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Richard Elliott Neustadt,
1919-2003:
A Tribute
Martha Joynt Kumar
Towson University
This tribute will appear in Presidential Studies Quarterly. 
Richard Elliott Neustadt was an
academic who throughout his lifetime combined politics and practice in his area
of American politics in a unique manner benefiting the academic and
governmental institutions in which he worked. Neustadt died October 31, 2003, as a result of complications
from a recurrence of sciatica. He
was important to the community of students and scholars who read and continue
to read his work, to those working in the executive branch, to the John F.
Kennedy School of Government, and to his two generations of students and to his
extended family and many friends.
Throughout his life, he was known for his mental acuity; his understanding of how government operated and how its institutions related to one another; his ability to effectively operate within its timetables; the confidence of those in senior governmental positions had in him; and his ability to motivate those with whom he dealt, whether they were students, administrators, or government officials. His web of relationships was an important part of his effectiveness, as he knew who to bring into an argument in the halls of government or just the right person to bring into the classroom.
When he was 31 and working in the Truman White House, all of these qualities that served him so well were evident and appreciated by senior level White House staff. “His mind is quick, alert and imaginative. At the same time he has those superior qualities of good sense and good judgment which do not necessarily go with superior intelligence,” commented Administrative Assistant Stephen J. Spingarn for whom Neustadt came to work in May, 1950.[1] In an October 9th, 1950, memorandum to Personnel Director Donald Dawson, Spingarn advocated a raise in grade for Neustadt. “His approach to problems is down-to-earth and practical. His knowledge of Government and what makes it tick is exceptional,” he commented. “He knows and has the confidence of key men in almost every agency in the Government as well as on the Hill, and he is able to get the necessary staff work done on any given problem and place it in a position for policy decision by the President or other appropriate officials with a minimum of fuss and feathers and a maximum of dispatch.”
Whether it was at the White House or when he was at Harvard or at the Presidential Debate Commission, Neustadt enjoyed the cooperation of those with whom he dealt. “He is extremely effective in dealing with people and in securing their cooperation,” commented Spingarn. Charles Murphy, President Truman’s chief political and policy staff member, on the same day, October the 9th, wrote to Dawson: "I have examined the attached recommendation for promotion for Dick Neustadt which is being sent to you by Steve Spingarn. I want you to know that I agree fully with what Steve has to say concerning Dick's outstanding ability and the exceptional quality of his work."[2]
As a political scientist, Neustadt was interested in understanding the operations of government and in improving the functioning of its institutions. As a staff member in the Bureau of the Budget and in the White House of President Harry S Truman, he brought rigor to the arguments made and presented to the president he served. As an academic interested in integrating teaching and practice, he brought together both through his work developing the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His active teaching, writing, and governmental careers spanned the time from his work in the Bureau of the Budget until barely a week before he died. “How can one think of the death of an 84 year old as premature?” queried political scientist Nelson Polsby who provided the answer to his own question.[3] “But his old age lasted 10 days at most.” In addition to the intellectual and common sense approach he brought to the institutions where he served, Neustadt will be missed for his warm presence. “Personally he had a very explosive laugh that you heard down the hall,” commented his White House colleague, Ken Hechler.[4] “He would always raise our spirits as he injected humor. We always appreciated that because sometimes White House work can get heavy.”
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The Early Years
The experiences of his family can account for Richard Neustadt’s triple interests in the executive branch of government, politics and political activism, and academic life. Born on June 26, 1919, Richard Elliott Neustadt was associated with activist politics from an early age.[5] The Neustadt family came to the United States when Jacob Neustadt, a pianist and teacher, arrived in New York from Prague in 1848 as a political refugee. “Jacob’s brother, Adolph, a newspaper writer and editor, was routinely having to flee to Austria and Hungary to avoid punishment for his anti-Hapsburg sentiments,” commented Kathy Neustadt, a cousin, who collects the family lore.[6] “His father David was a well-educated, well-to-do antiquarian book seller in Prague. He must have thought it would be safer for Jacob, his wife, Julie, and three young children in the U.S.” Once they got to the United States, they had three more children, one of whom Otto (born in 1851-1908), was the father of Richard Mitchell Neustadt, whose son was Richard Elliot Neustadt.
In his interviews with Charles O. Jones, Neustadt spoke of his father’s politics being shaped by Theodore Roosevelt. “My father was a youngster in the Teddy Roosevelt era. He was a Democrat, at least from Wilson’s time, but he was greatly influenced by Teddy.”[7] His mother, Elizabeth Neufeld, was a social worker and his father, Richard Mitchell Neustadt, was a social activist who worked inside and outside of government. As was sometimes true in the Neustadt family, luck and events played a significant role in the evolution of the family and where they lived and worked. Neustadt and Neufeld met by chance in Canada at a conference of social workers because alphabetically they found themselves next to one another.[8] Neustadt was given his middle name of Elliott after his father’s close friend, John Lovejoy Elliott, who was the founder of the Hudson Guild Settlement House in 1896 and was a leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.[9] His mother died in a flu epidemic when young Neustadt was four.[10] Three years later his father married a widow, Minna Blum, with two daughters, Janet and Minna, who became his sisters. The Blum and Neustadt families had been close for many years.
The Richard M. Neustadt family was an early bicoastal one. With the original Neustadt ancestors long settled on the East Coast, Richard M. Neustadt went to Amherst College, followed by work in the South End House, a settlement house in Boston.[11] He then lived in and enjoyed California, but his work in and around government often took the family back to the East Coast. Neustadt talked to Charles Jones of his father’s work at the Boston settlement house and in New York with the Governor’s Commission on Widows and Orphans.[12] “The minute the Depression set in seriously and the opportunity afforded it, he [Richard M. Neustadt] dived back into public service with enthusiasm.. which he didn’t leave thereafter,” Neustadt recounted to Jones.[13] During his time in Philadelphia, Neustadt’s father ran an unemployment program in Philadelphia funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, recounted Walter Sondheim, who visited the Neustadts when they lived in Jenkintown and who later married his Neustadt’s sister, Janet.[14] When the state of Pennsylvania would not come up with its share of the cost, the Rockefeller Foundation severed its funding.[15]
The Neustadt family went to Washington where Richard M. Neustadt served as the Managing Director for the Retail Code Authority in 1934 and 1935. While they were in Washington, Dick Neustadt was a student at Western High School. During these years, he met many people heading government programs. “Big Richard [Richard M. Neustadt] was friendly with all the people in the New Deal era, Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins. Don Nelson [former Sears, Roebuck executive] was a friend and stayed there; he was head of some production activity [Supply Priorities Allocation Board]. They were all friends of his,” noted Sondheim, who saw Nelson at the Neustadt house in Cleveland Park.[16] “It was a place of constant political talk and that was the atmosphere he [Dick Neustadt] was raised in.” Neustadt regarded his period in Washington as “the first part of my public service,” he told Jones.[17] “People do not believe me when I say that no one walked on the sidewalk on Washington in 1934; they floated six inches above it. At night you could stand in Lafayette Park and look over at the White House and see that halo. So having a father with Teddy Roosevelt’s ideals about public service and then being there during this glorious period: That did it.” When the National Industrial Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the senior Neustadt went to San Francisco to head the Western Region Office of the Social Security Board. In his position with the Social Security Board, he also was the regional director of the Federal Security Agency, which had many social welfare programs under it, including some elements of the Japanese Relocation Program. “He was very unhappy that a part of his job there in Social Security was the relocation of Japanese at the beginning of World War II,” commented Sondheim.
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Academic Training and Government Service
For Richard E. Neustadt, combining academic and governmental life was the key to his success in both venues. He brought to the Bureau of the Budget and to the White House his training as a political scientist, which served him well in both places. Once he left government service and went into academic life, his knowledge of governmental operations shaped his teaching and writings. His academic life was spent in places with strong political science and economics programs; he took advantage of both. A 1939 graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Neustadt went on to Harvard for his Master’s Degree in Political Economy and Government, which he received in 1941. “The graduate school of public administration was just getting under way,” commented Pendleton Herring, who organized the program and taught Neustadt while he was there.[18] Herring thought the program was particularly well suited for Neustadt’s needs. “Graduate students were going into government… It was a pioneering kind of degree and served his [Neustadt’s] interest better than one that was of classical political thought.” His years there were important for the teachers he had and for the students he met. In addition to Pendleton Herring, he had Arthur Holcombe in the political science program and John Dunlop in economics. He was friendly with people he later would work with in the Bureau of the Budget and the White House, including David Bell and George Elsey.
His time in government began with his 1941-1942 service as an assistant economist in the Office of Price Administration, followed by service in the Navy as a lieutenant, when he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands, followed by Oakland, California. At the end of his Navy service, he returned to Washington, D.C., and on December 21, 1945, he married Bertha Frances Cummings. He left the Navy in 1946 and went in the Bureau of the Budget.
For the next seven years he worked in the executive branch. First, he served as assistant to the director of the Bureau of the Budget. Ken Hechler, who was with Neustadt in both the Bureau of the Budget and the White House, noted Neustadt’s strengths. “In the Bureau of the Budget, he was a very imaginative and thorough person in anything he undertook,” he observed.[19] Hechler found Neustadt to be a strong competitor. Budget Director James Webb “sent out word that he would like to have a personal assistant, and a number of us competed for that job, including myself. Dick Neustadt, who later went to the White House staff, won out and got that position, which was a very prized position.”[20]
Neustadt moved from the Bureau of the Budget to the White House staff in 1950 where he served as a special assistant to the president working from May to October for Stephen Spingarn and then through the remainder of the administration for Charles S. Murphy. “We had come to know him so well as an assistant for Jim Webb,” said George Elsey.[21] “It seemed natural to pull in men who had been helpful and were knowledgeable, smart, quick, and facile with words.” It was natural to pick White House aides from among those in the Bureau of the Budget, noted Hechler. “President Truman had a very high respect for personnel at Bureau of the Budget, and he brought a large number of them on to the White House staff… because the President recognized that those who had been trained at the Bureau of Budget had a broad viewpoint that was above the agency level and were above an agency bias, which was important for the White House staff,” he said. The training Neustadt received from the Bureau of the Budget served him well when combined with his academic training.
His duties included working on speeches and policy issues, including the president’s 1952 immigration message. “Everyone worked on everything,” commented Elsey.[22] “You could have a speech on foreign policy one week and veto message on another. You had to be jacks of all trades. None of us was identified with a particular subject.” Neustadt recounted to Charles O. Jones the breadth of his work: “I did all kinds of things, you know, policy things, political things. I had a large hand in screwing up the steel seizure,” he said.[23] “I remember that well. In June 1950, I was the guy who had to organize the departments on war legislation…for the management of the economy in the Korean outbreak because there was no department that could do that.”
Hechler explained the special value of Neustadt’s work in building a policy argument to present to the president. “Dick Neustadt’s influence was great, as he provided the necessary research underpinnings for the kinds of things President Truman believed in,” he said.[24] “Dick was a facile writer who we depended upon for a broad range of assignments where you needed to dig into a subject quickly and get it right. His academic background and his background at Bureau of the Budget plus his ability to get along with people were tremendous assets.”
The liberal staff members in the West Wing who pressed for policies in the areas of health insurance, federal aid to education, raising the minimum wage, and civil rights struggled with the more conservative staff members in the East Wing for the President’s support. It was Charles Murphy in the West Wing against John Steelman in the East. Neustadt provided the intellectual and factual grounding for the arguments advanced by the Murphy faction.
Richard Neustadt and Ken Hechler campaigned with President Truman for the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson. Neustadt “quickly developed into a facile speechwriter. In 1952 we road the Truman train as roommates and shared a car,” Hechler said. “He ground out the whistle stop speeches at a rapid rate.” Beth Neustadt recalled her father speaking of the importance of the whistle stop tour. “He took great pains to hone [the speeches] to Truman’s natural cadence. Dad later said that’s when he really learned to write.”[25]
Later, Hechler said, Neustadt did the major work on the Farewell Address delivered in January 1953. He also worked on partisan policy matters. “It is traditional for the president. . . to make available a draft of a suggested platform as a starting point in the convention, and Neustadt did most of the drafting on the version that was sent from the White House to the convention in 1952,” said Charles Murphy.[26] “He did an excellent job which was, to a very considerable extent, a clarification, expression of the policies of the president at that time, and did not involve a great deal of developing new policies.”
He was extremely busy during his years at the Bureau of the Budget and then at the White House. Nevertheless, at the urging of Roger Jones, who ran the Legislative Reference Division at Bureau of the Budget, and for whom Neustadt worked from 1948 to 1950, Neustadt wrote and defended his dissertation on the Bureau’s legislative clearance function. Once he left government in 1953, his degree eased his passage to academic life.
His appraisal of personalities and his sense of how to work around conflicts served him well through his years in government and academic institutions. He impressed White House officials with a sense of how to present effectively information to the president and his staff. Ken Hechler told of how Neustadt advanced an insightful political memorandum from Roosevelt advisor James Rowe to President Truman. “Prior to the 1948 campaign, James Rowe wrote a very extensive analysis of what needed to be done if the Democrats were going to win,” noted Hechler.[27] Although the memorandum was a fine rendering of the problems Democrats faced in the upcoming election, the problem was Rowe was a law partner of Tommy Corcoran. “For some reason Truman never liked Corcoran,” commented Hechler. “When Rowe wrote this extensive memorandum, he was afraid to put his name on it. So Rowe gave it to Webb and Neustadt discovered it and cleverly wrote it directly to Clark Clifford and mentioned its source. Clifford changed a few paragraphs and put his own name on it.” Hechler observed: “Neustadt was the link there to make Truman feel it was something worthwhile. It was an accurate portrayal, except he said the Democrats would hold the South. Neustadt was alert enough to see how useful the memorandum would be. Otherwise it might have been tossed in the trash can. This underlines the fact that Neustadt had a good appraisal of personalities and knew that any minuses could be overcome.” His nose for good analysis never left him, nor did his sense of how to make the most effective use of it.
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Academic Life and Presidential
Power
By the time he left the Truman Administration, he had received his PhD, viewed the presidency close at hand, and was ready to teach. He began his academic career in 1953 with a year as an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at Cornell University. In 1954 he moved to Columbia University where he was in the Department of Public Law and Government. “As colleagues, I had David Truman on one side and Wallace Sayre on the other, and we were a very close little combine,” Neustadt said.[28] “And due to both of them and their colleagues, Columbia was a very compatible place in those years.” In October, 2003, Neustadt discussed his hiring by David Truman, who headed the undergraduate program, and the nervousness he experienced as an interviewee. "I first met David Truman in what was then his office on the seventh floor of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University,” Neustadt recalled in a message read by Ted Truman at the family memorial service for David Truman, who died August 28, 2003.[29] “It was a sunny, spring day in 1954, and I was there to be interviewed for a one-year assistant professorship, which I very badly needed since the equivalent appointment I then held at Cornell was to end that June.” The success he had met with in the government world had so far eluded him in the academic one. “With a wife and two children to support, and not so much as a nibble from any other university, I was an anxious interviewee. The extent of that anxiety I tried to conceal, I'm sure without success, but presently I forgot it in the intellectual as well as human interest of Dave's conversation." His affection for his Columbia colleagues, especially Truman and Sayre, remained through his lifetime and theirs.
It was at Columbia where he wrote Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership. The genesis of Presidential Power was the gap Neustadt saw “between the academic literature that existed in the middle ‘50s on the Presidency and my experience of it. Also, at that time in academia, if one could fill that gap, the political scientists would think it a contribution.”[30] In remarking about the response of his colleagues, he noted. “To them, it did seem that what I had done did not just fill a gap between my understanding and the literature, but added something important to the literature.” By 2003, there were over a million copies of the book sold and four revised editions of it with observations on succeeding presidencies.[31]
Putting his ideas into a manuscript and then into a book took the support of his family, Bert and their two children, Beth and Rick. Members of the department were involved as well. Elinor Truman, whose husband David then headed the undergraduate political science program for Columbia College, typed the manuscript for Presidential Power from Neustadt’s long hand writing on sheets of yellow legal paper. His handwriting was difficult to read, which meant they needed to be creative in figuring out his words. The Neustadts and the Trumans lived in the same apartment building and in the same section of the building one floor apart. “I had my typewriter in the maid’s room and he had his in same room above,” she said.[32] “I would tap on the pipe and then open the window to tell him I couldn’t read [his writing]. He leaned out of his window from the floor above to answer.” Later Neustadt and Truman used the walkie-talkies their children had to go over undecipherable text.
Although four publishers passed
over the manuscript before David Truman got John F. Wiley to accept it, the
book became an instant success.[33] A Supreme Court Justice “said to
him [Neustadt] once that he had the best press agent in the world because
Kennedy had it under his arm [and a photograph recording the event appeared on
the front page of the New York Times],”
Sondheim recounted. “He never lost sight of the fact that it was chance and
luck,” said Beth Neustadt.
“David [Truman] was very helpful in many ways.” As was the newly-elected president who
carried and then read the work.
As a teacher, Neustadt brought the same enthusiasm to his classroom he exhibited in his work in government and provided his students with a sense of who the people are who serve in government. He brought government into the classroom. In 1959 Neustadt brought former President Truman to Columbia University for three days of campus sessions with students.[34] “Truman did not want to lecture per se and Dick did not want to have disorganized questions, so they had a panel of questioners, many or most of whom were students,” related Ted Truman, the son of David and Elinor Truman, a high school senior, who helped with the morning breakfast sessions in the Neustadt apartment. “Dick, and Bert I suspect, realized that if they did it cold, the questioners would not be relaxed enough.” Thus, the former President had three breakfast meetings in the Neustadt apartment where Bert Neustadt served as the hostess and he spoke informally with the students who would later in the day publicly query him. In one of the sessions, “Truman played spontaneously, to the group of students who happened to be there, on our unexceptional upright piano,” recalls Beth Neustadt.[35] Ted Truman remembers the former President playing the Missouri Waltz.[36]
Neustadt knew that the staging of such events often involved unscripted appearances of important persons wanting to get the attention of the former President. Averell Harriman, who had worked in his administration, came to one of the sessions, which Neustadt feared would result in the students’ getting less time of their own to pose queries to the former president. Neustadt asked Elinor Truman to sit next to Harriman and make sure he did not dominate the question and answer session. “Unfortunately, I was seated by his deaf ear and wasn’t able to do very much,” she said.[37] Although the Truman visit was unique, the practice of bringing students into their home was not. “Every month they would have a group of students come in,” commented Beth Neustadt.[38] “My mother found no matter how much food she made there was never enough to feed the voracious students. Eventually, an architect friend recommended she use smaller plates.” That worked, and the dinners continued with a bit less angst on Bert Neustadt’s part.[39]
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Government Service in an Academic Setting
Although Neustadt did not again work in a White House as an employee, he returned many times to advise and counsel Democratic presidents, speak with White House staff members of both parties, and to work with other institutions on issues related to the presidency. Perhaps his most significant work was the counsel he gave John F. Kennedy when he was a president-elect and then when he came into government. As a presidential candidate, Kennedy wanted to make certain he had a plan once he won. “If I am elected, I don’t want to wake up on the morning of November 9 and have to as myself ‘What in the world do I do now?’” he was purported to say to Clark Clifford, who was advising him on setting up a government.[40] Clifford brought Neustadt into the transition preparation process. Ted Sorensen, who served as a close aide to President-elect and then President Kennedy, spoke about the role Neustadt had in the transition process. “He recommended the key positions that any president --- that any president-elect as well as president should have on his staff; and he then made specific recommendations – such as David Bell as budget director – to fill those positions,” said Sorensen.[41] “He performed a similar task for Jimmy Carter after the 1976 election.”
At the president’s request, Neustadt studied the elements of the Skybolt crisis where communications broke down between the governments of the United States and Great Britain over the missile system. “While he was never employed in government, Kennedy used him especially for his relationships with the British government,” observed Walter Sondheim, with whom he discussed the work.[42] Neustadt developed many long standing relationships with British colleagues when he went to Nuffield College at Oxford University on a 1961 sabbatical. He maintained his contacts. “Dick went to Europe and around the U.S. with a letter from Kennedy telling people to open up their files to him. Kennedy read Dick’s report on a plane and said to his wife, ‘you ought to read this. It will give you an idea of what I am up against’. The next day he died in Dallas,” said Sondheim. The Skybolt report was declassified and published in 1993 under the title, Report to JFK: The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective.
A participant in the Democratic platform process in 1952, he continued his participation in party politics for years to come. He served in 1956 as a staff member of the Democratic Platform Committee. In 1960 he worked as a consultant to it and became its chairman in 1972. The most typical consultancy projects for Neustadt were ones associated with making the presidency and the White House staff more effective institutions. He worked on White House staffing and governing issues in a variety of venues. In the 1960s he dealt with considerations of national security organization through his work with Senator Henry Jackson’s subcommittees on staffing. Jackson’s subcommittee had among its several titles at one time or another, the Senate Subcommittee on Organizational Issues in Defense and Diplomacy, the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, and the Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations. Through the years, he also served as a consultant to the Bureau of the Budget (1961-1970) as well to the Atomic Energy Commission (1962-1968) and the Department of State (1962-1969).
Although his main focus once he left White House service was on his teaching, he rendered excellent service as a member of outside boards. Janet Brown, executive director of the Presidential Debate Commission, spoke of his service beginning in 1987 as chairman of its Advisory Committee on Candidate Selection. His committee developed criteria to determine eligibility for inclusion of candidates in presidential debates. “He brought historical perspective; an enormous grasp of the political history of elections and debates; a sense of trying to achieve balance and proportion,” she commented.[43] He also brought to the task “this profound joy and enthusiasm and optimism about the American democratic process.” His direction was felt as well through his sense of purpose. “Dick was committed to doing the right thing,” she said. “Whatever the question, the bottom line was to do it right.”
A continuing thread in his government service was his interest in the issue of the transition between administrations. President Truman organized the first systematic effort by an administration in office to accumulate information on programs and personnel for the incoming team. In June, 1953, Neustadt wrote a memorandum on the White House staff system under President Truman and how the president prepared for the transition. The Truman transition was a very deliberate one and Neustadt thoughtfully watched it. “Truman was fashioning precedents, and decidedly so,” he wrote.[44] “He was filling a gap in our constitutional arrangements, and that is exactly what he meant to do. Rarely had Harry Truman been more thoughtful, more impersonal, more conscious of history or office than in his approach to the tasks of transfer.”
Truman, he observed, had four elements to his transition planning: informing the new administration on issues, policies, and problems prior to their assuming office; equipping the team in order for them to act once they took office; informing them why he was taking the actions he was during the transition period; and having his own administration “wind up its affairs in a posture of dignity and good will, bowing out gracefully, neither cringing nor rancorous.”[45] His observations of the Truman to Eisenhower transition served him well as he thought through the passage of power between Eisenhower and Kennedy. His interest in the importance of opportunities an incoming president has when he first comes into office remained throughout his life. As a way to sharpen the thinking of the Democratic and Republican candidates as they prepared for office in 2001, Neustadt worked with Professor Charles O. Jones in 2000 to edit the memoranda he prepared for those coming into the White House in the Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton administrations.[46]
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The Harvard and London Years
As a person who believed in public service, the opportunity to create a program training people to work in government became a move he could not turn down. He came to Harvard University in 1965 as a Professor in the Department of Government and from there worked on the development of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He had a joint appointment in both institutions. “He saw people needing to be trained in economics, statistics, and decision making analysis, but also trained in the arts and the practice of governance, political strategy, and policy development,” observed Roger Porter who himself has commuted between the Kennedy School and the White House.[47] “And, therefore, he sought to ensure that all of those things were included in the Kennedy School curriculum.” While its progenitor, the Graduate School of Public Administration had a focus of several program areas, business, law, public health, and the arts and sciences, the proposal for the Kennedy School called for an institution more attuned to current needs” observed Pendleton Herring.[48] “When the Kennedy School came along, it was government, politics, and the contemporary world,” said Herring. “The Kennedy School gave a more effective basis for dealing with contemporary politics [than did the Graduate School of Public Administration].”
Good ideas only rarely get translated into effective institutions. It takes persuasive people to make it happen. Derek Bok, the President of Harvard University when the Kennedy School of Government was created, explained the impact on him of having faculty, such as Stanley Surrey, Thomas Schelling, John Dunlop, and Dick Neustadt, who agreed upon an effective program and were willing to put their personal energy into making it happen. “All felt that they could see for the first time a way to put together a coherent curriculum that was more than simply the mechanics of putting together a budget and terminating an employee,” he said.[49] “They plotted how it could be done. They were willing to devote large pieces of their life to making it happen. That was unusual and had a lot to do with my making it a high priority of my administration.”
Once the Kennedy School was formed, Neustadt served as Associate Dean from 1965-1971. Within the Kennedy School, he served as the director of the Institute of Politics from 1966-1971. He brought to the Institute of Politics a respect for political officials not often found on university campuses. “He had a passionate interest in governing and in people who committed themselves to try to govern,” observed Ernest May.[50] “He was fascinated by people who ran for office and who governed. He had deep sympathy with people who were willing to run the risk of running for office and risking empty lives.” He brought into the Institute of Politics fellows who had careers in public life, such as Alan Simpson. “Politicians were a higher order than public servants,” in Neustadt’s ranking, May said.
He was crucial to the success of
the program not only because of his sense of the program, but also his ability
to persuade others to give to it.
“Aside from the fact he combined the necessary stature from his book
and had a real practical grasp of how the executive branch worked, his special
strength was using those skills and combining them with an engaging and
persuasive personality to inspire faculty members to believe they could pull it
off,” Bok remarked.[51] In addition to the faculty, Neustadt
needed to persuade people to provide the necessary support for the school and
then place students in government.
“He had a capacity to create friends without making enemies.
Therefore when he was about generating support for something, he had a welcome
audience,” commented Roger Porter.[52] While he worked to build support for
the Kennedy School, he also was concerned with the institution maintaining its
initial focus. “Schools of public policy always struggle to maintain
balance to not have one school or discipline dominate,” said Porter. “He was trying to preserve and
protect political
science in the curriculum since economics often tends to dominate in
schools of public policy.” He was concerned as well with placing his
students, including at his favorite Washington governmental institution, now
titled the Office of Management and Budget.
Although he worked on developing
the Kennedy School, above all he was a teacher. As he had at Columbia, Neustadt taught a course on the
American Presidency. He last taught the course in the fall of 1986, when he
handed it over to his former student who, like him, had White House experience.
Roger Porter, who served in the Ford, Reagan, and, later, the Bush White
House, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation
at Harvard under Neustadt’s direction. “Each year I invited
him to give a lecture in the course.
The students loved seeing the master still at work and at the top of his
game,” Porter related.[53]
“This year was no exception and his lecture on September 18, 2003 was to
a packed audience of nearly 200 students.”
It was often through his teaching that his writing developed. Ernest May, Neustadt’s collaborator both in the classroom and in writing, spoke of their work together. They taught a course together well before the Kennedy School came into being. “We discovered we had a lot of common interests and perspectives and some complementary interests,” he said.[54] “Dick was fundamentally an historian, very contemporary historian who got information from watching people and talking to people. I had always been interested in the same subjects but using library archives.” They began teaching the course, The Uses of History for Decision Makers, as a module with a small number of students meeting in the house Dick and Bert Neustadt had near campus. “Once it became a regular course, we got into the habit of having lunch a couple of days before hand and working out the cases we wanted to raise. We were selfish; our theory was it wasn’t going to be a good session unless we learned something. It was a pleasure for both of us over the years.” They published their work as a book of the same title, which won the Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Contributing to World Order, named after the industrialist Charles Grawemeyer.
It was during his Harvard years that his wife, Bert, became terminally ill with multiple sclerosis. “The human quality that impressed me the most was his response to his wife’s multiple sclerosis,” said Derek Bok.[55] “I have hardly seen anyone so devoted. Whatever it took, he did. I was very moved seeing his affection and devotion to her.” Indeed, her illness seemed to be a turning point for him. During his years at the White House and for some while later, he was totally focused on his work. Indeed, Stephen Spingarn wrote of Neustadt’s devotion to his White House work. “It is almost unnecessary to state that Neustadt has worked tirelessly, not only during working hours but nights and weekends in carrying out this important job,” he said in his letter recommending Neustadt’s promotion.[56] Neustadt worked at that pace through his years writing Presidential Power and into the years building the Harvard program. But once Bert became ill, he spent a great deal of time with her and, their daughter recounts, their time together during her illness “enriched their relationship. The personal story is about his growing capacity to love and support and give. She had always been the one of provide support, emotional support,” she said.[57] “Now she needed his, and he discovered that he could give it.”[58] That capacity to love and give support was an important source of strength for him as he shouldered the losses of Bert and his son, Richard Mitchell Neustadt, a lawyer and telecommunications specialist, who died in 1995 in a rafting accident on the Yuba River near Sacramento.
While she was ill, Neustadt and Bert spoke of marriage, their daughter recollected. “She told him he should marry again, only this time someone different from her. ‘You should marry someone like Shirley [Williams]. You have so many interests and achievements in common,’” Beth Neustadt recounted her mother as telling her father.[59] They had known Williams since 1961, the year they spent in England at Nuffield College. Williams and her husband, philosopher Bernard Williams, were divorced in 1974, and their marriage annulled in 1980. Williams, who in 1993 became the Baroness Williams of Crosby, serves as the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords. “She [Bert Neustadt] sowed the seeds. It was a good idea. He had two great marriages.” During the years Bert was ill, Beth Neustadt said, “he was turning down things to look after Mom.” Then in his later years, he was happy following the career of Shirley Williams, whom he married in December, 1987. “He was so proud of Shirley,” she recounted. He also made time for his daughter, Beth, an organization development consultant who had made her own way to England, and his granddaughter, Rachel Eireann Neustadt. He told Rachel, then 11 years old, that if she decided to stay in London, he would see them regularly. “He promised to come have dinner with his granddaughter, and her mother, once a week,” Beth recalled.[60] “And so he did, rain or shine, throughout that year. He returned to his beloved Cape [Cod at Wellfleet, Massachusetts] for the summer, of course--where we spent time with him, too--and upon his return to London in mid-October of this year, sure enough, he turned up for dinner that very week.” He made time as well for Rebecca Williams, the daughter of Shirley William and Bernard Williams, and her husband, Christopher Honey and their two sons, Sam and Nat.
Richard Neustadt was honored in several ways during his lifetime. The American Political Science Association gave him three of its most prestigious awards. First, in 1961 he received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for Presidential Power. The award is for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs. Second, in 1982 he was given the Association’s Charles E. Merriam award “given to given to a person whose published work and career represents a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research.” Third, the Association recognized his many contributions to political science in 1993 through the Hubert H. Humphrey Award, “presented each year in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist.” The Grawemeyer Prize for Thinking in Time was awarded in 1986. On the 35th anniversary of the publication of Presidential Power his colleagues held a panel discussion of the impact of his work on the presidency as a field in political science. In 1995 a conference was held at Columbia University honoring Neustadt by bringing together junior and senior scholars to consider contemporary issues relating to the presidency. In 2002, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery awarded the first Paul Peck Awards for contributions to the presidency.
In many ways his career was a
practical one, yet at the same time complex because of all of the contributions
he brought together and the many people he touched. “The calling was a practical calling; to do research
and analysis toward contributing to better government,” Charles O. Jones
said of Neustadt’s career interest.[61] In achieving his end of successfully
bringing together knowledge and government, Neustadt contributed to the
effective operation of an executive branch agency and the White House, smoothed
the presidential transition process, created an institution to foster effective
public service, contributed his own service to governmental boards, and taught
two generations of students many of whom are now in the public sector or
focusing on subjects learned in his classroom. In addition, he leaves behind colleagues inside and outside
of government who feel his loss in a very personal way, as friendship was so
important to him as well as it was to them in their professional lives. it was
to them as they conducted their professional lives. “He has been my
friend and colleague in many a council and conference on presidential issues in
the four decades since [they worked on issues in the Kennedy years],”
commented Ted Sorensen.[62]
“He was a wonderful human being who will be sorely missed.”