, if ever, the work you put in will be put to use.  It all depends on the political leaders.  What I want is for us to have on the shelf, so to say, good analytical work that shows how we could both reduce the weapons and reduce the danger, both the structural arms control in reducing numbers and the functional arms control reducing the risk of an inadvertent firing, to do that work so that sooner or later some day, somehow it may be useful."  And they were willing to do that.  I mean, great physicists and engineers and other scientists spent a huge amount of time, energy, and aggravation in that work, knowing the importance of it potentially, but not knowing if it would ever be put to use.


Now as it turned out, it was hugely valuable once Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  and Reagan got around to making the political decisions.  That kind of analytical stuff which had diffused into the arms control community, into the government and elsewhere, was very valuable.  It shows you have to be patient and you have to take some risks, and people have to invest valuable time in a mission they believe to be terribly important.  You feel it's so important, if you make the least little contribution, it's worth doing, and you have to be patient to wait for it to come to fruition.


So, the arms control is one piece.  The crisis prevention was another.  It got to the point where many of the proposals made in and around the crisis prevention group were adopted.  We supported Senator Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and Senator [John W.] Warner XE "Warner, John W." , with Barry [M.] Blechman XE "Blechman, Barry M." , early on in my term to do a group looking at nuclear risk reduction centers, places where we and the Soviets would both have expert professional people, day in and day out, year in and year out, examining all the risks of inadvertent launch and accidental war and ways of reducing those risks, just in the same way we had challenged the scholarly groups early on to ask how could a nuclear war actually happen.  How could it happen?  And then think about preventive interventions on each pathway to make the slippery slope a little bit less slippery.  That was the concept behind the nuclear risk reduction centers.  They did eventually get established on a more modest scale.  Senator Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  has recently produced a proposal to strengthen those for somewhat other purposes, related to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.  The concept would be the same.


So a number of proposals, like strengthening the hot line and creating nuclear risk reduction centers, and having new rules of the road to avoid nasty surprises, and starting regional consultations.  That was one of the ideas, primarily came from Alex George XE "George, Alexander L." , and at first the governments were quite awkward, but then they became rather skillful.  That is, we and the Soviets would meet about different regional conflicts.  At the least, we could delineate what is our vital interest, and each side could go very carefully if they recognized that the other side had a truly vital interest at stake.  "Don't push me too hard there, because I can't let you."  In other places we could bargain and we could give and take a more mutual accommodation.  So the regional consultations were another part of that whole scheme of avoiding nasty surprises, getting gradually more transparent, troop notifications, major weapons movement notifications, so that you won't think we're going to war when we move some troops around.


So I think that whole field of crisis prevention grew and developed and provided an impetus for what came to be called confidence-building measures.  That's still important on the international security stage today, confidence-building measures.

[tape interruption]

Q:  Did you want to finish that thought on confidence-building?

Hamburg:  Yes, more generally to respond to your question about assessing some of the outcomes of the Avoiding Nuclear War program.  I think it's important to recognize that the studies we supported got out into the general discourse, certainly in the democratic countries at home and abroad, and to a certain extent in the Soviet Union through their scientific community.  


For example, the studies that we supported on arms control and crisis prevention, the studies we supported on Star Wars [Defense Initiative], the studies we supported on Soviet decision-making, they were in newspaper columns and op ed pieces and magazine articles.  In congressional hearings, I think it's fair to say that after, I don't know, let's say about 1985, in the ensuing decade, probably, there was hardly ever a congressional hearing that didn't have reference to one of the Carnegie-supported studies or having testimony from one of the Carnegie-supported experts or members of one of the Carnegie-supported panels.  It was just part of the discourse.  There were a lot of other sources.  I'm not suggesting it was the only one.  It is true we were, for a few years, the only foundation deeply engaged in this kind of work, and then we gave great encouragement to MacArthur [Foundation] to come into it.  It's a long story, but we played a very active and cooperative role with MacArthur, and other foundations gradually did.


We were largely alone in the field in the darkest days of the Cold War, in the early and mid eighties.  But anyway, there were many other influences, to be sure, and it's hard to track down.  It's not like you can put a radioactive label in medicine and follow where the label goes, but you can tell that, for instance, the prevalence of Carnegie-related testimony in congressional hearings is one very good measure that this was significant.  


When President Reagan announced his Star Wars proposal, we initiated contacts with major scientific organizations in this country to examine it objectively.  It was the biggest proposal in history, of vast, enormous complexity, and it needed to be studied from the point of view of technical feasibility, it needed to be studied from the point of view of economic costs, and it needed to be studied from the point of view of its effect on international relations and on the stability of delicate balance in the arms race.  


So we got many experts, mostly in conjunction, interdisciplinary groups of experts from major scientific organizations -- the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, and a few of the major universities, to look at that issue.  It became very much a part of the currency.  These were the independent studies that were very largely relied upon to compare with what the government was saying, compare and contrast sometimes, and work out for members of Congress and for the public what this proposal could and couldn't do.  


I think it was proposed in very good faith and with a high aspiration and a high moral commitment to rid the world of the danger of nuclear war, but, unfortunately, it was an awful lot more complicated than it looked at first glance.  In some ways it could be very dangerous, in other ways not feasible.  In any case, a long, long, long way off.  So all that needed to be understood.  Again, it was public education as well as policy-maker education.  The independent experts involved in these studies were mainly scientists and scholars, but there also were a number of excellent recently retired military -- admirals and generals -- who had the expertise, a different kind of expertise, who participated in these studies.  The important thing was their independence -- independent military, science, scholar -- to look as objectively as humanly possible at these issues, whether it be the weapons themselves or defense against the weapons or various notions about military strategies.


So I think the contribution to broadening and elevating the discourse was considerable.  There's no way to be absolutely precise about it.  That was one thing.


The other thing I want to call to your attention before I shut up on this topic is the linkage functions.  That is, we know that major leading figures in our Congress, just to focus on the Congress for a moment, regularly participated in these Carnegie-supported linkage meetings.  Some were through the Aspen Institute, some were through the American Association for the Advancement of Science, some were through the National Academy of Sciences.  There were different sponsoring groups to which we made grants, all of which conducted themselves at a very high caliber, objective analysis.  They typically weren't there to get involved in a debate of the current policy issues, but rather to build a broader factual underpinning.  We would say to members of Congress, "The idea is to help you get the facts straight for the long term.  You're going to have to make momentous decisions this year, in three years, in ten years, and the more you have a solid factual basis, the better off you'll be."  They were enthusiastic about that notion, always have been.


So what measures can you take of whether it was useful or not?  We know that we got time and again the most respected people in the Congress over about a ten-year span -- the leader, senior members of the relevant committees, Armed Services and International Relations Committees.  The other leaders, Speaker of the House and so on, people of that kind, came frequently.  Some came regularly.  So, is that a measure of success?  Well, in a way it is.  People with highly consequential responsibilities, leadership of people in the country were exposed to a wider range and a greater depth of knowledge on the subject from more independent sources than they would otherwise have had, and they would give testimonies, fervent testimonies, to the value of it.  We periodically examined the question, should we back off now?  Should we fade out of this business?  We got the most enthusiastic responses.  I was like shaken by the shoulders, "David, do not stop this.  This is the only time we get this sort of thing."  So I would say that is a measure of success.


You could argue on a different level, well, you don't know what they did with it, and maybe they messed it up and so on.  I'm very, very happy to know that leading members of Congress from both parties and both houses got a lot of information they wouldn't have had, and took it very seriously and valued it and tried to apply it in their work.  If they failed, maybe we failed, but I think that some good was done.


Let me give you one concrete case that was a big one for us.  There is something in the country that's come to be called the Nunn-Lugar program, the nuclear threat reduction program.  It's been going on now for almost a decade.  Senator Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and Senator Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G."  would tell you -- they've often said publicly -- this grew directly out of some Carnegie-sponsored activities.  What happened was the following.  There was the coup against Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .  I called two quick emergency meetings, one was in Budapest and then back in New York.  The one in Budapest had a number of Russians involved, some of whom had been involved in the coup -- not coup plotters, but coup defenders, pro-Gorbachev, pro-Yeltsin, pro-democracy forces.  We tried to make an assessment, members of Congress and independent experts in Budapest, to make an assessment of what had happened, how dangerous was it, what to make of it.  We concluded it was very dangerous, that Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  might not hold power much longer, that the Soviet Union might fall apart, with indeterminate consequences, with all those nuclear weapons and launching vehicles. 


So we came back.  I got together all of our grantees who were experts on the Soviet Union, plus a few consultants with great experience, like Bob [Robert S.] McNamara XE "McNamara, Robert S." , who'd been Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and so forth, Mac [McGeorge] Bundy XE "Bundy, McGeorge" , who later was a resident scholar with us, and some retired military people, in addition to our grantees, and we spent a day or so trying to figure out what we could usefully do.


One of the things that became clear was that we needed to know to the extent possible where were the Soviet nuclear weapons.  There was a lot of information available, and we had a quick and dirty study, led primarily by Ashton [B.] Carter XE "Carter, Ashton B."  of Harvard, with a number of colleagues, and we therefore had a quite reliable map in a couple of months' time of where the weapons were and some knowledge of how well they were supervised and all that sort of thing, because our concern was, what would be the fate of the nuclear weapons in the disintegrating Soviet Union?  


Meantime, earlier, a couple of years before, I had set up the steering committee on POP.  POP was Prevention of Proliferation.  The steering committee consisted of me and William Perry XE "Perry, William J." , who was then a professor at Stanford, later to be Secretary of Defense, and John [D.] Steinbruner XE "Steinbruner, John D."  from the Brookings Institution, who headed their international program, a very respected scholar, and Senator Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and Senator Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G." , the five of us.  We met regularly to talk about what the United States could do in the world to minimize proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.


So I called an emergency meeting of that group to hear Ashton Carter XE "Carter, Ashton B." 's report about the Soviet nuclear weapons, and Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G."  were very excited about it and were very creative in thinking about how they could translate this knowledge into legislation.  They asked us to come back in a few days to meet with a larger group.  They convened twenty-some senators two or three days later for an emergency meeting on what they could do about this problem.  The point was twofold.  First of all, could we put up money through the Defense Department to work with the Ministry of Defense in the then Soviet Union, to make sure that their nuclear weapons were safeguarded to the maximum extent possible, that they were in secure places, they didn't fall into the hands of terrorists, that they weren't sold on the black market, any of that?  


Secondly, to provide scientific work for their nuclear-capable scientists and engineers so they wouldn't be inclined to go to Iran or Iraq or Libya or some place like that -- and moreover help them to turn their work gradually to civilian uses.  That high-tech skill could be a source of wealth for Russia in high-tech industry.  It was most clear in the case of the aircraft industry, but, nevertheless, needed to be looked at in many other ways.


So they drew up legislation to do that, to help safeguard the weapons, move them to safe storage, with responsible stewardship, and set up the scientific centers in Russia and Ukraine to employ nuclear-capable scientists and engineers.  That went through.


Then before long, Perry XE "Perry, William J."  was Secretary of Defense, first Deputy, then Secretary, and Carter XE "Carter, Ashton B."  was with him as Assistant Secretary in charge of nuclear weapons policy, and there they were implementing the very thing that they had earlier analyzed.  In implementation they had a lot of cooperation from Senators Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G." .  Some multiple billions of dollars have now gone into that over a decade.  A huge amount of actual destruction of nuclear warheads and other nuclear-related technology has occurred under that program, as well as a lot of stabilization of their scientific and technical community.  It's moved more slowly than we would have wished both here and there.  There were problems with it.  


In early '92, Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A." , Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G." , and a couple of other senators, Perry XE "Perry, William J."  and I and Carter XE "Carter, Ashton B." , went to Russia and Ukraine to see if we could speed up implementation there and back home.  This was Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G." 's initiative.  They met with President Bush, Secretary [Howard H.] Baker XE "Baker, Howard H."  in return, to expedite it even before Perry XE "Perry, William J."  was in the government.  Perry and Ashton Carter XE "Carter, Ashton B."  gave great attention to that in government.  They've just written a follow-up book, Perry and Carter have, just now, with Carnegie support on that whole program.


But you talk about leverage.  Every foundation talks about leverage.  I don't know what we spent, a very modest amount of money Carnegie spent, and leveraged billions of dollars, federal dollars, on a huge international program which materially reduced the nuclear danger, substantially reduced the nuclear danger.  If there was ever a success story in the foundation community, this is one.  This is one.  Not my testimony -- Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G."  and the others have very often spoken about that.  It's the ideal model.  Nunn is now on the Carnegie board, by the way.  He views Carnegie's achievements in this field as something very special. 


I don't claim it personally.  What I claim personally is that I had the good sense to have an affinity for terribly able people like Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A."  and Lugar XE "Lugar, Richard G."  and Perry XE "Perry, William J."  and Carter XE "Carter, Ashton B." , and to feel a comfortable sense in the American democracy of moving back and forth across that permeable membrane of government and non-government.  My attitude is, the President of the United States has at his disposal, if he wants it, all the expertise in our country.  It's all his to use.  And it ought to be not just those in government, it oughtn't to be turf issues, it oughtn't to be this foundation or that university or that department of government.  The whole country is his to use, and we tried to put that kind of concept into operation as best we could.  Sure, we had very good cooperation from President Reagan and Bush, a lot of stimulation from them, of course from President Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  more recently.  All of them have asked me about things the foundation world could do, "Could you do this faster than we could, or better than we could?  Or could you stimulate something to happen across national boundaries that might be sensitive for the government to do?"  And we've tried.  Some of that goes under the name of track two diplomacy.

Q:  Did you have any conflicts with Reagan about the Star Wars program?

Hamburg:  No, no.  I didn't engage a lot with him on it.  But his attitude was, by the time I met him in the spring of '84, his attitude was, he'd learned a tremendous amount about nuclear weapons since he got there, he realized that they were incredibly dangerous.  He did not consider them useful military weapons.  He sincerely believed, as did Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." , if there's a way to get rid of the damn things, you ought to get rid of them, and he hoped that Star Wars would do that, but if it wouldn't, then there ought to be other ways to do that.  You ought to try the Star Wars track and you ought to try negotiation, reducing the levels track, and you ought to try public education.  He came to be a true believer in the enormous dangers of these weapons.


He was a complicated guy.  He wasn't what he seemed to be at first glance.  We had thought that he might be very angry about our messing around in this field, but he wasn't.  His attitude was, "I need all the help I can get."  But that wasn't true of everybody in his administration.  He told me one time that it troubled him very much that his administration was often divided on these issues, like reopening the scientific and scholarly exchanges with the Soviets in '84.  A number of his people didn't want to do that, but he did.  He wanted us to be strong, we could defend ourselves militarily if we had to, we didn't have to be afraid of anybody, but from that position we could negotiate quite radically.

Q:  I'm thinking in terms of your discussions earlier about leadership and the importance of leadership and the ability of one individual to make a difference.  You're dealing really in a highly constructed situation here with two superpowers in terms of avoiding nuclear war.  Could you describe your first meeting with Gorbachev and talk a little bit about what role his openness played in this whole process?

Hamburg:  It was very dramatic, and it was one of many points in my career when I really had to pinch myself.  I have to say I wish my grandfather could be around to see it.  I always was concerned.  I mean, to some degree there was always within me the kid who grew up in a small town in Indiana, close to people who had fled from persecution, and feeling a little bit marginal, a little bit insecure, and lacking in chutzpah.  But I felt if you had a chance, you should try.  President Kennedy XE "Kennedy, John F."  once said something to the effect that what's influence for except to use it.  If you have it, you should use it.  


So when we had these arms-control meetings between the American Academy group and the Soviet Academy group from 1980 onward -- and I was a member of the group, I wasn't a sponsor.  Carnegie wasn't in support of that, that was pre-Carnegie.  But I was a participant.  Later, I went off of it and Carnegie supported it.  But in my participation, I became friendly with a couple of leading scientists in their group, the chairman at that time, a physicist named Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P." , who was well respected by our physicists.  So I would meet on the side with one or two of their leading people and have other discussions.  I figured maybe there was something else I could do with the academy or with the foundations or universities, apart from the arms-control issue.  What's happening?  Are there openings to improve the relationship, to reduce one danger or another?


So it happened, by chance, at the Moscow meeting of the arms-control group, what we called CISAC, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, was in Moscow a few months after Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  came to power.  So I had my meeting, I remember, under some steps in their academy, with Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P." , my ritual meeting.  I said to him, "You've got a new leader.  I don't know anything about him.  I apologize for my ignorance.  I'd never heard of him before he was appointed.  I'm certainly nowhere near a Soviet expert.  I don't know if he's good for us, for the cause of peace, for the United States, for friendship, any of that.  I don't know.  Maybe good, maybe bad.  But I do know this.  New leaders, when they come to power, like to have a distinctive ecological niche, to say to yourself, 'There's some way in which I can make a contribution different from my predecessors or exceeding my predecessors, whatever.  I wonder how he feels about that?  I wonder if we could help him see that a contribution he could make might be to begin to wind down the Cold War.  Is that possible?"


So Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  got very excited, said, "Let me think about it.  I have to think about it.  I'll get back to you in a while."  What I didn't know was, he was going to talk to Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  overnight.  I had no way of knowing his relationship with Gorbachev.


The next morning, he was waiting for me when I came in.  I was five minutes late.  People said, "Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P." 's been looking for you all over."  Very uncharacteristic behavior.  The Soviets were never very punctual.  He was all excited.  So he had brought some ideas from Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." .  There were a whole series of rapid-fire interplays that first year.  


But anyway, the first meeting with Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  was one which was really dramatic because he gave me a critique of the Soviet Union the likes of which I have never heard from any right-winger in the United States.  He told me for seventy years the damage that had been done, and then he would sort of beat me about the head and shoulders, as if I were criticizing, and say, "We are great people.  We have great mathematicians and novelists and musicians and artists," and this and that and the other.  "We are a great country.  We've just been hamstrung for these years by a dictatorial regime.  Dictatorial regimes cannot bring to full flower the creativity of people, and our people are great people.  Don't put us down."  You know.  And so forth.


So it was very funny.  But he said, you're -- Velikhov XE "Velikhov, Evgeniy P."  had introduced me as a leader of the scientific community.  I was at that time president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  I guess he really told him about that.  So, for instance, he said to me, "Your scientific community should be helping us."  For example, he said, "In the social sciences, you should be advocating objective social science.  Our social science has been distorted by ideology.  I'm supposed to be a policy-maker.  How can I decide when I have no honest facts before me?  I don't know what to believe in economics or social trends.  What is the truth?  We have to have a disciplined collection of social information that's reliable, and you have to help us with that, because we have no background, no tradition in it.  We have great mathematicians, you know.  We can do it."  It was extraordinary.


So, toward the end, I said to him, "It seems to me you're very interested in ideas outside.  If I could be of any help -- "  I felt he's going to kick me out of the room for being so presumptuous to say I could bring in people or ideas, but, no, he put his arm around me and he said, "That would be a great thing.  Would you be willing to do that?  Would you be willing to bring people to see me, send people to see me and my colleagues?  We must open up.  We have good ideas.  We have very good ideas, but we don't have all the good ideas, you know."


So it was fantastic.  I really couldn't tell, it could have been a terrific act.  I went to see Senator Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A." , who was one of the few Americans at that time who'd had any extended exposure to Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S." , and we had to compare notes.  He had the same reaction I did.  We weren't sure what to make of it.  He could be a terrific actor.  One thing that made me think that he wasn't an actor was, when we got talking about nuclear weapons, back to my research on stress, he began to tremble and sweat.  Now, I don't know, maybe some very good actors can do that, some method acting that permits you to evoke these autonomic responses, all my old adrenalin stuff, but he had it.  Let me tell you, when we talked about nuclear weapons, he said, somewhat like Reagan said, that he'd learned a tremendous amount about nuclear weapons after he came to power, and he just, you know, he couldn't believe that anybody could think of using a nuclear weapon.  What responsible person would order a weapon to be fired that could cause millions of people to be killed in a minute?  Just crazy.  


So I didn't think it was an act, but, still, it took a while to sort out.  But I saw no harm -- I did clear it with some people in the White House and the State Department, that they didn't think it was subversive if I were to begin to organize delegations to go and visit and so on.


I have up on my wall some photographs that were taken by Deana Arsenian XE "Arsenian, Deana" , who was on our staff, and still is, who grew up there and left in adolescence from Moscow.  Her first trip back was on a particular delegation that I took, that had five distinguished scientists and five members of the Senate.  Some wonderful pictures of Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A." , Simpson XE "Simpson, Alan K." , Cranston XE "Cranston, Alan" , a couple of others.  Oh, Bill Cohen XE "Cohen, William S." , who's now Secretary of Defense, was one of that delegation, and some very distinguished scientists who are arms-control experts.  That was perhaps the peak one -- ten of us for a whole week meeting with his top military people and his top economic people and so on, and then a half day with him at the end.


There's a kind of amusing story.  This was in March of 1988, as I remember.  Early '88, anyway.  At the end, he was talking to us in ones and twos, and I said to him, "Mr. President," or whatever it was, the terminology we used, "if you stay on the track you are now, I think the Cold War might just be over by the year 2000, by the turn of the century."


And when I walked out with Nunn XE "Nunn, Samuel A." , I said, "Gee, Sam, did I get carried away by that?"


And he said, "No, no, no.  The spirit was right.  It was right for the occasion.  You were probably just too optimistic about the timing."


Well, you know, a year later, depending on what criteria you use, one or two years later, it was all over.  Two thousand was way too pessimistic, not too optimistic a projection.  Who anticipated it?


But those delegations, I think, were useful.  Later, in speeches, when he was still in office and since, in speeches at Stanford, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he has said the new ideas, our new thinking, which is a term they use, didn't just arise in the Kremlin; it came elsewhere.  Some of our best ideas came out of American universities, came out of American foundations like Carnegie.  He's been very generous in giving us credit.  At least we played a role, some kind of stimulating role in that ferment of a great leader.  And the United States leadership met him more or less half way.

[END TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO; BEGIN TAPE THREE, SIDE ONE]

Q:  I'd like to move to a discussion of preventing deadly conflict.  I realize there's an interim program, but maybe if you could follow through with preventing deadly conflict.

Hamburg:  The spirit of preventing the deadliest conflicts pervaded our work, and still does.  I think we've really come back to one of the great spiritual heirlooms we have of Andrew Carnegie in that work.  


As the Cold War ended, I felt that we were very likely to have an upsurge of ethnic and religious conflicts.  I had written about that in my second essay, second annual report essay, 1984, and had talked with some of the Soviet experts during the Cold War about what might happen in the Soviet Union with the many different ethnic and religious conflicts within and around their borders.  


So we adapted the program to focus more on ethnic, religious, regional conflicts, and less on the risk of international war, though not abandoning international war either, and to try to make grants that would help us to understand and, above all, to prevent the emergence of an enormous rash of ethnic and religious conflicts around the world.


I guess it's enough for the moment to focus on the most visible part of that program, which was the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.  Now, the way that came about was that I had involved Cyrus Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  as an advisor, along with a number of other people, to our international program from the beginning of my term of office, and he'd been a very valuable advisor.  Then I had tried to be helpful to him in some of the missions he did with U.N. Secretary General, providing him with background material and a little intellectual support here and there, to make it possible for him to do missions on short notice.  Again, the flexibility of foundations to respond.  So he had done troubleshooting for the Secretary General in South Africa and Nagorno Karabakh, and then in Yugoslavia, first vis-à-vis the Serb-Croatia conflict, and then in Bosnia, of course, ultimately with the famous Vance-Owen Plan. 


I visited him in Geneva toward the end of the time when he was working on Bosnia, and I said I thought he really ought to do a book when he got back, that we'd be happy to support a book, trying to consider how that conflict came about and how it might have been prevented, especially how it might have been prevented.  Part of my motivation was the following, that one of our expert groups in 1987, in August 1987, in a meeting in Europe with members of Congress, had focused on Eastern Europe, with special attention to Yugoslavia, where [Josip Broz] Tito XE "Tito, Josip Broz"  had died in 1980.  In 1987, this expert group concluded emphatically that Yugoslavia was very likely to have a violent disintegration within five years, '87 to '92.  


Members of Congress asked me to report that back to the Secretary of State.  They took it very seriously.  I did report it, and he took it seriously.  The Europeans basically said to the Secretary of State, "It's a European problem.  Don't be excitable.  Leave it to us.  We'll take care of it."  And so for a number of years, as a matter of fact, the United States was happy to let the Europeans take care of it.  Of course, they failed to take care of it.


But the point, you see, that was so striking, there was early warning.  The experts knew that this violent conflagration was likely to come.  Later down the line, Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  had written a letter, and the Secretary General of the United Nations, at Vance's urging, had written a letter to the Foreign Secretary of Germany, saying, "Don't recognize Croatia, because if you recognize Croatia, then there will be a war in Bosnia."  It's exactly what happened.  They went ahead, and it happened.


All I'm saying is, there very often is early warning, but there's not effective action to respond to the early warning and prevent these terrible things.  Then the Rubicon is crossed.  Once Rubicon is crossed, it becomes infinitely harder, the revenge motives and all that.  After the slaughter, after the mass raping and all that, it's so much harder to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, you know, and if you could prevent it in the first place, work towards some kind of just outcome over time, some mutual accommodation among the adversaries.


Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  came back to me after a couple of months and said, "It's too hard.  I can't write a book, even with a collaborator.  It's too complicated.  What we should do is have an international commission to look at the whole problem."  So that's what we did.  We had an international commission.  He was adamant that I should co-chair the commission with him, because we do work well together.  So that's what we did.  We had an international commission for three years, and now we're in the midst of a two-year follow-up explaining all over what we've said and why.  What we've done, in short form, is to set out the nature of the problem, why it's so dangerous, why it's likely to get more dangerous in the next century when everybody will have weapons, everybody will be able to destroy everybody else at the path we're now on.  No part of the world will be too remote to cause terrible damage somewhere else.


So we laid out, in a comprehensive way, the tools and strategies available for prevention, somewhat on a public health model, and then we asked who could do what, who could use those tools to implement prevention strategies effectively in the future.  That's what it is, it's an overview, in the so-called final report that we put out one year ago this month, at the White House, and we are in the midst of putting out forty additional reports and books.  About half are out.  The other half will be out by the end of next year.  So you'll have a sort of two-foot shelf of what there is to know on prevention.  There are also many related publications from the grant-making program.


Since this field, unfortunately, moves slowly, I suspect that it's going to be useful for decades to come.  I don't know how long.  But each one goes into depth on some aspect of the final report.  It's like chapter by chapter you get depth on what is known or could be known about that part of the prevention problem.  So this is a big, visible, worldwide enterprise which in its first year after the final report is concentrating on high-level government policy-makers at the U.N. and regional organizations like the Organization of American States, Organization of African Unity, that sort of thing.  It's been adopted wholeheartedly by the U.N. Secretary General and by many leaders in a variety of countries, I'd say especially the United States, Sweden, Norway, Japan, Canada, one or two others.  More to come.  A lot of interest in Russia, a lot of interest in Germany.  A lot of interest in the francophone countries, being spearheaded by Boutros-Ghali XE "Boutros-Ghali, Boutros" , who was part of this venture when he was at the U.N.  


We were running ourselves ragged, trying to explain what we said and why, and to stimulate better ideas all over the world.  We are shifting our emphasis to younger people, and now we want to develop some kind of global network of cooperating universities, not a vast network in numbers, but in geography, yes, universities, at least one on every continent that is teaching preventing deadly conflict more or less along the lines of our publications, drawing on the resource of our publications.


Along with that, there have been many grants to learn more about these issues and to put into practice on a small scale ways of de-fusing emerging conflicts.  That illustrates a principle of Carnegie's operation during my time, that I believe we have carried to a certain level that's unusual.  I don't recommend it for every foundation every time, but for us I believe it's worked well, and that is an interplay between a commission-like body, a commission, a council, a task force, you name it, and the grant-making.  So that ideas coming up out of the grant-making challenge and stimulate and inform the council or the commission, and, on the other hand, observations of the commission challenge the grant-makers to go out and find somebody who can dig more deeply into the subject and understand it better, or to try out on a small scale some conflict-prevention idea that the commission thinks is promising, that interplay back and forth between grant-making all over the country, all over the world, the grant-making on the one side and these commission-like bodies on the other hand.


One of our commission-like bodies that was enormously interesting and hopeful was the Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa.  If the end of the Cold War brought great hope to the world, so, too, did the end of apartheid in South Africa.  Neither was much predicted.  There was every reason to believe there might be a horrible bloody war in both places, maybe both even conceivably nuclear.  And it didn't happen.  There were some lives lost, to be sure, but nothing like what might have happened.  So it's a great source of hope in a bloody twentieth century which had the worst war in history and which had the Holocaust.  There are these great sources of hope.


Our inquiry in South Africa, we believe -- and I think most South Africans believe -- played a significant role in helping to roll back apartheid.  It was started, to his great credit, in Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." 's time.  It was early in its development when I came to office.  The only plea that Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J."  made to me and to the board was to continue the work in South Africa.  Otherwise, he kept scrupulously out, as I have with Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" , but he did make this plea that it was at such an early stage and so important, that we should pursue it.  I took that very seriously and did pursue it.  We modified it some, and it developed a lot more in ways that we hadn't foreseen, but we carried it forward.


There are a few general points about that inquiry.  First of all, as was characteristic of my time, one of my clichés at Carnegie, we wanted to get the facts straight, facts about poverty and development: how bad was poverty, who did it affect, who did it not affect, what possibilities were there for relieving poverty, how could you envision development in South Africa and Southern Africa, in the region.  That was one piece of it.


The second piece was to do that in a way that would involve blacks and browns and not only whites, to embed it as much as possible in the black community.  For all their deprivation, they were very gifted people, like Desmond Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond"  and Mamphela Ramphele XE "Ramphele, Mamphela" , not to speak of Nelson Mandela XE "Mandela, Nelson" , and Thabo Mbeki XE "Mbeki, Thabo" , and Cyril Ramaphosa XE "Ramaphosa, Cyril" , and many, many others.  There were many gifted people, even though a tiny fraction of blacks were getting educated at that time.


We tried to involve many accomplished and promising younger blacks and browns, coloreds, in the enterprise, right across the spectrum of all those maddening South African racial classifications.  We based it at the University of Capetown, where a very courageous vice chancellor, Stuart Saunders XE "Saunders, Stuart" , a white man, protected it, nurtured it.  A brilliant economist, Francis Wilson XE "Wilson, Francis" , white, was the first director of it.  As soon as we could get Mamphela Ramphele XE "Ramphele, Mamphela"  freed from where she'd been banished out to the boondocks, to bring her back and to work on it, and then she became the co-director with Francis Wilson XE "Wilson, Francis" .


There were various task forces that covered South African society, a task force on education and poverty, a task force on religion and poverty, task force on business and poverty, you name it, twelve, fifteen task forces, and, where possible, headed by a prominent black.  Desmond Tutu XE "Tutu, Desmond"  brilliantly spearheaded the task force on religion and poverty.  In any case, headed by very competent people with leaders from different sectors, a mixture of people from different social backgrounds, trying to work out how could this sector could pull itself up by some bootstraps or other, how could we help to overcome racial discrimination and poverty in southern Africa.  


Many volumes were put out of a factual nature.  There was a lot of research training of blacks in the behavioral and social sciences, in vital statistics and the facts that would be needed to make social policy more wisely whenever the politics would permit that.  And so as it went along, we used it as a vehicle for dissemination about South Africa in South Africa and in the United States and also in Western Europe.  We did a number of collateral activities in which we drew upon the resources of the inquiry.  We had an art exhibit in many parts of this country, photographs taken for the inquiry -- the face of poverty in South Africa.


I should say we built upon early Carnegie history.  There had been a late '20s, early '30s study of a similar kind, but it was the Poor White study.  Blacks simply didn't come into it at all, they were non-persons at that time.  We basically revisited that study, looking at the whole population, which, of course, meant in our time poverty was very largely black.


One of the things we did was to get very promising people and try to nurture their careers.  We'd bring them here for a time or bring them to Europe for a time, provide research training in South Africa, provide networking in South Africa and outside.  And I'm very happy and proud to say that many of those people are leaders in South Africa today, particularly in the government, also in universities, to some extent in business.  There were a number of blacks, particularly, who got their first start or their main chance out of some experience with the Carnegie Inquiry.  When you go to South Africa, you can explore that more fully.


Ramphele XE "Ramphele, Mamphela"  is a wonderful case in point.  She was [Bantu] Stephen Biko’s common-law wife.  She bore children by him.  She's a brilliant person.  She was banned.  When I visited her in 1984 out in the boondocks, I could see how brilliant and ingenious she was, and felt we ought to make every effort to get her back to the university, even if it would be initially in a very modest capacity, but to be there and to be part of the mix.  Of course, she rose very rapidly once she came back.


I had the honor of being denounced by P.W. Botha XE "Botha, P.W."  in the Parliament.  It wasn't a terrible denunciation.  When I gave a speech in South Africa at a conference on the inquiry, he said something like, "Dr. Hamburg undoubtedly means well, but he doesn't understand South Africa.  We have our own customs and tradition, our own culture, our own justice," and so on.  "But meanwhile he should go away and leave us alone.  He's only making trouble.  We don't need outside agitators."  [Laughter]

Q:  You won an award two years ago, a year ago, and I'm wondering if it partly has to do with all your efforts in the peace area.  Could you talk to us about that?

Hamburg:  I've been much, much honored far beyond anything I could ever have dreamt, but there are two that are especially meaningful to me and just off the scale.  Well, maybe three.  I'd say the first honorary degree I ever got was from my alma mater a long time ago, in the 1970s, from Indiana University, and my scientific mentor, Tracy Sonneborn XE "Sonneborn, Tracy M." , was the instigator behind it.  That was a very moving occasion.


A couple of years ago, President Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  gave me the Medal of Freedom, which is meant to be the highest civilian honor we have, and I must say I was very deeply touched.  In the citation they dealt with my whole career, but both the domestic and international side of it.  I was touched, on the morning of the event, President Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." , looking at the citation, told some of his colleagues that he felt there was not enough said about the international and peace side of things and the African side of things.  There was a lot about the domestic side, education, child development, what have you, behavioral science, but he wanted a balance, a more balanced statement.  So they scurried around and got that done.  I was very touched by that.  In any case, it was quite fantastic to get that award.


Then this year the National Academy of Sciences gave me its highest award, the Public Welfare Medal.  Since the academy has been so important in my life, that was very, very meaningful.  All three of these were total out-of-the-blue surprises, and they cited both domestic and international activities.  The Public Welfare Medal is symbolic of our academy, that is, the academy not only recognizes great achievement in science, but also it recognizes the uses of science for the benefit of society.  In that, it really differs largely from any other academy in the world.  So those awards were enormously meaningful to me, and I cherish them.

Q:  On the subject of human welfare and back to Carnegie's programs, I wonder if you could talk for a few moments about your programs in the area of child development [unclear].

Hamburg:  Indeed, there is a bridge in the sense that I've long been interested in education for conflict resolution, education for mutual accommodation, learning to live together.  That is, groups have to come to terms with their differences.  I think that education is an important part of that -- schools, community organizations, religious institutions.  That's, of course, only a modest but highly significant part of what education has to be in the next century.


When I came to Carnegie, as I said earlier, we tackled the problems of the fundamental underpinnings of child and adolescent development.  So we developed, over those years, a developmental strategy, starting with conception and going on through adolescence.  I'll give it to you developmentally, though we didn't do it in chronological sequence quite this way, for very practical reasons.  It wasn't neat and tidy aesthetically as it might have been to do first zero to three, then three to ten.  But in the end, we did all those.


I should say, the key structure of it was to make grants both to fill gaps in research, gaps in knowledge, and to support carefully assessed innovations in education, and to use our convening function to get together people from different sectors of the world of education and child development, to learn from each other, and then from time to time to have high-visibility, high-quality groups from different sectors of American society that would try to make a synthesis.  What is known about the zero to three age group?  What is known about three to ten?  What is known about ten to fifteen?  


Now, those groups typically were from different sectors.  About half the group would be experts on the subject -- educators, pediatricians, child psychiatrists, developmental psychologists, you name it.  And the other half would be leaders in business -- the CEO of a pharmaceutical firm or Ted Koppel XE "Koppel, Ted"  of ABC, Admiral [James D.] Watkins XE "Watkins, James D." , who'd been head of the Navy and then Secretary of Energy.  Leaders in different sectors.  The idea of these intersectoral groups was both that you'd have a broader mix and more stimulation and more ideas, and also that you'd have more opportunities, when you finished your work, to open the door and get into different sectors, to say, "Look.  It's important to reach out a helping hand to our children."


So those groups, I think, were powerful intellectually and perhaps even politically, and they also had a wonderful interplay with the grant program.  First there were two grant programs chaired by [E.] Alden Dunham XE "Dunham, Alden E."  on the one hand, Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien"  on the other, and then later a combined program chaired by Vivien Stewart.  Each task force and grant-making stimulated and helped the other.  I think it's an art form that I cherish, although it's hard to do, and I certainly don't recommend it as any kind of panacea for the foundation world.  I don't even recommend it for the next phase of Carnegie's life.  But in this particular phase, it was very useful.


Now, the zero to three task force was first chaired by Dick Riley XE "Riley, Richard W." , former governor of South Carolina, who had been a wonderful governor on these issues of young children.  Then when he became President Clinton's Secretary of Education, two distinguished scholars took over: Julius Richmond XE "Richmond, Julius B."  from Harvard, who'd been the father of Head Start, and Eleanor [E.] Maccoby XE "Maccoby, Eleanor E." , sort of the dean of developmental psychology, professor at Stanford.  They took over and co-chaired and saw it through.


A very touching aspect of that was that my dear friend Jonas Salk XE "Salk, Jonas E."  served on it.  He was ill -- it was the last body of that kind that he served on during his life.  He was too ill to attend meetings, but we talked on the phone regularly and we corresponded.  He sent me a message to be read at the meeting, where we brought out this report, a meeting at which Hillary Clinton XE "Rodham Clinton, Hillary"  was the keynote speaker.  That report emphasized the health side of it, prenatal care, and primary health care for young children in a broader conception, prenatal care, for example, that included an educational component and a social service component, not just a medical component in a narrow sense.  And so, too, with early primary health care.


The second thrust of it was an educational component, not warehousing young children, but preschool education truly, more or less on the Head Start model, for poor kids and rich kids alike, some of the attributes of high quality preschool education, high quality child care.  


Then the preparation for parenthood, various opportunities for preparing for responsible parenthood -- parent education in different settings, ways of getting the knowledge and skill to be a good parent, especially in this complicated time when both parents are likely to be in the paid work force outside the home, and a very complicated mix of caretaking by parents and by others, how to strengthen all the relevant institutions.


And, finally, the fourth strand of that report was on community mobilizations, how we can bring together the different sectors on behalf of our young children.  If you can't get mobilized over babies, I don't know what could bring us together.  So, that zero to three was one piece.


The second piece was middle childhood and mainly elementary school education, although it had some pre-elementary stuff in it, and some transition from elementary to junior high, but mainly around very important recent research particularly coming out of Yale, coming out of Johns Hopkins, and applied to school systems all over the country.  Ways of raising standards, helping kids, especially poor kids, to meet the standards, improving teaching as a profession.  So that was an important report, co-chaired by Admiral Watkins XE "Watkins, James D." , who I referred to before, and Shirley Malcom XE "Malcom, Shirley M." , head of educational activities at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Again, intersectoral group, high visibility, coming-out party.  Tried to call national attention each time to get a lot of coverage.  We were extraordinarily lucky in getting very broad and largely accurate and positive media coverage of these reports.  


And then to have follow-up activities afterwards for several years to see what would happen if you implemented the recommendations.  But the most ambitious of all of these was the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.  Shall we just go straight through into that?

Q:  Yes.

Hamburg:  That was a ten-year effort.  It overlapped with these others, '86 to '96.  We began it as a three-year effort, but it had such a powerful effect in the country that the board felt there was no way we should wind it down.  It was intersectoral, it had leading people, terrific people on it, and they worked very hard.  We had a staff in Washington, and they interacted with the grant-making staff in New York. 


It was a stimulating and guiding body, the council itself was, and we set up, or stimulated others to set up, a number of convening functions and major studies and dissemination functions on various topics of adolescence.  Last I heard, I think we were in the neighborhood of three-quarters of a million of our volumes as of a month or two ago, had been distributed, and there had been a vast amount of media coverage, a lot of interaction with governors and presidents and cabinet members and so forth.  The creation of an Office of Adolescent Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, many ramifications of that council.


Basically what we did, we put out major reports on -- well, first I'll say we focused primarily on early adolescence, ages ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.  We recognized and did some things on middle and later adolescence, but we mainly focused on early adolescence, because it's so neglected.  I have to say -- I should have said before -- I learned a lot from my own kids about early adolescence, not only when they were early adolescents, because we were very close, but since.  My kids, as well as my wife, have been collaborators in almost everything I've done, and they've gone on to wonderful accomplishments, of course, in their own right.  I learn much more from them now than they learn from me.  But the early adolescent focus, they undoubtedly helped me and my wife to make that focus, because it was so neglected and so important.  You suddenly go from childhood to something like an adult, puberty pops out, and all these biological changes, psychological changes.  You go from a little elementary school in the neighborhood to a big junior high school.  You go from being expected to be a child to be something like an adult, but you don't know what.  Huge biological, psychological, social changes converging on this fascinated participant-observer, the young adolescent.


We felt we ought to look at schools, we ought to look at the health system with respect to those adolescents, we ought to look at community organizations, including religious ones, we ought to look at the media, all the front-line institutions that have an impact on them.  That's the same philosophy -- we did that with younger children, too, but perhaps we did the most on the adolescents.


So there was one major report, the earliest one, called Turning Points, and what we did there was particularly significant, I think, perhaps as a model for other work.  We got together an intersectoral task force again, on upgrading school education in early adolescence, junior high or middle schools, what we call generically the middle-grade schools.  We looked at the curriculum, we looked at the organization of schools, we looked at the surround of schools.  It was my belief, my passionate conviction, that it's not worth very much to just look in the classroom, important as that is.  It's not enough to look just at what happens in the school building, important as that is.  We as a society have to consider all the factors that influence learning in and out of the school.  That means substance abuse and crime and television, a whole host of influences -- now, of course, the Internet.  And not just what goes on in class, although it's terribly important, what goes on in class.


So that's the approach we took to this Turning Points report.  One of the members of that task force was William Jefferson Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." , then the governor of Arkansas.  We had a set of education governors that we involved from the very beginning in Carnegie activities, some Democrats, some Republicans.  Tom Kean XE "Kean, Thomas H." , Republican from New Jersey, is now the chairman of the Carnegie board.  We had wonderful governors -- Jim [James B.] Hunt XE "Hunt Jr., James B."  [Jr.] of North Carolina, Lawton Chiles XE "Chiles, Lawton"  of Florida, Dick Riley XE "Riley, Richard W."  of South Carolina, Kit [Christopher S.] Bond XE "Bond, Christopher S."  of Missouri, Michael [S.] Dukakis XE "Dukakis, Michael S."  of Massachusetts, and so on. The governors really awakened the country to education, and I'm happy to say we had a hand in that.  When we began, it was considered not a good political issue, and now it is considered a very important political issue, I hope not too partisan.  Sometimes it is too partisan now.  But anyhow, Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  made a good contribution to that report, and when we brought out the report he was the principal spokesman for it on national television and for the print media, as well.  


But the substance of the report was formulated by experts on education and child development, and much of it is still going forward at the present time.  We advocated smaller units.  Break down these factory-like schools into smaller units, a school within a school, a house, whatever, various ways of doing it, but organize it in ways that each individual can get sustained individual attention.  We advocated having an organizing principle intellectually, which should be the life sciences, because the kids are experiencing or have recently experienced puberty and their curiosity is enormous, and you want to direct that around a life sciences curriculum which includes a lot of health information in it.  High-risk behavior is related to each functional system of the body.  You talk about respiration, you talk about smoking.  You talk about the brain, you talk about drugs.  You talk about reproductive biology, you talk about sexually transmitted diseases.  You talk about cardiovascular system, you talk about diet and exercise and smoking.


So among other things, the grant-making program stimulated a superb new curriculum, which just fully arrived on my desk last week, multiple volumes, an interactive lively curriculum, growing out of Stanford's human biology program, of which I was one of the founders thirty years ago.  They've adapted it.  Ten years of work adapting that curriculum for Stanford undergraduates to the middle-grade schools.  So we had then this organizing principle for a curriculum which linked education and health, and we had the smaller units and ways of getting sustained individual attention.  


We had life skills training, including systematic training in decision-making.  Rather than making impulsive, ignorant decisions, learning how to make informed and deliberate decisions.  Also life skills training -- which my wife, by the way, is a major contributor -- life skills training that deal with peers learning from slightly older peers about how to make friendships and how to resolve disputes without violence.  These are practical skills for getting along in the world, that have not traditionally been a part of the curriculum.  They can be taught in schools, they can be taught in community-based organizations like Ys or Boys and Girls Clubs, they can be taught in religious institutions.  But they're important to connect with the traditional curricular material.


We talked about mentoring and other social supports, ways in which particularly lonely or isolated or very poor kids, especially kids in disadvantaged communities, could have some sense of attachment, of reliable human relationships, with adult mentors or with slightly older and more fortunate peers.  


So that's all in there, and more -- the relationship between community organizations, supervised academic community service, learning to be useful to others beyond the self, transcending ego-centered orientations.


Then we did a follow-up to that report.  Partly thanks to Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  and partly to others who participated in the coming-out events for that report, we got a lot of public attention on it.  Then we set up a competition among states -- ultimately fifteen states participated -- in implementing these reports, the recommendations of the report "Turning Points."  And then we had independent researchers, principally then from the University of Illinois and UCLA, assessing implementation.  Number one, the fidelity of implementation of recommendations.  Number two, did it make a difference?  Were academic results better?  Were interpersonal results better?


That's a very interesting model, because it might turn out the reports were plausible and attractive, but they didn't work.  In this case, it did work.  In general, the more nearly it was implemented, the more faithfully it was implemented, the better the results academically and otherwise.  Of course, that's very heartening.  It takes a period of years to do that.  But this is an illustration of what I mean, an interplay between the grant-making program and the commission or task force.  


The follow-up to a report, you don't just put it out there and sink without a trace.  You put it out there, you disseminate, you explain, you stimulate interest, you stimulate better ideas, but you also stimulate studies to see does it work.  Can you get it implemented?  And if it's implemented, does it work?  So that Turning Points was a good model.


I'll briefly mention, we also had an important report written by Fred Hechinger XE "Hechinger, Fred M." , who came up earlier in this story, written in a way that would be accessible to the general reader, called Fateful Choices, decisions kids make about smoking and weapons and so on that affect their health and the health of others.  So that's an adolescence health, disease prevention, health promotion approach, another volume parallel to Turning Points.


Then there was one called A Matter of Time, the time being out of school, the role of community organizations, as much time out of school as in school.  A lot of bad things happen in the out-of-school hours these days.  So we laid out what the potential is for community organizations, the general notion being to lure kids any way you can, make it attractive, with food, with music, with sports, with interested adults, with interested older peers, get them in, in the after-school hours, and then have educational activities and health-related activities, tutoring, mentoring, what have you, in community activities.  The idea is to cover the waking hours of the kids with an opportunity, an array of constructive activities in school and out of school.  If you put Turning Points side by side with Matter of Time, you've got the waking hours covered.


We also stimulated some other organizations to probe more deeply into adolescent health, so we went to health and education and the social environment of early adolescence, and covered it pretty comprehensively with these reports, all of which had the aspiration, at least the aspiration, to be intelligible and credible, intelligible because they were translated out of technical jargon into straightforward English, and credible because they were based, to the maximum extent possible, on research and the most carefully evaluated innovations in clinics and schools throughout the country.  


That was the approach.  It went ten years.  I think it was probably the most serious sustained effort ever made on issues of adolescence in this country.  It's now being followed up by a forum on adolescence at the National Academy of Sciences, which I chair for a while.  I'll pass the baton in a year or two to somebody else.  


But adolescents are a hard sell.  I'll stop with that message.  We've got to keep thinking about adolescents.  They tend to be perceived in a way that's frightening by adults -- wild animals, raging hormones, all that stuff.  Young babies are a much easier sell, in my experience than the adolescents.  Adolescence is a fateful time, a crucially formative time, just like infancy, and we've got to pay more sustained attention in this country and all over the world to the fate of our young people.

Q:  Another question.

Hamburg:  Sure, have no mercy.  

[Laughter]

Q:  When you first came to Carnegie, I asked you earlier what your impressions of philanthropy were, and they were rather vague because you hadn't thought a lot about it.  Now what are your impressions of what role the philanthropy and the foundations should play in American society?

Hamburg:  Well, it was Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J."  who said to me early on that the great thing about foundations is that they have such scope and flexibility.  I learned that from him, and he's absolutely right.  That scope and flexibility includes the opportunity to develop somewhat novel art forms, like the one I've been hammering on, of the interplay between a grant-making program and commission-like bodies.  


I think also foundations, at least the older ones that have good names like Carnegie, established names, but, in general, foundations have a wonderful convening power.  You find you can get people of very high quality and dedication to come together from different backgrounds, to have some serious exchange on neutral turf about important issues. 


Another thing I would say is that a foundation like ours can be a wonderful interface between research and social action.  You don't have to.  Some foundations just support research and do it superbly.  Some foundations just support social action, although I confess I wonder sometimes, "What are they advocating for?"  I don't know where you get the knowledge on which to advocate except through research.  


But anyway, our conception is that the interface between research and social action is a very good one because it gives you the best chance to have well-documented, well-formulated, constructive social actions which you can help to inform and advocate about.  Those are some of the things.


I think you have to keep light on your feet.  You have to keep looking for new opportunities.  You have to see when a line of inquiry or innovation has been played out.  You need to shake yourself up about every five years or so.  But I think the scope and flexibility is unmatched.  I think you can go into some areas of sensitivity where government might shy away from or otherwise it would be too partisan or too ideological.  I'd say, for example, on matters of reproductive biology and women's health, some foundations are doing a lot of good things.  We haven't done a great deal.  We've done some.  I think you can help universities to look more at social problems than they traditionally have, apply some of their expertise to social problems.  Those are some of the ways in which foundations can be helpful.  I'm sure there are many others that I haven't thought of.

[END TAPE THREE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE THREE, SIDE TWO]

Q:  You were talking about the big dependable foundations.  Being a little bit of a foundation-watcher, I've heard a lot recently about partnering, foundations wanting to partner together.  I was wondering -- I'd just like to get your historical perspective on that, when it's worked and when it hasn't worked, what you think about it generally.

Hamburg:  I think there's a lot that can be done.  We were very open to that in my time, and we have a number of interesting cases.  Some are quite explicit, where two foundations, or conceivably more, get together to start something together.  Like we and the Ford Foundation got together to start the Center for Children in Poverty, and placed it in the School of Public Health at Columbia University.  I think it's been a very useful function.  That's one way of doing it.  


It's not easy to do.  Each foundation has its own policy guidelines, its own identity, its own pride, its own turf sensitivities, sometimes the "not invented here" syndrome.  It's not easy to start from scratch, but we've done it a number of times, and you can do it, but it takes a great deal of patience.  You have to be very, very careful to the sensitivities of the other foundation and be prepared to let the lion's share of the credit go elsewhere, if there is credit.


Now, there are a lot of circumstances where you can share in an individual grant, informal contact between staff.  "It looks promising to us, but we don't have enough to make it work.  Does it look promising to you?"  Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't.  But where staff can have that kind of an interplay.  We did a great deal of that.  There are many, many of our grants that, from the start, were done jointly with some other foundation, but not in a very highly visible way.  That's quite possible.  In my experience, the higher-visibility ones are really hard to do, but there are many ways in which you can partner.


An example for us that was kind of dramatic was with the MacArthur Foundation.  I had been advisor to MacArthur in its early years before I came to Carnegie, so I knew the board quite well.  When I came to Carnegie, I hit the ground running on the Avoiding Nuclear War program.  One of the MacArthur board members, Rod [John Roderick] MacArthur XE "MacArthur, John Roderick" , the son of the founder, heard about it, took a great interest in it, and he and several other board members, namely Jonas Salk XE "Salk, Jonas E."  and Jerome Wiesner XE "Wiesner, Jerome B."  and Murray Gell-Mann XE "Gell-Mann, Murray" , all distinguished scientists, the four of them called me together from a MacArthur board meeting and asked me if I could come out the next day for the second day of the board meeting, and tell them about what we were doing, and try to accelerate the process, help them persuade their board to move in to some similar program.   Indeed, on the phone they proposed that simply they would adopt the Carnegie program in order to move rapidly.


I did that.  I dropped everything and went out.  On the plane going out, I thought, "It's not a good idea for them to adopt the Carnegie program.  Even if they should do it at the moment, I think there might be repercussions that would not be suitable for their pride.  Let me think about a way to do it that could be spiritually the same program or in the same big tent, but not exactly the same."


So I thought about some division of labor, and I thought about the device of a joint advisory committee for both foundations.  This we worked out.  It took a little doing, but we worked out a joint advisory committee chaired by McGeorge Bundy XE "Bundy, McGeorge" , and over a period of some months it made recommendations to both foundations.  It started out some division of labor very informally.  So their program grew directly out of ours, but it wasn't the same.  It was a very good partnership for years.  For instance, when they had their press conference to announce their program, they asked me to come, and I said, "No, I think it's better, it's your program.  You announce it."  I just felt their sense of pride, of ownership should be theirs.  I said, "You say at the press conference, 'We're cooperating with Carnegie on this.'  Fine." 


So, that's what we've done.  There are different ways of partnering.  I do believe it takes a lot of sensitivity.  It's easy to say these days, there's way more talk about it than there is practice.  I'll give you a good example in our experience at the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.  From day one, we had an open-door policy.  We invited representatives from many foundations.  Very few were in adolescence at the time.  We hoped more would come.  I looked over my notes from the first meeting.  I said to them, "Please feel free to take up any part of this agenda that's interesting.  Don't ask us any questions.  If you want help, we'd be happy to help.  You don't need our help, probably."  A number of foundations did initiate or strengthen programs on adolescence over the years.  Some of them referred to the Carnegie Council, some didn't.  I know of one program where it was a direct offshoot of Carnegie and they never mentioned Carnegie, and I felt very proud.  I told my staff, "Don't say anything.  It's wonderful that they have done this, and it would be nice if they gave us a little credit, but if they don't, it's okay, too."


And all the way through its ten years, there were many kinds of foundation involvement.  Ruby Takanishi XE "Takanishi, Ruby" , who was our staff director and now is the president of the Foundation for Child Development, Ruby would tell you better than I could all the many different foundations that came to our meetings or had informal contact with her or got data from our office in Washington.  Or Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien"  can tell you some of this.  I think it had a profound effect on the foundation world, though we never, I never, at least, made an effort to map out.  That's another kind of partnering, if you want.


I think the kind of partnering where you're going to get four or five foundation presidents to announce together some huge slam-bang initiative is going to be hard to do.  When push comes to shove, I think that that will rarely happen.  Once in a while it will.  I don't know that it's important to happen.  It can be important sometimes in the sense that it's a statement to the public at large, that this is so important that several foundations are really willing to commit real resources to it.  But my main point to you about partnership is that there are many varieties of partnership and people like John Gardner XE "Gardner, John W."  and Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J."  and Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien"  and Ruby Takanishi XE "Takanishi, Ruby"  and others can tell you, Barbara Finberg XE "Finberg, Barbara D." , can tell you chapter and verse, Dave Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z." , of different ways of cooperative efforts among foundations, and also, by the way, between foundations and other institutions, government agencies and what have you.

Q:  I guess another question that I have that we just simply haven't gotten to today is for you to talk briefly about the kind of board that you created at Carnegie and how you wanted that board to relate to the staff and issues of leadership.

Hamburg:  I'm very proud of that.  I invested a lot of time and energy.  I was blessed to have the opportunity to have a lot to say about board selection.  I didn't make the selections alone, but I was very active in the process, I did a huge amount of homework, checking out very, very carefully how people had functioned in other board situations.  The best predictor of behavior is behavior in similar situations.  I wanted people who were extremely able, maybe visible, had earned a great deal of respect, came from different backgrounds, different professional backgrounds, different social backgrounds, black, white, green, whatever you want.  Not only the traditional lawyers and bankers, although they're very important, but scientists particularly.  I recommended more scientists, physical scientists like Sheila Widnall XE "Widnall, Sheila E." , who later became Secretary of the Air Force, biological scientists like Josh Lederberg XE "Lederberg, Joshua" , the great geneticist, as well as behavioral and social scientists.  A variety of people from the sciences as well as from the professions on the board, people who accomplished a lot in their own right, people who were accustomed to working well with high-level people from other fields.  


Of course, in the financial side, real experts, authentic experts.  We were privileged to have people like John Whitehead XE "Whitehead, John C." , who had been the co-chair of Goldman Sachs, later Bob Rubin XE "Rubin, Robert E." , now Secretary of the Treasury, who also was from Goldman Sachs, Dick [Richard B.] Fisher XE "Fisher, Richard B." , who was the CEO of Morgan Stanley.  Real leaders in that community, giving the guidance for the investment of the money.  I felt we, by and large, ought to leave it to the real experts in that domain, although we wanted experts in that domain who were interested in education, interested in peace, etc., as most of them were.


So I think we had a board of very high caliber.  Then I have to say I scared the staff initially by proposing to engage board members in our commissions, task forces, etc.  Most of them were.  If they wanted to be, they were.  Either they were deeply engaged in that or deeply engaged in the management of the assets.  Some did both, but it's hard to do both.  All I'm saying is that our board members were deeply engaged in the substance of the work of the foundation.  I think they did superbly on the various commissions and whatnot.  The Watkins-Malcolm Task Force, "Years of Promise: The Middle Child Education," they were both board members at the time.  I didn't feel that they had to be board members, but no reason why not.  


It's tricky.  I admit you could have problems about that.  I encouraged the maximum interplay between staff and board.  I didn't want the board communications to just go through me.  I invited virtually the whole professional staff to attend board meetings.  I realize a lot of foundations don't think that's a good idea, a lot of universities don't think it's a good idea.  It depends on your circumstances.  For me, maximum interplay on a collegial basis, earned mutual respect between staff and board, was desirable.  I thought there was mutual benefit in education, and it was good for morale.  But it doesn't have to be that way.

Q:  We have just a couple of minutes, but I realize we had an elliptical conversation earlier about utilizing large institutions, say, for example, in implementation like the World Bank.  We were just speaking of the World Bank, in particular,  to help with the concrete application, implementation of some of the initiatives that are happening, particularly with preventing deadly conflict.  Could you just talk briefly about that?

Hamburg:  When we would develop, through our grantees or consultants or staff or board, some ideas or innovations that seemed promising, we would discuss it along the way in an early stage with people from other institutions that would have much more resources and might take an interest or might not.  So in the case of the World Bank, for instance, as we were working on science and technology for development, or we were working on ways to prevent maternal mortality in developing countries, we would discuss it with relevant staff at the Bank.  From time to time I would have the privilege of discussing it with the president of the Bank, sometimes take a staff member or board member with me to meet the president of the Bank.  I was lucky to have such access going back to McNamara's time.  There were times when things got picked up, where there would be a joint effort and typically the bank would do its thing in its way, and we would do our thing in some complementary fashion.  They had more resources.  


In the next few weeks, Cyrus Vance XE "Vance, Cyrus R."  and I, as co-chairs of the commission, together with Jane Holl XE "Holl, Jane E." , the executive director of the Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, will meet with Jim [James D.] Wolfensohn XE "Wolfensohn, James D." , the president of the Bank, and probably he'll bring some of his senior staff, I expect, to convey our ideas that are reflected in a small book we've just published about how the World Bank could have a larger role in preventing deadly conflict.  It may come of something, it may not.  He certainly will be open-minded about it, Wolfensohn XE "Wolfensohn, James D." , I'm sure.  So we've tried, where we can, to do that with the World Bank, with the National Science Foundation, with other institutions, governmental or intergovernmental organizations that have far more resources than we do, where the communication is free and open, and sometimes things take hold.

Q:  Is there anything else you'd like to say or talk about?

Hamburg:  Well, for the moment I'm pretty well talked out.  I'll probably have some inspiration later.  Thank you very much.  It's been fascinating for me.

[End of Session Nine]

	TTT
	Session Ten

	Interviewee:  David A. Hamburg     
	Date:  December 23, 1998

	Interviewer:  Brenda Hearing     
	New York, New York

	
	


Q:  We are here today on the twenty-third of December, 1998, for our ninth audio tape session with Dr. Hamburg and our final session.  In fact, it is your tenth interview for the Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project, your last interview having been on videotape on the tenth of December.  We're here again in the offices of the Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict [Carnegie Corporation of New York].


Thank you very much, Dr. Hamburg, for meeting with me again.  My name is Brenda Hearing.  We started this process two years ago this month.  We talked last time about discussing the evolution of the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development at some length today.  Why don't I just let you begin with that.

Hamburg:  Well, Brenda, let me say, first of all, on our second anniversary of these interviews, how much I appreciate what you've done.  It's been very fascinating and stimulating for me.  It's really made me think about what we've been trying to do and what influences might have led to what decisions and that sort of thing.  It's been very, very constructive from my point of view.

Q:  Wonderful.  Thank you.

Hamburg:  On the adolescent council, maybe in the approach you've taken, going back to some prehistory, let me give you the prehistoric origins of it as best I can reconstruct them.  In the focus particularly on early adolescence, although adolescence generally goes back quite a long way for me, and I'm quite sure that Betty's influence was very important.  She made very pertinent observations about adolescent development many years ago, both to me personally and professionally.  She wrote a pioneering paper, indeed a series of papers, delineating the phase of early adolescence as a distinct phase.  This was a time when the literature in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pediatrics, in speaking about adolescence, largely meant late adolescence and largely meant late adolescence in males, and even largely meant late adolescence in highly educated, rather affluent families, primarily because those were the ones coming for treatment who could afford it.  It was really very skewed, and Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A."  made important distinctions between early, middle, and late adolescence.  That was certainly as a direct carryover into the decisions that we made many years later at Carnegie.


A second strand for me grew out of the coping work.  As I told you about earlier, at some point I felt that emotionally and personally it was too hard to continue coping studies in these terribly life-threatening situations, indeed, situations in which many of the patients died and great suffering was involved.  I wanted to find other circumstances, and one of the circumstances that I turned to in the framework of major transitions that required new adaptive behavior was the adolescent transition.  At that time, we focused more on relatively late adolescence.  We particularly focused on the transition from high school to college.


But later on, I got really quite fascinated with the pubertal transition and these years around ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, including the question that I raised with Jane Goodall XE "Goodall, Jane"  early on, whether there was something like that in chimpanzees.  It seemed to me, from an evolutionary standpoint, there ought to be a phase in development of chimpanzees that would show both the physical changes associated with puberty and, perhaps, some behavioral changes.  Jane thought from her early observations that that might well be the case.  


What we did was to set Anne Pusey XE "Pusey, Anne"  on the task.  Anne had come to work with Jane initially as a field worker and then she became my graduate student at Stanford.  She came from an academic family in England and today is a professor at the University of Minnesota.  Anne Pusey XE "Pusey, Anne" , so to say, discovered -- she really did discover -- chimpanzee adolescence and she delineated major changes in behavior that are somewhat sex-differentiated in adolescence, including a very surprising finding, that is, that it was the females, not the males, who, so to say, "go abroad" during adolescence, explore other communities, and most of whom eventually shift over into another community, not the one in which they were born and raised.  That was a very interesting discovery.  Anne, I'm happy to say, now serves as a member of the Adolescent Forum at the National Academy of Sciences, which I chair.


But that was, in the primate field, I think that was the single most important discovery that's been made with respect to adolescence and maybe with respect to development altogether.  [Recording interruption]


Well, suffice it to say that a number of prior experiences made me feel that the onset of adolescence is a huge transition, is a biological upheaval of major proportions that affects every cell and tissue in the body, and it is associated with drastic psychosocial changes as well, the most striking of which is the shift typically from a neighborhood elementary school to a large kind of factory-style junior high school at some distance from home.  


Given the historic neglect of that phase, I thought that it would be useful to have a really concerted effort to clarify the nature of early adolescent development, what the problems were, and what could be done about those problems, but I thought we should be open to the broader range of adolescent development issues, too.  


I brought up with the board these kinds of problems.  We'd done a certain amount of grantmaking in the first few years at Carnegie, and I think the board was quite energized by it, certainly the staff was, that this was not something that Carnegie, or perhaps any foundation, had really focused on, and maybe we ought to make a kind of sustained and perhaps visible effort to sort of draw national, conceivably even international attention to this neglected and important phase of the life span.


So, after some exploratory discussions, we undertook what initially was a three-year commitment, and there was strong feeling of both staff and board that I should chair it.  I must say that I was a little apprehensive about it in the beginning because I was deeply immersed in Cold War issues and I had a lot on my plate, and was not quite sure how that would work.  But I was persuaded that it made sense, partly symbolic, for the president of the Corporation to draw attention to the problems and partly in a substantive way, that I had some knowledge of it and some commitment to it.  So we would try it for a three-year period and see what could usefully be done.


The notion was that this would not be a commission in the sense of writing a report altogether, but, rather, it would be a kind of a stimulating body for the field and perhaps to some extent a guiding body as well.  We followed this pattern that came to characterize these kinds of efforts of getting an intersectoral group.  The idea was to have roughly half the people on it would be experts on adolescent development, and the other half would be leaders in different fields, who would both contribute additional perspectives, but also have some door-opening and stimulating effect in their respective fields.  


So that, for instance, we had [P.] Roy Vagelos XE "Vagelos, P. Roy" , the CEO of the Merck [& Co., Inc.] corporation, arguably the most respected pharmaceutical firm.  We had Admiral Watkins XE "Watkins, James D." , who later became, of course, deeply engaged with us in other ways, but he'd been the head of the Navy and later Secretary of Energy.  And a number of leaders like Ted Koppel XE "Koppel, Ted"  of ABC [American Broadcasting Corporation].  So, from the world beyond any specializations concerned with adolescence, we had some eminent people, who, I must say, were, by and large, thoughtfully committed to the enterprise and really did contribute over a period of years.  So we did a search, and our finalists for the position of the executive director have all gone on to do really very important things.  


The person we chose was Ruby Takanishi XE "Takanishi, Ruby" , who is now the president of the Foundation for Child Development.  I got her really through Senator [Daniel K.] Inouye XE "Inouye, Daniel K." .  I had worked with Senator Inouye when I was at the Institute of Medicine.  He was, and is, a great champion of health issues and particularly health and behavior relations, and, for instance, stress problems.  So he had Ruby on his staff and he knew her quite well and recommended her very highly.  


Partly because she was in Washington [D.C.] and wanted to stay there, and partly for other reasons, we decided to have the headquarters in Washington.  We recognized that there could be a tension between Washington and New York.  In some ways it would have been better to have the staff right here, handily by.  On the other hand, by having it in Washington we would enlarge our network, not only because the federal government is there, but because so many organizations and associations have headquarters in Washington, that it really might well be a stimulating effect, give us a better sense of national activities and national concerns.  Anyway, we ended up doing that.  


I recall the first meeting in Washington was on a Super Bowl day.  The Chicago Bears were in the Super Bowl, and William Julius Wilson XE "Wilson, Julius" , who was a member of it, the eminent scholar, then at the University of Chicago, was late getting to it because he had to see how the Bears did in the Super Bowl.  We started out with an evening session.


I was very impressed by the level of commitment we had.  We had on it Governor Kean XE "Kean, Thomas H." , now our board chairman; Senator Kassebaum XE "Kassebaum, Nancy L." ; Senator Inouye XE "Inouye, Daniel K." ; then-Congressman [James M.] Jeffords XE "Jeffords, James M." , now Senator Jeffords; then-Congressman Bill [William H.] Gray XE "Gray III, William H."  [III], now head of the United Negro College Fund, in addition to the people I've mentioned earlier.  There were some wonderful people on the professional side.  Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A."  was a member, of course; Julie [Julius] Richmond XE "Richmond, Julius B." , who'd been my colleague over a period of years and my deputy at Harvard, who succeeded me in the Harvard program; and Fred [Frederick C.] Robbins XE "Robbins, Frederick C." , who succeeded me as president to the [Institute of] Medicine, both pediatricians.  Fred's a Nobelist for the work on polio.  Eleanor Maccoby XE "Maccoby, Eleanor E." , one of the world leaders in developmental psychology, long-time professor at Stanford.


So these were mostly people that I knew quite well, I knew I could count on, and could get a lot of work out of.  I think for a novel adventure of this kind it was helpful that there was a core of people, all of whom I knew and most of whom knew each other to some extent.  We were able to get a level of cooperation and involvement that was terrific.


So what we did was to commission a lot of papers so the members of the commission could get a good overview of the field, different facets of the field, then we published those papers so they were widely available.  But after a while we decided that it would be helpful to create high-level task forces on some of the major opportunities to prevent serious damage during adolescence, to promote health and education during adolescence.


I don't recall exactly how it evolved, but it became clear that there was a lot more life in this than three years.  From time to time, presentations were made to the board, putting the question, should we wind it down at three years or five years or whatever, and there was basically a lot of enthusiasm for continuing it right up to some time fairly close to my retirement as president.  So we did it.  We decided ultimately it was ten years.  I didn't want to go right up to the last day when I walked out the door, but it was a ten-year period, from the late eighties to the late nineties.


We put out a series of reports, the first of which was on what we came to call generically the middle-grade schools, meaning both junior high and middle schools, the central institution.


Well, I guess I ought to back up and just say that the concept we had was to ask, what are the requirements for healthy adolescent development, healthy in the broadest sense, inquiring, vigorous, and constructive and problem-solving kind of behavior in adolescents.  What are the essential requirements?   How are those now being met?  Are there serious gaps in how they're being met?  How could they be met by the pivotal institutions that have an impact on the adolescents day-in and day-out?


So was it the case that the pivotal institutions needed some kind of upgrading or adapting to really be more effective in this, particularly at a time when the family had changed so much, with both parents commonly in the workplace and such a frequent pattern of marriage and divorce, or marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce, a revolving-door pattern of marriages.  The family community changes suggested that the other institutions would really have to take perhaps a larger role than they had historically.


So we addressed the families, first and foremost, but also the schools and the health-care sector and the media and community organizations.  Surrounding the front-line organizations, the day-to-day contact, powerful institutions that could have an effect on the front-line institutions, like the business community and the scientific community and various professions, especially health and education professions that have a powerful bearing on the situation.


Anyway, within that kind of framework we then said, well, all right, let's look at the schools.  We had a lot of concern, and some of that concern had come through work that Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A."  had done originally, that she'd done in the Palo Alto schools, and the experience our own kids had in the junior high schools; it was during the turbulent time of the Vietnam War and all that, the advent of the drug scene.  But we had quite a window on the great difficulties that the junior high was having, even good ones like we had in Palo Alto, relatively good ones, the difficulty they had.


The pattern nationally was that teachers really didn't want to teach in those schools.  They wanted to do elementary or secondary, but this fell in between.  And doctors really weren't trained to deal with adolescents.  So you really had a gap in which relevant professions were not focusing, and, indeed, were to some extent wanting to avoid this kind of turbulent period.  There were a lot of stereotypes, kind of wild animals and raging hormones and all that stuff, about this post-pubertal group.


So we put together a special task force that included some members from the Adolescent Council and some people who were not members, mostly who were not members.  We brought in people who really had a lot to contribute to the understanding of this problem.  


The chair was David Hornbeck XE "Hornbeck, David W." , who'd been the superintendent of schools for the state of Maryland and today has that position for the city of Philadelphia.  We did a search and brought in Tony Jackson XE "Jackson, Anthony W."  as the staff director.  He had done his doctorate work at the University of Michigan in educational psychology and had worked on the Hill, so he was at the interface between scholarship and policy on educational matters.  I guess the most visible member, at any rate in due course, of that task force was then-governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." .


We really did draw up a comprehensive program for reforming and upgrading the middle-grade schools.  I think it's fair to say it was the most influential report ever put out on that subject.  The task force did a very good job.  I remained deeply engaged throughout the process.  I asked Bill Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  to present it on national television, and he did a very good job with that.  So we got a level of visibility for these schools that really they'd never had before, and the good Carnegie name was very helpful because in the educational system throughout the country, a lot of teachers and principals took this report and really kind of waved it in the air as a symbol of what they could do to strengthen these schools.  


We developed a pattern there that I think is worth sketching.  We had made some grants before, which helped to illuminate, at least for us, the nature of the problem of the middle-grade schools that contributed to this task force.  That and a lot of other information went into the report of the task force called Turning Points.  


Then we decided to follow up, and we had a grants program in fifteen states over a period of years where the grants were made in a way that brought together different elements within the state.  It was kind of a superordinate goal concept, one that I'm very attracted to, that they could get the grants if and only if they cooperated in different sectors within the state.  I was surprised how a small amount of money could go a long way within the states, essentially by getting together a body of educational leaders and committed reformers within the state whose mission it was to see about applying the recommendations of Turning Points.  And that happened over a period of years in the states.


We then supported some independent researchers.  One group at the time based at the University of Illinois, another at UCLA, to see what was happening.  Basically the question we were asking was, (a) to what extent were the recommendations actually implemented in practice; (b) if they were implemented, did they make a difference in either academic or social outcomes for the students.


I think there was an integrity in that because the results might well have been negative.  We felt it was important to learn where they could be implemented and, if so, did it make a difference.  Well, happily, it turned out over a period of years that it did make a difference; that, in general, the greater the degree of implementation of Turning Points's recommendations, the better the academic and social results of the students involved and the schools involved.


So I think that's a very interesting pattern.  We had different variations on that theme during my time at Carnegie, but they all involved an interplay between the grantmaking and these report-writing bodies, task forces or commissions or councils.  And I think such an interplay can be very stimulating and, in that case, I think, produce really good results.  


I believe it's fair to say that in the education reform movement since the early eighties to the present time, that the reform of the middle-grade schools is as encouraging and positive a development as anything in the whole education reform movement.


Well, I won't go on at such length about the other things, but suffice it to say we had a similar report that was meant to be accessible to the general public about health in adolescence.  We got at that in a different way.  Instead of having a task force, I simply asked one person, Fred Hechinger XE "Hechinger, Fred M." , to write it.  I made some suggestions about materials we had available.  We had a lot of materials available, and he took those materials and visited many centers of activity in the field and wrote a book, Fateful Choices.  Because he was such a good writer and a great professional from his years with the New York Times, he really was able to do a fine book and then considerable follow-up with the media on what was in this book.  We had, again, a big national meeting to bring it out, as we had with Turning Points, a kind of high-visibility meeting.  


One of the things we did, we'd bring out each of these reports with some visibility, getting a number of national leaders on the program of the meeting and in attendance at the meeting, and there was, a remarkable amount of accurate and positive media coverage.  The cumulative effect was, I think, to suggest to the nation that there were a lot of things wrong, but a lot of constructive useful things that could be done.  Our emphasis was always on what can you do about the problem.  If you sound an alarm without anything to do, people will run away from it.  They will try to avoid the problem.  But if you connect it with useful steps to be taken, you're more likely to get serious attention.  There's actually a body of research in and around social psychology on that principle, relating the alarm to actions that could be taken to cope with the problem.


So, in the health sector we also stimulated the [U.S. Congress] Office of Technology Assessment, which was Congress's arm for getting accurate information about science and technology questions.  We stimulated them to do a report on adolescent health.  I worked with Jack [John H.] Gibbons XE "Gibbons, John H." , who later became President Clinton XE "Clinton, William J." 's science advisor, but at that time was the long-term director of the Office of Technology Assessment.  And they ended up doing three volumes.  


Of course, Senator Kassebaum XE "Kassebaum, Nancy L."  and Senator Inouye XE "Inouye, Daniel K."  were enormously helpful in getting that under way and then bringing their report to public attention, and that was another way to illuminate the adolescent health issues, a policy-relevant way, oriented more toward the Congress than Hechinger XE "Hechinger, Fred M." 's report, which was one toward parents and families and the general public.  But in those two main thrusts we did get a lot of attention for the public on adolescent health.


I should say we also did a scholarly volume oriented toward the scientific community on adolescent health promotion, in which the prime mover really was Elena [O.] Nightingale XE "Nightingale, Elena O."  of our staff and also Susan [G.] Millstein XE "Millstein, Susan G."  from our staff.  But she had very good help from others, including Anne [C.] Petersen XE "Petersen, Anne C." , who today is executive vice president of the Kellogg Foundation.


There was one other scholarly, major scholarly book that came out of the council, I should have mentioned it at the outset.  We did very early a multi-author book called At the Threshold [:The Developing Adolescent], again oriented toward the scientific community, what did we know about adolescent development.  Those two volumes were intended to stimulate science and scholarship on adolescence, and I think they had a very good effect.  My long-time colleague Glen [R.] Elliott XE "Elliott, Glen R." , from the University of California, San Francisco, was co-editor of the At the Threshold volume, with [S.] Shirley Feldman XE "Feldman, Shirley S."  from Stanford.


So those two volumes were different in character from the others.  The others were oriented toward an educated, concerned public.  These were oriented more toward specialists in different scholarly fields and professions.


Now, back on the other institutions, then we did one on community organizations, called Matter of Time, the "time" being the after-school hours, weekends, the summertime, the free time, when a lot of bad things were happening, like adolescent pregnancies.  A person who was very instrumental was Billie [Wilma S.] Tisch XE "Tisch, Wilma S." , who was on the Adolescent Council and later became a member of the board.  She was an advocate on the council for our paying attention to the voluntary sector.  She'd been very active in that in New York and had a very keen appreciation of what community organizations can do and the role that volunteers can play in community organizations to reach adolescents.


We, again, did a search and brought in Jane Quinn XE "Quinn, Jane" .  Jane Quinn was really called to my attention by Betty XE "Hamburg, Beatrix A." .  She'd been research director for the Girls Clubs of America, later it became Girls and Boys Clubs of America.  They had an outstanding track record in reaching into poor communities, particularly, and in researching what they were doing.  Jane Quinn XE "Quinn, Jane"  did a superb job as a staff director for that.


Again, we had this number of distinguished people, like John Gardner XE "Gardner, John W." , some specialists in the field, and some non-specialists, and had a high-visibility meeting to bring out the report, and a lot of follow-up activity. 

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Hamburg:  Jane Quinn XE "Quinn, Jane"  was still director; Billie Tisch XE "Tisch, Wilma S."  and Jim [James P.] Comer XE "Comer, James P."  from Yale, were the co-chairs.  They spoke all over the country to community organizations, professional associations and whatnot, to make clear what the recommendations were and why, and to try to broaden the horizons of the field.


In essence, what they were, in very short form, what the recommendations said would be that it's very important for community organizations to extend their reach into adolescence.  They did better with younger children than with adolescents.  And also to extend their reach from more affluent communities, which the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts had served well for a long time, into poor communities where the needs were even greater, and made a number of suggestions about how that could be done. 


The way I would put it is that it's important to lure kids into community organizations with whatever they find attractive, music, sports, food, whatever, and then when you have them there, to have education and health-promoting activities, tutoring, mentoring, whatnot, that could strengthen the likelihood of their doing well in school, not becoming alienated from school, strengthen the likelihood of learning about how to take care of their own health and so forth. 


So that was another piece of it.  We had now addressed schools, health-sector, community organizations, and then we had other reports that were less visible, on families, on the media and so on.  We just really didn't have the capacity to have high-visibility reports on all of these, but they were widely distributed.  Last I heard, I think it was getting close to three-quarters of a million copies of the various adolescent council reports had been distributed, mainly in this country, but to some extent abroad.


Then we undertook to draw it all together in a kind of final synthesis report, the one we called Great Transitions.  I was the principal author of that myself.  I felt very strongly that we should draw together the whole experience.  We had a little steering committee for it, which, of course, was Ruby, Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien" , Elena Nightingale XE "Nightingale, Elena O." , Avery Russell XE "Russell, Avery B." , Susan [V.] Smith XE "Smith, Susan V." .  It was a staff group.  But in the case of the Great Transitions report, I proposed to the council that, unlike our other reports, which were signed by the task forces or the individuals who prepared the reports, in this case that I hoped that everybody would sign off on it.  This was a report not mandated by the council, but of the council.  And that worked.  We had actually no dissent.  It was quite astonishing.  We circulated drafts, first draft, a second draft, a third draft, whatever it was, and we had lots of input, lots of good suggestions, and everybody signed off.  It was very gratifying to me that that happened.


Then we had a major meeting to draw that to the nation's attention.  That was then the conclusion, and I wrote a signed epilogue for it, which projected some of the ways in which the council's activities might be continued in the future, and I guess the most striking one of that is this Adolescence Forum at the Academy, which drew out of the suggestions made in the epilogue.


So, it was a ten-year duration.  It has continuing life.  I think it probably was the single most sustained, concerted effort, and probably the most influential effort on early adolescence that's ever been made, I think anywhere in the world, to my knowledge.  We did connect with UNICEF and the World Health Organization and the Johann Jacob Foundation in Switzerland to get some ramifications of this in the rest of the world.  It's hard for me to gauge how far that's gone, but certainly it's had some impact beyond this country.  But in this country I think there's no doubt that it has been a high-impact proposition.


The final thing I'd say about that, it's a long, hard sell for adolescence, and maybe particularly for early adolescence.  We found that our experience with Starting Points, with the younger children, and also with the middle grade, with the middle-childhood, elementary-school period, it's an easier sell.  The babies are very appealing.  The younger children are not threatening.  There is something about adolescence that is messy.  For example, we did a lot of work with the National Governors' Association, some work with the Association of State Legislators, and a lot of work with both the Bush and Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  administration on the various reports, and some with the business community.  I would say all the way through we got stronger responses from powerful institutions, federal government, state government, business, for babies and young children than we did for adolescents.


So I've been trying in the past few years to keep the message alive, that it's a long, slow process of cultural change to find better ways to meet the needs of adolescent development than it is for young children.  Both are terribly important, but just in terms of receptivity, there is a difference.

Q:  Someone in the future, looking at Carnegie's history of work in child development will very likely be taking a look at both the Council on Adolescent Development and the Carnegie Council on Children, which preceded it.  I understand that the Carnegie Council on Children didn't focus on adolescence.  But I'm wondering if there was any thought to consciously following up on any of the work that came out of the Carnegie Council on Children, or was CAD [Council on Adolescent Development] something brand new?  I'm sort of getting to a bigger question there.  It's been pointed out to me by some here that they felt the Carnegie Council, the work of the Carnegie Council on Children, was not taken advantage of to the extent that it could have been.

Hamburg:  Well, that's probably true.  I think that spiritually it was very important.  I viewed it as an important part of the tradition of Carnegie and mentioned it at a variety of staff and board meetings and national meetings.  


I actually had some fun with Hillary Clinton XE "Rodham Clinton, Hillary"  at -- I forget which of the meetings.  She introduced a couple of our meetings.  And her first, I think, first gainful employment was with the Carnegie Council on Children.  I remember teasing her somewhat.  I got out the record of that, from the personnel records, some things said about the staff in general, not about Hillary in particular.  You know, they were kind of bright, aggressive, brash, and so on, and I remember having fun with her, in introducing her to one of our national meetings, about the staff of the Carnegie Council.


It was a group that had very high ideals and a lot of good people were involved, and I think a lot of the substance of it was valuable.  It was, however -- it was widely perceived in the nation as having at least being off in its timing.  There was a strategic concept of the Council on Children, as I understood it, to focus on poverty and to take a strong position.  It came to be perceived in the nation that until you, more or less, got rid of poverty, you couldn't do much for children.  There's no doubt that poverty is a fundamental problem, and all the risk and damage indicators are worse in poverty than in affluence; nevertheless, there is a somewhat self-defeating quality in saying we've got to get rid of poverty before we do anything.  They didn't really say that, but it somehow gave that impression.  And to some degree they were unfairly stigmatized, but we did deliberately distance ourself from it for that reason.  


We made a strategic decision in our grantmaking program and in these reports that we would speak about all children, and, within that, to pay special attention to children in poverty.  But we really felt that we would not be able to build national consensus if we said, "We're going to do this for children in poverty."


We also felt that the problems were serious right across all social classes, and that it was a mistake not to recognize how many problems there were in the middle class and affluent groups, as well.  If you're going to engage the powerful institutions and get policy changes, you need to enlist the whole country for a sense of doing this for all our children, but always to remind that within that, the greatest needs and the greatest risks are for poor children.


Now, it might have been, in a different national climate, the Council on Children might have had a much better reception, but there was a certain reaction to it as being unrealistic -- high aspirations, but expecting miracles.  There were some reverberations of it in some of the task forces.  In the Starting Points task force, there were some people who said what we need or just should do is an anti-poverty strategy, rather than a professional services strategy.  And we had to hammer that out.  


My recollection is there were two people on that task force who felt that way about it, that we ought to say very largely how you would overcome poverty in the nation and then, within that, how young children would benefit.  But most of the people on the task force felt, although they were sympathetic with the point of view, that we wouldn't get to first base.  Certainly, the chairs, first Dick Riley XE "Riley, Richard W." , who left when he became Secretary of Education, and then Julius Richmond XE "Richmond, Julius B."  and Eleanor Maccoby XE "Maccoby, Eleanor E." , who succeeded him as co-chairs, felt that it just wasn't a realistic proposition, even though they were very sympathetic.  I mean, Julius Richmond XE "Richmond, Julius B." , after all, was the father of Head Start, and Eleanor Maccoby XE "Maccoby, Eleanor E."  was very committed to the proposition that we had to pay special attention to poor children and their families.  


The upshot was, we addressed all children, and then, within that, the special needs of poor communities.  But that was the issue about that council.  I think they started during the Great Society time.  If they'd finished right in the midst of Great Society, it's entirely possible that their recommendations might have had a high impact on what the federal government did, and perhaps on what state governments did, but by the time it got done, the climate in the country had changed.  To some degree, the whole foundation was caught up in that.


My understanding is that in the early years of Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J." 's presidency, that Alan wanted to reinforce the thrust of the Great Society.  Of course, here was our former president John Gardner XE "Gardner, John W."  in the Cabinet implementing some Great Society recommendations.  I think President Johnson had the sense, let us do as much as possible for poor children or for poor people as rapidly as possible while we have the opportunity, but whatever else is true, the Vietnam War undermined his capacity to pursue the Great Society objectives and there was a reaction in the country against it.


The problems didn't go away, but there had to be somewhat different ways of thinking about how you would tackle the problems of poverty in general and poor children in particular.  We certainly did what we could on the front of poor children, like we, together with the Ford Foundation, had a lovely partnership on that; we created the Center for Children on Poverty.  We were very active in picking the director for it and placing it at the Columbia University School of Public Health.  That was a way of keeping before the nation the attention of the problems of children in poverty, and to collect and disseminate useful interventions with respect to children in poverty.


But you're right, it was an interesting sort of disjunction where the spirit of the Council on Children remained and animated our work, but the particular recommendations did not directly feed very much into the later activities.

Q:  Thank you very much.  Very thoughtful response.

Hamburg:  It was an interesting concatenation of events there.

Q:  Yes.  The larger question that I alluded to is this, that there does seem to be certainly consensus among the people I've spoken with, with respect to their seeing you as a very strong, dynamic leader of Carnegie, that you put your own stamp on the programming here right away, that the board selected you consciously, you and the proposals that you were setting forth.  You've been described to me as "the" program officer for the Corporation during your tenure as president, and that it was the beginning of something very new here.  I suppose the biggest example of that would be, more or less, the suspension of activity in higher education and a new emphasis on child development and the furthering of that.


With that in mind, I'm interested in any reaction to that perception that you might have, and I'd also like to lead us into talking about, as you suggested, your patterns of interaction with board members and staff members over your years here as president.

Hamburg:  Good.  Well, on the substantive decision to focus on essentially precollegiate education and to put that in the context of child and adolescent development, that was my decision, with the concurrence of the board.  I'm not entirely sure that I brought that to Carnegie.  I certainly brought elements of it.  When I came here, I felt that Carnegie had such a great tradition in education in all of its forms, going back to Andrew Carnegie's own deep commitment to education and most manifested, of course, in the, whatever it was, 2,509 libraries when we stopped counting.  We lost count.  


So I asked myself, well, what would be the best thing to do now, particularly given Andrew Carnegie's broad mandate, you know, that, "The best tribute that the board can pay me in the future is to use its own judgment about what would be the best use of these funds at that time."  So I asked myself, what would be the best use of these funds for education at this time?  


My background was in higher education.  I mean, my whole life was changed by the experience I had a student at Indiana University, and then when I went to Yale, not only meeting Betty, but the whole enormously invigorating effect of a single year at Yale, and the later wonderful years on the faculty at Stanford and Harvard, and the National Academy of Sciences, of course, whatever else it is, I would say is primarily a way to draw together the scientific leadership mainly from the great research universities of the country.  So that was my background.  


It was the most natural thing in the world to concentrate on those institutions qua institutions.  I knew more about it, I was more comfortable with it.  I had a lot of ideas about it.  But when I started this process of the terrain maps, which I'd also done at the Institute of Medicine -- let's look at the terrain of education and consider where are the greatest needs, it was true that rather rapidly, in a matter of the early months here, and -- maybe even in the few months even before I got here, in thinking about this more broadly, I thought, hey, wait a minute, whatever the problems of higher education, our universities are the envy of the world.  People all over the world vote with their feet.  I mean, if they can possibly come to American universities, they do.  Higher education had its problems, but they were much less serious problems, in my judgment.  I felt very privileged to be a part of these institutions.  They had a great creative phase after World War II, for decades, a kind of efflorescence of new ideas and new institutional strength.


But then, my God, when we looked at elementary and secondary education, it was crumbling.  I hadn't been aware until I got here.  There was more expertise on the staff about that and we brought in consultants.  I hadn't been aware of how serious the problems were.  Then, too, there was some prior involvement in preschool education here, most vividly exemplified by Barbara Finberg XE "Finberg, Barbara D." .  I had had some, at least, modest exposure to that before I came.  


I don't know when it exactly crystallized, but it was during that working group terrain-mapping process in the early months here that I felt I really had to recommend to the board that we shift our attention to where the need was really very great and where the problems were very serious, and that Carnegie, with its tradition and its great name, maybe really could make a difference.  


I would say on the staff here at the time, that Alden Dunham XE "Dunham, Alden E."  and Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien"  and Barbara Finberg XE "Finberg, Barbara D."  and David Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z."  were influential on me in bringing me up to speed of what the problems were and what were some of the promising innovations in precollegiate education, and Barbara on preschool education.  So we did make a big shift.


Now, one thing I want to say about the role of the universities, there always during my time was a major role of the universities in our grantmaking programs.  It was just that we didn't address very much focus, put very much focus on the institutional problems of universities qua universities.  It was what can universities contribute to clarifying and ameliorating important social problems.  


Indeed, we had one sub-program under special projects that Barbara chaired, called Universities and Society.  There it was explicit, looking at the sort of structural properties of American universities and asking, to what extent do those properties get in the way of universities contributing even more than they now have to clarifying and coping with social problems, but in every arena we went to universities as an important part of our grantmaking process to say, "What can you do about nuclear war?"  I've described that to you earlier, and I won't repeat it, but that was the main thrust, was on drawing universities more into contributing to lowering the nuclear danger.


In the Developing Countries program, one of the most interesting things we ever did was a university consortium on diminishing maternal mortality in Africa, in which Columbia University was the lead university in this country working with a set of West African universities.  I still hope that there will be more publications than we now have drawing out the lessons of operating an international, interuniversity consortium.  But that was, in a way, a flagship of our Developing Countries program.  Allan Rosenfield XE "Rosenfield, Allan" , the dean of the school of public health at Columbia, was a great leader in this.  


So that was very important to assimilate in the elementary, secondary education reform efforts, grants we made to Jim Comer XE "Comer, James P."  at Yale, before he later became actively involved and ultimately a trustee, ultimately vice chairman of our board.  But in my early years we went to Jim Comer and said, "Could you extend your work in elementary school to junior high school?" as part of our emphasis, our new emphasis, on early adolescent education, to engage Jim in that, but also in general to promote the movement to "Comerize" American schools in poor communities, to get the lessons learned from what he'd started around New Haven and spread to the rest of the country.


Similarly with Bob [Robert E.] Slavin XE "Slavin, Robert E."  at Johns Hopkins with his work that we supported, that started at Hopkins and then spread.  I took a personal interest in that.  I called the staff's attention to Jim Comer XE "Comer, James P."  and Bob Slavin XE "Slavin, Robert E."  and backed our getting engaged with them.  We did it in other activities.  We also made grants to them, so Hopkins and Yale were important institutions in the elementary, secondary school reform education.  Similarly, grants to the Yale Child Study Center involving Ed [Edward] Zigler XE "Zigler, Edward"  and Sharon Lynn Kagan XE "Kagan, Sharon Lynn"  and others who were very important in the child-care work and the work on upgrading preschool education, early childhood education.


All I'm saying is that in every facet of our program, whether it be in the conflict side, the peace side of the house, or the education side of the house, universities were very important.  We never abandoned universities, by any means, but always our orientation was how can the great repository of knowledge and expertise of the universities be drawn more into communities, including poor communities, and more into addressing important social problems, including international problems.  So it was a difference in emphasis.


I always did say, too, that some day in the future Carnegie may come back to the very important work, the kind that Clark Kerr XE "Kerr, Clark"  led, on universities, higher educational institutions, or the work on liberal arts colleges that Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J."  was identified with.  I said we may come back to that, that's very important and these things change over time.  When I was talking with Vartan Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan"  very early, even about the possibility that he might become president, then when he first became president, I said, in effect, "Vartan, you might want to come back to a focus on higher educational institutions per se, partly because it's your background and partly because in the last fifteen years we haven't had that focus, and you might want to reconsider."  I didn't necessarily recommend that he do it, but I certainly recommended that he actively consider it as an option. 


So much for that part of it.  Now, when I came, I can't recall precisely how far down the road I was toward programmatic commitments.  There's no doubt that I wanted to be deeply involved in the substance of our programmatic decisions.  No question.  That was just second nature.  I couldn't have done it any other way, and the search committee understood that very well.  Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L."  was chair of the search committee and Bud Taylor XE "Taylor III, John C. [Bud]"  was chair of the board.  They knew that about me.  They were getting that idiosyncrasy, like it or not, that I would be deeply engaged in the substance.  They liked it.  They knew, when they got me, that's what they got.


On the other hand, I don't think they believed, and I didn't believe, that I would come in with a kind of an authoritarian stamp, you know, "Boys and girls, this is what we're going to do."  It was, "There are certain important problem areas that we ought to think about, and we ought to do these terrain maps."  And I early set up, almost immediately, I think even before I'd moved to New York, some working groups which would have primarily staff, but also have board involvement and have outside consultant involvement.  They were a three-way thing, staff, board and outside consultants, who typically, almost all, I think, came from universities.  They were experts in different subject matters.  "Let us look at what, if anything, we could do to diminish the risk of nuclear war.  Let us look at different aspects of education and see how the great Carnegie tradition might be helpful."


I think the process of those terrain maps -- those early papers, of course, are in the files; I went back to those early papers from time to time over the years, although I haven't lately.  I think they were pretty good stuff, actually.  They had a lot of options.  The general rationale was, within the terrain map we'd see if there were kind of hot spots, certain points on the terrain where we could say, "Hey, this is a really important problem," or, "We might be able to get some leverage."  We could see a way that we could do something to put out the fire identified in that part of the map.


I always felt -- I think it's a very important point -- we would have to make priorities.  You could take broad problem areas, if and only if you made priorities, otherwise you'd get too diffuse.  Many years later, Condee [Condoleezza] Rice XE "Rice, Condoleezza" , as a board member, pointed out the value of that, of picking the broad problem areas so we wouldn't have blinders on, but also making priorities within those so we could have some real leverage.


Now, I had a very lively interaction from the beginning with staff and board.  I think they would tell you, I hope they would, that I tried to stimulate everybody.  I really tried to bring out the best in people to look at new problems or readjust their sights on old problems and to see how we could -- and the cliche they came to kid me about -- how we get the facts straight in the first place, and then to see what we could do about those facts.  I felt it was a highly interactive process.  It did involve some degree of opening up the foundation to "outsiders" in shaping our programs.  We brought outsiders to the board meetings and to the retreat.


We had a very crucially formative retreat.  I guess it was in 1983.  We went off to the Wye Plantation, which has lately been made famous by the Mideast peace talks that President Clinton XE "Clinton, William J."  looked after there.  But anyway, that was very important, that retreat, the board and staff getting together.  It was also part of the very collegial attitude that I tried to foster between board and staff.  


I kept adding to the staff participation in board meetings.  I may have gone too far.  I know that privately some board members talked to me about it.  In the end, I think they were comfortable.  There has been some reaction since I left the presidency, and maybe I went too far, I don't know, it's hard to say.  I felt it was of mutual benefit to having substantial interaction between staff and board.  I didn't feel that all the communications had to go through me.  I felt that it was very good if the staff got the thinking of the board, broad philosophical and policy orientations of the board, and if the board could make their own assessment about the professional competence of staff members, and there could be an interplay in that.  

[END TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO; BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE]

Hamburg:  That characterized my time.  Maybe I overdid it.  Maybe we had too many people at board meetings.  I don't have any regrets about it, I wouldn't have personally done it any differently, but I can understand that at other times and places it might be better to do it in a different way.


Now, I do believe that, overall, a high level of mutual respect developed between staff and board.  Maybe the board would have liked more executive sessions.  I'm not sure.  I never had any static about it.  A couple of board chairs spoke to me privately about their experiences from universities where fewer staff members were present in most board sessions and how did I feel about that.  I explained my rationale, but said, "If over time you're uncomfortable with it and feel we should reduce it, I'm willing to consider it.  There's no hard and fast rule about it."  Over time, they were comfortable with it and no board chair in the end suggested to me that we reduce the number of staff present.  But that's only one facet of the problem.  


It does say that I tried very hard to treat staff with respect.  If I felt staff members weren't working well, either I would suggest a change in role or quietly work behind the scenes to move somebody out.  I moved a number of people out, you know, one or two the first year, one or two the second year, and each year there were some -- most years there were some departures.  I never wanted to have blood on the floor.  I never saw any necessity for it.


There was only one time when I recall something close to my firing somebody in anger, but that was something I very much wished to avoid.  I thought the staff changes you should do with dignity, you should do quietly, you should do behind the scenes.  You should help people find a new and better position elsewhere, at least a different role.  Some people changed roles within the foundation very effectively.  I always felt those who'd given loyal and devoted service should have that opportunity.  If it didn't work out, okay, but if it did work out, fine.


I believe there was a cumulative effect of having people on the staff who had a lot of experience in grantmaking and some experience in commissions and that type of thing.  Yes, we brought in new people.  I mentioned to you about Ruby Takanishi XE "Takanishi, Ruby"  and Tony Jackson XE "Jackson, Anthony W."  and a number of others.  Elena Nightingale XE "Nightingale, Elena O." , of course, I brought right from the start.  I thought some mix of new and old people was a very good thing, but I certainly didn't have the feeling that I had to clean out the place and get my own staff.  


Some board members privately said to me at the beginning, especially those in the corporate sector, "You're the CEO now. Get your own staff."  My response was, "I will to the extent I feel the need for it, but I don't feel an across-the-board need for it.  There's a lot of professionalism on the staff and I'll try to make the most of it."


Now, on the board several things come to mind.  I did take a very active part in selecting new board members.  I was privileged to do that.  We had a nominating committee.  I worked very closely with the nominating committee.  It may have been that I was de facto chair of the nominating committee.  At least I did pretty much pick who was to be chair of the nominating committee and worked closely with that person.  


I was very up-front about it.  It's enormously important that there be a good working relationship of the president and the board.  I wanted very strong and able people, but I didn't want authoritarian personalities.  One of the concepts that I had was that we ought to bring in strong people from the sciences across the board, physical sciences like Sheila Widnall XE "Widnall, Sheila E." , biological sciences like Josh Lederberg XE "Lederberg, Joshua" , social sciences like Ray Marshall XE "Marshall, Ray F." .  Very distinguished people.  Very distinguished people.  Sheila later became Secretary of the Air Force, very successfully so.  Josh was a Nobel laureate, one of the youngest Nobel laureates this country ever had.  Ray Marshall XE "Marshall, Ray F."  had been Secretary of Labor.  First-rate people.  


I wasn't looking for people who would be "yes" people to me.  Not in the slightest.  I wanted people of great stature and accomplishment in their own right.  But I did want people who could work well across disciplinary lines, across programmatic lines, were fundamentally collegial and respectful of others.  I didn't want people who were spoiled brats grown up, or egos out of control.  And I spent a lot of time on that.  When you go after very distinguished people who have accomplished a lot, they may easily have the habit of command, especially in the business sector, but in other sectors, as well.  


We had on this board during my time, and at my initiative, eminent people from the world of business, like Bob Rubin XE "Rubin, Robert E."  and John Whitehead XE "Whitehead, John C."  and Dick Fisher XE "Fisher, Richard B."  and Larry [Laurence A.] Tisch XE "Tisch, Laurence A."  and on and on.  Very strong people.  And from the military, Jim Watkins XE "Watkins, James D." , the head of the Navy.  Josh was president of the Rockefeller University and so on.  People who had commanded organizations.  But I think it's also fair to say that they were not people who were inclined to push others around.  They were inclined towards a very collegial, mutually respectful give-and-take with other high-level accomplished people.


I did feel it was important to have some people from the academic world and from other organizations that were not commanders, had not been deans or presidents or whatnot, but had been outstanding in their scholarly work or in social innovations.  I also felt, as Alan had felt before me, that it was very important to have a broad range of social backgrounds, to have women, to have minorities.  But I also felt that I wanted to be extremely careful not to have a kind of inadvertent well-meaning tokenism.  By that I mean people who come from a minority group and who are not at the level of accomplishment of other members of the board.  


I used to say to the nominating committee, "We're not looking for hundreds or thousands of people, we're looking for a small number."  So you can have from the African-American community a person of the great distinction and leadership of a Jim Comer XE "Comer, James P."  or a Shirley Malcom XE "Malcom, Shirley M."  or Jim Gibbs.  You don't want to have somebody who is looked upon as, well, he or she is there because he or she is black or brown.  You have a Hispanic of the distinction of Marta Tienda, a leading social scientist and person of great accomplishment and initiative.  I felt that that was singularly important, that they would be respected in their own right, and I think we really did accomplish that.  We had terrific minorities and, of course, the women on the board, from Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L."  on, were in outstanding leadership roles.  So that was very important, the diversity of professional and social and sectoral backgrounds on the board.  


Then the pattern that we evolved for the board, for the board meetings, was to have a major substantive session taking up most of the morning and then administrative matters in the afternoon.  I arrived at that really when I went to the Institute of Medicine.  At that time I went to a number of institutions to talk about boards.  Our board at the IOM was called a council, but no matter.  I wanted to see how a board could be really useful and effective.  The thing that I got in talking to board members from universities and the Council on Foreign Relations and organizations like that, and foundations, was that mostly they said it's so damn boring -- we get a lot of housekeeping, a lot of detail that we don't care about -- it's not really interesting.


So at the IOM and here, I made these things substantive.  What I wanted to do at each board meeting, in the substantive session in the morning was to have distinguished people and mostly grantees, not entirely, but mostly grantees, and rotating the different fields in which we were active and talking about the major problems and approaches to those problems, and then have the discussion so the staff could hear the board discussing it.  The staff could participate in the discussion, too, but it was mainly board.  In effect, we were informally reshaping the policy guidelines as we went along.  You'd get a certain informal consensus in the board discussion that within this problem area here's a very high-priority target.  Here's something where we could make a difference, or in contrast here's something that has been played out or is losing its luster.  So there was an informal process of reshaping the policy guidelines given by the board as we went along.  I think those were very stimulating and enjoyable sessions, and I would recommend a continuation of that kind of thing.


I did take a strong position early with the board that we were not going to go through grant by grant by grant.  I felt that in a foundation our size or larger, that it just wasn't feasible to do that.  In a small foundation you could do it if you wanted to, but this is a professionally managed foundation and we needed a way for the board to give input, but not to do grant by grant by grant.  They give the policy guidelines and within that, the staff has to be accountable in making grants that fit the policy guidelines.


So we did different things at different times.  I would say, in retrospect, it may be that some board members came to feel that they didn't have enough input on specific grants, and I could understand that.  We were moving pretty fast and pretty far.  I never had any strong negative input from the board about it, but I suspect that some at least would have welcomed more input into the grant-making process.


What we did was to have both written and oral questions about grants that could be discussed at the board or outside the board, and there was plenty of that.  Also, I think a very useful device we probably should have done more was to have some sessions an hour or so on a cluster of grants.  "Here are the problems we find in making these kinds of grants.  Would you give us input, what you think about that class of grants?"  It was a way of getting policy to zero in on a cluster of grants within a program area.  That, I think, was very good and we should have done more.


But, anyway, those were some of the ways in which we interacted.  I really think that I, in a way, was the program officer, but not at the level of telling the staff exactly which grants to make.  I did some of that, but the vast majority of grants were worked out by the staff.  They would come to me and say, "We think this organization, or this institution, or this individual, would be very, very good for implementing the policy guidelines we have for the program."


And I would say, in effect, "Why do you think that?  Tell me more about it."  Or I would say, "Yes, I've heard that."  Or I would say, "Could we get some independent reading?  So-and-so or So-and-so would be a good consultant on it."


But I would say the vast majority of grants were identified and shaped by the staff, but also I would take them some good possibilities.  Now, I also sometimes would formally, but mostly informally, ask some senior staff to ride herd on me.  If I was very enthusiastic, if I'd been somewhere and I'd encountered some very promising potential grantee, or had some idea about some novel combination of elements that would make a creative grant, I would say to people like Dave Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z."  and Barbara and Vivien and others, "I want you to check this out very carefully.  I realize I may be carried away by my enthusiasm.  I think very highly of So-and-so."  Or, "I think this institution has unique strengths.  Check it out.  Get consultants.  Give me honest feedback if you think I'm being carried away and I'm making a mistake," and they did.


I think probably more often than not I was kind of on the right track and they would shape it and improve it and refine it, but sometimes they would say to me, "You have been carried away."  Dave Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z."  used to kid me.  He used to speak about his wet-blanket function, not only with me, but in staff meetings.  He would say, "There was a germ of an idea there, but, look, if you did this, you'd get into that problem, and have you thought about that?"  


And sometimes I'd say, "No, damn it, I hadn't thought about that."  


If I was the senior program officer, it was a kind of a freewheeling and modulated program officer function with a high degree of reliance on the professional staff and a great openness with the board.  


Now, on the board, one thing that I opened up widley to the board was participation in the commissions and councils and task forces.  Almost all the board members did, except for the people who spent a lot of time on the financial side.  I always felt they had a big responsibility and they had the expertise and they put in a lot of time.  Now, some of them also did substantive work on commissions and councils, but mostly the financial people put a lot of time on that side, the investment side and management of the funds.  But other board members mostly were on these commission-like bodies.


I have to say, in the beginning the staff was apprehensive.  The staff thought that the board might really interfere too much with the professional functions of the staff.  My position basically was, "Let's try it and see.  I believe the kind of board members that we have and are likely to have in the future will be good about that sort of thing, and I'll be glad to speak with them directly if you think you're having problems."  I don't think it ever was a problem.  I think it was a big asset to the foundation.  Yet, I don't recommend that for all foundations, however, or for this foundation all the time. 


During my time with the kind of board we had and the kind of relations that I had with the board and the staff had with the board, it was a very good thing to do.  It was a high level -- it was probably, I would guess, the highest level of substantive involvement of a board that any large foundation has had in recent times.  But it was not primarily on individual grants.  There was some of that, but not a lot.

Q:  That leads me to a larger question and, I'm sure, one of our concluding questions, too, around the role of a large general-purpose foundation such as Carnegie in American society.  Throughout the project, a part of my mind has always been on Ellen [Condliffe] Lagemann XE "Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe" 's book Politics of Knowledge [:The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy], and her criticisms there of task forces, commissions, as sort of an elite mechanism, the influence on public policy of an organization like Carnegie, ironic, actually, given that her work concluded just before your presidency began and your presidency has been marked by such a great degree of influence in that regard.  So I'm wondering what your reaction is to that generic sort of question:  How do you perceive the role of an organization such as Carnegie in our democracy?

Hamburg:  Let me try to speak to that.  First let me add a brief addendum to the board discussion.  It also does bear on this question.  Maybe that's why it came to mind.  That is my relation with the board chairs.  I do want to say something about that.  I thought that the board chairs, the board chair in a foundation is really very important.  Foundations in a way are president-centered creatures.  It's very lucky if you are a president, but it conceivably lends itself to abuse of power, albeit inadvertently, but still.  Therefore, it seemed to me very important that you have a strong board chair.  That's not the only reason, but that's one reason.  And that there be a really ongoing continuing interplay of the president and the board chair.  


Most of the things I've talked about in these interviews, in my judgment, couldn't have worked well if I hadn't had an awful lot of interaction, constructive, thoughtful, stimulating interaction with the board chairs, from Bud Taylor XE "Taylor III, John C. [Bud]"  to Helene Kaplan XE "Kaplan, Helene L." , to Warren Christopher XE "Christopher, Warren M." , to Newton Minow XE "Minow, Newton N." , and I was very happy to suggest Tom Kean XE "Kean, Thomas H."  as the chair.  He didn't take over until after I left.  I worked the most period of years with Helene, and almost as much with Chris and with Newt.  It was a shorter time with Bud Taylor XE "Taylor III, John C. [Bud]" .


I think it's true to say that during most of those years I talked more or less weekly with the board chairman, either in person or on the telephone.  That was the aspiration.  I think we came pretty close to it.  I wanted them to know what I was thinking, what was emerging here.  I didn't want them to be presented with a fait accompli.  I asked them for a lot of advice.  All of them were very good about the distinction between policy and operations.  They often made it explicit at board meetings, and from time to time on the board retreats, the distinction that the board's function is policy and my function was to lead the operations.


They didn't interfere, but they certainly were always there if I needed advice.  I often felt, if in doubt, I'd ask for advice.  These were experienced, wise, savvy people.  If we were moving into new ground, for me or for the foundation, I was particularly eager to test the ideas with them or shape the ideas jointly with them:  "Is this crazy?  Is this dangerous?  Is it institutionally dangerous?"  There were times, a few times, when I said, "It may be that I ought to say to the board, or even publicly, that this is my initiative, I take personal responsibility, and if it gets into difficulty that I'm even prepared to resign over it."


Now, that leads me to a concept about foundations.  I think there's a fairly broad consensus that foundations ought to be sort of the venture capital of the nonprofit sector.  It means they take some risks.  They get into problem areas that are complex and difficult and sensitive.  They support gifted people who may be unconventional.  They do work in poor communities in this country or abroad where it may be very hard to monitor the use of the funds in detail.  A lot of different kinds of risks, intellectual and political and financial risks that foundations very often pride themselves in taking, and yet, and yet, and yet, there is a considerable risk-averse tendency in the foundation community, in my judgment.


I had one special opportunity to look at that on the occasion of the 150th birthday anniversary of John D. Rockefeller.  David Rockefeller convened at Potanico, the family estate, a meeting of foundation people from this country and from other countries, partly to celebrate his grandfather's creative philanthropy but partly to try to stimulate new wealth in this country and abroad to set up foundations or to enlarge existing foundations.  


David Rockefeller XE "Rockefeller, David"  asked me to do the wrap-up at the end.  He asked me well in advance so I'd have the lead time to go to the various working groups, because the meeting was of several days' duration, and do whatever I needed to do to get a sense overall of the foundation community and try to make a grand synthesis at the end.  I worked very hard at that and stayed up pretty much all night before the final session, with my bed covered with the notes I'd taken and the materials I'd been given.  I did a substantial statement, which was very gratifying.  It was very well received.  I was chastised later that I never published that, but anyway, there is a written report of it somewhere.  


But one of the things I concluded and I said in the meeting, and there was really no dissent from it, that looking at it overall, the foundations were not taking very many risks.  I said something like this, "The staff is afraid of the board, the board is afraid of the government, everybody's afraid of the media, and the net effect is that we're constantly looking over our shoulders and being very cautious, and I understand that."  But I did take it seriously that we are the risk capital.  You shouldn't take foolish risks, not impulsive.  On the contrary, the more you recognize that it is kind of risky terrain, the more you ought to get all the knowledge and expertise you can.  The more you ought to involve the board in the discussions, particularly the board chair.  


That was true, for example, of the early work on avoiding nuclear war.  Did a nongovernmental organization [NGO] have a role in this field?  It seems ridiculous today because NGOs have burgeoned so in this conflict field.  But it wasn't ridiculous in 1982, '83, '84.  Did we have a role?  There were people who thought we didn't.  Should foundations be supporting universities to do independent work that might contradict the government?  We might be a pebble in the shoe of our own government, let alone other governments.  Was that our business?  You know, it's a serious point.


So, in that respect, I thought that the role of the president and interaction of the board chairman was very important in deciding when and how to involve the board in those matters so there'd be an informed decision.  "Look, we think we're taking a risk insofar as we can see it.  Do you support this risk?"  The board was extremely supportive about the Avoiding Nuclear War program, knowing that it was inherently potentially controversial.  


We also felt a lot depends on how you handle it.  You don't want to be confrontational, you don't want to spit in the eye of your government or any segment of the society, but you may get into terrain that is novel and inherently controversial.  I used to sometimes say, almost anything worth doing is probably inherently controversial.  Somebody somewhere will take umbrage that we've done this, but we should do it as respectfully as we can in the pluralism of our democracy and the pluralism of the world.  There are different approaches and different points of view and so forth.  So that's one thing about the role of foundations in society, to try to look at very hard problems.  I got teased that I, in the first board meeting, I said, "The only thing I will promise you is that I will bring you intractable problems."


Now, let's see.  Alan Pifer XE "Pifer, Alan J."  said at his last, his outgoing board meeting, he said he wanted to underscore the scope and flexibility of foundations and we should make use of that.  He was very good.  I even think he said, or at least said to me privately, he didn't feel he did all he should have to utilize the scope and flexibility, and he urged me to do more.  It was a valuable lesson.


You can.  You can move quickly if you need to.  You can take up almost any problem.  I used to say in my psychiatric days to the patients, there's nothing too awful to talk about.  That applies to Carnegie, to foundations.  There's nothing too awful to talk about, no problem too difficult or messy.  You may decide, you look at it carefully and you just can't see a way to do anything about it.  You may decide, well, we just can't right now, but there's no reason not to utilize that scope and flexibility to look at any issues and to move quickly if you need to.


An example of the flexibility and moving quickly, certainly I was emboldened to do that in the work we did toward the end of the Cold War.  I may have told you this story, I forget, about when the coup attempt was made against Gorbachev XE "Gorbachev, Mikhail S."  and we made some very rapid moves -- I won't repeat it -- to see what the dangers would be arising from a Soviet Union that might fall apart with the thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons.  That was a story that led to the Nunn-Lugar program, among other things.


We moved very quickly and very flexibly, and I kept the board chair involved and kept the board informed, but I felt the stakes were so high and we had such a position in the field, we had the expertise at our disposal.  The Carnegie network was a terrific network, and so we moved and we did what we had to do.  You notice it was Nunn-Lugar, insofar as it was all bipartisan where it involved the government, but the stakes were very high and we could move rapidly.


I think it is the function, at least of large professionally managed foundations with a good name like Carnegie or Rockefeller, to put on the national or international agenda important problems that need to be addressed, not with final answers, but to support good people and good institutions, to look at hard problems and to try innovations and to evaluate those innovations and to say, "This is the kind of world it is, these are things that we have to address."  That's a distinctive function where foundations can contribute, mostly through their grantees, but to some extent in their own name and with their own presidential essays or annual reports or special meetings, some of that, but mostly through the grantees.


Now, on the specific point you raised about the commission-council-task force, I was well aware when I came here of the conventional wisdom that says they're mostly ineffective, and what I tried to do was delineate conditions under which such bodies can be effective.  I believe that even the finest reports can be largely ineffective if you just put them out and they sink without a trace.  I believe that it works better if you have strong representation from different sectors involved in it.  If you have not only specialized experts, but the Jim Watkinses and Bill Clintons and Cyrus Vances and Roy Vageloses and Ted Koppels of this world on those bodies, so that they have a certain visibility and a certain credibility and legitimacy at the outset.


Secondly, if you have a determined campaign to explain all over the country or all over the world what you've said and why, and stimulate better ideas along that line, then I think you have a real chance.  And I think we've shown that these bodies can call national or international attention to very important and neglected problems and to promising approaches to dealing with those problems and they can reverberate for years after you've put them out.


So those reports have to be credible because they're based on the strongest evidence, research-based to the extent possible.  They have to be intelligible because they're expressed in clear language, not in technical jargon, and they have to be visible in the best sense, to have a fighting chance to be effective.  


Now, the most common critique of such bodies is that they often are ineffective.  Ellen Lagemann's critique is a less -- 

[END TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO]

Hamburg:  -- common one, that they represent elite opinion.  Well, you know, my attitude is, what you wanted for such bodies was for them to have on them and to mobilize the best knowledge and skill that exists in the world on the problem.  If that's elite, so be it.  I stand guilty.  I mean, do you want ignorance?  Is that what you want?


Now, if you're talking about, as I think Ellen is, doing something useful for poor people, you've got to have lots of input from poor people and poor communities and the organizations that represent poor people and poor communities.  We certainly did that; we did that to a fare-thee-well.  We did that so we got a fair amount of criticism from quarters that are less interested in the fate of poor people, but that knowledge and skill about what's happening to poor communities has to be drawn together in some way so that the nation as a whole can see it and think about it, is my view.


For example, would Ellen want us not to have scholars like William Julius Wilson XE "Wilson, Julius"  and Marta Tienda, who studied the daylights out of poor communities, that they should not be grantees of ours or board members of ours or council members of ours.  I don't think she would maintain that.  You have to have people who draw together the research-based knowledge and first-hand experience in the ghettos and so on if you're going to have a fighting chance to be accurate and influential with respect to the fate of the ghettos.  That's my view.


As a matter of fact, far from being elite, if you look at most of these councils and commissions and task forces we had in my time, a lot of what they were doing was addressing problems of seriously disadvantaged populations.  That's what they were doing.  But if those populations could have come up out of poverty or disadvantage on their own, they would have done so long ago.  They need a helping hand in doing it.  My view was that expertise matters in that and favorable sympathetic public interest matters in that.  So I think the answer is it all depends on how you do these things, not in whether you do them, but how you do them.  There's not a single right way, but there are ways that tend to be effective and socially useful.  


But anyway, those are some of my views about the role of foundations in the society.  I do think the foundations have played a big part in the burgeoning of NGOs of all kinds, and that's, on the whole, a good thing.  The foundation community has strengthened what nongovernmental organizations do in environment and education and anti-poverty efforts and so forth.  They're not all virtuous.  There are a lot of NGOs that are nasty and hostile and so on, but, on the whole, this efflorescence of NGOs in our country and their counterparts NGOs in other countries is very constructive, it's part of the democratic pluralism that I believe is one of the hallmarks of foundation commitment.

Q:  That's wonderful.  Let me pause just a second, please.  [Tape recorder turned off.]


This is our second digital tape for our session today with Dr. Hamburg on the twenty-third of December.


Thank you for that response to that question on Ellen's book, certainly, and the task force mechanism in particular.  I'm wondering if there's anything, looking back now, and it may be a little too soon, that you would do differently, that you would have done differently as president of Carnegie.  I'm also wondering if there was anything that you would have liked to have done that you didn't have a chance, for whatever reason, to explore here.

Hamburg:  That's obviously a very pertinent question.  It probably is too soon.  I mean, in general, overall I have the feeling it was a very good period.  I feel very blessed to have had the opportunity, and I think we did accomplish a lot, in a number of respects more than I would have dreamt possible.  Nevertheless, I have mentioned from time to time some things that I wish I'd done differently or would have had the time or energy or imagination or money to do.  But let me just take a few examples, because I certainly don't feel complacent about it.  I think there are always ways in which you can do better than you've done.


Procedurally I mentioned to you a while back that I think it would have been a good thing to have built into the board meetings on a regular basis, instead of a sporadic basis, a discussion of clusters of grants within a program and get more detailed policy guidance from the board about ways of approaching that cluster of grants.  That would be one example.  And probably I would do a certain amount of rethinking of other aspects of the board, but not a lot.


Similarly, on staff it might have been a good thing if I had really gone after something like a sabbatical policy, because if you're going to deliberately nurture long-term commitment of professional staff to a foundation, maybe you'd have something akin to universities, where people can get away and get new input and refresh themselves from time to time.  Now, I did discuss it with staff from time to time, and basically the feeling was, what was going on here was so exciting, nobody wanted to go away and there was so much input constantly that there was a stimulation and replenishment.  Yet in retrospect, if I had it to do over again, I might have had a fuller exploration of that issue.


Another procedural matter that I'm not sure about to this day, one of the business people on the board, Bruce [B.] Dayton XE "Dayton, Bruce B."  from Minneapolis, advocated that we adopt a corporate model to this extent, that since the board was very enthusiastic about my leadership, why didn't I select a successor and groom that successor over a period of years, not necessarily at that moment when he spoke, but at some point in the foreseeable future, why wouldn't I do that.  


I was against that.  I rejected it.  I think the main argument that I made was that we wanted to be able to get the best person possibly available in the world to succeed me when the time came, and that person might not be visible to us or might not be accessible to come in and be my deputy or my executive vice president or something.  We might not be able to get such people in that mode, but we could get them as president when I left the office.  It was that emphasis on getting the best possible person at the time, but also there might have been just a certain amount of conventional wisdom.  The way most foundations had done it was not to groom a successor, but to make a fresh search de novo.  So we never  really gave serious consideration to Bruce's proposal.  There was no apparent board interest in it.  


In later years, the Commonwealth Fund board encouraged Margaret [E.] Mahoney XE "Mahoney, Margaret E."  to do that, and she brought in Karen Davis XE "Davis, Karen"  and Karen has done a very good job.  That transition went very well.  A similar thing happened at Ford when Susan [V.] Berresford XE "Berresford, Susan V."  succeeded Frank Thomas XE "Thomas, Franklin A." .  I'm less informed about that, but from a distance it seems to be going well.


So that it is conceivable that we should have given more serious attention to that option.  I'm not sure I would have come out at a different place, but those would be some examples of procedural matters that maybe needed more explicit attention than we gave them.


Here is another procedural question.  In two cases we set up the staff for an operation, a long-term operation, in Washington, the Council on Adolescent Development and the Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.  That had powerful advantages.  On the whole it worked out well, and yet, as we recognized in both cases at the beginning, there is an inherent tension about having two staffs in different places.  I guess it has to be weighed and balanced in the individual case.  It's hard to know what you gain and what you lose by doing it, and it depends a lot on the individual players.  On the whole in these two cases, I think it worked out well, but I want to make clear it isn't something that I would recommend routinely and I might recommend doing it in a different way at a different time.


Now, on substantive matters, one thing that I edged up to and circled around that yet remains to be done and I have some regrets about it, is the matter of this sort of techno-economic globalization, the huge changes in the world, which I talked about from the very beginning.  One of our little cliches was "WT," which stood for world transformation.  I started talking about world transformation at an early time, the technology-driven changes that were already, in '82 and '83, certainly foreseeable as having powerful economic effects and social effects, as well.


My feeling was, the good news was that the technological and economic changes, in principle, would make it possible to greatly benefit the circumstances and quality of living for people all over the world, including poor countries and poor communities in this country.  That was the good news.  I used to say that in some ways we live as kings and queens of the past could not live.  The material benefits available and emerging were just enormous.


At the same time I worried about the profound, largely inadvertent social dislocations, similar to those that occurred from the industrial revolution, vast numbers of people terribly uprooted and disoriented and even treated miserably, and the emotionally charged social movements -- sometimes violent -- that arose in the wake of those dislocations of the Industrial Revolution.


The part that all of that played in the rise of Communism and Fascism and Nazism, there was something to worry about here, so my message was that the great institutions, the foundations, universities, science academies and so on, ought to be monitoring these changes, ought to be keeping track of the technological, economic, and social changes as best we can and support that kind of research.  


At my last board meeting, the substantive session was devoted to that.  We had Bob [Robert M.] White XE "White, Robert M." , the former president of the National Academy of Engineering, on the technological changes, and Ray Marshall XE "Marshall, Ray F."  on the economic changes, and Joe [Joseph S.] Nye XE "Nye, Joseph S." , the dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, on the social and political changes, particularly the governmental responses to the world transformation.  That was part of my legacy to Vartan, to say these are very important issues and they deserve consideration.


The day before that board meeting, I convened a meeting at the Cosmos Club in Washington, really for Hillary Clinton XE "Rodham Clinton, Hillary" , with the same people and some others in a longer session.  Marta Tienda presented, Bill Wilson XE "Wilson, Bill"  presented.  We were looking at the effects on cities, particularly, of these world-transforming events.  Towards the end of my term, I was still wrestling with this complex problem.  


About four or five years before, I had thought about whether Carnegie should set up a grantmaking program and/or a commission on the future of the American economy in a time of globalization.  I had talked with Bob Rubin XE "Rubin, Robert E." , who was then on the board, later Secretary of the Treasury, about it; Dick Fisher XE "Fisher, Richard B." , head of Morgan Stanley [Dean Witter & Co.], who was on the board; various others; people from the business community about that; Ray Marshall XE "Marshall, Ray F."  in economics; Bob Solow XE "Solow, Robert A." , the eminent economist at MIT who was a member of our Commission on Science, Technology and Government.  


I was wrestling with that problem.  I kept putting it off, kicking that can down the road.  The board members -- this is a good example of board involvement.  The board members thought, yes, I was right, the problems were serious.  Bob Rubin XE "Rubin, Robert E."  even had me convene a session for some of his senior colleagues at Goldman, Sachs about long-term world changes.  When he went into government, he had me convene a similar meeting for the National Economic Council in the White House on that subject.


The board members thought I was pursuing something that was important and needed to be examined, and yet none of us had a clear idea about how to do it.  So we kept putting it off.  I did not want to be presumptuous.  One of the problems was that there was a bipartisan governmental commission around the time when I first started talking about this, and the thought was that maybe that commission would do what needed doing.  In the event, they didn't.


So it was partly a conceptual problem, partly operational, partly political; we never got a clear and sharp focus on that possibility.  If I were doing it today, I probably would have a grantmaking program on globalization, something like that.

Q:  But this was going to be something different than ESTE [Education: Science, Technology and the Economy] had been?  I confess I don't know that much about ESTE's work, under Mark Tucker and other people, but as you talk about this I'm reminded of -- 

Hamburg:  ESTE reflected that influence.  It clearly did.  ESTE reflected it.  The grant to the National Academy of Engineering on Technology and Society reflected that.  The grant to Ray Marshall XE "Marshall, Ray F." , which is a book about to come out, I had a letter from him last week, which, incredibly enough, he dedicated to me, I'm very touched by that.  It's a book called Restoring Broad Prosperity [Back to Shared Prosperity: The Growing Inequality of Wealth and Income in America].  That reflected that influence.  There are many facets of it, but I never felt we kind of got around the contours.  It's a very big problem, big set of problems.


ESTE really asked what are the implications of these global trends for American education. In that sphere, it did a pretty good job, but even there we didn't do all I wish we would have done.  For example, we had some discussions there on some of the grantmaking in Vivien's program.  If you're going to bring up kids to work in a global economy, presumably it means they're going to have more contact with foreigners.  If you're going to make money out of international trade and investment, you have to deal with other cultures.  


I don't know how much it means that American kids should learn something about the languages and history and culture of other societies.  I don't know how much it means that they should learn about intergroup relations, about learning to live together across boundaries of nation and group and race and ethnicity.  Almost certainly it means learning more than we now learn.


So we did some things, yes, in that.  We had an important book that Tony Jackson XE "Jackson, Anthony W."  edited that grew out of some meetings we had at Carnegie, and then later a research initiative on the development of intergroup relations in childhood and adolescence.  And most recently, just a month or two ago, a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences, Carnegie-initiated, Carnegie-supported, on the development of intergroup relations.  Yes, we did things on that and more on the technical education in ESTE, technology in education and science education, of course, we did a lot.


I brought to the foundation the concept that to participate in a modern technical economy, you would have to have a more widely distributed technical competence in the entire population, not just for the elites.  We tried to work on that.  So I'm not saying we missed it, but I wish I'd been able to formulate a more coherent and comprehensive grantmaking program and/or commission-like bodies on that subject.  We did some, maybe a good deal, probably should have done more and better.

Q:  I want to shift to a procedural question.  I do feel like the kaleidoscope is really narrowing here, forgive me, but I think I would be remiss if I didn't ask, particularly given my feeling, and certainly the feelings of many I've spoken with, that Carnegie is undergoing another great change now, and is still in a lengthy transition period from your presidency to that of Vartan Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" 's.  


I was reminded of this, actually, when you spoke about the possibility of choosing a successor, grooming a successor, might have been something you would reconsider.  What about the appointment of an executive vice president for your successor, if I'm understanding that correctly?  Was Vivien Stewart XE "Stewart, Vivien"  appointed by you to serve as Gregorian XE "Gregorian, Vartan" 's vice president?  Was that a decision that you made unilaterally or in concert with him?  This is a question you obviously don't have to answer -- any questions that I have for you, but -- 

Hamburg:  I had a strong feeling that I ought to clear the way for a new generation of leadership.  We worked it out very carefully that Minow XE "Minow, Newton N."  would retire as board chairman, I would retire as president, Barbara Finberg XE "Finberg, Barbara D."  would retire as executive vice president, and David Robinson XE "Robinson, David Z."  would retire also.  He'd been a vice president, a very senior person.  The four of us would retire within a year, so that my successor, whoever it would be, would be able to bring in a new generation of leadership.  I thought that would give the best chance for a really fresh assessment.  I hoped that, and said so, there would be some continuity, but that there would be the opportunity to rethink what would be the best contribution Carnegie could make now, fifteen years after we did that rethinking at the advent of my presidency.  


Vivien's appointment was interim exclusively, with Vartan's permission beforehand.  I discussed it with him several times.  I said, "Because I've cleared away the decks for a new generation of leadership, we are in danger of having some chaos here.  We could appoint an interim vice president or we could do it some other way."  And I told him I was completely open.  If we wanted to have an interim vice president, Vivien was extremely well-suited, a superb person.  I suggested she go up and visit with him, that they talk, etc., etc.


He was very positive and very supportive about doing that.  He felt it would make for a better transition, and urged me to go ahead and do it, but it was explicitly interim.  I asked Vivien if she wanted to do it, because it was always possible that she might be chewed up in the process.  Transitions are inherently stressful, as I taught in my coping days.  She wanted to do it, if Vartan wanted it.  She thought it would be a very interesting, worthwhile experience.  She was absolutely clear, from me and in her own thinking, that it had carried no implication that she would become executive vice president, or even that he would have an executive vice president.  There was a recognition that he might want some new structure, as indeed it turned out he wanted to do.  But that's the story on it.  I think she was very helpful in the transition.  I think it was not easy for her, but she did it with a very high level of ability and integrity and made the transition better than it otherwise would have been.

Q:  Thank you very much.  Well, is there anything you wish I would have asked you that I haven't thought to ask, or that Mary Marshall [Clark] did not think to ask?

Hamburg:  I think the two of you have covered the territory wonderfully and given me a terrific opportunity to say what I think and tell you more than I know.  [Laughter]  But thank you very much.

Q:  It's been a joy and a great learning experience for me, Dr. Hamburg.  Absolutely a privilege and an honor.  Thank you very, very much.

Hamburg:  Thank you so much, it's been a wonderful experience for me, too.

Q:  Thank you.

[END OF SESSION]
[END OF INTERVIEW] 



Abacha, Sani
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Adams, John E.
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Alberts, Bruce
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Albright, Madeleine
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Allison, Graham T.
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Annan, Kofi
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Arbatov, Georgy A.
306

Arsenian, Deana
213, 322

Baker, Howard H.
316

Ballentine, Karen
244

Barchas, Jack
91, 271

Benedek, Therese
41

Bergman, Emilie
142

Berresford, Susan V.
391

Billington, James H.
233

Blechman, Barry M.
309

Boesak, Allan A.
193

Bok, Derek
231, 287

Bond, Christopher S.
337

Botha, P.W.
193, 330

Boutros-Ghali, Boutros
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Bowen, William G.
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Bowlby, John
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Breneman, William R.
14, 268

Brown, Norman
195

Brundtland, Harlem
140, 278

Bundy, McGeorge
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Bunney, William
91

Califano Jr., Joseph A.
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Cannon, Walter Bradford
79, 80, 268

Carter, Ashton B.
314, 315, 316, 317

Carter, Jimmy
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Carter, William Beverly Jr.
124, 131, 133, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 278, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286

Caspari, Ernst W.
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Chaskalson, Arthur
188

Chiles, Lawton
337

Christopher, Warren M.
122, 232, 235, 236, 250, 383

Ciaranello, Roland
271

Clark, Dick
213

Clinton, William J.
68, 235, 246, 247, 248, 251, 317, 331, 337, 339, 357, 360, 364, 374

Coelho, George
100

Cohen, Robert A.
238

Cohen, William S.
212, 322

Comer, James P.
362, 371, 372, 378

Craig, Gregory B.
192

Cranston, Alan
212, 322

Davis, Karen
391

Dayton, Bruce B.
391

Drell, Sidney D.
212, 214

Dukakis, Michael S.
337

Dunham, Alden E.
333, 370

Elliott, Glen R.
361

Erikson, Erik H.
267

Falco, Mathea
224, 225

Feldman, Shirley S.
361

Finberg, Barbara D.
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Fisher, Richard B.
347, 377, 394

Flexner, Abraham
222

Ford, Gerald R.
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Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda
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Gardner, John W.
119, 303, 346, 362, 367

Gell-Mann, Murray
344

George, Alexander L.
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Gerwal, Jake
195

Gibbons, John H.
360

Goodall, Jane
132, 273, 279, 283, 351

Gorbachev, Mikhail S.
156, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 215, 231, 242, 243, 244, 301, 302, 308, 309, 314, 318, 319, 320, 321, 386

Gore, Albert A.
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Grant, James P.
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Gray III, William H.
354

Gregorian, Vartan
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Grinker, Roy R.
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Hamburg, Beatrix A.
43, 86, 246, 247, 280, 292, 351, 355, 356, 362

Hamburg, Margaret
86

Handler, Philip
124

Hechinger, Fred M.
145, 283, 340, 359, 360

Heffner, Richard D.
41

Hinde, Robert A.
83

Hitler, Adolf
162, 241, 299

Holl, Jane E.
165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 349

Hood, David R.
187

Hornbeck, David W.
247, 357

Hunt Jr., James B.
337

Hunter, Carrie
142

Hurtado, Miguel de la Madrid
183

Inouye, Daniel K.
354, 360

Jackson, Anthony W.
248, 357, 376, 396

Jeffords, James M.
354

Jones, Judith E.
226

Kabila, Laurent
123, 127, 130, 133, 134, 275, 281

Kagan, Sharon Lynn
372

Kaplan, Helene L.
112, 115, 190, 192, 225, 234, 292, 373, 378, 383

Kassebaum, Nancy L.
73, 192, 354, 360

Kean, Thomas H.
247, 337, 354, 383

Kennedy, Edward M.
192

Kennedy, John F.
319

Kerr, Clark
118, 372

Keynan, Alexander
170

Kinsey, Alfred
268

Kissinger, Henry A.
130, 131, 144, 145, 281

Kokoshin, Andrei A.
206

Koppel, Ted
333, 353

Korner, Anneliese F.
69

Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe
382

Lamumba, Patrice
135

Lashof, Joyce C.
252

Lawick, Hugo von
273

Leakey, Louis S. B.
273

Lederberg, Joshua
103, 226, 347, 377

Legvold, Robert H.
212

Levin, Carl
212

Levine, Rachmiel
38

Levine, Seymour
69

Lucas, Adetokunbo O.
203, 204

Lugar, Richard G.
192, 314, 315, 316, 317

MacArthur, John Roderick
344

Maccoby, Eleanor E.
334, 355, 367

MacFarlane, Lewis
131, 143, 278

Mahler, Halfdan
199

Mahoney, Margaret E.
391

Malcom, Shirley M.
228, 335, 378

Mandela, Nelson
328

Marshall, Ray F.
52, 161, 377, 393, 394, 395

Matlock, Jack F.
210, 233

Mbeki, Thabo
328

McNamara, Robert S.
314

Miller, Judith
168

Millstein, Susan G.
361

Minow, Newton N.
122, 383, 397

Mobutu, Sese Scho
128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 198, 276, 277, 278

Mosher, Frederic A.
300

Msangi, Abdul
202

Nightingale, Elena O.
360, 363, 376

Nunn, Samuel A.
212, 213, 303, 309, 314, 315, 316, 317, 321, 322

Nye, Joseph S.
393

Nyerere, Julius K.
129, 130, 131, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 202, 276, 277, 278, 279

Obasanjo, Olusegun
200, 201

Perry, William J.
164, 315, 316, 317

Petersen, Anne C.
361

Piers, Gerhart
41

Pifer, Alan J.
111, 115, 186, 187, 189, 197, 290, 294, 328, 341, 346, 367, 372, 386

Pritzker, Jay A.
91

Pusey, Anne
351

Quinn, Jane
362

Ramaphosa, Cyril
328

Ramphele, Mamphela
188, 190, 328, 329, 330

Redlich, Frederick C. [Fritz]
28, 33

Reiner, Rob
69, 70

Rice, Condoleezza
374

Rice, Donald B.
212

Richmond, Julius B.
113, 159, 333, 355, 366, 367

Riding, Alan
181

Riley, Richard W.
232, 236, 333, 337, 366

Rioch, David M.
44, 45

Robbins, Frederick C.
355

Robinson, David Z.
111, 116, 226, 242, 346, 370, 381, 397

Rockefeller, David
384

Rodham Clinton, Hillary
68, 246, 334, 365, 393

Rosenfield, Allan
201, 226, 371

Rosenfield, Patricia L.
183, 203

Rowan, Carl T.
146, 283

Rubin, Robert E.
232, 347, 377, 394

Rudenstine, Neil L.
86

Russell, Avery B.
186, 191, 363

Sagdeyev, Roald Z.
209, 210, 212

Sakharov, Andrei
210, 211, 303

Salk, Jonas E.
49, 334, 344

Saunders, Stuart
193, 195, 329

Selye, Hans
29, 43, 79, 262

Shalala, Donna
232

Shultz, George
154, 191, 214, 234, 302

Simpson, Alan K.
212, 303, 322

Slavin, Robert E.
372

Smith, Alfred E.
7

Smith, Steve
138, 141, 142

Smith, Susan V.
363

Smuts, Barbara B.
135, 142, 143

Soberón, Guillermo
182

Solow, Robert A.
84, 394

Sonneborn, Tracy M.
14, 23, 29, 40, 60, 102, 103, 258, 259, 331

Spiegel, John P.
26, 261

Steinbruner, John D.
315

Sterling, Wallace
103

Stern, Fritz R.
272

Stewart, Vivien
226, 242, 248, 333, 346, 363, 370, 396

Strum, Shirley C.
272

Takanishi, Ruby
345, 346, 354, 376

Taylor III, John C. [Bud]
112, 115, 292, 373, 383

Thomas, Franklin A.
187, 192, 195, 391

Tisch, Laurence A.
377

Tisch, Wilma S.
361, 362

Tito, Josip Broz
325

Townes, Charles H.
212

Trudeau, Michelle
143

Tutu, Desmond
188, 190, 191, 193, 200, 242, 243, 328, 329

Vagelos, P. Roy
353

Vance, Cyrus R.
147, 148, 157, 158, 159, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 176, 225, 284, 306, 324, 325, 349

Velikhov, Evgeniy P.
208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 319, 320, 321

Warner, John W.
309

Washburn, Sherwood Larned
81, 82, 84, 272, 279

Watkins, James D.
333, 335, 353, 377

White, Robert M.
393

Whitehead, John C.
191, 192, 210, 234, 347, 377

Widnall, Sheila E.
233, 236, 347, 377

Wiesner, Jerome B.
210, 231, 344

Wilson, Bill
393

Wilson, Francis
188, 189, 190, 191, 329

Wilson, Julius
354, 389

Wolfensohn, James D.
349

Zigler, Edward
372



    �  "Q" refers to Mary Marshall Clark.  "Q2" refers to Brenda Hearing.