Oral History Interview

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened December 2015
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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GESELBRACHT: This is Ray Geselbracht, and I'm here with Larry Hackman, former director of the Harry S. Truman Library, to begin an oral history interview with him. It is Wednesday, August 20, 2014. Larry, thank you for doing an interview for the Truman Library. I want to get things started and just ask you, where did you grow up? Where did you come from? Where did you go to college?

HACKMAN: I was born and raised in Glasgow, Missouri, a small river town in the middle of the state, a historical town in the sense that it was founded in the 1830's, there was a Civil War battle there, and it was in Howard County, part of the "Little Dixie" region that ran across the state on both sides of the Missouri River. Howard was the Missouri county with the most slaves on the eve of the Civil War. I was born at home in the half of an 1841 house that my parents rented for $20 or $25 a month. Neither of my parents or any of their relatives had much of an education. My father made it to the seventh grade and my mother to the eighth grade. We were from German Catholic families, large families on my mother's side and my father's side.

A small number of the cousins in my generation began to go to college. At the time I needed to decide where to go to college, which I wanted to do, there was no experience in higher education among those close around me and no good high school counseling either. The University of Missouri at Columbia which is 40 miles from Glasgow was the most logical place to go so I did. I had no idea what to major in. I was a pre-business major for awhile, believe it or not. I was an economics major for awhile and was even inducted into an economics honorary society just on the basis of a high general grade point. Finally, when I was a second semester junior I believe, I found my way to American History. I earned my B.A. in American History in 1964 and my M.A. in American history in 1965. I already had a few graduate courses toward the Ph.D. by that time and I already had sent in my PhD dissertation topic to the AHA at that point, the topic being the Harlem Renaissance at a time when it was largely ignored. My major professor was Allen Davis who taught American social and intellectual History. But I also had had two upper class courses and two graduate reading seminars with Richard Kirkendall in recent United States history; he was the professor at that point who was sending the greatest number of graduate students and dissertation writers to do research at the relatively new Harry S. Truman Library in Independence. Kirkendall became a close friend and colleague many years later after I came to the Truman Library in 1995.

In the fall of 1965 I was a graduate teaching assistant in the Honors College section of the American history survey course as I worked toward the Ph.D. That was interrupted when I received my reclassification from my county draft board. I appealed that unsuccessfully and I knew that unless I did something, I would probably be on my way to Vietnam fairly quickly. I considered several alternatives in the military as an officer, but I knew I wasn't really interested, and then I scrambled into an Army Reserve Unit in Kansas City. In this same period, I found that I was not enjoying my first experience as a teaching assistant and I had nearly concluded that I was not going to enjoy being an academic historian in any case because I also did not enjoy primary research. Perhaps I would have learned to enjoy research if I had done more of it, and maybe I would have become a good teacher. In retrospect, I believe both were problematic. So I took a job in Kansas City with the regional

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office of the new Office of Economic Opportunity, the War on Poverty program under President Johnson that Sargent Shriver headed. And I worked there for about six months.

One day I was approached by a more senior staff member in the regional OEO office who happened to have worked at GSA in Washington with a fellow named John Stewart who was then at the National Archives and had just been named the new director of the John F. Kennedy Oral History Project. That project was funded in those days by the Carnegie Foundation, but located in the National Archives. Stewart was interested in hiring an interviewer who had a reasonably strong background in recent United States history. So John came out to Kansas City by train because there was an airline strike on and he interviewed me at the Truman Library to become an oral history interviewer for the John F. Kennedy Oral History Project. I accepted the position. The work I was doing at OEO in reviewing applications from school districts in the very early days of Project Head Start was not very interesting to me. At this same time I had passed the Federal Management Intern exam and the interviewing process and was offered a job at the Department of Labor in Washington. Then this Kennedy job offer came along which sounded much more interesting and also raised my Civil Service status from a Grade 7 to an 11, a big jump for me.

GESELBRACHT: When was this?

HACKMAN: This was in the summer of 1966. Sandi and I were married in June in Columbia and rented an apartment in Kansas City. By September, we were living in Washington. In November, I was called into active duty at Fort Jackson, South Carolina in the Army Reserves. I had done only one or two oral history interviews before I was called to active duty. I did basic training and then wrote for the base newspaper for another couple of months before returning to the oral history job in April or May 1967. I was substantially involved in the Kennedy Oral History Project work for about four years. This was an intense, eye-opening learning experience in public history. I did research on a wide variety of topics and issues and met and interviewed an incredible array of people at high levels, just listening to and learning not only about the Kennedy period, especially the 1950s and early 1960s, but also about how people at high levels in government and politics and the media went about their work, how they got things done. I interviewed some members of the White House staff and other close personal associates of John and Robert Kennedy, leaders in various Cabinet and executive agencies, ambassadors and high officials in the State Department, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, members of the press, and some governors and other leaders in politics around the country. Many of these people were household names then. Many of the transcripts of those interviews have been used by scholars since that time and almost all are now available on-line.

I can't think of a better, more fortuitous experience for someone with my limited background to have over the first five years of a career than learning about so many policy areas and also learning how to feel comfortable in discussing such a wide range of subject matter with so many different kinds of people involved in these issues. I did a great deal of reading in those days, nonfiction, journals, newspapers, magazines, even many novels about government and politics and recent United States history. I just learned a lot and gained confidence, which you need to do oral history at a high level . So that was a great first work experience. It also introduced me to a limited extent to presidential libraries and to the National Archives and to their cultures and some limited amount about the way they thought about things.

GESELBRACHT: You were based in Washington this whole time?

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HACKMAN: Based in Washington in a third or fourth floor office in the National Archives; not back in the stacks. We operated with big Wollensak reel to reel recorders, which seemed very cumbersome, and were certainly compared to today's equipment. We had a staff of part time transcribers, mostly college students, and a couple of editors. After a few years, the Kennedy Library proper began to organize a pre-Kennedy Library operation out of the Federal Records Center in Waltham, Massachusetts. That's where the Kennedy papers were transferred and where after a few years researchers could come to research papers as we began to open files and oral history interviews under the terms of the relevant deeds of gift. Some of that early research was quite good given the limitations on access.

In 1970, I applied for the Littauer Fellowship to the School of Government at Harvard and I was awarded that Fellowship. Frank Mankiewicz, who had been a Peace Corps official and then Robert Kennedy's press secretary wrote my main recommendation. I knew I didn't want to continue to do oral history forever, and I was kind of casting around for something else to do. I'm not sure that I learned a great deal from that year at Harvard, which gave me a master's in public administration. I sort of paused, I took a relatively easy course load, they gave an easy one-year master's program. Almost everyone in that program was a mid-career civil servant and I was much the younger of that group. As some aspects of a Kennedy Library began to take shape at that Federal Records Center, I went to work there as an employee of the National Archives proper, no longer on Carnegie funds but on regular appropriated funds. I didn't do much collections management even though my title was senior archivist. I did work a lot with the early researchers who came there because I knew a lot of the history, the content of many oral history interviews, a lot of the people, where some of the papers were, and so on. I negotiated the deposit of some Kennedy-related papers to the Kennedy Library.

GESELBRACHT: So you were still working on the Kennedy Library staff at that point?

HACKMAN: Right. I was working on-

GESELBRACHT: But still in Washington?

HACKMAN: No. This was all in Waltham. After the year in Cambridge.

GESELBRACHT: After Harvard.

HACKMAN: We bought an old 1832 two-family house on the Mystic River in Arlington and started our family. After a couple of years we bought another on Little Pond in Belmont, Massachusetts. For five years, I worked for that operation out of the Federal Records Center. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, for a couple of years I and a new staff member stationed in Washington had focused on oral history interviewing with the people around Robert Kennedy in the Justice Department, political campaigns, the Senate, and so on.

The early oral history experience had been a great first learning experience. Another learning experience came while I was in that Kennedy operation in Waltham when I was given a new title, because of some programs we were trying to develop there, as Director of Special Programs. This may have been an informal title of convenience as I worked over the next couple of years. The work included community outreach, working with secondary schools and universities, doing a wide variety of public programs, a few modest exhibits, being executive producer of an interactive film on Presidential decision making - which is

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where a lot of ideas came from that I later brought to the Truman Library - a little fundraising, learning to work with all kinds of institutions, nonprofits, educational, local governments. We developed one program we called the Community Visitors Program where we would find someone who had been active in the Kennedy period - Nicholas Katzenbach, former Attorney General; Frank Mankiewicz, Robert Kennedy's former press secretary ; Tom Wicker of the New York Times; Sander Vanocur of NBC; Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior, and others. We would bring one of them to the Boston area or to Massachusetts for a day, give them to a particular community around Boston or in Massachusetts, collaborating especially with the League of Women Voters. The "visitor" typically would have a couple of interviews on radio and television. They would meet with social studies teachers in the schools. They would maybe have lunch with the Chamber of Commerce leadership. Meet with some college students. We were just giving a community access for a full day to someone who had rich experience and interesting perspectives. This is something that helped me later in my career in learning how to work with different groups on everything from an events arrangements level to working with the media to serving as a kind of a consultant and mediator. It was just another good piece of experience which I was able to draw on later.

GESELBRACHT: Now were you in charge of this operation?

HACKMAN: No. A man named Dan Fenn was named as the first Director of the Kennedy Library probably around 1971. Dan was first the Director of the Library “in progress.” And John Stewart who had hired me, who had been the Director of the Oral History Project, John became Fenn's deputy. During most of my time in Waltham, I reported to John. But when I became this Coordinator of Special Programs or whatever the title was, I probably reported directly to Dan Fenn, at least on some of the projects, because the things we were doing, we were thinking of as kind of prototypes, or possibilities at least, for a permanent Kennedy Library wherever it was located. At that point, the decision had not been made that it would be built at Columbia Point. There was still a big battle as to whether it would go to a site near Harvard Square or to other alternatives.

GESELBRACHT: Did you have a staff working for you, or were you responsible for all these coordination duties on your own?

HACKMAN: I was able to draw on several staff people who didn't work for me full-time. There were some young people on the staff particularly who could work for me on a particular community visitor program, for example. I probably directly supervised only two, three, or four staff and then called on some other people. Some of the people I was supervising were doing the Robert Kennedy oral history editing and transcribing. I can't remember the exact lines that we drew; they didn't count for much in that kind of small operation. It was very fluid in those years I would say at least as far as I was concerned.

GESELBRACHT: How did you identify what would work in terms of bringing people in and taking them out to the community? What was effective, how did you recognize what wasn't going to work? What was the kind of structure that became apparent to you when you were trying to think how to match people with the opportunities in the community?

HACKMAN: Well in that situation you fairly quickly develop something like a template. You don't fill in every part of the template for every community. With Stewart Udall, for example, the longtime Secretary of the Interior, we brought him into Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell, Massachusetts was a historical city in terms of the Industrial Revolution and the labor

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movement and ethnic groups. One of the things that the City of Lowell was trying to think through was how it could use its history to revive itself. It was a very depressed, challenging area at that point. So we scheduled Udall for discussion with some of the town leaders after he had been taken on a tour of the old locks and mills and neighborhoods perhaps. Out of that, I believe, came some time later, perhaps several years, the proposal for the first National Urban Cultural Park, or something like that, folded into the National Park Service. But we would have taken Udall perhaps to meet with teachers who were teaching, if there was such a thing then, courses on the environment. We would relate the subject matter as much as we could to the background and interests of that person. If we brought in Tom Wicker, a distinguished journalist, he would perhaps meet with the nearby college journalism classes, or classes in current politics. Since we worked in communities with the League of Women Voters chapter as our coordinating partner, they almost always had good suggestions as to other organizations that would be interested and consequential. I don't recall that that part was all that challenging once we got into the program and had done it two or three times.

Most of these communities were small communities around Boston, though we went out to Springfield and the western part of the state a few times. In most cases, they were so pleased to have a household name coming to their community, and for free, that they were excited and usually amenable to suggestions and had good suggestions of their own. So it was a really good program and I was surprised that the Kennedy Library didn't keep it in that form. The later Kennedy Library when it was developed did bring in a lot of very distinguished speakers but mostly did that at the Kennedy Library as opposed to sending them out in the community. I think that a community visitor type program would have been something that almost every presidential library could have done with people who came out of the administration or who covered politics or were knowledgeable about it in that period. That would have been relatively easy to do in greater Kansas City or up and down the Hudson from Hyde Park or in lots of places around a presidential library. Once you get too far away in years, most of these potential visitors are dead and gone. But in the first 10-20 years after an administration, you could have done a lot with that as a kind of standard program. One of my frustrations with the National Archives and the Office of Presidential Libraries is that I always thought they should spot good things in one presidential library or another and then really promote it very actively to other Libraries almost as a best practices kind of thing. I didn't see a lot of that kind of leadership coming out of that office.

GESELBRACHT: I agree. Did you create the partnership with the League of Women voters, did you recognize that that's the partner you needed to help you?

HACKMAN: As in a lot of things, Dan Fenn, who was a longtime resident of the Boston area, had been a member of the Tariff Commission during the Kennedy Administration, taught at the Harvard Business School before and after that, had headed many organizations, participated in the Boston area, he knew everyone. So he knew Lucy Benson who at that point maybe was or had recently been the national president of the League of Women Voters and had been the leader in Massachusetts. So we met with her for lunch or something like that, and that idea came out of that conversation. Dan was from Lexington, Massachusetts and in many communities he would know people, and he knew some of these people who we brought to Massachusetts who’d been in the Kennedy Administration because Dan had been in Washington early on involved in recruiting people for the Administration. So he just knew a lot of people. He was a wonderful resource as well as a wonderful human being. He made a lot of things possible once that operation was in the Boston area.

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GESELBRACHT: So did you talk with him quite often about organizing these different programs?

HACKMAN: Yeah. I learned a lot.

GESELBRACHT: Would he come to you with an idea for - he said, "You know, I talked to Udall last night. He's going to be coming into town and give him a call" and that kind of thing?

HACKMAN: It would be more that we would talk about who we might be able to get or who might be appropriate for a certain area. Dan would usually either write the letter describing the program or get on the phone with whoever it was and invite them to come in. It probably would operate a little differently at different times whether we had the guest first or the interest of community first or we knew somebody was coming to town for some other reason. It usually took several months to set one of these days up and to get things organized. So it might work in different ways at different times. But I learned a lot from Fenn just because he knew so many different people in so many different organizations and because he was extremely open to ideas, very welcoming. He wasn't a directive person and he was much more helter-skelter than I ever was in my approach to things. I was more structured at that point in the way I did things and more organized I guess in some ways. So it was a good combination.

GESELBRACHT: When the guests arrived, did you drive him or her around? Is that part of your duty too?

HACKMAN: Yeah. Because usually I would be the person basically briefing them on what was coming up next and with some suggestions on who we were going to be talking to and what they might be interested in or what you might talk to them about. Often, if Dan Fenn had the whole day, he would be in the car and I would be in the car with whomever was coming in. One of the things we were trying to do was to build relationships that would endure for what would become the Kennedy Library proper. So we were always interested in putting somebody important in the community in the car with whomever the distinguished guest was. So you might have the principal of the high school on our way to the high school. Or you might have the owner of the local newspaper or the editor in the car while we were going down to meet with the journalists on the Lowell Sun or whatever the equivalent might be - which again was a learning experience for me in terms of how you maximize the use of people who are coming in to do something for or with your institution. We probably should have done much more of that when I was at the Truman Library.

While I think of it Ray, I should mention that some years ago the Kennedy Library called four of us "founding fathers" together for a group oral history interview. That group was Dan Fenn, John Stewart, Larry Hackman, and Bill Moss who we hired to do oral history interviews several years after I came and then he also moved to the Waltham operation and served as the senior archivist, especially on records relating to foreign and military affairs. He wrote a book on oral history, a manual, and was later State Archivist of Tennessee. He died several years ago. Dan Fenn is over 90 and still teaching. John Stewart is 82 and still playing basketball and softball regularly. I am the lazy one of the bunch.

GESELBRACHT: You've mentioned to me that you had some experience with the Kennedy Library involving an educational program that was decision-based that was later important to you when you came to the Truman Library. Could you describe that?

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HACKMAN: I might not get the sequence exactly right, but I believe someone came to Dan Fenn, the president and maybe the chief rabbi of Temple Mishkan Tefila, a conservative Jewish congregation in Newton, Massachusetts, just west of Boston. They wanted to do something ambitious with the Kennedy Library. Out of those conversations came a proposal to do a Presidential Festival at Temple Mishkan Tefilaa festival that ideally would involve to some degree all of the presidential libraries. That desire eventually evolved into the loan of artifacts, at least one but usually several on loan from each library, to be displayed in exhibit cases at the Temple. This included the famous Torah from the Truman Library, now on permanent display there. We brought in interesting artifacts from every presidential library mainly as an audience draw. We brought in a series of prominent speakers to give public presentations. I remember Arthur Schlesinger, for example, and a couple of former White House staff members. This all took place over a week or maybe two.

Quite in advance of the festival we had this idea to do something with decision-making. Perhaps at first we thought of developing case materials for group discussion. Dan was very accustomed to this approach in his teaching at Harvard Business School. I can’t remember quite how the idea of doing a film evolved. But since it was basically my assignment, they eventually called me the executive producer of the film. We hired a firm from Cambridge, Envision Inc, to come in and work with us. And Dan knew a mechanical engineer on the faculty at MIT and he figured out how to make this film interactive by using electronic voting devices that you could be wired to theatre types seats in a small auditorium at the Temple. So we made this film and the core structure was a series of background points, mostly with the camera moving around on still photos a la Ken Burns, then a question related to the background, then a pause for discussion and a formal decision, then on to the next issue. You would stop several times during this 16 mm film to discuss and vote, literally stop the projector. The film was about Kennedy’s 1962 Executive Order on discrimination in housing. The name of it was With the Stroke of a Pen. Kennedy had committed himself in the 1960 campaign to sign an Executive Order on discrimination in housing. So we provided in the film background about that commitment, what some of the political and legal issues were related to this matter. Then at appropriate times we stopped the film and the script explained the political and advocacy situation just before the November 1962 mid term elections "Would you sign the Order?" Then, if so, "Would you sign it before or after the election?" Then after further legal background, "Would you sign a narrow Order or a broad Order?" The case was basically a consideration of moral, political and legal issues.

We used the film with groups during the Festival and then in some other places with audiences ranging from junior high school students to former members of the White House staff, from academics from Harvard and Brandeis to general audiences, a wide range. And it worked with everyone. Audiences got super engaged in it. With some of the higher level groups, they would go from the film and treat it then in a much fuller discussion around the table with people talking about it in a more sophisticated way. The film was 17 minutes, but a group of high school students might be there for let’s say 45 minutes, seeing the film, stopping for discussion and for voting, then for reflective discussion after the film was over. That film won a number of silver medals or bronze medals in various competitions that Envision entered it in. I still have copies of some of those certificates somewhere — or maybe they're at the Truman Library by now, I’m not sure.

I left the Kennedy operation soon thereafter to go to Washington to work for NHPRC, but I carried that experience in my mind for 20 years before I came to the Truman Library. When I thought about Presidential Libraries in the meantime, which was not often, I thought also

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about what I felt the Kennedy Library proper had become, and that film often popped into my mind as an example of something that was highly engaging. It was highly respectful of an audience, gave them accurate background information but didn't draw the conclusions for them, challenged them to think about it and to go through a logical, informative decision making process, overall an experience that would give them something to take away from their visit that they would want to think and talk further about and share with others. They would almost certainly have learned from the experience in a participatory and interesting way. So that small one-time experience was useful to me when I got to the Truman Library and it influenced both the decision theaters in the presidential exhibition and most of all the White House Decision Theater.

GESELBRACHT: No, I agree. It sounds like you're describing the White House Decision Center and the way it basically runs and the way people react to it. All different kinds of people reacting as the different types of people you brought into this film reacted.

HACKMAN: As the years went by I sometimes visited other presidential libraries, and more of them after I was at Truman. Several of the other presidential libraries did something around presidential decisions but these were not as informative, challenging, engaging, open ended. Their goal, I recall at Reagan in particular, seemed to be to promote the reputation of the president. I never could understand and I still don't to this day why presidential libraries don't take a more challenging approach with their visitors. And I don't mean challenging them by overwhelming them with information, which most do. What I mean is conveying one way or another the message that history is never settled and that policies and events need to be rethought and that visitors can be engaged in that process. I believe that many people will go away pleased and excited by an experience that is not simply predictable and that provides for contingencies. Involving them in rethinking and remaking decisions from the past is a good way to convey that.

GESELBRACHT: It's thrilling to me to hear the origins of our White House Decision Center which we'll talk about more later. I think the Decision Center is – well one of the most important parts of the legacy that you've left to the Truman Library, as vital today as it was when it was first opened, maybe even growing in vitality as it matures and flourishes. As you're describing this, I'm wondering why the National Archives and Presidential Libraries haven't done more of this type of thing. I can't help but think that what you're describing at the Kennedy Library in those old days was a very creative process that you were a part of. Maybe you were primarily responsible for that, maybe you had good partners, but there was vitality and creativity in it. Maybe those things are just rare and that's why we haven't seen more of it in the Libraries. Before we leave the Kennedy Library, you’ve mentioned to me that you got some sense while working there of the presidential library as an institution with strengths but also weaknesses and problems. Can you describe how this model you were perceiving struck you?

HACKMAN: Probably not very in any great detail, Ray. It’s hard for me to sort out when I formed certain impressions. I believe I had visited the Truman Library at least once before I came for that interview which led me to the Kennedy Oral History Project job. I returned maybe a couple of times over the years. I was not impressed with the public part, with the exhibit part. It just seemed to me that having rooms filled with Presidential gifts, big objects which had no meaningful historical relevance to the Truman period other than they were given to the White House, that always disappointed me — that you couldn't do something more impactful and engaging for the public. And I'm sure that the public wasn’t very discontented with it. The public's expectations of presidential libraries I thought have been

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very low. I think they're higher now, but they were not very demanding.

Over the years, I went back two or three times to the Kennedy Library after it opened. The Kennedy Library, because of the magic of the name Kennedy and the continued family involvement in politics and public affairs and so on, always drew a lot of people that I thought of as on a pilgrimage to a great cathedral where the saint’s bones were kept — rather than looking for a more substantive experience. Which is too much to hope for, I know. But it seems to me the Kennedy Library — pandered is too strong a word — did not do much in the way of its exhibits and the experience that the public had while they were at that site other than wow them with a few objects and spaces and appeals to nostalgia. I don't think you went away with any of your impressions changed or that you had gotten involved in anything in any depth that really challenged you. It was an impressive site and a strong architectural statement, as I.M. Pei’s buildings often are.

Ray, you had written a question somewhere, would I have thought of working for any other Presidential Library than Truman? And the answer is no. After I left that Kennedy Library pilot phase, I never had any interest in going to work for a presidential library except for Truman, and that one mainly for more personal reasons. So I did not come to Truman feeling that presidential libraries are just the greatest thing and I’m honored to be a part of such a system, and now I just need to preside over something that’s doing wonderful work and that’s going to be a capstone for me. It was quite far from that view.

GESELBRACHT: Your next stop along the way, on the road to being Director of the Truman Library, was at the National Historical Publications Commission, soon to become the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. How did you make that next move and when did you arrive?

HACKMAN: That was as surprising a move as falling into the job with the Kennedy Oral History Project. I had never thought about having a career in archives. I had never read deeply or hardly at all about archival theory or methods. I had never done much in the way of collections management, and what I had done, I did not think I did well — a bit on the Robert Kennedy papers at the Kennedy Library. I had known almost nothing about NHPC (The National Historical Publications Commission), and I didn’t pay any attention to it. I’d hardly known it was part of the National Archives.

A group of state archivists had lobbied for several years in the early Seventies to have a separate national program created which would provide substantial funding to assist state archives — which they might then use some of it to do other things in their states to improve archival conditions. That advocacy effort did not succeed on their terms; instead, the Congress decided to take an existing commission, the National Historical Publications Commission, and add an R for Records to it. The National Archives was given a program which it never asked for and frankly did not want. I took a call one day from Ann Campbell who was the first paid Executive Director of the Society of American Archivists, located in Chicago. Ann told me I ought to think about applying for the new position as director of the new Historical Records Program at NHPRC. Maybe she knew I was restless at Kennedy. I didn’t want to stay a Kennedy person for my career. Ann Campbell had been on our staff at the Kennedy Oral History Program. She’d been the chief editor and administrative officer if I recall correctly. She was incredibly bright and hard-working and personable.

So I looked into this. I don’t know who I talked to but surely I must have talked to some people who knew NHPC and also could provide some background on the new program.

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Sandi and I liked living in Belmont, in the Boston area generally, we had two young children, but I didn’t see other opportunities on the horizon, in part because I did not know what I wanted to do in career terms. I knew I didn’t want to continue to do Kennedy stuff for very long. The more I looked at this new position, the more I could see that there might be both another great learning experience and opportunities to develop a new and significant national program. I say that, maybe that’s the way I thought about it, but I really don't recall that with confidence.

So I tried to investigate the situation really carefully almost as if I were preparing to begin in the position before I had applied for it or been selected for it. Frank Burke in the National Archives had just become the new Executive Director of NHPRC and he wrote an article for the American Archivist some years ago about the early development of the Records Program, which he calls “The Hackman Years.” He recounts the large quantity of questions that I was asking and all of the materials, background that I was asking for, and all of the ideas that I was proposing as possible approaches before I even began work in Washington. When I did get there, Herb Angel, who was the former Deputy Archivist of the United States, had drafted initial regulations to set up the structure as to how the new program might operate within NHPRC. You don't really need to know all of this in this interview.

I took that job, and we packed up and moved back to Washington. I was there for five years. It was a third opportunity, another great learning experience for someone who didn’t come really out of the archives community, and it meant a much greater level of complexity, scope, responsibility, and visibility for me. It helped me to understand as well as develop my leadership ability and some other skills as well. I had the opportunity, in fact was required, to know the archival community in a really rich sense. I came to know everybody it seemed in the leadership across the country, in all of the regional and state organizations, as well as in the Society of American Archivists. I learned a lot about many individual archives, both by visiting them but especially through their grant applications to the Historical Records Grant Program. I worked with the leadership of the profession over and over again, became involved personally in leadership in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference and in the SAA. I learned a good amount about the issues facing the profession, what the current methodologies were and the best practices, about the issues that people were really grappling with at that point and who the key people and their projects were. And I began to develop my own sense of what the major challenges were and how they might be addressed.

In those days there was a very limited archival literature beyond the American Archivist journal. Our first records grant was to support the first five basic manuals on archives, how you do arrangement, description, reference, surveys, security. It was a kind of take-off period in some ways for the profession because the SAA had a full-time staff for the first time, was developing a formal publishing program for the first time, was much more ambitious and energetic and effective. The NHPRC Records Grant Program was new, and it created a statewide network of state coordinators and advisory boards appointed by the governor in every state according to NHPRC guidelines. For the first time in the states, people started assessing conditions and needs and setting priorities together. For the first time, the state archivists were called together by the NHPRC, usually at least once a year, to talk about common problems, talk about funding, begin to form kind of a nascent advocacy group on a broader scale than it had been when the legislation was passed. A new organization, the National Association of State Archives and Records Administration (NASARA) was created; it later became the NAGARA, the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators. They were regarded at times as rivals by

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the SAA. Since the NHPRC supported some meetings of the state group, as well as making grants to the SAA, we often got caught in the middle of that.

I looked at hundreds of grant proposals to the NHPRC. As the Records Program director, I recommended them up or down, or to be modified or made conditional upon some further contribution by the applicant. We met with the Commission members three or four times a year; it had a member of the Supreme Court, a member from the Senate, a member from the House, representatives from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Association for State and Local History, the Society of American Archivists and public members appointed by the President. So I learned how to work in a board governance structure and process. The Executive Director, Frank Burke gave me incredible latitude on almost all aspects and he was very supportive, so I had a real chance to take hold of a new national and nationwide program and to help shape it.

GESELBRACHT: To what degree were you responsible for this new situation among all these different actors that you're describing? Did you create this? Did you bring all the state archivists together and do these other things that you're talking about?

HACKMAN: No. Given the regulations that Herb Angel already had written and I believe already just had been adopted when I came, there was in them the outline for state boards and coordinators to be created; so I didn’t create the mechanism but I was certainly extremely active in making it a reality in practice. I was drafting the letters to governors or calling their staff to get them to appoint the state coordinators and members of the state advisory boards. And then I went to meet with many of those boards in their early meetings to help them shape an agenda and make sure they understood the NHPRC requirements and grant review process.

I divided up the states in terms of who would be our day to day liaisons. I took at least a third of the states. Bill Fraley took some and Edie Hedlin took a portion. All of the proposals with staff recommendations for action would come through me. If West Virginia and Indiana were Bill Fraley’s states, he would communicate with the people who were trying to develop grant proposals from those states, then at a certain point in the process he would have to draft his staff recommendation which I would then review and work with Bill, often to make revisions to his recommendation, often to return it to the applicant for revision before that. After I finally signed off on our recommendation for action by the Commission in an upcoming meeting, Frank would have to sign off on them too. He seldom recommended revisions at that point. Then they would go to the commission for a formal vote. Some proposals didn’t come through the state mechanism but were considered national proposals, e.g. from the SAA or the American Association for the Advancement of Science or the Leadership Conference of Women Religious or the National Nurses Association. We would send them out for reviews by archivists and experts in those fields.

So I didn’t create the program through advocacy or set up the initial regulations. I was basically the main implementer of the program. But in the implementation process we created the first national priorities that had ever been created for archives in the United States. And we drafted the preferred approaches that we thought should be taken to address the highest priority archival issues. Again I felt it was a great opportunity to learn and to provide some real leadership. Inevitably in going around and meeting with the state boards, meeting with all of the archival associations, meeting people in advisory groups that were set up to deal with particular issues that we were interested in or that they might want to come to us on, I could have an influence on a lot that was going on in the archival world in

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the United States. It’s almost laughable at how small the Historical Records Program’s grants budget was commensurate with the influence that it had in those years. If you were to talk to people who were active in the archival profession in those years, some of them would say, I believe, “My God, NHPRC had such a substantial influence even though they had so little money to do what could have been done and should have been done.” We tried to create and seize opportunities to address key archival issues through those small funds and by influencing other organizations and individuals to lead and to provide support in projects to address important issues. We constantly sought ways to leverage our funds and our influence.

GESELBRACHT: Did your interest in what you call archival advocacy develop through your time you were at NHPRC?

HACKMAN: It did, Ray, and from two directions. One was that given the paucity of funding and the fact that it was a new program, we had to work really hard to get the White House and especially the Congress to understand what we were about, to get people all over the country to write those letters and make phone calls pointing out that the NHPRC was operating a nationwide grant program in its first year with only $200,000. That’s laughable, so you need to get it to a million, then you need to get it to two million and then try to increase it to much much more. So a lot of advocacy was needed from the grassroots into Washington and we worked hard at that. And then I learned about advocacy from a different perspective with a different purpose. As I visited the various states and a lot of individual archives, it was fairly easy to see that a lot of these archives were extremely weak and that even the State Archives in quite a few states had a tiny influence and were themselves very small in staffing and other resources and had weak and poorly qualified leadership; one state archivist was a former used car salesman, another a former undertaker. So I could figure out pretty quickly that if things were going to improve in many cases to even a minimally acceptable level, that somehow programs were going to have to get more resources and that meant having more influence and that that was going to happen only if you had stronger leadership and more visible and active advocacy and promotion.

One of the things we tried to do and that I still believe strongly in, and I put this argument in that advocacy book I put together that was published by the SAA a few years ago, is that there is considerable potential leverage in the grant application process itself — if the applicant and the granting source are willing to use the process as an advocacy tool. As an example, suppose an archives asks a philanthropist or a federal grant program for a $200,000 grant. Often the applicant should be pleased, not disappointed, if the granting program offers perhaps only fifty thousand the first year and fifty the second year and zero the third year, all of it conditional upon firm agreement from the administrative bishop or the mayor or whoever the chief officer is for the applicant that the organization will agree to provide the other $50,000 the first year and $50,000 the second year and to keep the new project staff archivist on for a third year or beyond. Those conditional grants that provide leverage for the archives program within the applicant organization are not easy to pull off. But such leverage is one thing you're always looking for because it can be a tool to change the stature of an archives program within an organization. To be effective in advocacy you have to identify, create and use influence, and looking always for leverage is part of that. One way or another in developing an organization, you're always looking to gain influence. Often it is within the organization itself, whether it’s influence with the president or the the budget officer or the legal officer or the head of the automation department. Or outside, it is seeking influence from “significant others,” the people who are significant to people on the

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inside who control the resources. You're always trying to find that kind of influence and apply it to strengthen your program.

Advocacy also relates especially to something we’ve talked about before, to a part of strategic planning, to setting an agenda. When I was writing my sections of my book on advocacy, my wife Sandi read my long introductory chapter on basic advocacy principles and techniques. And she said at one point, “Well, it’s really simple. Advocacy is just figuring out what you need, figuring out who has what you need, and figuring how to get them to give it to you.” That is basically what it is. But a lot of people don't give much attention to that first step: What do you need? That relates to creating a vision for what you want the organization to be and an honest assessment as to where it is now; and then that gap between these becomes the agenda that ordinarily requires effective advocacy. It’s not just: well I want to advocate for this little project and then maybe another project. You have to have a framework and an agenda within it before you can be smart in how you go about your advocacy and for what. Otherwise it’s just taking a few little bites rather than moving along to get the whole loaf.

I learned an awful lot during those five years at NHPRC about advocacy. In part, it was being able to recognize where it wasn’t happening. Who wasn’t able to do it? Who didn’t recognize that it needed to be done? Who didn’t think that it was in their job description to do it? You can find a lot of folks in any organization who say, “Well, we really need to somehow get to be much bigger or to have resources adequate to our present mission. But I don’t know who’s going to do that. I’m hoping the boss does that at some point. Or maybe we’ll get a new governor and he’ll love archives.” So part of building an organization is trying to get more people to recognize the importance of advocacy and to be willing to participate in doing it one way or another just as you go about your work every day.

GESELBRACHT: Now you're making me recall that somewhere along the way you told me that your real interest in any job you approach is in the institution and how to realize its potential and make it a healthy organization based on some clarity of vision and appropriate resources and all of that. I hear you describing that with what you're saying about archival advocacy and I know that you brought that point of view to the Truman Library. I've wondered in the past where it came from because in my experience this was a very unusual way to approach all the questions surrounding the presidential library. I used to think well maybe he learned that at the Harvard School of Government. Now as I listen to you, I think this is something that grew incrementally out of all of these work experiences that you had.

HACKMAN: Absolutely, absolutely. It just came along the way. And much the richest experience was the third one and that was at the New York State Archives. That is where I remained the longest and established and addressed the broadest and most ambitious agenda and achieved the most dramatic results and left the strongest legacy.

I was thinking about this when I was looking at your draft questions. A couple of things became clear to me. It relates to what you always describe as my unique way of looking at an organization. I don't think it’s unique, but perhaps it’s not common in the kinds of organizations that you and I have worked in most of our careers. Also, there’s a negative aspect to it, and that is that I have never had a deep interest in the historical subject matter of any program that I’ve been working with. When I was doing Kennedy oral history interviews, I had to be very interested in the Kennedy Administration and the people and issues around that. So that’s a major exception. When I was the State Archivist of New York, I was never deeply interested in New York history. I read books about it, enough to make

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intelligent conversation and persuade others of the importance of the documentation of this history. But I was never knowledgeable enough to go on a scholarly panel related to issues in New York history. The same is true with the Truman Library. I always have felt that as the leader of an organization my main interest, my preoccupation, needed to be the development of the organization. On other content, you need to know enough to get by. I've never taken the history-related subject matter home with me at night as what I most wanted or most needed to spend most of my time on. Because I haven’t had that interest or curiosity, it’s left me with much more time that I could devote to advancing the organization. I have been very interested in the design and content of exhibits and educational programs rather than scholarly research, perhaps because I can see a more direct impact on a broader audience and on the public visibility and reputation of the organization and those are often very useful to the development of the organization itself.

Another thing I learned about myself came from personality type profiles –- the Myers/Briggs Type Indicator and a couple of other instruments that have been administered in management seminar programs I participated in. Every time these indicated that I had a strong desire to create a framework to operate in, a high interest in “big picture” thinking and in an organized agenda, an intense dissatisfaction with incrementalism, a limited interest or capacity in technical issues, limited empathy for folks who don't think the way I do or who don’t appreciate someone who thinks that way. I was always very ambitious for the program or organization I was involved in, especially if I was the director. The lack of empathy could be a real challenge at times for me as a manager and for some staff members around me. I’ve read enough about these indicators to believe that there’s a good deal of validity in those instruments, that I do come at things from an atypical perspective. The first thing I always wanted to do with an organization was to scout out the whole territory and to somehow draw a big picture of it in which then I can begin to think about an agenda and about strategies to do big things. I don’t have a lot of patience with what I might feel is thinking small. Because of this, along with a lack of patience and empathy, I am far from being a great manager. A good leader, but not always a good manager. I sometimes lose interest in or patience with issues that a good manager needs to deal with.

So learning how to do the things well that my mind and personality also naturally gravitate toward was a gradual process. By the time I got to Truman, for better and for worse, you might say I was fully formed, or however you want to describe it. Maybe just set in my ways would be another description.

GESELBRACHT: You're helping me to understand something that I've been feeling as we’ve talked about all these, from my perspective, steps along the way to your arriving at the Truman Library. That is that in each case, in graduate school, at the Kennedy Library, in your different assignments that you had at NHPRC, there’s a you in the story. There’s something that makes up you that you're describing partly in terms of the Myers Briggs results that create the special character of that part of the story. Somebody else would have had all those experiences you’ve described and it just would have been totally different with completely different outcomes. But there’s something in you that created the situation that developed. I’m thinking to myself that I’m sure, and I imagine you, with your toy fort or toy soldiers or the cowboys and Indians type stuff, all these things I imagine you when you were a child that your mother or your aunt who liked to observe such things could have seen that personality that there just was a you that was going to go through life in this way that we’re describing. No? You're saying no?

HACKMAN: I don't think so. Not at all. I think at that point my parents probably would have

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worried some because I – it wasn’t that I was at all a recluse or didn’t enjoy going to school and with lots of friends. But there were a lot of the things that the people around me did that I had little interest in. When relatives would get together to play cards, if I possibly could get by with going in the other room and reading a book, I might do that. I was not a people person or let’s say a small talk person in the way that small town and extended family culture values highly. So it wouldn’t surprise me – my father died when I was 16 and he was sick a long time – if my parents were worried about how I would fit in. Because they didn’t have the background to see what kinds of things I might do in the future and what kind of characteristics might be valuable to success. Certainly they had very high expectations for my sister and brother and I, but I don't think they would have seen me as having great strengths other than being bright in school, at least enough to do really well in what the nuns at St. Mary’s grade school wanted us to do in the classroom. Basic math and reading and writing, answering by rote the Catechism questions they would drill us in, and being well behaved and respectful.

In college and graduate school, I learned for the first time that I could work incredibly hard. I had not worked hard when I was growing up because I hated the kind of work that there was in front of me. It was only in those jobs that we’ve been talking about where I learned more about what I was interested in and what my strengths and my weaknesses were — enough to be able to make good use of the strengths and downplay the weaknesses. It was just what you said, it was gradual. Which is why I can look back on those experiences and feel so positive about them when I think of them as learning experiences. While I feel I was successful in all of my professional positions, and almost spectacularly so in New York, I don't assess them strictly in terms of the legacy. I also view each as a learning experience and in that way I can relate each to what came next.

GESELBRACHT: Your next position was as Director of the New York State Archives. What made you want to leave a good career at the National Archives to take this position? How did you perceive the challenge of the new job and what were your experiences there that made you into our Truman Library Director, the future Director?

HACKMAN: I left NHPRC for a combination of reasons. Ronald Reagan and his Budget Director, David Stockman, proposed in the Federal Budget for fiscal year 1981 or maybe it was for FY1982 to abolish all funding for NHPRC grants, which was tiny anyway, maybe $4 million for both programs divided 50-50 between Publications and Records. Even more than that budget proposal but related to it was the fact that I was disappointed with the leadership of the National Archives. The National Archives hadn't wanted the R in NHPRC and never could see what I believed was its potential advantage to the National Archives itself. Here you have a grant function in which you can relate to organizations all over the country and through which you can relate to every governor and to the state archivist and a board of sometimes significant folks — and all of those boards could become stronger and more active as advocates over time. And yet the National Archives never seemed to want to even think about this, doesn’t even want to face the challenge of turning that nationwide structure into an advocacy mechanism that could help the National Archives as a whole. They only saw it as a potential drain on their funding for their core programs.

This is similar to my view later on presidential libraries; I could not understand why the Office of Presidential Libraries and the National Archives could never figure out how to take all of those nonprofit support and partner organizations with their many influential board members and bring them together to the extent that they could become a powerful advocacy organization for not only the Office of Presidential Libraries, but also for the National

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Archives. You could have harnessed that group, and the Board of the National Archives Foundation, and the Coalition to Save our Documentary Heritage, and developed stronger advocacy on behalf of the National Archives. At least you could have tried.

In any case, this lack of vision and imagination in the National Archives was one factor in my leaving NHPRC in 1981, because I couldn’t see that getting better. Also, I had no interest in staying around and trying eventually to become the Executive Director of NHPRC. I hoped that Frank Burke would stay there for a good while, but also I had no interest in dealing with all of those historical editors who were scholars preoccupied with funding for their long term editorial projects. I didn’t believe that as much funding should be going to editing projects as to supporting work on historical records around the country. So it seemed to me that in the long-term NHPRC was a place that would frustrate me.

Some background on the New York State Archives: We used to say when I was there that New York was the last state to create a state archives. All through the twentieth century there had been just a staff of a couple of people within the state library; they didn’t even call it the state archives, it was just the archives and manuscript staff of the state library in the State Education Department. After they first passed legislation sometime in the 1970s to create a state archives, not a very strong law, they were going to hire the first state archivist proper. And I went up and talked to the Deputy Commissioner for Cultural Education who would make that selection. I met the people in the state library; they were about as odd as some of the older people in the National Archives when I first went there, and I decided not to apply. A person who did apply and became the first real state archivist in New York was Ed Weldon, and he then stayed for four or five years and then took the job as Deputy Archivist of the United States when Bob Warner became the Archivist of the United States. Ed Weldon had assembled a small but good staff at the new New York State Archives. And it was about the time of the Reagan attack on NHPRC when Ed Weldon moved to the National Archives.

Incidentally, in my papers, which have been deposited at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is the journal that I kept that year, 1981, and I titled it “Journal of a Plague Year.” Out of that Reagan threat, a little coalition formed which began to call itself the Coalition for our Documentary Heritage. It formed around that crisis and later became the core of the advocacy group that eventually helped pass legislation whereby the National Archives was removed from the General Services Administration and became an independent agency as it is today. And I testified on behalf of that legislation after I was in New York before a Senate Subcommittee chaired by Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri.

Anyway, New York seemed to me like a good place to go at that time. The Records Grant Program had just made a series of grants to a small number of states to undertake for the first time a statewide assessment and planning and reporting project. What are the problems? What’s the agenda that needs to be addressed and how—and so on? Most states took those little $25,000 grants and hired a new staff person, put that grant funding all into staffing to doing a survey and then applying the findings to setting priorities. When I went to New York, probably the smartest thing I ever did in my life was to say, "We’re going to do this all with our present staff and with whatever assistance we can scrounge from within the State Education Department. We’re not going to rush it in three or six months; we’re going to do it right. And then we’re going to put all of the grant money into publication of the report. It’s going to be an impressive, handsome report that will get attention and respect, and people will be impressed with the level of work we’re doing." Bruce Dearstyne was the guy who really did yeoman’s work on this project. We put a lot of time, effort,

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resources, and strategic thinking into preparing that report; we involved and engaged and consulted with organizations and key individuals all over the state. And then we communicated the findings and recommendations and engaged the leaders in government and politics and in the archives and records communities. I later wrote a separate article about that project in the Public Historian called “From Assessment to Action in the Empire State.” That report, Toward a Usable Past: Historical Records in the Empire State, is the best single piece of work I ever did anywhere, though of course I had a lot of help from others, and especially Bruce. That report more or less became the agenda for my 14 years in Albany. We accomplished an awful lot of that agenda in the way of new legislation and appropriations and performance and services on archives and records in state and local government and in assisting in development in the non-government sector as well. We consolidated the State government records management program with the State Archives and just really did well overall.

But my real point above was to link NHPRC to New York, because when I went to Albany that planning and assessment grant had just been made. In fact, I had gone up to meet with the New York State Historical Records Advisory Board to talk about what they might do with it. Then I took the New York job and took that little $25,000 grant and we really made a lot out of that by thinking hard about what we wanted to do with it and how. New York state government was no longer in the expansive Rockefeller years. Hugh Carey was the governor when I went to Albany and then Mario Cuomo was elected for his several terms. George Pataki came in as governor just before I left. The New York State Archives was just a great challenge and it presented a great opportunity to take everything I had learned before, especially at NHPRC, about the archival community and archival needs and conditions and archival theory and methods, and so on, and about advocacy to the extent that I had learned something about it, and to apply all of that in a state archives which was very much still in an initial stage of archival development.

We were still very actively identifying and then bringing in the records from the construction of the Erie Canal, the original land survey records, and so on; so many records going back to the Colonial and statehood periods were still out in state agency custody, often in a warehouse or a basement, and in some cases agencies did not want to give up physical custody to important records they had held so long, or records that perhaps they felt might reflect poorly on the agency. Ed Weldon's staff had made a really great start on that identification, survey, negotiation and accessioning process. We also had to do some very basic things like adding lots of new movable shelving and repairing the roof and developing the expertise for a functioning preservation laboratory.

Then we passed comprehensive modern legislation on local government archives and records; we did this by working with local officials and their state associations and their lobbyists to get a strong piece of legislation passed. A second piece of local government records legislation, the Local Government Improvement Fund law, gave us the annual funding to create nine regional offices and to award seven to ten million dollars each year for archives and records program projects in local governments. Then we worked with the Governor’s Office of Management and Productivity to convince the Cuomo Administration that they ought to link the Records Management Program which was then in the Office of General Services — and that OGS cared almost nothing about, were not doing it well, just a warehousing and retrieval operation — to the State’s archival program. They agreed to transfer the records management program and authority to the State Archives and we became the New York State Archives and Records Administration. And we greatly strengthened and expanded the records management function, especially in training and

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technical assistance to state agencies and we built ongoing working relationships with most agencies. Then we secured legislation called The Documentary Heritage Program to make grants and provide technical assistance to non-government repositories statewide. I won't go into any detail on these programs, but we did get a whole lot done during my 14 years in Albany. And l learned a lot about advocacy and promotion and working in a large bureaucracy - the State Education Department was very large.

I had inherited the core of a really strong, professional staff, and we grew that a lot over the years, from just over 20 to over 100 staff positions. We were very aggressive about getting around bureaucratic restrictions in recruiting a strong staff nationally. We worked hard to bring in some highly qualified professional staff and recognized leaders from around the country. We were intensely involved in the archival community locally, regionally, statewide, nationally, internationally. We may have had more international visitors coming to see the New York State Archives and what it was doing in this period than came to the National Archives in these same years. I believe that while I was State Archivist, we had more staff elected as lifetime SAA Fellows than probably any other archives in the country, including the National Archives. We won awards for advocacy, outreach, and publications, and received the SAA's Distinguished Service Award which only goes to one organization in the country and in some years to nobody. So we were intensely involved in the profession. We also were very aggressive in seeking and receiving national grants from NEH and NHPRC. We set up a mechanism under another new piece of legislation, the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, to enable us to raise private money and to control its use, and in the process to create a high powered board that could help the archives as advocates. I believe that by the time I left, the New York State Archives was regarded as the strongest state archives and the most energetic and active leader in government archives in the nation.

During my years in Albany I also became a leader in the archives profession. I was elected to the SAA Council for a four year term and was elected by my fellow Council members to serve on the Executive Committee. I served on several SAA program committees and chaired the committee for the annual meeting in Boston, the best attended to that time. I was the driving force behind the first ever Committee on Goals and Priorities for the Archives Profession. I was made a lifetime Fellow of the Society and the nominations committee selected me to be a candidate for president of the Society, a close election that I lost to Frank Evans. I also wrote significant articles during this period for The American Archivist, History News, The Public Historian, the journal of the International Council on Archives and other journals, and I represented the United States on two international committees of the ICA. So it was a time when I was demonstrating to myself and to others that I had earned a respected reputation among my peers within the professional archives community.

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monthly and made frequent presentations to the Board of Regents Committee on Cultural Education and sometimes to the full board. The Regents were appointed by the State Legislature and had very useful relationships with people in their districts . So every single day was focusing on ambitious program goals, always in terms of how you could accomplish them. Many different parties were either engaged or potentially engaged that we needed to bring to bear on the agenda that we were addressing. Building relationships was very important. And the entire leadership team in the State Archives was active at building those relationships, especially by providing excellent professional services.

On the other hand a highly energetic and highly qualified staff like we built at the State Archives can mean that no one is ever entirely satisfied or happy about anything. Strong staff have high expectations. We were constantly struggling to improve our internal communications, coordination, planning, procedures, priorities and so on. That can be a wearing process where half of the staff are feeling they're not being asked enough for their advice and that others are being asked too much for their advice. Some of these people that I brought in on the staff are notorious in the archival profession as hard chargers with very high expectations for themselves and others, and also outspoken and often discontented. So that was a more intense and demanding experience than I'd had before with a staff.

So when I came to the Truman Library, I was coming out of an experience involving incredible change, rapid growth, constant assessment, thinking, rethinking, revising, strategic planning, intense engagement with what was going on in the field of archives in the country and to a certain extent in the world. The Truman Library culture was very different. It wasn't engaged on any of the archives functions very much with other parts of the profession, even those that might have many similarities with it. It wasn't accustomed to big changes, rapid changes, and it wasn't accustomed to strong, positive experiences other than the very positive feed back the archives staff received from many researchers. I know that the Library's museum staff had wanted to have much stronger permanent exhibits for a very long time and that the Library had not been able to accomplish that. For a long time that had not been a high priority with the leadership in the Library or the Institute. As you know, I felt from my direct personal experience and from observation of many other archival programs, that when you're an archival shop surely you would have procedures and priorities that everybody understood in appraisal and reappraisal, in the systematic creation of excellent finding aids, and that there would be a real preservation administration framework, surely much more than substituting copies of documents on permanent acid-free paper — which I don't think of as a viable long-term approach. So the staff experiences and expectations at Truman were simply different than the environment that I had been in and had helped to create.

I should pause here, Ray, to make clear that while the culture of the Truman Library was different from what I was accustomed to, part of that was because in many ways it was a more mature organization, it had been around for nearly forty years. When I was there, the Kennedy Library was just in the very early stage of development. The Historical Records Program at the NHPRC was new and had not even made its first grant when I arrived. The New York State Archives was new and small and in the early stage of development. So Truman might have been expected to operate in more settled ways and with less sense of urgency. And it is important to me to recognize that I worked at the Truman Library with some of my very favorite colleagues ever, some very talented and dedicated people.

Just off the top of my head, I think especially of you and how helpful you were to me in several capacities over the years, all of them important to me and to the Library, including

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some very complex issues and special projects in collections management and also so many important presentations to groups small and large as we sought to engage and educate key potential supporters. Clay Bauske made a great contribution throughout the renovation and exhibit preparation process, often under frustrating and under-appreciated circumstances. If the new permanent exhibits turned out to his satisfaction, he really deserved them because he was central to all of that. Rhonda Cook was a smart, willing, tireless administrative assistant during almost all of my time at the Library. Day to day life would have seemed impossible without her. Until she resigned after a couple of years, Vicky Alexander was a superb administrative officer and a great source of strength for the Truman Library as a whole. On the Institute staff, Kay Morris and Lisa Sullivan were smart, energetic, well organized, patient, and essential to holding the Institute together during a period of transition and then putting it on a more successful path. Jeffrey Byrne was very effective overall during his several years in staffing the capital campaign and shaping a stronger development operation overall. And there were many other willing and able staff members who would have been a credit to any organization.

After I arrived at Truman, and regardless of whatever internal Library issues I would have liked to dig into more deeply, it didn't take long to conclude that Institute operations and the major renovation initiative were in deep trouble and that unless the situation was addressed effectively I was going to be not only disappointed and frustrated, but also I was going to be part of a huge and very visible failure. So almost all of my energy went to addressing that complex challenge that also involved lots of other people. The exception was when a crisis reared its head elsewhere, like the classified materials issues, which became almost all-absorbing for a period and was as much as anything else what I worried about because who knew what was going to wind up in the newspapers and in the courts. That situation had the potential to compromise everything else, the other crisis that I was dealing with on the renovation project. A continuing public series of charges and countercharges over the management of the classified materials might have easily led some people whose support was critical to conclude, "I don't want anything to do with that organization."

My wife Sandi, as we talked recently about how I got to Truman, was reminding me correctly that there was at least as much push as pull. The pushes were several. One, I'd been in Albany nearly 14 years. We had never liked Albany as a place to live. I had done almost everything I thought that I could do on archives and records progress in the state. There were still a couple of issues remaining and the main one that would need to be addressed over the next five years, decade, and beyond was electronic records and information management. There were technical parts of that in which I absolutely had no interest, and very little ability on either. I just can't get my head around a lot of the technology and information management issues. And 14 years is a long time relative to our record of moving to a new job and a new city every five years before we came to Albany. In 1994-95 our son and daughter had just finished college. I made a list and I have it somewhere of pluses and minuses about taking the Truman job and leaving Albany. The only big negative about leaving Albany was that Sandi had a job as the Director of Operations at the New York State Museum that she was really beginning to like. Then you add to this the fact that the day that I was introduced as the new Director at the Truman Library we found out she had breast cancer. That was the most difficult summer and fall I had ever spent if I looked at it only in terms of the Truman Library and Institute challenges. But for her, it was a terrible time. If you put the two of us together, it was incredibly hard. Kate had just graduated from Williams and in the fall went to New York City and was working herself to death with three jobs. It was just a really hard time for all of us, including Alex who was working in Boston but worried about the rest of us. So that's why I say that there was push. It was time to leave Albany

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particularly for me - and our children had no attachment to Albany at that point either.

GESELBRACHT: Sounds like it.

HACKMAN: On another of your questions, yes I had thought about the Truman job occasionally over the years but there was never really an opening. When I did think about it, and certainly as I did in 1995 when I was ready to leave one thing and go to another, the Truman opening was of interest for a couple of reasons. First, because of the opportunity to return to Missouri where we had aging parents. And second, because I had a sense that the Truman Library was a place that would benefit from stronger leadership than I thought it had had. When I was out there and first interviewed for the Kennedy Oral History Project job, way back in 1966,I had met Phil Brooks, J.R. Fuchs, maybe Milton Perry who was the museum curator at that point, maybe a couple of other people, probably Liz Safly and Phil Lagerquist. Then after I left NHPRC one time I was a consultant for the Missouri State Historical Records Advisory Board on their strategic planning grant, the equivalent of the assessment project that we had done in Albany after I went there. And Ben Zobrist was on that Missouri board, and I was not at all impressed with him. He laughed a lot and was a really nice fellow, everybody liked him, but I couldn't see anything impressive that he was engaged with or contributing to on the planning project. Maybe I had gained some other impressions of Ben and the Library along the way.

Jumping ahead, Bob Warner told me at a conference at the Johnson Library that during his years as Archivist of the United States they had considered several times firing Ben Zobrist as director of the Truman Library, and Bob wrote that to me in a letter as well; that letter is now with my papers at the University of Wisconsin. It was only after I had left the Truman Library that Dick Jacobs also told me that for some time before I arrived, perhaps for years, the Office of Presidential Libraries had regarded the Truman Library as the weakest Library in the system. I don't believe that he gave me any particulars other than poor leadership.

GESELBRACHT: Uh-huh.

HACKMAN: Ray, I'm not sure what else to say about New York. I've already talked too much about it. I learned a lot about strategic planning and advocacy as I said and working in a large agency and in a political environment.

GESELBRACHT: Was there anything else in your experience that was important in creating the person who became our Director in July, 1995? We've talked a lot about how you developed the ideas that you brought to the Truman Library. I of course was part of the NARA culture, it was all that I had known after graduate school. I had been in presidential libraries my entire career, and I'd never seen anybody like you before. I think it took me quite a long time after your arrival just to understand some of the language that you used, what it meant. We've talked quite a bit about how you developed that way of thinking and the language that followed it. But was there anything else in your experience that you think to mention that came with you to the Truman Library that helped to make those very eventful five years in the Library's history?

Do you want to stop here today?

HACKMAN: Yeah.

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GESELBRACHT:   This is Ray Geselbracht. I’m with former Truman Library Director, Larry Hackman, at his home. It is September 3, 2014. This is our second interview session. Larry, how did you first hear that the Director’s position at the Truman Library was open? And when you heard about it, did you know right away that you wanted to apply?

HACKMAN: The answer to the first is I have no recollection of how I heard about it. It could have been anything from reading a notice of the vacancy in the newsletter of the Society of American Archivists to somebody calling me from the National Archives to tell me about it. I just don’t have any recollection. It could have been one of any number of ways. I guess I knew I was interested at that point, interested enough for Sandi and I to take a trip to Kansas City to see whether we felt we would be comfortable living here. I can’t remember whether I talked to anyone at the Library or met with anyone there during that first trip. I don't have the time sequence firmly in my head. So whether I had any conversations with anyone on the staff out here about the job, or even with someone from the Truman Library Institute at that point, or Dick Jacobs who was acting head of the Office of Presidential Libraries at that point, I just can’t remember the sequence. We came out and looked around at the neighborhoods. Maybe we even looked at a few houses at that point just to see what things looked like. On that trip or on the next trip, we looked at several places in Independence. We were not interested really in living in Independence.

At what point I decided to apply for the job, again I’m not sure. I’m sure it wasn’t immediately concluding, "I want that job." It involved some exploration from a family perspective. At some early point, I went down and talked with Dick Jacobs in Washington, met with Donald Dawson who was then the president of the Institute. I drove up to Old Forge, New York where Milton Kayle, a member of the Institute Board, had a summer house on one of the small lakes . And I probably talked to George Curtis and maybe Vickie Alexander at the Library. I can’t remember what stage that was, but I started pumping them for information and asking them to send me copies of reports and so on. Perhaps that came a little later in the sequence.

I talked last time about what tipped the balance and that was that it was just time to move on from the State Archives. I had done everything there that I wanted to accomplish or reasonably could have done. The Truman position was one that had attractions in terms of where it was because our parents were in Missouri. And one of my interests in presidential libraries generally and then Truman in particular was it offering an opportunity to create something like a model program, almost an anti-Kennedy Library model or an other-than-Kennedy Library model sort of thing. I just don't have specific recollections as to what happened and when during this period.

GESELBRACHT: Did you initiate all these meetings with NARA officials and Milton Kayle and others?

HACKMAN: It seems to me that I must have been close to deciding that I was going to pursue the job if I went to Washington to meet with Dick Jacobs. But I think I hadn't firmly decided at that point, I know I hadn't.  And then I think Dick suggested a meeting with Donald Dawson.  He may have told me or I may have found out from talking to Dawson or talking to George Curtis or just from looking at the list of Board members perhaps that there was an Institute Board member in the southern Adirondacks not so far from Albany, Milton Kayle.   It must have

[23]

occurred to me to try to get a different perspective on things because I didn’t learn very much I think from my conversations with Dick Jacobs or with Donald Dawson. I don't think Dick was particularly frank with me at that point about the low opinion that the Office of Presidential Libraries had had of the Truman Library over quite a few years. I'm not sure anyone could tell anything really substantive from talking to Donald Dawson who always spoke in a wildly optimistic fashion. I don't think I felt then, and certainly not later, that the important issues were brought to the table at that point.

GESELBRACHT: And there are, in your papers, notes that you took of some of the conversations that you had had with the NARA officials.

HACKMAN: Good.

GESELBRACHT: And Dawson. And so from what you've said, is it true that different people that you spoke to really did not present to you the situation that you eventually discovered at the Truman Library when you came as Director?

HACKMAN: I don't want to be unfair to those people. To try to be fair to them, they may not themselves have understood the dire situation that the Institute and therefore the Library was in with regard to resources to carry out this major renovation and expansion that they had in mind with this Twenty-first Century Campaign, the $10 million capital campaign that they had undertaken. I'm not sure any of these parties really understood the difficulties that were there in terms of the capacity and organization of the Institute, the lack of sound and sufficient contractual relationships and other controls with the firms and the people they had hired to do the Presidential Exhibition and to help develop educational programs. Probably the Institute just had not had the capacity to recognize or to describe and share or to come to grips with these problems and evaluate and monitor them.  Certainly the Institute leadership was not giving out very frank information to its own Board at that point about what was happening and what wasn't happening.

GESELBRACHT: Did anyone at the National Archives suggest to you some goal that the agency was looking for, that the next Director would execute?

HACKMAN: I don't recall any conversations like that, Ray. This may be my bias toward not looking to the National Archives for much guidance in terms of the way a presidential library should operate or what it should be doing or what conditions were and goals should be. I just don't have any recollection. The National Archives as an agency was in some turmoil at that point because they’d had an Acting Archivist of the United States and an acting head of presidential libraries. It didn't seem to be a time for great clarity or direction.

GESELBRACHT: One would have thought that when the Truman Library had been something of a problem for the National Archives for some while, one would have thought that someone would have said to you that there were these longstanding problems at the Truman Library, and we'd like them to be addressed. But that kind of conversation didn't apparently happen?

HACKMAN: Ray, not that I recall. One of the telling points that I do recall is Dick Jacobs telling me at one point in the process that if I did not take the job, then George Curtis, who was the Acting Director and longtime Deputy, would be appointed as the Director of the Truman Library. That didn't indicate to me that they were going to go to a lot of trouble to make sure that they had a strong, experienced leader at the Truman Library because there were major problems that absolutely had to be dealt with. That possible appointment doesn't convey that to me.

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Perhaps George was the only other name on the list of eligibles who was remotely acceptable.

GESELBRACHT: To what degree did the Truman Library Institute as distinct from the Truman Library figure in your thinking at this time? Just looking ahead for a moment, the Institute would be of great importance to you when you got into your directorship. Was this apparent to you as you were approaching, beginning this new position?

HACKMAN: I would say it was largely an unknown. I’m sure from my conversations with Milton Kayle, who became a good partner, supporter, friend, he would have given me some indication that there were some challenges. But I don't think I spoke with anyone at that point who really gave me a good feel for what I was walking into. No one had really rethought at that point how the Institute could be restructured - or maybe no one had come to grips with the fact that it really did need to be restructured in new bylaws, new leadership, new membership, new ways of operating and so on. I think they were hoping desperately that within the present structure somehow they could pull off a major fundraising campaign without making those kinds of fundamental changes. Until the fall and winter and then the following spring after I became Director, and after I had worked with those two committees that Donald Dawson had appointed without clear charges at all, there had been no prior serious, informed, thoughtful discussions about both conditions and needs and of options for how to address them.  There had been no consideration of a radical restructuring of the Institute. I feel sure that that kind of discussion had not taken place.

GESELBRACHT: The Director of the Truman Library had for a very long time, from the beginning of the existence of the Institute, had the rather odd title as being the Secretary of the Institute. Did you have a firm idea in mind about what your relationship as Director was going to be to the Institute?

HACKMAN: I'm sure I didn't immediately when I took the job. That evolved in the months to follow. I didn’t necessarily find Secretary a surprising title, and it wouldn’t have led me to believe that the Library Director hadn't played a central role in the operations, agenda setting, and that sort of thing for the Institute. It became obvious to me pretty quickly that it needed to be made clear that it was the Library Director who should be the coordinator of programs for the Institute as well as the Library because there was sort of a vacuum, it wasn’t clear who was supposed to be coordinating some things. Then eventually a few years later there was the change where the Library Director (myself) became also President of the Institute, and the Institute created the new position of Chairman of the Board.  That arrangement seemed to me then, seemed to me at the time that I resigned, still seems to me the ideal arrangement for a really good partnership between a Library and its nonprofit support partner. But for that to work, you have to have a pretty strong Library Director who has the confidence of not only the Library but also of the board and staff of the nonprofit partner, and also of the National Archives. All three have to feel that that is appropriate and will be effective.

GESELBRACHT: For the Director to be the President?

HACKMAN: Right, or whatever title it would be, the chief operating officer.

GESELBRACHT: What else did you do to prepare for taking up your new position?

HACKMAN: I think I did what I've done always when I've changed positions which is just try to obtain as much information as I can, from both written materials and from talking to people who are key actors, regarding whatever that new position is going to be and what will be needed for

[25]

the organization. I'd have to go back to my notes probably, and there are a lot of those at the Library I know, to understand how soon some of the major changes that I made or encouraged after I got there were in my head. I usually do a lot of list making and note taking - and a lot of times in those days these were just handwritten notes. When I have gone back to look at those notes, I could see at least the germ of things that then happened later. But I don't have detailed recollections.

GESELBRACHT: When you came to the Truman Library still a young man you'd already had at least three important careers. Did you think about how long you intended to be at the Truman Library, some idea of the kinds of things you wanted to accomplish, and how long you thought you wanted to stay?

HACKMAN: I used to say, but I wonder whether I meant it, that I had planned to stay three years, and that I then stayed five in order to put the campaign and the plans and the process for the renovation, including the exhibits and educational program, on a solid footing. But when I ask myself about that, well at three years I wouldn’t have been fully eligible to retire from the National Archives or the federal government. Certainly I wasn’t looking to stay for the long-term. I was looking to stay long enough to develop a presidential library to the point that I could take considerable satisfaction and pride in leaving it in a condition that I thought would be strong for the future. But I also wanted it to provide a good strong example for other presidential libraries, especially older presidential libraries, as to what they could be in terms of the things that I cared about: balanced interpretation in exhibits that really engaged the public, that weren’t worshipful and fawning about the president and his administration; an educational program that would push other presidential libraries also to think harder and more ambitiously about what a good educational program really could be.  I probably didn’t have a firm date in my own mind on how long I would stay.

GESELBRACHT:  But you mentioned three years as something that is in mind, that perhaps that’s the kind of time period you were thinking about. I should say that I’m just coming up on 40 years of service in the National Archives. It was your habit to meet with me and others, the other managers on your staff periodically, maybe once a week even, just one-on-one type meetings to just talk over program activity. I remember you fairly early in our relationship said something to me that indicated you were maybe looking forward to leaving the Library. As someone who was a lifer in this, I had a terrible time understanding why you would want to do that, but I understand that one has an opportunity for different careers as you're describing.

HACKMAN: Well I'd been a hard charger for a long time. It could be that there was simply some burnout. Sandi has reminded me, my wife has reminded me that one of the selling points that I tried to present to her on this move to the Truman Library was that this was going to be a much easier job than the jobs that I had undertaken before.  Those had been, for thirty years, to take new or fairly new programs and really bring them to life. I ask myself whether that was something that I was using to persuade my wife to think that I wouldn’t bring so much work home at night and be so preoccupied with work life or whether I was trying to fool myself — or whether it was more an expression of how little I really knew about what I was getting into at that point, not so much about the Library but about the Institute and the campaign for funds and the whole coordination and control of the renovation project.

GESELBRACHT:   I remember one of our meetings when I could tell very easily that it was not a good time for you and that maybe you had had a bad night. I can remember once when I came in for the meeting, and you asked me how I was. I said, "Well, I’m okay, but I couldn't sleep very well last night. I only slept five or six hours." You said to me, "I slept one hour."  And you said,

[26]

"The night before, I slept two hours."

HACKMAN: That was surely an exaggeration and it must have been really early on because when I first got to the Library — [redacted] — I was living for awhile in a Howard Johnson’s in Independence and there were some really hard times. I was getting up super early in those early days and coming to the Library very early in the morning and staying pretty late at night and taking work home. So that would have been so for the early months in particular.

GESELBRACHT: I remember I think I asked the question, "Did you think that the Truman Library job would be maybe a little easier than what you had done in Albany?" And you said yes, and I said, "But it didn’t work out that way?" You said no.

How did you come to attend the Truman Library Institute’s Board meeting on May 6, 1995? What happened there? What were your thoughts and feelings during the meeting? What did you say to Mrs. Hackman when you came back to New York?

HACKMAN: I am assuming, Ray, that it was almost certainly the proposal of Dick Jacobs, the Acting Director of the Office of Presidential Libraries. And I feel that the National Archives had probably cleared it with Donald Dawson, the President of the Institute or someone - that it would make sense since the Institute then met only once a year and for a short time - for me to come and be introduced as the new Director by the then Acting Archivist of the United States, Trudy Petersen. Whether that was a way for the National Archives to say things will get better or get straightened out, I’m not sure. I imagine it was just a matter of timing because I had just accepted the job, and the Institute wasn’t going to meet again for a year. So it probably just made sense to everyone that they trot me out and introduce me as the new Director and a native of Missouri. With Donald Dawson, every time he talked about me, my main qualification was that I was a native of Missouri! 

Anyway, I had no precedent in working with the Institute or knowing the members or how they operated or what the conversation usually was like. It would overstate it to say that I was stunned or shocked or in despair at this meeting. But it was a surprising meeting in the sense that so little information of substance was provided to Board members by the President or by Francis Heller. There were two Vice Presidents then I believe. Francis Heller held both positions and chaired two or three committees and, unbeknownst to most of the Board, was also on a retainer from the Institute for his services in a sort of secretariat role. Very little information was presented at the meeting about much of anything, and it was mostly optimistic or positive reporting about how things were going.  What I most recall is just vigorous criticism implied in the questioning from Senator Tom Eagleton who had been on the Board for some time by then. I know from looking at the minutes of earlier meetings that he had earlier raised questions about how the Institute’s money was being used, even for the long established research support programs. Then Margaret Truman Daniel made some extremely negative comments. I can't remember the particulars of what her comment was even about or whether it was just a general expression of dissatisfaction and discontent which would have fit certainly with her personality, whether there was any real substance to it or not. So I left feeling there was discontent at least from a couple of key people, but that there was not much information provided or much encouragement of detailed discussion of the type that might have led to any resolution or given people greater confidence in terms of what was going on. I'm sure I didn’t go away from that meeting feeling, wow, I don't have to worry about the Institute or the fundraising.

GESELBRACHT:       That was my seventh Institute Board meeting, and in memory, it’s like being present at the Trinity Test in New Mexico in 1945. What had always been - except for

[27]

Eagleton's presence I think in the prior meeting in 1994, I think he got up and walked out if my memory is right. That was in '94. He said something to the effect that this Board really has no idea what it’s doing with its fundraising; this is an irresponsible report. And he just got up and walked out. That was shocking enough, but in 1995 it was as if the whole meeting was like that. I remember the man sitting next to me was the Chancellor of the University of Kansas, and he challenged Dr. Heller who was a faculty member at the University of Kansas. He said something like: well you talk about this education committee that reviews all these grant requests; I don't think there is any committee. And a very strange conversation followed after that. At any rate, it was just like the whole settled world of the Truman Library with respect to the Institute, the work they did together, was just coming apart, it was coming apart.

HACKMAN: I suppose I should regard that in retrospect as obvious evidence that things really did need to change, that they really did need to open up, that I could play a very useful role in that if nothing else. And you know that I did begin soon to do a lot of that, as a provider of frank opinions backed up by a lot of information at the levels that the Institute had not been accustomed to receiving before. That was a pretty easy thing and a natural thing to change and it helped build a base of confidence and respect in me as well. It also began to educate, if you will, some of the board members and prepare the way for a vigorous exchange of ideas and then some substantial action within the next 12 months. The crucial changes were made about a year later.

GESELBRACHT: One of the things that happened in that May 1995 board meeting was that Trudy Peterson, who was the Acting Archivist of the United States at the time, was at the meeting. She rose and gave a brief speech to introduce you as the incoming Director, then also to give an appreciation of the work that longtime Assistant Director, George Curtis, had done. But clearly it was an attempt from the agency head to make the intrusion of this new person and the non-selection of the longtime Assistant Director as graceful as it could be. Did Dick Jacobs or anyone else at NARA explain to you why they wanted you rather than George Curtis?

HACKMAN: Not that I recall, but I understood. Just to take those people: Trudy Peterson was super active, a very active leader in the archival community nationally and internationally, and Dick Jacobs, who had been active in the Society of American Archivists and so on. They knew my reputation at NHPRC and in the professional associations and especially in New York and that there was an established and respected reputation for not only strong leadership in organizations but also strategic thinking and ambitious thinking.  I don't know how much Trudy knew George Curtis, Dick perhaps knew him better, but they recognized that while George might have been a very competent Deputy he was unlikely to be an agent of substantial change, that he was unlikely to be able to do that just by experience and manner.  I think that’s part of the problem that people have when they stay almost all of their career in a single institution. Either they are the obvious choice to be the next Director or they're the obvious choice not to be Director at that point.

GESELBRACHT: But it’s interesting from what Jacobs had told you earlier, you were their preferred candidate to be Director. But if you had stepped aside, not taken the position, they were perfectly content to make George Curtis the Director.

HACKMAN: I didn't say, Ray, that I believed they were perfectly content. You know the Civil Service selection system as well as I do. If you get to the end of a process and the number one candidate doesn’t take the job, you're faced with a choice - in a time where there were issues at the Truman Library - of having an acting Director and not knowing whether you were going to get stronger candidates but understanding all of the time and effort it will take to repost the

[28]

position and to do all of that process again. So you might just say for the time being we’re going to muddle through. I don't know how they thought about that. I think what I said to you earlier when we were chatting is simply that it indicated to me that the National Archives wasn’t necessarily prepared to treat the Truman Library as something that was such a challenge that they really needed to ensure that there would be somebody there who would bring about major change. It may be, Ray, that the National Archives, no more than I did coming in, didn’t really perceive the extent of the problem on the renovation campaign or the potential for some solutions through substantial changes.

GESELBRACHT: All right, first day of the job was July 3, 1995. Your second day on the job was a holiday. In that, you did better than your successor as Director, Michael Devine, because his first day on the job was a holiday.

HACKMAN: Well all I would say is that the holiday was no holiday for me or the Library because the big event of the year in those days for the Truman Library was their Fourth of July celebration with lots of music and games and fireworks and a huge area-wide audience and valuable publicity. So the day that I was sworn in, July 3, seemed to me helter-skelter, kind of last minute preparations, lots going on, volunteers running up, down, left, and right. Worry, worry, worry over whether things would come off okay the next day. I was going to be the emcee for all of that on my second day on the job. What I most remember is getting up to introduce Congresswoman Karen McCarthy as the lead speaker at some point during the program and the heavens opening up with lightning, thunder, and rain crashing down. I believe we had to move some of the program into the auditorium. I'm not certain how we got through that, but anyway it was a mostly successful day with some weather issues. It was quite an introduction to being Director of the Library.

GESELBRACHT: You mentioned to me in some notes that you sent me recently that your different experiences before you came to the Truman Library had resulted in what you called your settled approach in undertaking the management of an institution. Could you just quickly go through these elements? They're from the notes that you sent me prior to this interview. They're on page three.

HACKMAN: Well in the list of elements I sent you I was trying to recall how I generally approach things. Do you want me to talk about every one of these?

GESELBRACHT: I just thought you might go quickly through them. They're not in the Oral History Interview at this point. They're just in some notes you sent to me.

HACKMAN: Well one of them was a strategic planning framework. When I arrived it clearly was too soon for a formal strategic planning process. That’s not what was most needed. At first I was just trying to get opinions and evaluations in a wide variety of ways from inside the Library and from outside and to form relationships and to try out ideas.

GESELBRACHT: We'll talk more about these different things like the strategic planning as we get into the time that it was done. But I’m just thinking that this was something in your mind that you were going to go through these different stages as you became involved in your directorship.

HACKMAN: Well maybe we talked some about this last time. I'm sure we’ll come back to it. Just by personality, I can't operate without developing some framework within which I can put all of the strategies and the agenda and so on. So even though we didn’t begin strategic planning

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maybe for a couple of years in a formal sense, that's what was happening with me in all of that note gathering and conversations before I got there. I was trying to develop some kind of framework that I could begin to put things in. One of the other headings there I think was regular communication with staff by face-to-face meetings and written communication. You might recall that one of the first things I did was ask to meet with every single person on the staff and to ask them to write something for me in advance.  I promised that nobody would ever see those, and I destroyed them at some point. But I was asking people what they thought of the Library, what they thought its strengths and weaknesses were, and what the major changes were that they thought were needed. I found that a useful process, and it also told me a good deal about the Library staff.  If I recall correctly most of the Library staff didn't think that major changes were needed. Most of them felt that this was the best presidential library on earth and I was really  fortunate to be its Director. I didn't find that I recall a lot of thinking about the whole organization but mostly, and it's natural, thoughts about the parts that individuals worked in and were most interested in and involved in.

GESELBRACHT: And you also typically would go outside the organization to get some independent advice as part of the approaches that you mentioned?

HACKMAN: Sure, always doing that. We hired, I've forgotten the name of the marketing firm, the woman who headed it, to do a study of what people thought of the Truman Library. It was a much more expansive report than that and it had many recommendations in it. But what I recall so strongly was that it basically said after surveys, focus groups, and whatever, the conclusion was people were entirely neutral about the Truman Library. They didn't like it, they didn't dislike it, they really didn’t know much about it at all. And then I sought analysis and recommendations from some other consultants as well. But we can talk about that I assume down the line.

GESELBRACHT: Just at this point, foreshadowing, what's going to come? This is just the way that you did business and consulted with client groups. You undertook advocacy to find the resources you were going to need. You worried about building and maintaining credibility in the governance chain, finding allies, taking initiatives to impress the public and thus key decision makers, building momentum and excitement. We’ll talk more about the way these things became part of the Truman Library's history as we go through. As I go through this list, I can remember some things that happened. Although I learned about the approach by living through the five years. Maybe at the end of that time I could say, okay, at the beginning there was this.

HACKMAN: Yeah, well I probably had never written down this precise list before and probably every year if I had written it down, it would have changed some in terms of what was emphasized. But the main point is that I’d had enough experience in other organizations by this time to have something that seemed to me something like a toolkit I could draw on — ways of thinking and approaching things. That simply makes me recognize how fortunate I had been in the variety of experiences that I had had before I came to Truman.  And this rich mixture was unusual for someone who had spent a lot of time working in the archival community and directing archives organizations. Ray, this is all best discussed in my chapter in a book Leadership and Administration of Successful Archival Programs. This was published in 2001 by Greenwood Press and edited by Bruce Dearstyne.  My chapter title was "Ways and Means: Thinking and Acting to Strengthen the Infrastructure of Archival Programs." It was later published in slightly different form as a tech leaflet by the American Association for State and Local History.  That, plus the introductory chapter in the book I edited later for SAA on advocacy covers just about everything I think I knew about developing organizations, especially archives.

GESELBRACHT:       You already mentioned that what you found about the Library staff was that

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they were just extremely positive about the Library, and I was part of that myself. Who were the managers and other staff people with who you would work most closely? Can you say something about each one of these?

HACKMAN: No. I don't think it’s useful to do that beyond what I said in our first interview. Last time I tried to contrast the organization that I had come from in terms of its professional engagement and outside activities and so on, and how different that was from Truman.  And probably from almost any presidential library.

GESELBRACHT: Let's move to the Institute. What did you find when you arrived in terms of the Institute's staff?

HACKMAN:  I suppose you could say the chief of staff was Francis Heller. He came over from Lawrence relatively frequently. I had a lot of meetings with Francis and George, trying to understand things and just talk about what to do. I don't have detailed recollections of those meetings. I'm sure notes are in my files at the Library. I don't think those meetings were where I did most of the useful thinking about the Institute.

There was a Development Director, Phil Fleming, who came from California, from Los Angeles, I believe. I’m not sure how he had been hired. He probably would have been perfectly satisfactory in some jobs. This one was almost out of his control when I arrived in the sense that there was almost no one that he could turn to on the Institute Board for what you would expect - which were lead gifts and strong, active leadership of a capital campaign committee. There was such a committee, and it's a mystery to me how it had evolved. At one point John Horton who was married to Margaret Truman Daniels' maid of honor, Drucie Snyder, the daughter of Truman's former secretary of the Treasury, John Snyder.  Drucie's husband, John Horton, seemed to have become the co-chair of the capital campaign committee even though he wasn't on the Institute Board, and I don't know whether anyone actually asked him to do that. But my point was in terms of Phil Fleming.  The Institute didn’t have a kind of traditional capital campaign operation where the lead gifts or at least very substantial gifts came first from your own Board.  At the time I arrived they had adopted finally a strategy of holding large fund raising events I believe in New York City, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Phil was supposed to basically organize those on his own, and that's what he was trying to do to raise some substantial money that would make the campaign a success. I don't know at what point it's appropriate to talk about that strategy and how it worked out, but we should talk about that at some point.

The other staff person at that point was Kay Morris, kind of the administrative officer, administrative assistant, I don't remember what her title was. She was extremely competent, very well organized, very good with budgets and financial analysis and financial reporting and so on. I found her as time went by a really essential staff person in terms of analysis and extremely helpful, quietly competent, and someone I really leaned on over the years.

GESELBRACHT: And from what you've told me she was someone who was capable of some critical thinking and some original thinking with respect to telling you what she saw with respect to the Institute’s operations?

HACKMAN: I don't remember particulars, but I thought that she gradually became more perceptive and forthright in a broader sense. When I asked for opinions, she could provide them in a thoughtful way.  I can't recall exactly when Lisa Sullivan joined the staff, assisting Kay Morris, but she was also very competent and helpful.

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GESELBRACHT: What about the members of the Board? As you became familiar with the Board, which of them were important to you?

HACKMAN: Well the ones who became important early on were Milton Kayle, Beth Smith, Shawsie Branton, and Joe McGee.  Those four stand out just because they really worked with me very closely through the first fall and winter and early spring in putting together reports and recommendations from the two committees. They were important to me because they were engaged and serious, but they were also very receptive to my ideas.  We had good exchanges in those committees and then I would go away and do a lot of drafting, bring something back to them to obtain their approval or to tweak things a bit. I think we worked really well in that way together.

There were other Board members who were prominent and concerned and I know I am forgetting some who were especially helpful. Jonathan Kemper was outspoken and asked hard questions and was very hard to please. This was especially in the period when Donald Dawson was still the President and Francis Heller was still involved. There was very little action on the Board as a whole other than these two committees and an occasional meeting of the fundraising or development or capital campaign committee, whatever they called it at that point. This was co-chaired by James Nutter and perhaps by Shawsie Branton, and John Horton was very involved. I don't recall the particulars of those meetings except they didn't seem to be very productive because other than planning those major big city events not much was going on.

Ray, when I think about it, the long and the short of it is that in the initial months, the important things that were going on with the Institute were the work of those two committees and preparing drafts for discussion at a spring retreat. Another important thing that was going on was my reports to the full Board including especially my October '95 "State of the Library" report to them, just giving them an overview of what I thought I found at that point and some of the things that needed to be addressed. And then just communicating with the Institute on a more regular and detailed basis as to what was going on. That fits with one of those strategies that we had on my list which is just building confidence and building interest and engagement so that you had something to work with to address important challenges. With the Institute, it seems to me that whole first year really was doing that and getting to the point that they would support major change.

On the negative side, as it turned out, were the two major fundraisers, one in Washington in October of 1995 and one in Los Angeles the following June.  These were extremely ambitious, very successful as social events with all of the former Presidents in Washington and the most impressive group of participants and speakers that you could imagine in Los Angeles as well. Each event raised about a million dollars but each spent about $900,000 to raise the million - because cost controls were so poor. That’s why I say "poor Phil Fleming" because he was caught with having to carry out so much responsibility on these things without either good independent counsel or sufficient oversight from the Institute leadership or board.  So he was at the mercy of some very expensive consultants to arrange for these very glamorous high powered events.  As a result, during that first year, it was exposed that that strategy of big events with Phil as Development Director was not going to be the solution, that we had to come up with some other approaches that were more practical and more promising.

GESELBRACHT: What were the two Institute committees that you mentioned?

HACKMAN: I couldn't tell you the names of them, but if I had the exact names they would not tell you much.  One of them I believe Dawson had named the "survey committee."  I believe he

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may have appointed it at the 1995 annual meeting as a way to mollify those who raised concerns about the overall state of the Institute and its campaign.  I can't remember whether it retained that name. I’d have to go back and look at the files to see what the names were. I couldn’t tell you at this point which of those people I mentioned were on which committee or who the other members were. Beth Smith who taught nonprofit management courses at the University of Missouri, Kansas City was very engaged in the discussions of restructuring the Institute and the bylaws and the nominations process and related matters.  I loved the fact that she was so engaged and so positive and supportive. I thought some of her preoccupations with process on governance were a bit excessive or maybe a little naïve. They were classic textbook kinds of approaches as to how an ideal nonprofit organization should operate, but maybe not always the crucial things this organization needed in a crisis to face.

Joe McGee had been deeply involved with the Institute for many, many years, some as treasurer. He was one of the most conscientious, positive, engaged people that you could imagine, and he was very flexible and open to change.  He saw the need. I found him so helpful and such a good friend. He worked closely and well with Kay Morris on matters relating to finance and budget. Milton Kayle was in some ways the most influential with the Board because he was a former Truman staff member and a New York lawyer; he was someone that Dawson and Heller couldn’t simply ignore; and he was very supportive. He had quite a bit of experience on the boards of other educational and nonprofit organizations, a lot of good ideas. He was probably, in terms of the overall strategies for change, the person that I worked most closely with. Shawsie Branton was also extremely helpful and supportive and she was very knowledgeable about relationships within Kansas City, including those of other Institute board members.  She was very helpful in thinking about a better nominations process and about new members of the board.

GESELBRACHT: What was the nature of the recommendations made in these reports from the two committees?

HACKMAN: I won't remember the details, but…

GESELBRACHT: I mean just the spirit, what were they advising?

HACKMAN: Well it was a two-stage approach - which we felt we had to have. The first stage was for the two committees to identify the issues and problems faced by the Institute and to outline potential solutions. That's why we called a full board retreat, so that people could get used to chewing on those issues and would feel that they participated in the discussions as to how to address them. I cannot remember whether we framed hard recommendations going into that discussion meeting or whether we presented options.  I’m sure the first thing we did was send out the reports of those two committees, and they had recommendations in them, or at least alternatives.  And then we organized this retreat around maybe some broad topical areas with people around tables considering them and reacting to our findings and suggestions. I think the reaction to our reports and suggestions was very positive overall. Then I took those back and then put them into an action form with firm recommendations for action, probably with formal language for the many changes to by-laws. I'm pretty sure we worked with legal counsel, probably John Eccles at Lathrop and Gage, to review those and help with drafting. I believe it was in a May full Board meeting that all these were voted on.

I don't recall much disagreement at that point. The proposed changes that caused me some nervous concern were how would the people who were representing the universities, mostly the academic representatives from the presidents of these nine Midwestern universities, how would

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they react to their ex officio seats on the Board being abolished. And how would Donald Dawson and Francis Heller react to these organizational changes - which basically said to the world that the emperor has no clothes, things aren't working the way they are, we haven't been getting the kind of leadership or staffing that we need, and so we need to have a new nomination process and other structural and process changes, and a change in membership and leadership on the board. One key strategy during that period leading up to the formal board meeting was that I drafted a letter for her to sign and send to each board member simply saying, "I strongly endorse the recommendations that are made from the work of these two committees."

GESELBRACHT: Who to sign, Larry?

HACKMAN: Margaret Truman Daniel. And I believe that letter helped reduce the likelihood of any direct challenge from Donald Dawson or Francis Heller or others to the proposed changes.

GESELBRACHT: Now the retreat you're mentioning just for the record was in January of 1996, originally scheduled for November, '95 but there was a government shutdown. Oh, no, I’m sorry, I take it back.

HACKMAN: It was March.

GESELBRACHT: I'm sorry, that was a different retreat.

HACKMAN:    Right. The one in January was to bring together a variety of educators to discuss the development of an educational program, including a possible decision center or learning center of some sort.

GESELBRACHT: March, 1996.

HACKMAN: Right.

GESELBRACHT: So the Institute Board retreat was March, 1996.

HACKMAN:    Right.

GESELBRACHT: And then the Board meeting that followed up on the recommendations was in May of 1996.

HACKMAN: Right. I believe it was probably between the two meetings that Margaret Truman Daniel signed without change the letter that I had drafted for her that we then sent out to all Board members. Most of that, Ray, because there wasn't any other opposition likely, was increasing the challenge for Dawson and Heller to come out and say, "Well we oppose these recommendations."  My recollection is that in the retreat discussions there were really no strong dissents from what these committees were bringing forward for discussion. Again, there might have been some tweaking but there was pretty enthusiastic reception to those.

GESELBRACHT: Did you have reason to think that Dawson and Heller might oppose the recommendations?

HACKMAN: I don't think I had anything other than to think that it would be human nature for them to feel somewhat disrespected and somewhat isolated by these reports which called for

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really substantial changes in structure and process and membership and implied a change in leadership as well.

GESELBRACHT: Now how do you explain the fact that this is in March and May of 1996, so let’s just say a year before this or so, there was no apparent felt need for drastic change in the Institute. That at least until the May 1995 Board Meeting, the Institute let's just say at least on the surface was fairly content with itself. I mean it’s hard to say where the consciousness of the Institute is. But there wasn't any movement for the kind of change that was being discussed during this retreat that I know of. So then you come to this period of time, and there’s a very orderly, and largely as you're describing it uncontroversial, process among Institute Board members to drastically change this. Now how does one get from the first condition to the second? What made a difference? What made it happen?

HACKMAN: Well I would say there were a number of factors. I think part of that was the Institute Board understanding more about what conditions really were. That was in my State of the Library Report in October or so and in the fundraising consultant's report, though perhaps that came later. I can't remember when that came. It was just educating them more, informing them more about what conditions really were, putting out reports on how much we had spent last year and how much had come in, and how much the cost overruns were on the first phase of the renovation in the White House Gallery area, and of the failure from a financial point of view of the big Washington event in October of 1995. So part of it was just laying a background of more information and putting things in front of them that they almost had to face up to rather than  get by by maybe just complaining silently that "we're not finding out very much."

I believe part of why there wasn't earlier discontent was because the Institute really consisted of several clusters of members who didn't share much in common. There were the representatives of the universities who cared about historical research and maybe funds for their students or colleagues or whatever, not illogical at all, but they really weren't invested in the museum or new exhibitions or education programs for high school students. So that was one cluster. And then there was another cluster of old Truman people, and most of them were not heavily engaged or in a position to be very helpful. Then there was a small but significant cluster of Kansas City people who were mistrustful, who didn’t think that they had been getting information, didn’t frankly - I'll just use [redacted] as an example but I suspect it extended to others - they didn't have much confidence in the museum staff of the Library and, matter of fact, had overruled their selection of a Kansas City exhibit design firm and had pushed the process in which Chermayeff-Geismar/MetaForm was selected as the designer.  I did not understand this lack of confidence except perhaps some board members felt that there had been a very long period of inaction and couldn’t appreciate why.  And, as we discussed earlier, there was strong discontent expressed by Senator Eagleton and Margaret Truman Daniel which must have been shared by others.

That probably doesn't add up to answering your question. Obviously, and it sounds very self-serving, but the critical thing that changed was a new Director who took the responsibility to demonstrate that there really were significant problems, and to describe them in a detail that they hadn't been described in before, and to bring to the Board's attention new problems they had never focused on.  For example, we were paying a substantial monthly fee to an educational consultant but we didn’t have anything close to a plan to share with the board or the world as to what our educational program should be. We have a demonstration phase for fundraising purposes of our museum renovation, but it has large cost overruns, and it’s probably not going to convince people to give big bucks to the campaign. 

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GESELBRACHT: This is the so-called White House Gallery?

HACKMAN: Right.

GESELBRACHT: Around the Oval Office and "Buck Stops Here" sign?

HACKMAN: And the architectural features and so on in that whole area. So it was a combination of exposing conditions to them and then working with those two committees to say not only is change needed, but also here are some possible ways to change these things.

GESELBRACHT: Another thing that was happening, clearly was your interest in informing the Board about the conditions of things. This hadn't been done before, not in the way that you did, telling the truth rather than a very brief, sunny synopsis of things. That energized some of the Board members anyway, but also it sounds like part of what happened was that as you mentioned the Board kind of broke into different clusters. The cluster that rose in importance was the Kansas City group.

HACKMAN: They did over the next couple of years, and it's logical that they were the most engaged group because they lived here. The education program would affect their children or grandchildren. What a new and world class Truman museum represented to the community and to the world was of interest to them in terms of the reputation of their community and attracting visitors to it, and so on and so on. They had an incentive, even though I suspect they had not articulated that as a group. So when they saw people paying more attention to what was going on…. It’s not that I began all that. Barkley and Evergreen had already been hired by the Institute to help put on the Fourth of July celebrations and to do more advertising and getting attention to the Library. Those were positive things that you could build on. It's just that they were also scary if what you were doing was over-promising something that was going to crash and be an embarrassment to these people.

 Another person I haven't mentioned on the Board, and I probably didn't know very well early on, was Jim [James B] Nutter. Jim Nutter had been the guy on the Board who was responsible for going to the political leadership in Jeff City that he knew and had contributed to and getting them to support what?, an initial million dollar appropriation which gave a big boost and was paying for some of the early stuff. That was before I arrived. So he was certainly an important member. I should have a list to work from. I don't recall how early some other Kansas City leaders came on like Morton Sosland and Henry Bloch, I don't have the sequence in my head.

GESELBRACHT: Did you worry at all about possible problems that might develop down the way a bit, if not immediately, about having a Board that was too much composed of Kansas City people, Kansas City area interests?

HACKMAN: No, I didn't worry about that.  We had in the bylaws that there always needed to be a couple of Truman scholars. In the period that I was here, we brought on the board some very prominent members from around the country. I didn’t see any reason why you couldn’t continue that. It seemed to me that it would be very logical for people in Kansas City -  I know this is the case - if you could come up with prominent people from around the country, they would think that reflected well on them and their community. So having people like Cyrus Vance, even in his dotage, and David Stowe, Jr., the guy who was CEO of John Deere, there was a smattering of such people on the Board who you could use as examples. By working with a nominating committee, you could keep that going. If you let a vacuum develop as happened after I left, and the Kansas City people came to disrespect the Library Director and weren't receptive to much of

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anything that came from him, I mean that's basically what happened, Ray. The Kansas City members filled a vacuum. Tom McDonnell and others brought people onto the Board who they thought would be effective and who they had worked with on other big projects and liked. Perhaps they’ve forgotten the value of having perspectives from strong and prominent people who have other kinds of experiences and come from much further away. That didn't have to happen.

GESELBRACHT: Was another part of the fundraising strategy that was associated with Phil Fleming and those he worked with to raise money internationally?

HACKMAN: There was much talk, mostly before I came, some after I was there, coming especially from John Horton, probably also Donald Dawson, that you could raise money from those nations that were beholden to Truman and the Truman Administration, the Marshall Plan countries and Israel in particular.  They did raise I believe half a million or a million dollar gift from a prominent philanthropist who had a very high interest in Israel. I thought he had a Coke distributorship in Israel. There was much talk of how that strategy would work. Maybe that goes all the way back to what you find in the Institute Board discussions back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s when they decided there was no need to have a feasibility study on fundraising, just go out and start it and the money will start flowing. Maybe even then that was part of someone’s idea that we can raise big bucks internationally. But if there was a potential for that, they never had the pieces in place to be able to actually pull it off.

There were some funds raised from foundations. The Starr Foundation in New York I think had given a substantial early gift and then they gave another one later while I was there. The Institute had raised some money from a guy in Los Angeles

GESELBRACHT: The Pauley Foundation.

HACKMAN: The Pauley Foundation. It wasn’t that they hadn't raised money, wasn't that they hadn't tried. It was just that unless they went to organizations that had a natural affinity with Truman, they did not have the pieces in place in terms of a capital campaign to go very far.

GESELBRACHT: You mentioned the White House Gallery and area as a demonstration project. The primary purpose of it was to re-replicate the Oval Office replica at a higher level of authenticity and then to change quite drastically the area outside the Oval Office.

HACKMAN: Right.

GESELBRACHT: From what was just an unattractive corridor.

HACKMAN: Right.

GESELBRACHT: Into this White House architecture kind of thing.

HACKMAN: Right.

GESELBRACHT: With the "Buck Stops Here" sign in the middle.

HACKMAN: Right.

GESELBRACHT:       Did that succeed as a demonstration project? Did it persuade people that

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good things were happening and more money should be given?

HACKMAN: The real answer is I don’t know. I don't recall anyone coming in and saying, "That’s great. Now I'll give money." I don't recall anyone coming in and saying, "That’s awful. I won't give money." My concern was that it didn’t go very far, and especially when you put the cost overruns that they were already experiencing with it, that was an alarm bell for me - that we can’t be not raising money, and spending more money than was projected, and not being frank with the Institute Board that that’s what’s happening. So that also was maybe an early alarm bell on the contractual relationships that we had, especially with Chermayeff-Geismar, the designer, because the architectural work on that White House Gallery area was under a subcontract from Chermayeff-Geismar.

There was a contract with Jane Mobley and Associates which was the educational component and educational program developer; quite a bit of money was going out each month and the initial experiences to me at least weren't highly promising. Especially with education, I just come back to the fact that there seemed to be no framework. There was a long list of possible things you could do, but no criteria or mission clarity. Nobody was making decisions or pulling together people who actually knew a lot about education to help think through what might actually be valuable and might work and what it might cost.  Francis Heller seemed entranced by Jane Mobley, telling me how bright she was.  She was smart. But who was going to guide this process toward rational decisions taking into consideration the interests of the Institute and the Library rather than of the vendors?  And wasn’t there a need for an in house education program and staff rather than just a consultant?

GESELBRACHT: Now this other retreat that I mistakenly mentioned earlier that took place in January, 1996 actually had been scheduled for November, 1995 was postponed because of a government shut down. But you had been Director for just a few months. Why did you choose to have this retreat which regarded educational programs so early? Why was it before everything else? It was the first thing of this kind.

HACKMAN: I'll use some probabilities. Probably because I was pretty quickly nervous about the lack of a framework for an educational program in an area where we were spending money each month but really didn’t have a clear direction. Probably because education was the area in which I had a sense that there needed to be not a helter-skelter approach but something powerful that drove it - and I thought that that probably could be decision making even though obviously we hadn’t used the words "the White House Decision Center" or anything like it at that point. Probably because it was something that I could put my stamp on after such discussions, because the museum exhibition design process was much further along than education. I had been to New York to meet with Chermayeff & Geismar/Metaform. I think before I took the job, I went down and met with Tom Geismar and his staff. Either that or real early after I was appointed. So education seemed to me to be an area that needed attention and that it was a fruitful time to give it attention. When I looked at the experience of Jane Mobley and of the staff members that she had assigned to work on the Truman project, I couldn’t see that they had any substantial experience with secondary education or government and politics or presidential history. I think I felt nervous about it and that there was a need just to engage on it.

GESELBRACHT: I also am thinking that this was an area where because of your Kennedy Library experience that you already had quite a number of ideas that you thought were valuable that you could explore early on.

HACKMAN: It might be too strong to say a lot of ideas, Ray. I think I had maybe some instincts

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based on that experience, that we ought to be talking about something more innovative. I'll be too kind to myself if I say more than that, other than that reaching out and involving experienced and creative people for discussion and ideas always makes sense.

GESELBRACHT: Now what can you say about Chermayeff & Geismar? They were very important to the Truman Library obviously. Just what was this Truman Library contractor partner, what can you say about it?

HACKMAN: Well that they had a reputation for doing some good museum exhibitions around the country. They had done the first major exhibitions at the Kennedy Library, which I thought were much better than the second version of "permanent" exhibitions which were engineered by Caroline Kennedy's husband, Ed Schlossberg. The first, I thought, were more substantive and interesting. I thought they were just better.  All l I heard when I asked people about C&G was that they were pretty good but quite expensive. I found Tom Geismar, who was the chief of design there, a very nice person and quite easy to work with. Herman Eberhardt who was their researcher, the history substance guy on the exhibit, I thought was a terrific guy, worked well with Truman Library staff and certainly with me. The fellow who was the front person in terms of their financial arrangements and legal arrangements was Jack Masey and he became Francis Heller's good friend. I believe in that relationship lies some of the lack of cost controls and relationship problems. Let's just say they were good friends and Francis was pretty easy with his friends perhaps, Jane Mobley being another, personal relationships that maybe got in the way of hard analysis and more formal controls.

I found that when I proposed to Chermayeff-Geismar whenever it was in the process that I would like for them to consider or to reconsider some matter, or even specific proposals for changes in terms of the Presidential Galleries, that by and large they were receptive to that. They were very responsive with thinking and rethinking what became the two Decision Theaters. Initially there were to be three because one was going to be on ending the war in the Pacific and we did that in a different way finally. In terms of doing things like making sure the exhibit was fairly well balanced and had countervailing views presented in it, they were receptive to those things. Once we reworked the contract and gave the Institute greater control over expenditures and a review process that was more open and regular and so on, I really didn't have any problems with them. Except I didn't care for their front man, Jack Masey, the Metaform part of the firm. Nobody did that I knew except Francis Heller.

GESELBRACHT: You've mentioned from time to time Margaret Truman Daniel. What was her role as head of the Truman family? Was she genuinely engaged in what was happening, or was she just an occasional flamboyant personality to appear on the scene?

HACKMAN: At the initial meeting in May of 1995 that I attended and where I was  introduced, she made a negative, outspoken statement. I don't remember the particulars of it, if there were particulars.  That was the last Institute meeting that she ever attended. In my time as Director, she never showed intense interest or engagement in anything that was going on at the Library. I met with her probably four or five times in her apartment in New York City. Soon after I came, she began to have some fairly severe health problems. I don't remember any discussions that were very substantive. She never said to me, "Larry, I think you're doing great things at the Library." I doubt that she said anything positive to anybody, anywhere in those years. On the other hand, she never said, "You're doing an awful job, and I'm upset about this, that, or the other." So to me it was more keeping in touch than anything else. Maybe one of those discussions or maybe two were about Truman papers issues, the ownership of or access to certain Truman family papers at the Library, rather than about the museum renovation and the

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campaign. I know she thought positively of John Horton who was Drucie Snyder Horton's husband who was involved in the fundraising side with the Institute. I remember her saying, "You should pay some attention to John Horton, but his ideas often are too big and unrealistic so you have to be watchful on the other side." That's really the only specific comment that I can recall about people. She never had any good things to say about Dawson in particular or Heller. She'd say something like, "Oh, those guys, we need to get rid of them." But she was never engaged enough to follow through by getting on the phone and talking to someone, saying, "We need to do this or we need to do that." I don't remember her ever calling me and saying, "I really want you to pay attention to this or that or the other." So it was not much of a problem. It was not nearly the problem that I had been warned of or thought that it might be.

I should also just say on that, Ray, that probably as her son Clifton began to get a little bit involved with the Institute and the Library, I believe she thought positively about that. It may have also removed some of the need that she might have felt to follow things closely. To the extent that she was interested, she always could but seldom did call Shawsie Branton, her lifelong friend from her days in Independence. Or she could have talked to Clifton to the extent that he really was engaged at that point.

GESELBRACHT: I think Clifton may have started becoming involved in the Library at the time in 1994 of the fiftieth anniversary of the Vice Presidential nomination campaign. There was quite a lot going on in Chicago I remember that year. I might be wrong, but memory is saying that that's when he may have first appeared.

HACKMAN: I know he came to the Library a number of times while I was there. But I don't have in my head the particulars on what he was doing. I know he has reminded me several times that he and I were down in the museum artifact area, and he had suggested doing an exhibit of bad art about Truman selected from among the art and odds and ends created by many amateurs, the sort of folk art level. I had told him that I thought that was a bad idea and that it wouldn’t happen while I was Director. That was probably because we were in a fundraising mode and to offend people who cared about Truman or showed their admiration just seemed to me not timely at that point. Because it sounds like a better idea in the longer-term.

GESELBRACHT: Now before we leave behind the important Institute retreat in March 1996 and the Institute Board meeting in May 1996, I just want to try to distinguish the two a little bit. I know that the May meeting was the formal gathering which voted on the recommendations made at the retreat. In your memory, which was the important dramatic event where things really changed?

HACKMAN: I don't regard anything as dramatic at the meetings. I just remember it being one of those processes that was to me crucial and satisfying because it was highly successful. It moved through the agenda just as you would have hoped, and it didn’t seem to leave any residue, any bad feelings that manifested themselves to affect things. If certain people were in fact personally upset that they were no longer members or no longer leaders, they didn’t say it to anyone who counted. That's the cynical way maybe to put it. It just moved things logically to the next phase, and part of that then was a nominating process. I think Shawsie [Branton] may have chaired the nominating committee for the next few years and that is when the Board was able to bring in more influential and philanthropic leaders from the Kansas City area. I suspect that that's when Henry Bloch and maybe Morton Sosland and a few other people from Kansas City came in to join Shawsie and Beth [Smith] and Tom McDonnell, who had already been on.

GESELBRACHT:       Between May and October of 1996 which is getting toward the end of this

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period we’ve been talking about which I've characterized as the time when you took over the Library and the Institute, took charge of it, four people left the Institute Board, Library staff, Institute staff. Donald Dawson left in May 1996 as part of this Institute Board meeting, May of 1996, as did Francis Heller. So two of the primary officers of the Board had left. Then Phil Fleming, the Development Director associated with the fundraising strategies that were failing,  left in July.  And then Assistant Director George Curtis left in October. Can you say something about the importance that these four departures had for what you were engaged in doing with the Institute and the Library?  These had been four people, all in very important positions, primarily in the Institute obviously. So they all depart. What does this mean for you?

HACKMAN: Well what they have in common for me is that those departures further opened up new possibilities for the Library and the Institute to be more effective. With Dawson and Heller, I think there was a general consensus that there was a need for new leadership on the Board and in Institute staff, meaning Heller in his capacity as a sort of staff director. I think for Fleming, who was I felt in an impossible position, the outcome of the two major fundraising events, the one in Los Angeles just sort of clinched the case that we needed a different person there and a different strategy there. The report by David Mallison, the consultant who I had had some experience with in New York who I brought in to prepare an evaluation and report with recommendations on the campaign, helped lay a base for that resignation in the way that the retreats and the committee reports did for Dawson and Heller’s departure.  I didn't perceive that in any of the time that I was there, there was strong support for Phil Fleming. I don't know whether I would say that was fair or not. I don't think he was a person that would have inspired great confidence anywhere.

GESELBRACHT: You mean support amongst the Institute Board?

HACKMAN: Right, exactly.

GESELBRACHT: He was quite close to the research room staff. He used to come in the Research Room all the time and talk to the archivist, me, and he and Liz were quite friendly. I remember him coming in, it must have been right after he got the news that he was released, and he was just personally really shattered.

HACKMAN: He was shocked?

GESELBRACHT: Shattered, and he really loved Harry Truman, and he said he felt that this was a calling and that he was being removed from this thing he felt his whole life had led to kind of this thing.

HACKMAN: Well it might have.  Phil was also having some problems in his personal life at that point which I’m sure added to what he was feeling. I certainly didn't dislike him. It just was not going to get done with him there. Change was needed.

I couldn't begin to tell you what George was feeling at that point.  Obviously he was disappointed in not becoming Director, probably something he had hoped for and waited for a very long time. Then I think he saw lots of changes being made, maybe he thought some of them reflected on him.  Maybe he disagreed deeply with some of them. I don't know that. He wasn’t someone who would sit down and share his views very frankly with me.  I had a difficult time and I suspect he had. I think we had a hard time knowing what kind of work relationship we should have. I suspect he had a very different one under Ben Zobrist over the years than he did with me. I was probably much more involved in the details on a lot of things and felt I needed

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clearly to take over on the renovation side in a very hands-on way. He may just have felt there wasn't much room for him there to assert himself in a way that he would feel good about. I don't know. I felt bad if it was really unpleasant but I did not sense that that was the case. It must have been uncomfortable for him, but I don't know in detail.

GESELBRACHT: Now at about this time, I'm not sure exactly when, but someone else appears who was going to be very important to you, and that's Senator Tom Eagleton. Do you recall how you came to know of him? How he gained in prominence?

HACKMAN: Well he had been on the Board earlier in 1994 as you’ve recounted and I have in that May 1995 board meeting. I was trying to think of how we came up with the idea that we should ask him to become President of the Institute, whether that was my idea or someone else's idea, maybe Shawsie's even. But because he seemed willing to speak up and because he was a formidable and respected figure…. We were able to persuade him to serve as President only for one year. The term was a two-year term under the new bylaws but he said, “Well, I'll only do this for one year.”  I can't remember how well I knew him at that point, whether I had spent substantial time with him during my first year there … I'm pretty sure he came to that retreat. Probably I had gone to meet with him in St. Louis.  I think he saw good changes being made with the Library and the Institute that he could embrace.  You could see by reputation that Tom was a volatile person.  I had the benefit of saying to him that the first time I ever voted in an election, I voted in 1964 for young Tom Eagleton as either Lieutenant Governor or Attorney General of Missouri.  And that the only time I ever testified before the United States Senate was at a hearing chaired by him on independence for the National Archives. But I don't remember a substantial relationship between the two of us. It just developed really easily and we developed a mutual admiration relationship and a friendship that endured until the end of his life. I prize the several personal notes he sent me later saying something like, "You saved the Truman Library. You did it. No bull shit!"

He came to the Library several times after he became President. He always used to remind me that the first time he came to meet with me after he became President I believe, or maybe it was just before that, I took him to a Roy Rogers up the road for a ham sandwich for lunch which he thought was endlessly amusing because he was used to eating in much better restaurants than that. But he got engaged in the process. Tom and I went to several other museums to examine their exhibits and education programs and meet with their key staff. We went to the Minnesota Historical Society, we went to the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, and so on. We reviewed the script together of the Guggenheim biographical film intended for the Library auditorium which we both agreed was much too long — though it wound up still being much too long at the end. We met in Washington with Guggenheim at his studios and went over the cuts that Tom and I suggested, and most were made.

What else can I say? Other than being the new visible leader of the newly elected Board and supporting what had already started, which was sharing a lot of information with the Institute and asking them for their views, a major task that year was revising, refining the overall plan for the renovation, particularly the museum, the Presidential Galleries and bringing the Decision Center into the plans formally and into the physical plans.  And the product of all of this, if I remember correctly, was to bring to the Board an overall renovation plan for the building, exhibitions, and educational program, with revised cost projections, tighter contractual relationships, and so on. By the end of that year I believe almost everyone felt we were on much solider ground in almost every facet and this gave us more clarity and confidence going forward, though certainly there was still a lot of work to be done at a more detailed level and in fund raising.

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Then the key thing that Tom did of course - and maybe this is why we asked him, but I don't remember it that way - was he got on the phone with Congresswoman McCarthy and especially Senator Kit Bond who was a member’s item/earmark kind of guy in Washington, and with some other people on the Hill.  Tom was the crucial actor in getting the $8 million special appropriation from the federal government to the National Archives for the Truman Library renovation. When the National Archives found out that that $8 million was in their budget, I got a call from first Lew Bellardo, the Deputy Archivist of the United States, and then one from John Carlin, the Archivist of the United States, calling me maybe an SOB and asking me what the hell I thought I was doing or we were doing? Because the Roosevelt Library was regarded by the National Archives as first in line for renovation money. They had been waiting for a long time. I was able to point out to Lew and John that I had provided fair warning to them of what was going on because I had sent a couple of e-mails to Lew or to John or maybe both reporting that Senator Eagleton was actively working on this for the Institute with people in the Congress.

I don't remember my e-mails in detail but they probably could be found in my files. And so they calmed down once two things happened.  First, they weren't able to charge me because I had informed them that this campaign was going on, and second because in reaction to the concern from the Roosevelt group and from the National Archives, the Congress appropriated an additional $8 million for the Roosevelt renovation. The Roosevelt Library at that point, I was told very frankly, had had no realistic prospect of getting any money for their renovation that year. Their lobbying effort wasn't sufficiently influential. So here the Roosevelt Library benefited by $8 million that they would not otherwise have received, and the Truman Library got $8 million. The way Congress did that was they split it into two appropriation years with $4 million for each Library each year.

There was also some way we worked out, and it may have been that we put this in writing so that we could say it was the case, that if the federal government made an appropriation for the Truman Library renovation, the money would not be paid until we had raised twice that much in  other non-Federal funds. So that arrangement greatly increased our leverage in seeking funds from other sources. Anyway so that’s a wandering comment about Eagleton and how he was incredibly helpful. He was very reasonable to deal with. His name as the Institute’s President added additional cache for people we were trying to bring on the Board, and just generally in terms of the community and in terms of people in politics and government. So it was really beneficial.

GESELBRACHT: May I ask you just a few questions about the Library side of things, and then we can break?

HACKMAN: Sure.

GESELBRACHT: Well you've said to me a number of times that although there was much about the Library side of the Truman Library/Institute partnership that you were very interested in, that during the time you were Director most of your attention had to go to the Institute. But still there were some important things that happened with the Library too. What were some of your early impressions of the operations and staff of the Truman Library? How did these impressions relate to your engaging Michael Fox and Edwin Bridges to do a study of the Library's archives program?

HACKMAN: I'm not sure what the sequence of my impressions was. As I've already said, I was surprised by the lack of what I would call a complete archives infrastructure at the Library. I was surprised by the lack of finding aids, of policy and procedures and plans related to developing

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finding aids into the future. I was surprised that there wasn’t a more comprehensive approach to preservation that was written out and again was brought into the policy level as I understood it, a real preservation administration kind of framework. In part though, Ray, I knew that I was not going to have the time, it became pretty apparent pretty quickly, to do things like I would have done in New York, where I could have gotten more engaged in some of the details. That’s one of the reasons, and maybe the main reason, that I asked two people that I knew and respected, Mike Fox and Ed Bridges, to come in and take a fresh look at the operation. Perhaps the issues relating to classified files - whether you want to call that a mess or just a scary situation, a volatile situation on that side of things - might have scared me off from intervening more directly myself with archives policies and staff.  I might have had some fear of being sucked into that in a legal sense that would endanger everything else that I had to do that I couldn’t put at risk. That might not have been a factor in the Bridges/Fox thing, but maybe it was somewhat a factor in the extent of my engagement personally on archival methods and plans and operations when so much else had to get done, get corrected, to avoid a potential disaster on the renovation.

GESELBRACHT: Fairly early in your directorship, I can't remember the exact time, but you prepared a long memorandum which as I remember this, I haven't looked at it for awhile, but it was an overview of the Truman Library's operations, programs with a lot of the observations that you’ve talked about.

HACKMAN: And that was the State of the Library Report you mean? In the fall of 1995 a few months after I arrived.

GESELBRACHT: Yeah. It was at least a six, seven, eight page memorandum. And you circulated that to everybody although I remember understanding that it was initially written for the Institute Board. And then you decided to circulate it to everybody. What was your thinking? I should say there was a lot of blunt truth-telling in this memorandum. So what was your thinking in deciding to give that to everybody?

HACKMAN: Well I don't recall with certainty, but I suspect part of my thinking, Ray, would have been that they're going to see it anyway and that it just does not make sense to have this talked about in the Institute Board and with copies in my files and not to go ahead and share it with everyone. It might also have been: I've been here now for four or five months, and I've talked to all of the staff individually, it makes sense for me to say what I think I see and some issues that need to be addressed and to prepare the way for the possibility that changes would come internally as well as with the Institute and the renovation project. 

Ray, one of the things I think I heard you say in an earlier conversation was, "Well did you think about doing something like the Fox-Bridges report in the other areas beyond the archives?" The answer is that I did do it in some other vital areas: with the fundraising consultant, with the outside marketing study, with bringing in people to brainstorm and advise on education even if not to write such a formal evaluation. I did not think with the exhibition planning going on and pretty well along that it made much sense at that point to look at the museum side in terms of collection management. The collection management function on the museum side frankly isn't anywhere close to being as important as it is on the archives side. So that would have been kind of a meaningless gesture I thought at that point. Also, you will recall that the Fox-Bridges report really looked at the overall culture of the Truman Library, not just in the archives area.

GESELBRACHT: Larry, any concluding thoughts for this taking charge phase of your time as Director?

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HACKMAN: For anyone who may ever be interested at all in any of this, the documents in my files and in other files on both the Library side and the Institute side are probably much more revealing and much more accurate than are my comments here, which I’m sure are both too self-serving and handicapped by lack of memory and better recollections.

GESELBRACHT: There's typically a kind of information, or maybe I should say often but I think it’s true here, in all history interviews that documents maybe won't yield. Then also an interview can be read quite quickly to give an overview to a researcher that could greatly facilitate his working in the documents.

HACKMAN:  I agree with that. I certainly found that in my own five-plus years of Kennedy-related oral history experience. The only thing that I can think of that we might come back to is in filling in some content on that list, your "subtle approach" headings. But why don't we wait and do that some other time if we need to do it at all, probably not.

GESELBRACHT: The whole idea with that was just to foreshadow. We've talked about maybe most or all of it, at least a lot of those issues already.  I mean my thought when I saw your notes was that this is how he looks at things, and he’s just starting the job. So he’s telling me this is how he approaches every job that he takes on, and we’re going to see this working out as we go through the rest of the interview. That was all.

HACKMAN: I thought maybe we'd finish today. I hate to see you have to keep doing this.

GESELBRACHT: No, please, this is an important part of my career, and I’m very pleased with the interview, and we got through this whole first part of your directorship today. I think we’ll probably finish next time. But I’m not concerned. I'm really pleased. I listened to the first part yesterday. I just felt that that was exactly what I was hoping to record.

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GESELBRACHT: This is Ray Geselbracht. We’re at Larry Hackman's home with the third session of our oral history interview regarding his life and career and prominently his time as Director of the Truman Library. It’s September 9, 2014. Last time we finished up with the period of time which was the first 18 months roughly of his directorship where a lot of things happened that equated to his taking charge of the Library and the Institute. So now we start the second phase where I guess the honeymoon period is over and the time when Director Hackman can blame what’s happening on the prior Director is probably over, and he's got to take charge. So we’re beginning in 1997, and there’s a new Institute Board now. So how was this new Board different from its predecessor? An important question I think, where did the leadership come from in this Board? Did it come from the Board? Did it come from the Director? What was this new Board like?

HACKMAN: Ray, I don't think I have ever thought that all the problems as of 1995 were the fault of the prior Director.  Many people, including Library staff, Institute leaders, and National Archives staff in Washington, together over many years shaped the Library and the Institute.  And I certainly would never think of my first 18 months or first two years as a honeymoon period. In fact none of my time at the Library was a honeymoon except that by the time I left I thought there was a much healthier marriage between the Library and the Institute and I anticipated that that would be a good long term relationship.

But to your direct questions.  The Board consisted mainly of much more qualified members and officers as things developed in the period after the 1996 change in bylaws and the next election or two of the board. They were more engaged almost across the board. They were individually engaged in the renovation project and became more engaged as they understood the Library better.  Because they were better informed and engaged, they were much more accountable, more open about the way they did business and we did business overall. They soon came to be more in agreement among themselves and with the Library side in terms of a plan of action to complete the renovation and the things that went with it. So to me almost everything about the new Board was positive, including the fact that there were some excellent carryover members. The members who were carried over were by and large very useful because they had a perspective on what had been before. They had already been engaged and they had been involved in making the changes so they felt I believe some satisfaction about seeing that what had been thought might be possible was coming to life.

It's a little hard to pinpoint exactly where the leadership came from because it was shared. It’s too strong to say that anyone directed the Board; there were a lot of people who were participating. Those who had been on the Board and then those who came on the Board by and large did seem to have a good deal of respect or acquired it for my leadership role. I doubt that anyone would have claimed that I wasn’t the pivot point or the central person on a lot of what was going on. Both Tom Eagleton in that year that he was President and then Sandy Boyd, when he became President and then later Chairman of the Board, were strong leaders who were not shy about saying to me or to the Board as a whole what they thought. Sandy was a wise man with long experience in leading major organizations and working with boards. The officers then, the two Vice Presidents who were elected in 1997, Tom McDonnell and Beth Smith, were very strong leaders. The person who came in as the Treasurer, Chuck Foudre, had long experience in budgeting and accounting. So they just made for a stronger team overall. I

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don't think I had asked them and certainly didn’t direct them to do anything that was particularly difficult for them to do. I think mostly in that period we were coming to agreement on the essential things rather smoothly and everyone had a relatively realistic feel for what was possible in that period. Certainly we had a lot left to do and it was still not certain that we would succeed in everything we were trying to do. There was mutual respect among members of the Board. They felt they were on a very strong Board and respected one another and that helped a lot. There weren't members that I recall pointing fingers, saying, "Oh, well he's a terrible Chair of the Board or we're not getting the information that we need," or whatever. So that was a time for a real upswing for the Board.

GESELBRACHT: Could you feel the Board, including its leadership, turning to you continuously to understand what direction the Board was supposed to take?

HACKMAN: I don't have a good answer for that, Ray. I'm a proactive person. I believe they were getting all of the information and the outlines, the proposals, the plans almost before they could ask for them. The reporting to the Board and to others through my Director’s Briefing and via other reports tried to fill every vacuum, everything that people would be interested in at a level that they could digest and handle without overwhelming them with details that they really didn't want. Even if I had not played a prominent role as a member of the Institute Board, it’s not so much different than I would have done as Library Director because much of what we were doing in that period was re-examining the renovation plan and trying to re-cost it and tighten it up and make room for the White House Decision Center and so on. That’s a lot of what went on in 1997 and maybe even into ’98 a bit. That was all of such high interest to me as Library Director, and it was what the Institute needed to know, the officers and the members, in helping to decide about, or for the most part helping to ratify, the new plan and the new details and the new budgets and the new cost estimates of how much money needed to be raised and where it might come from. It just seemed to flow easily; I don't recall any discussion of, "Well now who should be doing what?" and "Is the Library Director doing too much or too little?" or "Shouldn’t his role be this or that, shouldn’t someone else being doing this or that?" I don't think there was much doubt; I don't remember any issues around that.

GESELBRACHT: Let's just say for a moment that maybe the most important thing that the Director has to do vis a vis the Institute is - because the Institute’s composed of volunteers, the leadership changes fairly often, members are coming and going not so often but coming and going, and they have many things in their lives away from the Library -  the Director is the one member of the Board who can provide a continuing flow of perceptive shaping information? So that when the Board looks at the Director’s Briefings and other things that are reported with respect to the budget, the things that they learn on the many tours of the Library, and briefings about Library activities and problems and challenges and so on, that if the Director pays very close attention to that side of his position on the Board, that the Board will come along the way that you're describing?

HACKMAN: Well that should be so, but there is a lot more than communication involved.  I believe that active intervention and vigorous persuasion around good plans and proposals is just as important.  As of course is oversight of operations and staff of both the Library and Institute and of the contractual relationships and wise selection and use of consultants and relationships with the media and so on.  So much of what was needed required being very active in an executive sense far beyond a kind of secretariat function.  And that is why, after a time, the Institute Board agreed to change the bylaws to make the Library Director also the President of the Institute.

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Also, we might note that other presidential libraries and their support organizations have done it differently. When a support organization hires its own Executive Director or the equivalent, then you have the dilemma of who shapes things and to what extent. And do Library proposals and reports then have to pass from the Library through someone else on their way to the partner organization, does there have to be a negotiation on a lot of important issues before something goes directly to Institute Board membership? That arrangement would have been unacceptable to me for more than a brief transition period. This issue was one of the reasons that drove my view that if you combine the operational executive function in one officer that largely takes away that issue of confusion, overlap and, inevitably, competition and resentment. And I have seen that in the case of the Roosevelt Foundation, for example, and for awhile with the Reagan Foundation, and at the Ford Library, and in other cases. But in the Truman case in my time, it seemed to work smoothly.  And I believe that is the best arrangement, some other considerations aside.

GESELBRACHT:  You mentioned last time that the Development Director left the Institute, and you had to find a new one. What was your thinking with respect to the new Development Director?

HACKMAN: Ray, one of the many things that I don't recall is what process was envisioned to recruit a new Development Director.  My recollection is that somewhere in the process Shawsie Branton came to me, maybe she had gone to some other Board members as well, maybe she had checked it in some other way, to say that she had someone we should consider, Jeffrey Byrne, and that's the person we hired. She knew him because he had Kansas City experience and perhaps she talked to some other Board members who knew him or knew of him. I found in talking with him that it seemed to be a logical selection. We must have been well along in the recruitment process because I can remember interviewing a handful of other candidates. The ones that I remember were from the Kansas City area, but there might have been candidates from other places as well.

In any case, we selected Jeffrey, and in part I'm sure that’s because there were a lot of advantages to having someone who knew the philanthropic community in Kansas City and knew some of the members of our Board.  There were other things attractive about Jeffrey. One was that he had worked on the staff of Kit Bond, the former Republican Governor of Missouri, now a United States Senator at the time we hired Jeffrey . He knew his way around Jefferson City, and that was an advantage to us in terms of state appropriations and in seeking state tax credits and so on as we organized campaigns to get those funds. But I don't remember the qualifications on paper that we listed for the position or exactly what the recruitment process was. It wasn't that we just heard of Jeffrey and picked him immediately. I don’t know where he came along in the process, whether he formally applied or whether we hadn't found strong candidates, and someone suggested him, or exactly how that worked.

GESELBRACHT: Now did he bring a lot of ideas to the team? In early meetings did he come in and say, "Your fundraising strategy should be this and this and this or . . .?"

HACKMAN:  Well I think Jeffrey had experience in organizing at least one capital campaign before. He considered himself a fundraiser, and he had been active in that professional community long enough to know how things were done and how they were organized in successful campaigns. He had worked for more than one organization although I don't remember what they were other than, I believe, the YMCA.  I can’t remember.  He had a professional competence in how you organize the kind of fundraising that needed to be done by the Truman Library. You needed to have a sound campaign plan, a strong campaign committee,

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a clear and impressive case statement, you needed to know how to do research and analysis on what you should ask individuals and organizations for in particular terms and how to approach them. So he knew the basics.

GESELBRACHT: But with Phil Fleming's departure, you were left with a failed campaign strategy. The dinners were over, no more had been raised essentially. How was that replaced with its successor?

HACKMAN: Well I'd say it was replaced with a tried and true classic approach. And you have to remember that by then the Board was now much stronger. The Board had quite a number of people on it who'd been involved in successful capital campaigns not simply as major contributors, but as organizers, as members of capital campaign committees and so on. So a new Development Director coming in could not have gotten away with any kind of planned approach that these people wouldn't recognize as a sound way to get things done. They also could look around the table at one another and realize that some substantial funding should come from themselves, that that was really more or less expected of them when they agreed to come on the Board. Sandy Boyd when he came in as the President and then Chairman, had run very large organizations, the University of Iowa, the Field Museum. Tom McDonnell and Beth Smith had been involved in endless major efforts to do important things in Kansas City. So you could almost say that a Development Director better show that he knew how to do those things or he wouldn’t be around very long at all. He wouldn't come up to them and say we’re going to raise all this money in New York, Chicago, and whatever, or we're going to raise it abroad, or we're going to sell mugs and “Buck Stops Here” signs or whatever to raise what had originally been $10 million but, as we clarified the program and developed sound cost projections, now needed to be $22.5 million. Not everyone thought the Development Director was always everything that he should be. You find people on a Board who simply don't like Development Directors because they're used to asking them or pushing them to give money and to help ask their peers for it.

GESELBRACHT: There was a report in late 1996, early 1997 prepared by the Institute staff about the fundraising project, cost projections, and the Executive Committee's recommendations for changes in the renovation plan. Do you remember what was the importance of this report in this process we’re talking about or an effective capital campaign and a revised renovation plan?

HACKMAN: Ray, is this the revised and expanded renovation plan we prepared after Eagleton was President? When you said late '96 or early '97, I would have said maybe a bit later, but maybe your dates are right. So I want to make sure that we're talking about the same plan.

GESELBRACHT: Well, talk about that.

HACKMAN: This happened after Tom Eagleton became President. He became President knowing that we really needed to go back and look at a whole set of contractual relationships and the elements of the renovation and the cost estimates and how we might raise the funds and so on. So that's the big proposal that I have in mind because that included in the renovation making space on the lower level for what became the White House Decision Center, for reducing the size of the Life and Times of Harry Truman Exhibit on the lower level, for adding some of the elements to the Presidential Galleries, of redoing or tightening up the contracts with Chermayeff-Geismar, of ending the contract with Mobley & Associates.  Perhaps not all of this was contained in a single report and proposal.

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You were asking me last time, because I know you're interested in this, about when I early on brought in a couple of archival consultants who wrote the Fox-Bridges Report, whether I had thought about doing that for other parts of the Library. It occurred to me after our interview that I should have said it didn't make sense to do that for the museum. But just stop and think. We brought in a consultant, David Mallison from New York, to do an evaluation and report on the fund raising strategy and methods at that time.  Then we hired a legal counsel, Lathrop & Gage, to look at all of the contracts and to set up a new process for the contracts. We hired a marketing firm to do a marketing study and make recommendations as to what we should do in that area. Then even when we started the formal fundraising campaign, we hired a separate, outside development counsel, Robert Hartsook, to look over our shoulders constantly. So I was just making the point that on almost everything, we brought in people of experience from the outside. There wasn't much of an education program to look at, there was some, but we did seek outside advice on that in a variety of ways and then we hired a first experienced education coordinator. So except for the museum, we looked at almost everything that was being done; it wasn't just the archives that had an outside look is my point.

GESELBRACHT: There's in all of this of course, a lot of emphasis on the museum exhibits. That's going back into the early '90s and even before that in many respects because the impetus for what became the renovation started with a concern with the museum exhibits. Although there was much more in the renovation than just that, it was a big part of it, and this was all happening at a time when nationally attendance at history museums was in pretty serious decline. So did that ever get into your thinking, that you're spending millions of dollars to make new museum exhibits, but the attendance is just likely to keep declining?

HACKMAN: I will go back to that and answer you, but I just want to add one thing. We clearly needed a new master plan for the renovation. This was not only so that the Board itself would know what was going on and endorse it and support it, so that they knew about and had confidence and comfort with what they were being asked to support, but  also so that we could go out to the world in our case statement and in the way we renamed the campaign and so on. We needed to have details to back up what we were asking people to support. This gave us all something that we could understand in detail, could have agreement on, and could have confidence in going forward, including when we dealt with the National Archives, including when we dealt with contractors and so on. So beyond just good planning we needed something everyone understood and embraced and we needed something not entirely new certainly but fresh and solid that we could share with everyone who we would need to be working with.

I don't think I thought very much, Ray, about attendance. I know in the projections that we did for what would come out of the new exhibits and the renovated Library that we made some attendance and admission and sales income projections. They were not huge increases, not by a factor of two or three, for example. They were ambitious, but still I thought within reason. I don't remember looking very much at trends in other libraries or even in other museums. Those trends seemed to become more noticeable later I would have thought. The two points that come to mind are that one, it seemed to me that a Library with a different kind of product than it had ever presented to the public before could do relatively well at least for a short time in terms of increasing its attendance and two, frankly,  I was much more interested in giving the people who came an engaging, insightful experience than I was with how many people came.  The overall attendance figures always include the groups who came on the tour bus and got off for an hour and saw the Truman Library, whatever it was, and got back on the bus and went to the next attraction. Mostly they were content with whatever was there. They did not have high expectations or demands. I was never very interested in those people. They were going to be more or less satisfied with whatever they saw on their tour sponsored by their local bank or their

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local church or whatever.

It seemed to me that to serve the public the focus should be, and it was also my focus, on having a quality experience that, for those who cared about it, would stand out from other presidential libraries, and I hoped it might offer an example for other presidential libraries as to what they then might do likewise. That's certainly what drove me. It never seemed to me that the earned income was so large a factor in the operations of the Library and Museum that it was going to make a heck of a lot of difference whether attendance was 110,000 or 150,000 people.  With regard to income, I thought that the revenue drain from all of the free admissions that the Library had been permitting over the years, most of which I ended, was more of a revenue  factor than a modest increase in attendance would be.  And that a much better gift shop was also important.

It also seemed to me, and it has proven to be the case with some reservations perhaps, that it was much more important to create an Institute that could raise substantial funds year after year than it was to focus on museum attendance.  And finally, with the Internet developing ultimately  people could find out so much on-line, including as time goes by an ability to interact remotely with the permanent exhibits, that boots on the ground if you will or boots in the museum was not going to be the factor that it might have been at some point. And it isn't.

GESELBRACHT: During this time, end of '96, early '97, there was a temporary exhibition at the Truman Library called  "the White House in Miniature." It seems to me that this was more than just another temporary exhibit, it was something that became part of the story of the renovation. Can you talk a little bit about that?

HACKMAN: Ray, I would describe this as just one part of a much broader effort to make the Library seem a larger resource and a more interesting place for the Kansas City community.  I was hopeful that it would offer an example of the kind of popular exhibits that could be done as a temporary exhibit on a continuing basis, both bringing in exhibits from the outside, or temporary exhibits that the Library might do. But when I think about it, I relate it in my mind more to events like drawing 5,000 people to hear Colin Powell or 1,500 people to hear Abba Eban or having Mark Russell play the piano with Washington insider humor in a theater downtown or the appearances at the Library of the former White House Social Director and the White House Usher and the Director of the Secret Service, all of those kinds of popular events to reach out to a broader community, a broader set of interests than the Library had tended to do. That’s a lot of what the White House in Miniature was because that attracted mostly parents, particularly mothers with children, who had never been to the Library before.

GESELBRACHT: So was that an important subset of the programs I guess you’d say where the emphasis isn't so much necessarily on education or certainly not scholarship, but on doing something that is spectacular in some respect, and that is newsworthy, and that brings in the public who might not otherwise be interested?

HACKMAN: That's true. And perhaps a little of that has been lost. I think currently the Library and Institute draw good audiences to some really impressive speakers at the Truman Forum at the Kansas City Public Library. But I don't really see much going on any more that doesn’t draw the same audience over and over again. I believe that the Library would be a bit healthier if it was still bringing in the Capitol Steps on occasion or something that you might classify as simply entertainment relating to government and politics and history. Certainly one applauds the really good speakers that are an ongoing part of the Institute’s public programs now and also bring good publicity because each speaker tends to go on public radio for an interview and is featured

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perhaps in the Kansas City Star or elsewhere. But I'd still mix it up a little more. I'd also probably bring in more major outside exhibits.

GESELBRACHT: Did you ever worry - maybe this is my worry - but once you’ve done a White House in Miniature or once you've had Colin Powell on behalf of the Library in an auditorium that draws 5,000 people, did you ever worry that you would never be able to do that again? That you can't make it part of the program? That you're lucky if it happens once? Was that ever a worry?

HACKMAN:    Well it didn't worry me. I mean those were spectacular events that were needed very much at the time while we were trying so hard to run a successful capital campaign. A lot of what we did in that period also related to that need. But I don't think it’s impossible to do those kinds of things again. You don't have to aim for an audience of 5,000, but I think you can still aim for an audience where you have to go to a special auditorium to do it and which would have a substantive impact on a major part of the community. I haven't thought very much about that, but  there’s no downside to doing something spectacular as far as I can see. It got a lot of notoriety and a broad interest in the community - even if you couldn't do it again in the next five or ten years.

GESELBRACHT: It's not always an easy business to be in, this type of thing we're talking about. I’m remembering, although I wasn't there, I did not see it, but there was a Saturday that was devoted to Hoover Ball. As I say, I did not go in that day, but the image that I got was that the Hoover Ball Festival, the way it worked out was primarily yourself and Rita Klepac, who was the Special Events Coordinator, tossing the Hoover Ball to one another.

HACKMAN: There was a team that came down from Iowa and a local team from somewhere closer to Kansas City maybe. There certainly was not a substantial audience beyond maybe husbands and wives or a few people who came down from Iowa to go to the bar in Kansas City after the match - maybe before as well!. It got a little notoriety in the newspaper. I certainly would not regard that as one of those spectacular events, nor did it aim to be. It aimed to be something amusing that might be picked up in the media and that was an easy one to do. Not one that’s on my list of successful events.

GESELBRACHT: Memorable but not as successful.

HACKMAN: Right.

GESELBRACHT: All right, let's turn to the Presidential Gallery, the focus of so much of the renovation. What was your vision for the Presidential Gallery?

HACKMAN: I don't think I came with a broad vision. By the time I got there, and from a trip to meet with the primary consultants, Chermayeff & Geismar/MetaForm in New York City either before I came out or shortly thereafter, I knew that the planning for the Presidential Exhibition was really pretty far along.  Also, work had already begun at the Library on the “White House Gallery” area near the lobby as a demonstration phase. Clearly I was not going to simply recommend rejection, that all should be tossed aside and we should start from ground zero. So my role was to look at that proposal for the exhibitions on the Truman presidency on the main floor and for "the Life and Times of Harry Truman" exhibition plans for the lower level, and to see whether without great cost or sacrifice there were some things that might be changed about it to make it, from my point of view, more effective. It might not have been more effective from the museum designer's point of view. In a matter of months, but I can’t remember how many,

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the changes under discussion included bringing in, first it was three and then we settled on two, Decision Theaters as another way to actively involve the audience, rather than treat them passively in the Presidential Exhibition. Another thing that came to my mind that I pushed and that the museum designers readily accommodated was trying to do something to avoid giving the impression that this was simply another fawning presidential exhibition where a president did almost nothing wrong. A way to do that was to put in some countervailing content, and it emerged mostly in the form of flip books that were placed in several places throughout the exhibit. These would give the perspectives of people during the time of the Truman Administration who had very different opinions on the issues then, and then also the views of historians and other critics later who had different perspectives. The flip books are not an ideal way to do that because a visitor has to be interested enough to go look into them. But they were a method, and a symbolic way if nothing else, to show that we were trying to set ourselves apart from the typical presidential exhibition in presidential libraries. So those were minor contributions I would say but contributions.  Of course later on we reduced substantially the size of the area set aside on the lower level for the second permanent exhibition on the personal side of the Truman story.   Some of that space went to the White House Decision Center, the centerpiece of the education program.

GESELBRACHT: Now were you responsible for the fact that one of the Decision Theaters was devoted to something negative in the Truman Administration, which was the Loyalty Program, something that didn't work out very well, certainly not the way Truman had hoped it would, and something that historians look at with some dismay?

HACKMAN: Again, I won't remember the details. It’s likely that out of conversations with Chermayeff-Geismar/MetaForm, their staff, that we considered a number of alternatives, including beginning with a third Decision Theater that was going to be on the decision to end the war in the Pacific, to drop the bomb. And we finally decided that having young kids, students, voting to drop a bomb that killed an awful lot of people was not something we wanted - kids running up and pressing the button without necessarily considering carefully the background that would be provided and so on. So we changed that into a different kind of exhibit where we encouraged people to leave their written comments on that decision and where again we put in countervailing views in that exhibit so that the visitors could see that at the time of the end of the war there were people who were opposed to that decision or had a very different perspective on it, and we drew out the views also of some historians and some public figures who subsequently have analyzed and criticized that decision. So to provide some better context to that exhibit we tried to give views of thoughtful people at the time that decision was being considered and made and views since, and that has worked very well. Lots of people provide comments and appreciate being invited to share their opinions.

I have in the back of my mind that on both of the decision theaters we considered some alternatives but the Loyalty Oath one certainly seemed attractive. It had high potential to me to engage visitors and to provoke strong reactions, and I thought the Museum designers did a really good job with that. I know in each of the Decision Theaters, we had multiple reviews of the script proposals and the visuals and the audio and so on. I was particularly satisfied and pleased with that one on the Loyalty Oath and so were the designers.

GESELBRACHT: I wanted to ask you, what is the most important thing in the Presidential Gallery? I probably don't expect you to be able to answer that question because I have the answer already. But do you want to guess what the most important thing is in there?

HACKMAN: I don't have a clue, Ray.

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GESELBRACHT: All right, I'm going to ask you partly if you wrote this, the most important thing in the Presidential Gallery I can assure you is the introductory text panel that’s right outside the theater. And it says, to shorten it somewhat, "The years of Harry S. Truman’s Presidency are crowded with significant and controversial events. No single, universally accepted account of this period exists. Historians and nonhistorians alike bring a variety of perspectives to the study of these times. This Exhibition presents one interpretation of the Truman Presidency. There are other ways of looking at the subjects presented here. As you visit the galleries, you will encounter flip books that highlight some of these alternative views. These differing viewpoints are reminders that the history of the Truman years is not settled. It is constantly being disputed, reviewed, and revised. History never speaks with one voice. It is always under debate."

HACKMAN: Ray, I love that statement and would not disagree with your selection. The only thing I would say is that if that had been thought of earlier and highlighted in larger type, hung in a more prominent place, perhaps highlighted all in neon or flashing lights, that I would agree with you that it's the most important thing in the Exhibit. I think it represents almost everything that I wanted the Exhibit to demonstrate and be part of what visitors took away for themselves from the exhibition. If there’s one thing that I wish every presidential library would feel very positive about doing, it would be to change the word Truman, but otherwise to use that statement and put it right at the beginning of their presidential exhibition. That ought to be what presidential libraries are trying to do in their permanent exhibits.

GESELBRACHT: Did you write that or get involved in writing it?

HACKMAN: Perhaps again this emerged from discussion. I suspect that Herman Eberhardt drafted it after discussions. I know I reviewed it and may have revised it. It was late in the design process that it occurred to me that we needed something like this at the beginning of the exhibit, not at the end. I suppose you could have put it at the end.  But the statement itself seemed to me perfect. I just wish that earlier in the design we had left more room for it to be more prominently brought to the attention of every visitor, perhaps even expanded upon or demonstrated directly in an adjacent exhibit area.

GESELBRACHT: The Institute hired an Educational Programs Coordinator in 1997, the Library hired a Public Programs Coordinator in 1998. How did you think of these two program areas in terms of the renovated Truman Library?

HACKMAN: Well I thought of education as being a core function of the Library along with the archives and the museum. I thought that made sense, maybe not from the beginning of presidential libraries but it made sense from the point that I was there and on into the future with the education program drawing on resources from both the archives and the museum. I wanted it to be a separate program, not buried in either the archives or the museum, which is the case some places perhaps. I wanted it to be professionally competent and respected by educators and other experts. I wanted it to be a factor in building interest in and support for the Library on a continuing basis, which I think it's doing, particularly the White House Decision Center, but probably other parts as well. I wanted it to be a basis for continuing relationships with schools and teachers. I believe it has done all of those.

Public programs, we've talked about some. I wanted that staff cluster to be a center for proposing and coordinating a continuing rich mix of attractive and innovative programs from low brow to high brow. I wanted it to be a way to demonstrate the Library’s deep interest in public affairs and to create programs that link the past to current issues in government and politics and public policy  And I thought that would help attract media attention on an ongoing basis. Public

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programs events also should be a way to involve and reward major supporters and Board members and so on. That was one of the things that we did while the campaign was still in process with events like the Colin Powell program or the Abba Eban presentations.  And the one that comes most spectacularly to mind was when the State Department suggested that the formal process to accession Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary into NATO take place at the Truman Library.  After that formal ceremony in the auditorium we had an elegant luncheon. We invited some or all of our Institute board and some other supporters to participate in that. That was just a wonderful opportunity which I think we took advantage of.

The public programs coordinator position, that new position also was supposed to coordinate some other things like the gift shop and sales, volunteers and interns, some of the other promotional activities. It was supposed to bring some productive coordination to activities which in the past may not have been particularly well coordinated I thought, and had been left at too low a level to be operating on their own with an expectation of wisdom and success. It didn't work out the way I had hoped, primarily because, as is frequently the case with Civil Service positions, the candidates who were presented were not very strong. I did interviews with several eligible candidates who just would have been totally inappropriate for the position. Even the hire that we made did not bring the characteristics that I was really looking for in that position.

GESELBRACHT: Did you ever worry about how the Truman Library should assess the success or failure of programs and then learn from assessments about how to change, how to develop the activities?

HACKMAN: Ray, I don't remember much about that at this point. I think part of that is because it was so easy to judge their success during the period I was there in terms of those objectives that I've talked about a number of times, in terms of building interest in the Library on a broad scale and having a wide variety of programs and using them as vehicles for involving potential supporters or rewarding proven supporters. I don't think that I thought very hard about a formal internal system of program evaluation in that period, though we did use a lot of focus groups and advisory groups to seek opinions and ideas.

I know you have also been interested in how to measure the relative value of programs in terms of how much resources to put into them. I don't recall having that very much in my mind at all. For one thing, it presumes that on the Civil Service side, you can look at those things and then make decisions about how you're going to use resources. Most of your resources are in personnel and changing those is a long range issue, not something that one would be spending much time thinking about if you didn't plan to stay for the long-term. Historically it's the case that the archival function and the archival staff always had received much more attention and support than any other part of the Library. I felt that there was still a lot of work that needed to be done on the archival side, even though I thought it should have been done long ago. So I wasn't going to be reducing the Archives staff so that resources could be transferred somewhere else. I did try to bring in some additional archives personnel and some personnel with different perspectives. But it wouldn't have been moving archives resources elsewhere. The resources on the museum side were not substantial but I did not believe that more were needed during my period at the Library. Anyway, I didn't spend much time thinking about that.

GESELBRACHT: Can you explain how you integrated the financial management of the Library and Institute and why this was important?

HACKMAN: I'm not sure that we integrated them to any great extent. The important thing that we did was to produce spreadsheets and the explanatory narratives that went with them that

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enabled both the Library and the Institute to understand where all money came from and where it went so that they would understand each other better, appreciate each other's position better, be more mutually supportive, and to encourage both sides to be forthright and thoughtful. And then also just to promote accountability and better decision making because there are some areas, education for example, where funds come from both sides. It’s really useful for them to understand which positions are supported from which funds and so on.

I had found when I came to the Library, and this was confirmed later when I looked back over the Institute minutes for a number of years, that there was an incredible amount of suspicion on the Institute side, that they were being taken for a ride by the National Archives. I found a lot of suspicion on the Library side; staff didn’t understand the Institute, they didn't value the Institute, they didn’t understand its potential, they were suspicious and then sometimes resentful that the Institute staff was there taking up space - which the Library frankly didn't have much need for, office space anyway. But one of the ways I tried to break down that kind of feeling was not only through my Director’s Briefings which reported on both the Institute and the Library and went to all staff and board members and other significant folks, but also in these joint spreadsheets with explanatory notes. Kay Morris was very patient and very helpful in getting those boiled down to something that people could relate to, could understand the figures and so on. She and I worked hard to make that useful. The fact that, as far as I understand, this didn't continue very long after I left, indicates that it wasn't very well integrated, it was simply a useful tool to develop a better partnership in a time when that was needed. I believe it could play a useful role as a continuing tool for reporting, analysis, discussion and decision making.

GESELBRACHT: The old Twenty-First Century Fund campaign as it was called, which failed as a development device, was ended in late 1997. Did the new campaign follow directly on the end of the old one? Or do you remember some of the strategic thinking that was involved here? How did you arrive at the name of the campaign?

HACKMAN: I do want to go back after awhile and talk about the State of Missouri because it was so critical. We skipped over that.

GESELBRACHT: Let's do it now.

HACKMAN: No, let's do this first. I don't remember the decision to simply end the first campaign, maybe it just faded away. There was very little mileage to be gotten from a title that told the public absolutely nothing about what that campaign hoped to accomplish. The more we talked to people, and maybe it came out of focus groups and so on, the more it seemed that education was a big driver. And certainly from my point of view, the whole idea of expressing our interest in politics and public affairs, not just in Harry Truman and his time, was something that I wanted to do. So "Creating a Classroom for Democracy" as the name of the new campaign seemed like good words to express both the educational thrust and the engagement with, if you will, creating a better world, not just looking back at a better previous world. The phrase "Classroom for Democracy" came from me, and I stole it from a comment that Gerald Ford gave at the opening of the George H.W. Bush Library which I attended. I can remember tearing off a piece of paper and writing those words with my pencil or pen and sticking it in the pocket of my sport coat.  I would almost bet that Richard Norton Smith, who wrote a lot for Gerald Ford and had been director of the Ford Library, was the author of Ford's comments.

In any case, I carried that around until we were in the process of naming a new campaign. Then a really important step for us was writing and designing and printing a high quality, thougthful case study with the right reliable financial figures in it, with quotes on the right things from the

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right people, and so on. It was impressive and it proved very useful as a device to present to people whose support we were wanting.  It was clear and concise in a way which they could digest pretty quickly and feel very positive about.

GESELBRACHT: We've talked a fair amount about how the federal government got involved in the campaign. What about the State of Missouri?

HACKMAN: Well, the State of Missouri was absolutely crucial. Again, this is one of the things I take great pride in, although it certainly wasn’t mostly my creation. I don't believe there’s any other Presidential Library, so far as I know, that has had any appropriation, let alone $3 million, from their home state. And that’s not even to speak of a separate $3.5 million in state tax credits which then drove another $3.5 million, or maybe it was $7 million more, in private funds. The first $1 million appropriation had been made before I got there. Jim Nutter, a member of the Institute Board I believe was the primary agent in that because he’d been a supporter of Governor Mel Carnahan. It was Carnahan's Administration which put that in the state budget at some point. I had obviously nothing to do with that. I believe those funds were used to help support the first phase of the renovation, or maybe it was dedicated to the Guggenheim biographical film. What makes me think of that is that Governor and Mrs. Carnahan were our featured guests at the premier of that film at the Library.

The more important developments happened a few years later. Crucial to the fundraising overall was getting the $8 million of federal appropriations with a condition attached to it that it would be paid in two $4 million increments provided that the Institute raised twice that much from nonfederal funds. That allowed us to go back to Governor Carnahan saying, "We need to raise these monies. We’ve got this conditional federal appropriation." So he put another $2 million at some point into the state budget. That probably helped our argument then as we went to the Missouri Economic Development Commission, perhaps I don’t have the name just right, which provided state tax credits for economic development projects, and they included tourism development under that. We spent quite a bit of time with the staff director of that commission. We worked hard on a proposal. We met with some individual members. It was fortunate that one of the members of that economic development council, whatever it was called, was a fellow named John Starr, who was Beth Smith’s cousin. There were a couple other Kansas City members on that committee. But that $3.5 million worth of tax credits in just a matter of a couple of months, as we were further into the campaign, led to another $3.5 million or more of private contributions. Maybe that had to be at a two to one ratio.  I've forgotten exactly how that worked. But they were very attractive to private corporations and philanthropists. So if you add up the federal appropriations, and how that provided leverage for state funds and how those together provided leverage to get the remaining private funds that were needed, the State was just absolutely central in that.

I believe you haven't actually asked yet whether the campaign could have failed? And the answer is it certainly could have failed. I believe that without the federal funds, it would have failed. It may have failed without the state funds, or it would have taken years to complete raising private funds without that. But it took really only about a year, once we really had that leverage, to finish up that campaign with $24 million.

GESELBRACHT:  We're leaving 1997 behind, coming into 1998. As I have looked over what happened in 1998, it looks like everything is coming right. It's not that big, spectacular climax yet, but everything is coming right. Do you remember having some sense of that like maybe driving at home at night and thinking, well everything is starting to look pretty good now? I can probably sleep more easily and just relax a little more and feel good about what’s going on

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every day.

HACKMAN: I don't have the calendar in my head.  Perhaps it was getting close to that, but at that time there was still so much in the air regarding funds; I might have felt that the Library and the Institute and myself were doing a good job of bringing the package together that, if the funds were sufficient, would produce a successful outcome in terms of the content. But I know that in the back of my mind there was still a lot of worry about whether the funding would come together. So it certainly was not in any sense being over confident or coasting or deriving great satisfaction at that point. I don't think any of those were there yet, Ray. And there were still a lot of details to work out on the building renovations, the courtyard addition,on the content for the White House Decision Center, on many of the individual parts of the presidential gallery. We really haven't talked at all about the building and grounds related aspect of the renovation, the parking lots and the front entrance and the courtyard modifications and so on. Those were complicated because of the multiple players: the National Archives, the GSA, the architects and other contractors, and so on.

GESELBRACHT: Now sometime in 1998, I'm not sure exactly when, but the Library's website was moved from its initial server at the University of North Carolina to the University of Missouri. What was behind this and what was your thinking with respect to the website? The Internet was becoming more important all the time. Certainly nothing quite like today in 1998, but still its importance was recognized. What was your thinking?

HACKMAN: You were involved in it too, and you may remember it better than I do. I think that I couldn't see any reason or any way perhaps that the University of North Carolina was going to have an abiding interest or incentive to be highly responsive to the needs of the Truman Library as the Internet developed further and became more central to things. What I don't recall is the extent to which that related to the grant that we received, the Project Whistle Stop grant of a million dollars to work with several Jackson County school districts. I think the grant actually was to the Independence School District, but it really came from our proposal in working with a number of school districts to undertake this large project centered around using technology in the classroom and drawing on materials in the Truman Library or about Truman as the major content resources. I don't know the timing, the sequence, and the extent to which this also drove us to work with people in the School of Education at the University of Missouri.  They were also involved in educational research if I remember correctly in that cluster at the University. So there may have been a desire and a need to pull away from North Carolina. At the same time, there was a pull from this project at the University of Missouri to do it that way. But I don't recall many details.

GESELBRACHT: Did you have some thoughts that this website’s going to be really big? I mean it's just going to become more and more important?

HACKMAN: Well it seemed to me it was going to be, and that project in a sense proved it, really important for education, that it was going to become increasingly important for the archives function in terms of access to materials that were going to be or already beginning to be scanned and it was going to be important for the museum as different techniques developed and museums draw more and more on materials in electronic form to make them available within the museum and then beyond the museum as well. So I don't feel that I saw anything other than what other people sensed more clearly and I'm sure earlier than I did.

GESELBRACHT:       I remember that one day you said to me something like, "The most important thing that the Truman Library has to do in the next so many years is to get all 50-some of our

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student research document files on our website."

HACKMAN: Well there's a negative and a positive about that comment, Ray, if I try to put it in perspective. The negative is that if I had been Director earlier, I probably would not have supported that very extensive student research files project and all of the time spent on selection of documents and then  copying the thousands of documents that went into it just to serve classes of students, and it was a relatively small number, that were coming to the Truman Library for a research experience. But seeing that wonderful product already there, again I may be too generous to myself, my first inclination was to make it more  widely accessible. You've already copied them, let’s make some additional copies and distribute them to some other places where more people could have access to them, including college students and so on. Whether that ever proved to be a sensible thing to do, I don’t know whether anybody uses those copies. Whether I really recognized that the important thing to do was to scan those and make them easily accessible remotely, I really don't recall. I'd probably be way too generous to myself to say, oh yeah, that made sense. But whether I had that in my head or whether it was proposed to me or not and if so when, I don’t recall.

GESELBRACHT: In 1998, the Library Director, yourself, became also the President of the Truman Library Institute, November 1998. Can you explain the reason for this really quite striking development and where the idea came from for this?

HACKMAN: Well it seemed to me that the reason for doing it was it reflected the operational reality that already existed regarding the Library Director’s role at that point. It was very different and it involved a great deal more operational responsibility than had ever been the case before I arrived. It was appropriate to recognize that responsibility and the leadership involved in it beyond what the Institute had done earlier when we changed the bylaws in 1996 - which had been to designate the Library Director clearly as the "Coordinator of Institute Programs." I have to believe that it was my idea, tried out on a few other people, and maybe I convinced someone else, probably Sandy Boyd who was the President at that point, that it would make sense in the long-term to have the Library Director be the Institute President and for there to be a Chairman of the Board position created at the same time. I know that Sandy himself was feeling at that point that he wanted to lighten up his load somewhat on the Institute side and that he wanted to move out of the Institute responsibilities at some point soon. So he may have seen that this was one additional way to place more of the burden where, having been the Director of two major organizations in the past, he felt it would be most appropriate and that it reflected the reality of what was already the case. In the world that he had lived in, President was not a title that didn’t leave room for other titles, whether it’s Chancellor or Chairman of the Board or whatever. So I believe Sandy felt comfortable with that. Clearly from my point of view, and you know how strongly I feel about this, that was a way to ensure at least while I was there a more coherent and productive relationship between the two partners.

I don't recall there being any opposition to it. I think there was good support on the Institute Board for it. It did need approval of the National Archives and the Office of Presidential Libraries, and there was some consternation about that because they had - I don’t know whether you would say they were moving in the other direction. But there had been a number of white papers, and I remember reading the drafts and making suggestions and so on, trying to better define what the potential responsibilities and roles of a Library Director could be, what would be acceptable to the National Archives vis a vis roles relating to a non-profit library partner. Could he or she participate at all in fundraising, be a member of the board, supervise staff, other sorts of questions. So the new arrangement proposed at Truman was kind of pressing maybe a little bit beyond their comfort level, although there had been precedence -

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Harry Middleton at the Johnson Library and maybe another example.

GESELBRACHT: In August, 1998, the Institute received a $1 million anonymous gift from a Board member. Can you talk about the importance of the gift to the fundraising campaign and then how this gift happened? The thought is, did the offer of the gift come first, or did the perception that such a gift was essential come first?

HACKMAN: I don't know whether we regarded it as essential.  Jeffrey Byrne and I went, maybe it was on a Thursday or a Friday, to see Beth Smith. Beth Smith was one of our best and most engaged Board members, a woman who cared a lot about what we were doing, who was especially interested in the educational potential of what we were trying to do. Another circumstance that needs to be mentioned was that a year or two before this, Beth’s husband had been killed in an auto accident by a hit and run driver in Phoenix. Beth had been a leader, in fact a creator, of a string of organizations in Kansas City, especially those related to women’s issues, and also to education. She taught at the University of Missouri, Kansas City as an adjunct in nonprofit management, a very accomplished, highly respected woman. How we came up with what we asked her for, I do not know, or why we went to her first I do not know. Maybe it was because we thought she was the most engaged Board member. [redacted] But that was just immensely helpful in setting kind of a benchmark that other people could key off of. And it certainly made it appropriate that we later attached her and her husband’s names to the White House Decision Center in her honor.

GESELBRACHT: The Learning Exchange came into the picture at about this time and was working on the concept of what we were calling the "learning center" at the Library. Can you just talk a bit about the Learning Exchange and what its importance was in the renovation?

HACKMAN: It probably followed on the fact that we had developed, I had drafted, our first white paper on an education program, at least a framework document for it. We at some point I’m sure distributed that to Institute Board members as well indicating just that these are the kinds of possibilities we’re talking about. Seeing that decision making was in there as a key concept, perhaps someone on the Board, could have been Beth Smith, could have been Shawsie Branton, might have been someone else but I think it’s most likely one of those two, perhaps came to me and said, "Well if you don't know about it, you really should know about the Learning Exchange and this established program they have called Exchange City which they run for grade school kids."  Exchange City was in a facility off Broadway in midtown.  It put kids into role playing in a small town or city mostly economic kinds of positions, a banker, a store manager, and so on, but I believe a few political as well, maybe the mayor and the police chief. So I went down and met with the Director, Connie Campbell at that point, of the Learning Exchange and spent a few hours observing and talking. I can’t remember whether anyone else was along. We might have hired Mark Adams as our first Education Director by then and he might have gone with me and observed and then read more about how Exchange City worked. We might have learned at that point or soon thereafter that the Learning Exchange was developing a second program for junior high or for high school students, I’ve forgotten which, called Earthworks, in one of the industrial caves north of the Missouri River. It was going to be about ecology, changes in an environment and how you measure them, deal with them, respond to them, and so on. That was being developed under the direction of a woman named Linda Segebrecht.

Out of some conversations and discussions, we developed a contract with the Learning Exchange, not to develop but to advise us on the development of this decision center/learning center at the Library.  Linda Segebrecht proved very helpful in a couple of ways. She had

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experience in experiential learning programs, so as we talked through ideas and then began to consider particular options for content in a decision center; Linda could respond from an experiential educator’s perspective. She also had used before I think, and brought to these discussions, software through which she could record our own decision making, first our ideas, but then in the particulars as we developed them, as we revised and firmed things up as we moved toward formal decision-case content. Probably you and Tom Heuertz remember more than I do on this.  And the software facilitated this developmental process. So that each time we met we had an up-to-date base from which we continued to build. Those two things were very helpful.

Later on I, and maybe some of the rest of you, became somewhat resentful at the extent to which the Learning Exchange claimed that they had either invented the White House Decision Center or played the central role. I would simply say that I really respect Linda Segebrecht for her expertise and helpful approach, but when she came to work with us, she might not have been able to explain that there were three branches of government or that there was a House of Representatives and a Senate or other very basic things about government and politics - because she had almost zero interest in them - let alone about American history or the Presidency or certainly the Truman Administration. So while she was very helpful as a facilitator and advisor, the Learning Exchange is not responsible for the White House Decision Center. That is with me and you and staff at the Library. We worked with Linda as we thought this through and came out with something very close to the final product which was then implemented at the Library. I can't recall how long Linda continued to serve as an advisor. I'm sure she was always useful as an advisor, but I think it’s important to know where the idea came from and where most of the expertise came from and the content came from. I don't know whether you share that or not to the degree I do but it is something that I feel pretty strongly about. Perhaps the Learning Exchange's inflated claims came as they were struggling later with resources and were trying to become more entrepreneurial, mostly after Linda left and became an independent consultant.

GESELBRACHT: The Truman Library adopted its first strategic plan in 1999 that was called "The Truman Library in a Time of Change." We’ve talked awhile ago in this interview about the strategic plan being part of the subtle way that you approached your position. So why did you wait over three years before creating a strategic plan for the Truman Library?

HACKMAN: Ray, you keep using the term my "subtle way" of approaching things. Where does that come from?  I don’t think of any of my basic approaches to organizational development as especially subtle. I hope they were thoughtful, sound, some even creative, but based largely on my prior experience and success in other settings.

With regard to the timing of that first formal strategic planning process, I would give several reasons. One was a lack of time. Another was the lack of readiness of the staff.  Another was the lack of urgent priority. There was a lot of other stuff to do that was more important; the internal changes in the Library that could be made in that period were not the primary things that needed to be done. I thought that the Library staff needed to see change under way and to see progress under way before I’d be able to have sufficient confidence from staff in things that I might throw out and suggest for the future. I wanted them to see some barriers already being broken down before I tried to initiate a process that would invite some broader thinking and so on. So there were several factors related to the timing.

Most of my interest in the strategic planning was not in so much having the product but in the process in terms of challenging staff to think bigger and longer and to kind of break them maybe

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out of their individual silo perspectives a bit. But I also wanted to make obvious and provide evidence that the Library was a multi-faceted organization and to encourage staff to feel some sense of responsibility for the whole thing, not just their smaller slice. And I certainly wanted to invite them to contribute their ideas, identify with and help shape the whole organization - and to understand the shape of the whole organization.

I know you were interested in whether I saw a strategic plan as a management tool to be tied directly to employee work plans. That’s never been the part of strategic planning that I enjoy or think is most beneficial. That view is heretical perhaps to strategic planning experts and consultants. There were some differences of views on this with the consultant and facilitator, John Detweiler, whom  we contracted to help us go through that process, because he was very accustomed to taking it to the level of work plans. I thought for the Library staff that what was important at that point was to think about the whole organization, to think in the longer-term, to just open things up for discussion, to try to get some buy-in into what I already thought that the Institution was becoming - in part through the renovation under way. So to the extent that we took it beyond vision, mission, goals and objectives, priorities and strategies - which are what were the most important to me - the extent to which work planning later developed from that after I left, I don't know. The extent to which strategic planning was sustained after I left, I'm highly doubtful about that.  I would have hoped that what could have been sustained were periodic revisits to that higher level of thinking, engaging the whole staff in that process.

GESELBRACHT: By the way, I think that your strategic plan is in the mail to members of the Institute Board just because I saw Lisa stapling a whole bunch of copies together.

HACKMAN: The old one you mean, the first one?

GESELBRACHT: Yeah, and the reason is that the Board has, distinct from the Library, the Library’' not involved in this at all, but the Board has become very interested in developing for themselves a new strategic plan. So they wanted to see what there was from before.

HACKMAN: Probably not a very good example for their purposes, but maybe they'll learn something about the Library from it.

GESELBRACHT: Well 1999 was the year when the money came in. The State of Missouri appropriated its second large gift, $2 million, and we talked about this, plus the $3.5 million of tax credits. Several Kansas City donors gave among them a combined $5 million almost. The federal government provided the second half of its $8 million appropriation. So your office should have been in a state of exuberance and celebration. Did that happen? Did you feel pretty good?

HACKMAN: I certainly felt a lot of relief at that point and that attention could be turned more to implementing what was on the drawing boards and in process. I was thinking about one of your legacy questions. You were asking me about the up and down times - which relates to this question. I was thinking that almost all of the real down times were in the first 13 or 14 months, until we got the changes made on the Institute side and you could see that an organization was being put into place that had a reasonable chance of addressing the major challenges. The down times were one, getting there and realizing how much larger and scarier the challenges were that I faced and realizing that for better or for worse, for a time, hopefully not forever, I was going to be the one who had to be the primary mover in preparing the way for those problems to be addressed and then for addressing them directly. Then encountering the Briley charges regarding the handling of classified records in the archives was one of the biggest downs. I can't

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remember when we figured out in response to what was going on…The National Archives had agreed to take to Washington for processing the small volume of classified materials from the Hoover Library and was it FDR maybe, or was it Eisenhower - FDR?

GESELBRACHT: It was the Roosevelt Library.

HACKMAN: Right, back to Washington. It occurred to us, maybe to me, maybe to you, maybe to both of us, that also moving the classified Truman materials to Washington could be a solution to that everyday threat of disaster from the issues regarding the prior handling of classified Truman materials at the Library given the negative publicity on it and the legal suits or challenges that the Library faced. Once we were able to get the National Archives to require that those materials would be moved to Washington, that turned one huge downer into a neutral, let's say.  So as we got into the fall of '96 and into '97 and had by then looked into so many issues regarding the renovation plan and had come up with a refreshed, revised proposal, much  of a certain kind of the work was out of the way and detailed exhibit and education program development and fundraising really became the primary focus.

GESELBRACHT: There was an important press conference in September 1999 about the fundraising campaign. Do you remember this?

HACKMAN: Oh, vaguely.

GESELBRACHT: Now the Classroom for Democracy Campaign had only been announced in July of 1999, and the goal of $22.5 million announced at that time. Then in September at this press conference, it was announced that the goal had been achieved. Now what was the thinking behind just keeping it all very tight until you essentially had all the funds needed?

HACKMAN: Ray, that's the classic capital campaign management approach. You don't usually announce to the public that you have some of the money until you are a really good way along in raising the money. Otherwise, what’s in people's minds is "Do they have any chance at all of raising this money?" With an institution that had never raised anything like this amount of money, it was really important to have most of the money in hand. The other thing that made that possible of course was, as I had mentioned earlier, the tax credits. That was high leverage, and it had a time ticker on it. If somebody, a corporation, didn't seize those while they were available, they wouldn't get them. So people were thinking pretty quickly about "don't I want those tax credits?" So that also moved the amount raised faster and further than otherwise would have been the case. 

I watch now with more knowledge than I used to have when an organization around town, announces a campaign and states that they are going to raise a half million dollars or even $10 million or twenty but perhaps has never raised substantial funds before and does not now announce that they have raised impressive contributions in this new campaign. That is a damper on enthusiasm right off. It especially shows that your own Board and your own family so to speak hasn't contributed major gifts. You're apparently expecting almost all of it from people who don't know you. That's a killer!  So the basic point is that what the Institute did is pretty standard practice where at all possible.  And in our case, because of the tax credits and the major gifts from our own Board, we were able to do that in a compact period of time.

GESELBRACHT:   Now we've talked a little bit about attention to media coverage of the Library and of its fundraising ambitions. Can you talk a bit about what your thinking was with respect to this media campaign? How did it relate to everything else that was going on? Was this

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something in your mind that you knew you had to continue seeking media attention for what was happening?

HACKMAN: I don't recall a detailed plan, Ray.  This fits with everything we've talked about in terms of public programming, that you seize absolutely every event, every sign of progress, acceptance of large donations, everything that you can do to give a positive impression to the community at large, everything that you can do to give a positive impression and involve those people who support your particular needs. So taking advantage of the fiftieth anniversary of the recognition of Israel to do everything you could with the Jewish community which has a reputation for supporting things historical, cultural, and so on; that kind of thing is obvious. Holding events in Kansas City and trying to publicize them and interest the community, but especially community leaders, in them and to get media coverage. I don't think it was a formal plan; it's just a fairly simple strategy and then implementing it each and every time. Two things that we really used effectively I thought were ads on KCUR on public radio because people who are interested in the community and who are potential supporters listen to public radio; and trying hard to get things in the Star because community leaders still, then at least, read the Star. It's what they grew up reading, it's what their parents read, it’s what their kids read - if there’s one thing in the community. So those are the two things we worked hard at.

GESELBRACHT: Now in early 2000, in your last six months as Director, the museum design firm completed the design drawings for the Presidential Gallery. The newly named White House Decision Center program was successfully highlighted during the year. Both these things, the Presidential Gallery, the White House Decision Center, have decision-making at their heart. When I think back through our interview sessions here, it seems to me that that’s because of you. It goes all the way back to your experience with that filmmaking at the Kennedy Library, and it was something that was in your mind every day, and you got it into these programs. Is that fair?

HACKMAN: I think that's fair.  I carried that concept around with me for almost 25 years before I got to Truman. It seemed to me when I got to the Truman Library that the education function in the past had not been very substantial or very ambitiously thought about or well defined. The Institute’s initial fund raising campaign already had included an educational component; and frankly, looking back at the minutes of their earlier meetings, that seemed to me because they had in mind a $10 million campaign and at some point when they costed out the exhibits, the proposal was it would take $7 million. They had announced $10 million and they figured they needed to do something with the other three, more or less that approach. But they still didn't know what they meant when they talked about education.

So the opportunity was there to shape something substantial. The White House Decision Center and whatever else the education program is grew from some of those initial discussions that we had, bringing in people from the outside, discussions and focus groups, and through creating a teacher’s advisory group, and so on.  Then the ideas for a learning center/decision center were embedded in our renovation plans with a space and a configuration and a facility and a cost figure.  At that point I was feeling pretty good about this because that would have been pretty hard to back away from once funds were allocated for the physical work to prepare the space and so on.

GESELBRACHT:       Just a footnote of my own is that I remember having a conversation with Phil Fleming, who later left as Development Director at the Institute, during the time when the first campaign was being developed. I don't know why I went to see him, but I was in his little office area there. He was working up I guess the case statement you would call it for this new

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campaign, the Twenty-first Century Fund. He was breaking down the expenditures and so forth and there was this education line, and I asked him about that. He said, “Well, what we're really trying to do is we need to raise money to build these new museum exhibits. Nobody will give you money to build museum exhibits, but they'll give you money for education.” So that's why that's in there.

HACKMAN: Well, good.

GESELBRACHT: You were mentioning that it got in there somehow. But you're absolutely right. It wasn't there because there were a lot of really strong ideas for an educational component. It was because it was regarded as an essential area if they really wanted to raise more money.

HACKMAN: Yeah, and after the bylaws were changed and as more members from Kansas City became involved, that just became clearer. We should mention here, Ray, that you and I wrote an article for History News about the emergence of that idea for the White House Decision Center and the central aspects of it and what its goals were in terms of the educational component and so on. Anyone who has any interest in this should go back and read that article.

GESELBRACHT: I think it was 2004 in History News. But all that we've been talking about was not finished yet in 2000. The grand rededication which opened the Presidential Gallery, and it was kind of also I guess the official opening of the White House Decision Center which had just started business a few months before, was in December, 2001. But you resigned as Director in December, 2000. So why?

HACKMAN: Well I announced that I was resigning in the middle of 2000.  I did that for several reasons. I think the first was personal exhaustion. I think another was that I wanted to leave while I sort of felt I was on top, everyone seemed satisfied with what was happening and what they thought was going to happen. Part of it, believe it or not, naively was that I wanted to leave something for my successor to be able to be a part of and to build momentum for him or her going forward after my departure so that he or she would have a major influence especially on the second major permanent exhibit, the Life and Times of Harry Truman, and also in establishing a presence in the community and taking charge of the new programming and exhibits. And in the back of my mind, Ray, was that it seemed to me most of the challenges that would be coming up after the renovation would be dealing with internal issues, maybe a couple of difficult staff changes that would be needed and in better overall internal performance. After fighting many fights of those kinds over my career, I didn't feel much stomach for going back to the day-to-day management issues as compared to the leadership and creation issues. So I'm sure that was also part of my thinking and feeling.

My one regret is that I wasn't able to get myself energized enough to spend maybe another year at the Library. When I look at it in retrospect, there are two things that make me feel that way. One is that I don't think my successor took advantage of what was there anyway, including the substantial funds that were left for the Institute that he could have developed new initiatives with if he had held the confidence of the Institute Board. The second is that I think I let a handful of people down whose good opinion I highly valued by leaving when I did.  Beth Smith, Morton Sosland, Shawsie Branton, Tom McDonald, and some other people probably had the expectation that I would see that whole renovation project through and then maybe resign or even stay on much longer. I feel bad about that, although at the time I felt it was absolutely necessarily to leave for my own well-being.

GESELBRACHT:       After you stepped down as Director, you remained at the Library for another

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two years on a part-time basis. In fact, it may have been even just one day a week. One of the most important things you did in that time was to write a lengthy paper, I guess for the Archivist of the United States and the Director of the Office of Presidential Libraries, and probably for Institute leadership as well, called "A Presidential Library Partnership" which explored a lot of the things that we've been talking about and the creation of the partnership agreement. I would like to get your reflections on what the meaning of the word partnership is in this respect. Did you feel you were making the Institute truly into a full partner that would work with the Library in preserving and exploring Truman's legacy? Or was it more developing an organization that the Truman Library Director could direct as its President and find to be a helpful instrument?

HACKMAN: Well some of both.  I've mentioned this a number of times in passing, but in a lot of what I was doing, I had in mind creating an example that other Presidential Libraries and their support groups could draw on.  As you know, after I retired, I was asked to go and speak to some of the support organizations for other presidential libraries about how we did things at the Truman Library and Truman Library Institute. Of course what they were most interested in was how did we raise all of that money?  But I tried to get them to also listen to what lay underneath that.

I thought the Truman Library and the Truman Library Institute were on their way to a true partnership that could have become fully developed. I believe that ideally that term partnership ought to apply to these non-profit organizations and the libraries because I think partners need to be mutually respectful and supportive, confident in one another, and invested in one another's future. I do not believe that you can obtain that if one organization sees itself primarily as the beneficiary and the other organization sees itself only as the supporter. It has to be something beyond that, or it’s going to be much less effective than it could be and with continuing tension that need not be there. 

I wanted the National Archives and the Office of Presidential Libraries to see that there could be a true, effective, smoothly operating partnership that would not constantly be bringing problems to Washington to solve: somebody’s mad at somebody else, the chair of the foundation doesn’t like the director of the library and wants him or her fired, or all of that kind of stuff which a lot of the libraries have gone through and continue to go through. That doesn't show me that the present model is necessarily a very good model. And the dominant partner can become the private partner. That's too much the case in too many instances. That’s what I particularly dislike and that I believe is disruptive. That partnership study that I wrote is not really a history of the partnership except in the chronology section; it clearly needs to be supplemented by reading Ray Geselbracht’s mini-history of the Truman Library in the special issue of the Public Historian in 2006. 

As the author of the partnership study, it was not appropriate for me to overemphasize my own role. I tried to underemphasize it. My own feeling about my role probably emerges too much. Nevertheless, I was really pleased that after I finished that and I sent it off to Sandy Boyd who was back teaching law again at the University of Iowa, that he sent me a letter from which I’m just going to read one paragraph. "I’m greatly impressed by your stellar overview and analysis of the Truman Library/Truman Library Institute Partnership. It's a pathfinding document with significance for all support foundations. It will be of enormous use to me and others who work on these issues. I want to give copies to students who are researching support foundations both from a legal and managerial perspective. I cannot adequately express my appreciation to you for making our partnership a reality and then codifying it so clearly in this document." And he's somebody who has studied nonprofits for most of his career and has been the leader of several very large and complex ones that have needed major assistance from outside supporters. So I

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was glad to see that someone who doesn’t have a vested interest on either the Library side or the Institute side, recognized partnership as an appropriate term.

Maybe you worried about the relationship being out of balance in either direction.  I worry about it being out of balance in either direction. But the easiest one to fix is the Institute side, the nonprofit side. And if only my successor had been more perceptive and more interested, it would have remained, I would say, easily in balance. It needed a Library director who wanted to lead and take responsibility on behalf of both organizations, not merely to preside.

There's plenty of room for there to be leadership in the Institute and membership in the Institute that's not from Kansas City. It just needs a little leadership and, if needed, a nudge on the nomination and selection process, a nudge that can be provided very readily by a Library Director acting as the Institute President. And I believe that would be welcomed. He or she may need to help find some of those candidates nationally. I don't think that would be difficult either. That's enough to say.

GESELBRACHT: I am just remembering your time as Director, also thinking about our conversations here, but also having gone through some recent years at the Truman Library since you left where the relationships between the two partners were very problematic just to state it in a veiled way. I think that when you arrived at the Library, the Institute was still largely, not entirely, but still largely what it had always been which was an organization that was almost without any consciousness at all. I mean there was a small bank account and a number of people that came together every year, many of them in earlier days friends and associates of the President. The program ambitions were very slight, and they had a little money so that they gave some research grants and had some conferences. The directors of the Library, Phil Brooks and then Ben Zobrist, very much directed the work at the Institute. I think that's fair to say, and again these two had very little self-consciousness. It was a group of people that came together once a year and they were treated very nicely at the Library and taken around and talked to by the Library leadership and so on.

But by the time you left, all these things that have happened that we've talked about with respect to the Institute created a much different organization. This was an organization that was self-conscious, and it had a permanent staff. It had some strong personalities in that permanent staff, had the potential to have even stronger personalities as later happened to some degree, who were capable of taking the role that I think you largely took during the time you were Director of creating, always constantly educating, constantly providing them the information that’s going to cause them to be a good partner with the Library. But the potential was there for that kind of thing being done by the Institute permanent staff and not the Director. I think that's happened in the last few years. So that's the point.

I know I'm going on too long as the interviewer rather than the interviewee, but the last point I'd say is that I come away from our conversations thinking that the new Institute created during your directorship is always going to be a potential danger for the Library. It’s very important that the Library Director maintain control of that role as the information provider and constantly be courting the members so that they receive their education from the Library Director - education into what the Library is and what it means and how it wants to work together. What are your thoughts about that over-long statement?

HACKMAN: Well, a couple of things. At the time that I left, I don't believe there was anyone on the Institute staff who would have played a strong role in filling that gap. As talented as Kay Morris and Lisa Sullivan are, they were not going to play that role on their own. It wasn't

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anywhere close to their job descriptions or the expectations of the Institute Board. The Development Director at the point that I left was not going to play a lead role. So I would simply say that if I had stayed, that wouldn't have happened, it wouldn't have needed to happen. You would have had a Development Director, not an Executive Director. It just would have been different if my model for an effective President who was also the Library Director had been stuck to; it wouldn't have been a problem.

 I've often thought about why the Institute played the particular role that it played earlier regarding support for research. I would attribute a lot of that to the National Archives. You always have to remember that Presidential Libraries are part of the National Archives, not the National Archives and Museum. It seemed to me that for a long time, and the Truman Library was an obvious case, the National Archives basically showed no interest in the museum function and no interest in educational programs at Presidential Libraries. So it was very logical that the Institute focused almost exclusively on the role that was valued by the parent organization and by the Library, and that when they were encouraged to do something else and to provide much greater funding, they weren't ready to do it. So blame it on the National Archives.

GESELBRACHT: Well and the first Director was an archivist and had, as you described it, no interests in the museum. As I remember, the first curator was somewhat critical of him for that. I know that the museum budget in the early years was measured, according to this first curator in his oral history, in the hundreds of dollars per year. So there was not anything going on as a consequence in the museum. I think the first Director, who was widely loved and admired by everyone, just wasn't interested.

HACKMAN: I can't argue with that priority in an absolute sense, and I can’t argue with that priority given the predilections and directions of the parent institution, the National Archives. I think the only argument that you could make is then why would you create museums if you're not serious about them? If you're not serious about them, then you do invite private parties to come in and largely determine the character of those museums. Once you start doing that in one or two instances, then people while they're still in the White House are going to get interested in controlling that. So if the National Archives all of those years had been on its own developing first rate, impressive museums as parts of Presidential Libraries, the vacuum would not have been there for other people to waltz in and think they should run it. Which lecture would you like next?

GESELBRACHT: Did you get involved in choosing your successor as Director?

HACKMAN: I did. In conversations with Sandy Boyd, the Chairman of the Board at the Truman Library Institute, and perhaps others we decided that it would be a good thing if the Institute tried to play some role in the selection of a successor. Part of that effort was to propose to the National Archives, or ask their approval or their nodding approval, that the Truman Library Institute was willing to hire a search firm to try to find some strong applicants for the job. And they did that, and it was largely a waste of money.

I convinced one of my best friends and most admired colleagues, Ed Bridges, who was at that point the Director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, to be a candidate. He and his wife, Martha, came to Kansas City, met with the Institute, looked at the Library. He'd been out here of course before as a consultant. Ed decided to apply, and the Institute Board was super impressed with him. The people in the Office of Presidential Libraries were impressed with Ed and were favorable to his appointment. Because of the classification then the

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Director's position was not a senior executive service (SES) position, it was a competitive position. So a number of other people applied. The Office of Presidential Libraries set up the usual panel to review the applications. Two of the three members of the panel favored the appointment of Ed Bridges. One member of the panel objected that Bridges had not filled out the application form fully enough and protested. Hence, Ed Bridges is not the Director of the Truman Library and another candidate was appointed, someone the National Archives had previously tried to appoint as Director of the George H.W. Bush Library. The George H.W. Bush Library support organization rejected him as an unacceptable candidate. So the Archivist of the United States felt he had previously offered a job to this fellow, and he was prepared to appoint him at Truman. In the meantime, the candidate, who ultimately was appointed, had accepted appointment as the Director of the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, I believe it was called. Sandy Boyd, the Chairman of the Board of the Institute, wanted to leave his Institute position and did not want to push the National Archives to re-open the job announcement. Hence, I made a call to Michael Devine to persuade him not to take the North Carolina job but to take the Truman job, which he did. That’s the story of my involvement as I remember it on issues of consequence. I think everyone suffered from that process and the decision that was made.

GESELBRACHT: I know that you must think about your legacy and that perhaps you would have preferred that it was more strongly in place now than you probably feel it is?

HACKMAN: Well what I had hoped for was a Library that was more widely visible, understood, respected, supported, and used and that operated at a higher level of performance in the museum, education, and public programs. I hoped it would serve as an example that would endure in terms of quality and innovation as a presidential library. The things that I thought were most important to get done while I was there mostly got done or were clearly in process. But only part of the legacy clearly has survived.

I think the precedent of a high quality Presidential Exhibition and the development of the White House Decision Center as the keystone of the educational program ought to be long-lasting. I don't know how soon another Presidential Exhibition will come about, but I can't believe that they will go back next time to the much lower level that preceded my time there. I believe the strength of the Institute both in terms of its interest in the museum and its capacity to provide financial support will help make that true.  The Institute will be vital to that, and is being so, because the National Archives appears to put almost no resources into the museum programs in older libraries.  They are largely on their own.

A much more effective Institute in terms of board members capable of raising funds needed for major Library initiatives is a positive legacy. What did not survive regarding the Institute was a Library Director who could and would play a lead role in the operation of the Institute, making it a good partner and supporter for the Library. So clearly the precedent that I hoped to set on that did not last and that created a vacuum that at this point has been filled through a different arrangement.

I had hoped to set as a precedent and leave as a legacy an Institute/Library partnership where there was continuing collaboration in terms of getting and using resources for agreed-upon purposes. I don't know whether that will survive to the extent that I hoped. I don't think there have been any major initiatives that I know of proposed by the Library that the Institute hasn't been responsive to to some degree, but I could be wrong there. I had also hoped to leave a legacy and a precedent that a Library Director would play an active personal, visible, positive, respected role in Greater Kansas City and especially in Kansas City itself, and I don't see that

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that has survived nearly to the extent that I would have hoped. I think that's a powerful tool for a Library Director, not only in terms of the Library proper, but also in the relationship to the Institute. If you want to use their influence, you have to have some yourself. You have to accumulate that by hard work and realizing that it is important. And if you don't have it, you don't have any leverage; and that lesson was not learned. That's a down note to end on, on what was mostly a positive experience for me.

GESELBRACHT: Larry, I thank you for giving this interview to the Truman Library. It's been a great pleasure for me to interview you and a great honor to do so. I just want to express my own personal gratitude and that of the Truman Library as well for your giving us this interview.

HACKMAN: If anyone ever reads it, Ray, maybe they will feel I have overstated my role and by too much preachiness toward almost everybody else involved - which maybe is why, as you said in your article about the Truman Library, "Larry Hackman once said that he knew how to get people to do things, but he didn't necessarily know how to get them to like it." And that's probably because of my personal characteristics in terms of being too demanding, too prideful, too whatever.

GESELBRACHT: Well I think you gave an excellent interview.

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Addtional comments

Regarding other materials on the development of the Truman Library and the Truman Institute during 1995-2000.

In reviewing the transcripts of the three oral history interviews with me conducted by Dr. Ray Geselbracht, I regret that I often could not be sure of the time or sequence of certain developments or provide the proper names of certain groups or individuals.  For anyone interested in this period, I suggest reference to my February 2002 report, "A Presidential Library Partnership: The Harry S. Truman Library and the Harry S. Truman Library Institute for National and International Affairs." I especially wish that before and during the oral history interviews I had consulted the chronology that I had prepared in that report for the years 1987-2001; this is especially detailed for the 1995-2000 period. For a thoughtful overview based on extensive research in primary materials, see also the excellent article on the history of the Truman Library, including the period when I was director, by Dr. Geselbracht published in the 2006 special issue on presidential libraries of the Public Historian.  My  own "Director’s Briefing" sent several times each year from 1996 to 2000 to the board of the Truman Library Institute, to staff of the Truman Library and to others significant to the Library and Institute describes, from my perspective, most activities important to the progress of the Library and Institute. For more detailed evidence, see the extensive files at the Truman Library from my office as well as the files of the Truman Library Institute for these years.

Regarding selected individuals.

In reading the transcripts I notice that I slighted or even did not mention many individuals who played important positive roles during my time at the Library.  Several especially come to mind:  Tom McDonnell was highly active and very effective as chair of the Institute’s resource development committee during the capital campaign and as one of the two vice presidents of the Institute after the bylaws changes. Morton Sosland and Henry Bloch were not only major financial supporters during the campaign but also added deep wisdom and experience to the board and increased its stature and credibility in Kansas City.  Dr. Richard Kirkendall, also elected to the board, continued his long service to the Library and Institute as a leading Truman scholar. Ray Geselbracht, as assistant to the director, was invaluable to me personally on many projects, as the Library’s representative to several external organizations and in leading groups of important visitors and potential contributors on tailored tours of the archives. Mark Adams made major contributions to the success of the Library as both its first education director and as its webmaster. Tom Heuertz was a perfect first director of the White House Decision Center. Many others, unmentioned here, made significant contributions to the Library and/or Institute.

Regarding the Truman Library and the National Archives, especially the Office of Presidential Libraries.

During my years as Director of the Truman Library, I and the Truman Library received strong cooperation and good support from the leaders and staff of the National Archives, including the Archivist of the United States and the Deputy Archivist, and from the Office of Presidential Libraries. From the latter office, David Peterson and Sharon Fawcett were valued professional colleagues during these years. They were receptive to my suggestions and requests to the extent that they could be, they encouraged cooperation and support for the Truman Library from other parts of the National Archives, they recognized some of the approaches we were using at the Truman Library as good practices and encouraged that they be considered by other presidential libraries, and they were generous in their appreciation for our efforts.

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Although at times I felt that both the National Archives and the Office of Presidential Libraries could have been more imaginative and aggressive in their leadership of the presidential library system, including promoting more collaborative initiatives among the libraries, this did not negatively impact me or the Truman Library.

I and the Library also benefitted from the assistance of other parts of the National Archives, especially the legal staff in the General Counsel’s Office.

Larry J. Hackman, August 2015