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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

and you can bring in McNamara and so on.

Heiskell:

Yeah. About seven or eight years ago I was approached by--I forget who--to join Brookings and to-it was never quite clear as to exactly what they wanted me to do, but they ended up by saying, “Would you be chairman of the executive committee.” I learned later that what they really wanted me to do was to be chairman of Brookings and take Bob Roosa's place. But nobody had gotten around to telling Bob Roosa this.

Q:

Why did they want to get rid of Bob Roosa?

Heiskell:

Because Brookings was in trouble and they felt it needed more leadership. And Bob Roosa and the president of Brookings, Bruce McLaury, were two of a stripe. They were non promotional, non sales minded types.

Q:

More intellectual?

Heiskell:

Yeah. The president was perfectly good and Bob Roosa was a perfectly good economist, but when it came to running an organization with a budget of twelve million dollars and going around raising the kind of money that you needed, he wasn't there to do it. But as I said, nobody told Bob Roosa. So I ended up as chairman of the executive committee and tried to have some impact on how to organize





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