INTERVIEWER: Today is
July 23rd, 2007. This is the MIT 150 Oral
History project. We're interviewing former
president and former chairman of the Corporation,
Howard Johnson. Mr. Johnson, thank you
for taking the time to be with us today. As you've already written a
book, Holding the Center, this interview will be somewhat of
a different format than previous ones since much of your
biographical information has already been
covered there. So what I'd like to get from
you, as much as possible, is your thoughts on the various
offices and positions and responsibilities that you've
held here at MIT. First start, going on back all
the way to the beginning, you mentioned that you had come
through on your way to Europe. You had come to Boston for a
term, but you'd never heard of MIT before that or you'd never
knew that MIT would be in your life such as that but-- JOHNSON: It's the second
part of that statement that's correct. I'd heard of MIT. I had an interest in MIT. It was known-- but I had
never been here. It was known as the greatest
technologically based institution in the country--
had that reputation. When I looked across the river
on that foggy day, I couldn't see it. And that's what I referred
to in that piece. INTERVIEWER: So when had you
first heard about MIT? Was it an interest in
engineering that you had that would've brought you to here? JOHNSON: My interest was
actually science more than engineering. I went to a high school in
Chicago-- typical, large metropolitan high school. But fortunately, we had a couple
of very good physicists and a pretty good mathematician
on the faculty. And I gravitated to those two
fields: science and math. I thought that I would end up
perhaps in math, but certainly in physics-- interested in it. So engineering wasn't taught
as a field and what I knew about engineering was
relatively little. And since I graduated in 1939--
the depression years had been going on for several
years, since certainly '32 and the mills and factories
were in the state of deep disrepair. So there was not much
talk of engineering. I became interested in
engineering really only after my service in the US Army. I knew that we had to
do something about the wreckage of Europe. And it seemed to me that
engineering was worth a field. That and the dreadful
state of human beings and human relations. Those two areas seemed to strike
me as interesting. INTERVIEWER: When was the
first time you came to campus-- when you came
to MIT's campus? JOHNSON: I visited here briefly
as a visitor in the-- I suppose it would be
'48, after the war. I had never been here before,
never been in Cambridge. In New York often, in
Philadelphia once in a while, but my base was the
Middle West-- Chicago and all that. So I didn't know MIT physically until after the war. And shall I tell you that
process of how I did see it? INTERVIEWER: Sure. JOHNSON: I had a phone call,
literally, unexpected from an old friend of mine,
Eli Shapiro. Shapiro had been a colleague at
the University of Chicago. His field was finance. He's still alive. I saw him the other day. He called to see whether
I'd be interested in coming to MIT. He was, at that point,
associate dean. An absolute new idea at MIT--
the Sloan School. You know that we had a strong
department of called business and engineering administration,
it was called-- course fifteen. We had such a course, had been
going on since 1917, I think. But we did not have a school
of-- what became the school of Alfred P. Sloan, School
of Industrial Management till 1952. And Shapiro, who was a professor
at Chicago, was invited to become
the professor of finance at that school. We said goodbye to Eli. He lived next door to me in the
university neighborhood. And he was calling out of the
blue to see whether I'd be interested in coming to teach
in the new Sloan School. For a variety of reasons that
aren't important at this point, I thought about it
and said, yes, I would come out to see him. But before I had a chance
to do that, Dean Brooks, who was the dean-- E. P. Brooks-- called me and
said he was coming to Chicago and wanted to talk to me. I suppose to see whether
it was really worth my coming over. And he did come. I saw him in actually one
of his children home in Hinsdale, Illinois. And he described what he saw
as the future of this brand new school that had just began--
this is 1954 by the way-- and classes had just begun
a couple of years before that under that heading
of the Sloan School. We had a very good morning. I was intrigued by what he had
to say because up to that time, I must confess, business
schools did not seem to me to be heavyweights in academics. The business schools I knew, and
I don't pretend I knew a great deal, but they struck
me as lightweights. I was at that time teaching in
the Department of Economics in the School of Business at the
University of Chicago. I was a brand new assistant
professor, soon to be associate professor. I had found I really
enjoyed teaching-- really enjoyed teaching. And Chicago was an interesting
institution. And having grown up in Chicago,
I had the feeling that I was going to end up
at Chicago for my life. It was a serious institution. Brooks and I talked on and on
and then he said, will you come out and meet
a class or two? We have an opening. I want to tell you, he said to
me, that the chief task of that job will be to run
something we call the Sloan program, but you'll also
teach a normal load. He said, we got two other good
candidates for the job and we've already gone far, quite
far, with one of them. So I don't want to promise
you a hint of anything. But if you can come over,
we'll take a look. And my wife and I talked that
over alas that evening. And we both agreed that while
New England was a factor x for us, it certainly deserved
a look. Again, a couple of reasons
that are not important. So I came to Cambridge,
did teach a course. Did meet with the
Sloan Fellows. And you can read about
the Sloan Fellows-- they still exist. But it was a group of men in
their 30s who had been nominated by their companies
to come for a year-- a full year, twelve months of study--
they'd get, on the basis of that, if they succeeded with the
thesis, a Master's degree. Most of all, the companies were
seeking to prepare those people for senior positions and
they had typically been trained as engineers. And they thought they ought to
have some other strengths. I agreed with that thesis
completely. So I enjoyed meeting with
the group of Sloans-- 29 of them. They had a lot of questions. They were clearly testing me. Their term had already
started. So they were in full speed. I was impressed by them. And maybe they were
impressed by me. I was younger than the
average Sloan. I was 33. But I was older in some ways. Although most of them
had been in the war. And they were typically plant
managers or on a hot track. So I enjoyed it and I told
Pen and Eli that, yeah, I enjoyed it. That's kind of feel that--
it struck me so differently than Chicago. Chicago was a school
of theory. Still is, by and large,
although the School of Business is a little different
than that. But MIT struck me immediately
as a school that was interested in applications,
getting results. That struck me as a
very good idea. That is, not the only theory,
modeling as we call it now of various kinds, but of making
things happen. So I remember Eli Shapiro, who
was in his own right already a very distinguished person, and
Pen Brooks saying, well, what do you think it? And I said, I like
it very much. I didn't want to hem
and haw, I like it. They said, we'll be in touch
within a week or two. I frankly did not give it much
of a chance because Pen told me on the side that one of their
nominees had had a good deal of experience
in business. I had almost none in business. I'd say none. And the younger man
had completed all his academic work. I had too, but I don't think
quite as heavy as his. You notice in those early days,
we only use the male gender in describing people
who took jobs in academia. We had practically no women. I mean that for Chicago as well
as MIT and practically every other institution. I didn't think I had
much of a chance. To my amazement within a week
Eli called me and said, we're willing to appoint you
associate professor, outlined the work. Said, we'll pay your moving
expenses, which was important. And he named the salary,
which was more than I was getting at Chicago. But it could have been less and
I think I would've taken it because I liked what they
were talking about. So I took the job to report
the next July. INTERVIEWER: So when you arrived
on campus, is there anything that struck you about
the architecture, the atmosphere, the curriculum
when you arrived? JOHNSON: Well architecture. It was called The Factory on
the Charles in those days. Except for the main buildings,
which we are here, it struck you as an Institute. Limestone buildings, no
Jeffersonian touches of architecture except maybe
for the columns. And you heard practically in the
old, old commentary, it's a place for men to work,
not for boys to play. And things of that ilk. Sort of a-- it's a
hard workplace. This is 1954 when I came over
and walked around the campus. The temporary buildings erected
right after World War II, some for the radiation
laboratory that had functioned all during the war, some many,
many residential buildings for the students coming back
after the war. It was not what you call "a
distinguished academic look about the place."
But. I loved it. It looked like a place where
men really were working. Vannevar Bush-- we may
talk about him. In his thinking about the place,
he says, MIT is an institution that has
a habit of success. I don't know whether that was an
original comment, it could have been, it almost had to be
Bush, not Rogers or any of his predecessors-- any of
his successors. So there was a tone that
I liked about it. And there were problems: there
was no campus in a sense of faculty housing. We were spread for a mile and
little more now, quite a bit more, along the Charles,
looking over at Boston. Behind us, behind the Institute,
were a curious mixture: a chocolate factory
that spread it's wonderful smell around the place, and the
Necco Candy Factory, and then a lot of little one-story
shops, welding shops, all the rest that had sprung up, Belding
Company, I remember. All of those were there, but
it didn't remind you of the University of Chicago or
certainly Harvard or Northwestern-- the institutions I knew pretty well. And yet there was this drive
behind the place that made it exciting. Hard to explain, but
it was exciting. INTERVIEWER: What building
were you-- oh, go ahead. JOHNSON: Well we were in
a brand new building. Not brand new, brand
new to MIT. It was Unilever. The US headquarters
for Unilever. And headquarters, its people
decided, ought to be in New York. So they moved to New York and
the building, their building, same building you see today,
complete with elevators and all the rest, were dated from
the 30's, the early 30's. Apart from that, there were
no intrusions on there. And we were right on the river
just as we are today. That's the building in which
I was told where my office would be. The economists were there too. And the Sloan School. So we had a lot of space, lots
of appointments to make, a future to make. The rest of MIT looked-- you
can see fragments of the original MIT. The only thing that's exactly
like it was-- well, no we had a brand new building, Kresge
Auditorium, has been dedicated the year in '54. And the auditorium and the
chapel were brand new. Most of the other things--
the gymnasium was a former Armory converted. Still there. Most of the buildings-- Kresge library had just been
built-- but there was a lot of the old standard buildings. And most of the buildings, the
grand shell central, the hub of the Institute, were built,
completed between 1916-1919. So it was a still relatively
new institution. That part of it. INTERVIEWER: When you arrived,
you were assuming your post of the head of the Sloan Fellows
Program, how much were you aware of the goings ons of the
McCarthy Committee and kind of the impact that had on academic
research that you or others at the Institute
were doing? JOHNSON: That had been a major
battle at the University of Chicago and at MIT. But the battle was over. And by and large, the McCarthy
threats-- we all faced that at Chicago. We did not sign loyalty
oaths at Chicago. And by and large, I think
Chicago was considered-- president was Robert Hutchins--
anyway, there was no-- we'd gone through
that battle. And it, by and large, was over
by the time I got here. You remember Eisenhower
was elected in '52. The early part of his term they
were sort of cleaning up. But it was the previous
turn in which that battle was fought. INTERVIEWER: Did you notice
any scars of any of that battles here at MIT? JOHNSON: Yeah, MIT had
some hearings. Dirk Struik, professor of
mathematics and a communist, was such an innocent communist
in the sense. He was a mathematician who
had a European-- he was essentially a socialist. And he was censured in some way,
but never lost any pay. And I met him much later. I wanted to see him. He lived to past a hundred-
years- old. Showed up at-- in any case, the
Department of Mathematics, the department which I still
identified with, had some real problems. You can go read about those. The head of the department
had been a communist. MIT by and large protected
those few. There had been no really-- I'm going over this very
carefully in my mind to make sure I'm not making a mistake
in my recall. I'm recalling what happened at
MIT during those periods and I wasn't here. The Department of Mathematics,
its chair, other people in it, were under good deal
of pressure. But by and large the trustees
and the faculty allowed those people to teach and to go on. And we're talking
about very few. It's not like the
California case. We didn't have a governor who
wanted everybody to sign loyalty oaths. I think when I got here there,
was one brief-- nobody was interested in loyalty
oats by that time. And Eisenhower, who'd been at
Columbia as president for a brief period, had been pretty
well-- he put that to one side, I think. Fortunately. INTERVIEWER: What kind of
relationship did the Sloan School, or the Sloan Course
15 program have with the Department of Economics? JOHNSON: Good one. And I helped a bit with it. But it was good to start with. And that made one of the major
differences at MIT with other institutions of management
and management education. At Chicago, for example, the
Department of Economics, pretty good one. I say that you know, it's
a very good one. I should say that. It's one of the very
good institutions. But it, in those days, saw
itself separate from the School of Business. The School of Business was
teaching how to become a Business manager. The Department of Economics was
teaching economic theory. We had some people like Paul
Douglas and others at Chicago who were interested
in applications. Paul was later elected to the
Senate and served three terms. People like that. But in general, the School of
Business and the Departments of Economics were far apart. Here, both from the point of
view of geography and the point of view of interest,
because of I think this overarching notion of interest
in theory and practice together, they came together. They were in our
same building. They talked in the
Sloan Program. And I shouldn't even use the
they because they were-- we taught together. My field by that time, the one
in which I did my work, was Labor Economics. I was very interested
after the war. That was a big field. You know, the large scale
strikes of John L. Lewis and all of that, right
after the war. Those were the issues that
were still demanding. And I taught in that field. And we had some splendid people
in that field, most of whom were centered in the
Department of Economics. But I was the one who was
a member this Industrail Relation's Center, we called
it-- was also a member of it. So economics and management
have gone together. And I proposed-- the reason I
got involved in later years-- I proposed to the head
of the Course 15. Course 15 isn't fair to call it
at the-- the Department of Economics, which was part of the
School of Humanities and Social Science. It was really the shining star
of that School in those days. May still be. Had well-known people in it. And I proposed to the head of
the department that when we appointed an Applied Economist--
or just call it an economist-- we had several
examples, that I would like to run them through the Department
of Economics' Personnel Committee, as we
always called them, as well as our own school. Make sure the Department of
Economics thought that they passed muster. And we did that. We had-- I won't go through all their
names-- we probably had five or six people who could have. Well I'll mention names. Franco Modigliani,
we hired him. He was at Northwestern at the
time and he came because he wanted to come. His appointment was in
management at the Sloan School, but was half- time in
the Department of Economics. And people like-- well, there's
a number them who had, really right up to the present
day, Schmalensee taught in economics, was a member of the
President's Council of Economic Advisers. So they went together and they
strengthened both groups. They certainly strengthened
the Sloan School. INTERVIEWER: How well did you
get to know Paul Samuelson or Robert Solow, who would later
on go onto do great things? JOHNSON: I still know them. They're still around. I was at dinner with Paul
the other night. At the age 90, he's not an
active teacher but we see him here often. And Bob Solow, who is roughly
my age, I think, has been an active professor,
taught Sloans. And there's a famous story that
was going on when I got here: Paul looked
awfully young. And the Sloans gathered for
their course in price theory or whatever it was going to
be, and they watched this young guy, looked like
a graduate student. And normally when you start a
class here, as you do at many institutions, you put your name
and your hours up on the blackboard and you
start your first lecture, interchange really. Paul came in and turned
around and said, assume that GNP is x. The inflation rate is x. What would be the direction if
you're thinking what should be done in fiscal policy? And a man who later
became chairman of Boeing and a good friend. He held his hand up and he
said, would you mind introducing yourself and
telling us who you are? Oh, Samuelson said, I'm sorry. Professor Paul Samuelson. He looked that young. But he taught Sloans
and continued to teach through the program. I knew them very well. And their wives. INTERVIEWER: Maybe you can
indulge me and just give me your experience with-- I'm going to name some names
and you can tell me your experience with them and their
relationships with MIT. Who is Alfred Sloan? JOHNSON: Who is Alfred Sloan? Well, he's one of the greatest
men I ever knew. I say that without-- I once had to put together a
list of six or eight people who really had an influence on
me and I regarded as really truly great people. Sloan would be on that list
and among the top ones. Alfred Sloan was a
graduate of MIT. Class of '95. Electrical engineering. His father had a little
company, manufacturing company, they made the parts
that later became auto- parts as the automobile
began to grow. Sloan was a very bright man. And he built the company when
he went back to it after graduation-- Hyatt Roller Bearing. And then Durant and others who
were trying to put together the beginnings of
General Motors. This is by that time probably
in the early teens. Made an offer and bought the
roller bearing company in return for General
Motors stock. The timing was just right
and Alfred Sloan gets no credit for that. But he accepted the offer and
became a vice president, running a group of bearing
companies. Bearings were very important,
of course, to smooth functioning wheel. Sloan disagreed with everything
they were doing. And there a bit of
genius comes in. He went off to Europe and wrote
a long paper about what the company needed. The major financing behind
General Motors at that time, besides a handful of men on the
inside, was the du Ponts-- Pierre DuPont and other members
of the DuPont family, his brothers. Pierre DuPont read that thing
and said, "This guy is bright." He probably didn't
say at that point. And the company, General
Motors, was in deep trouble by that time. We're talking 1919, 1920-21. And he came to know Sloan and
when General Motors was hovering on the brink of
bankruptcy, he offered Sloan the presidency of
General Motors. Of course you know that their
chief competition was Ford Motor Company and Henry Ford and
all that, paying what was then astronomical wages. And you can have any car you
want as long as it's black and all-- you know those stories. But Sloan had a different
notion that the American public in the '20s, still
fairly prosperous. That the automobile
had a real future. And the Americans
wanted choices. So they really started a series
of cars, and you could eventually-- it became you could
grow up with a Chevrolet and then a Buick and then
a Cadillac and so on. All that took through the 30s. But it was a brilliant idea. And you can have it in blue and
green as well as black. And they did all the pieces. DuPont was interested because
of the paint. They put it all together and
Sloan was-- if you want a pleasant evening, an exciting
evening, read his book. And I came into the picture
because he had funded-- being interested in students-- he
had funded a couple of fellowships called the Alfred
P. Sloan Fellowship. I think it was certainly
Compton who proposed that to him. And they were called Alfred's
Sloan Fellows, but it wasn't treated as a group. They were just in it. They chose their classes
in the old Course 15. And they chose-- it had
no cohesion, no integration of an idea. Well, Sloan solved through the
Depression, the '30s, through all the upheaval of various
kinds, Sloan demonstrated time and time again that there was
a-- that he was a man of measured merriment but he
was also a man of great intelligence. I say that is a first person
like that, that I'm identifying them, because when
I became head of the director of the Sloan Program, which is
no big deal you know, but I was interested in-- we
were trying to get it going after the war. It had started, but it
was having problems. And that's why they
brought me in. To somehow make it the best
in the world, was Pen Brooks's comment. That wasn't a very large horizon
because I think there were about three programs in
the world that were called Advanced Manager Programs. But I decided I had
to see Sloan. So I-- he wasn't keen on seeing
me and he probably looked at this young guy who
came into his office-- but I found it interesting. And he must of, because I went
down to see him every month and then occasionally
he'd come up here. And we came to know each
other quite well. He had ideas that he was
constantly talking about. He wasn't interested
in influencing the academic program. He'd say, 'Professor, you know
what is best there.' But he would run ideas about the
automobile company past me. That was my-- I enjoyed that. I really did. He lived till the first days
of my own presidency. He was delighted with that. And took some steps to help
the school financially. He died well into his 90s. And I have not met a business
person, a business manager, who had-- at his advanced age,
what he must have been at fifty and sixty and forty,
when he wrote that memorandum-- must have been
something to see. But even when I knew him, I
would say you would name him a man with vision, intelligence,
and drive. It's pretty important. And he knew how to make
critical decisions. Which is a very important
idea too. In other words, I put him
very high on the list. INTERVIEWER: Who was
Elting Morison, how did you get to know-- JOHNSON: Elting was a member
of the faculty. He had been in the history
group-- wasn't a department. And he was interested in
management and industry. So he became a member of
this small faculty-- I think there were five
professors, maybe a few more than that in the Sloan School
when I got here. There had to be more. I think they started out
with four or five and there were more. Elting was really the
oddball because he was teaching history. Why teach history,
one might ask? Because he had the idea that
to really understand this country and all the countries,
you had to have a sense of breadth, the problems,
the past. You really are destined to
repeat the mistakes if you don't understand the past. And Elting, besides
that, was very bright and very brilliant. And he had his office next
to mine so we saw a lot of each other. And Elting taught a course in
the Sloan Fellows, typically named the most powerful
course they had. He would take a novel,
essentially. And of course that suited me
fine because the great books were one of the mainstreams at
the University of Chicago. And he'd go back to Aristotle,
or he would take Stendhal. I remember 'Le Rouge
et le Noir', 'The Red and the Black'. And required careful reading on
the part of the students. And then essentially-- how do
you keep your-- here's a man who was struggling with the
problems in France of the church and the state. And then he would deal with
Aristophanes and Aristotle. How do you manage,
essentially? Do you do it by love or
do you do it by fear? And he made the people think. Made all of us think. And he was just one of
a double handful. We were fortunate in faculty. We had bright people. Elting was one. INTERVIEWER: Who was
Jay Forrester? JOHNSON: Closer to that. Jay is still around. Elting long dead, of course. Jay was an engineer. He was holds the patent
for the magnetic tube used in computers. A small device instead of
using vacuum tubes. He developed that. And he, of course, benefited
from that personally. But he would say that his big
idea was not the device for the computer, but rather the
idea of modeling feedback mechanisms in business. And he taught a whole
generation of people that idea. A lot of people didn't give
him a lot of credit. I really supported him a 100
percent because I thought he too proposed ideas, enigmatic
ideas, to the students. Very good. INTERVIEWER: Tell me about how
you progressed from being a professor who was just nominally
a on a four- year contract, to be here, to
becoming associate dean and then dean of the school? JOHNSON: That's sometimes
still surprises me. But I was a good professor. I taught. And then I had the Sloans. And I built that program and I
built the senior executives. So the Institute that used
to-- professors of engineering, professors of
mathematics, even professors of architecture, thought our
School of Management was a place for failed engineers. I put that too strongly, but
you know what I mean. If you didn't pass physics,
you could always go to Course 15. That's not precisely true
because you have to pass physics, but you probably
won't go beyond the first two courses. And that, juxtaposed against the
obvious evidence that our best graduates frequently were
graduates of Course 15. They were the ones who knew
how to run something. They were the ones who
made the money. The professors of engineering,
many of them made a lot of money, but basically they were
engineers and never-- we didn't have a Bill Gates type. In my case, the Executive
Development Programs were building strength. They were great places. I knew the whole faculty. So when it came time for the
associate dean to move on to teaching and research-- that
included Eli Shapiro and Douglas Brown, two
great people. But after being associate dean
for a couple of years, they found it not really
very interesting. I think that's true. So Pen asked me whether in
addition to what I was doing I would be interested in becoming
associate dean. Well I knew I could
do that job. I knew the faculty
by that time. INTERVIEWER: What did the
responsibilities entail? JOHNSON: Well, since Pen was
not an academic himself, it really meant a large role
in choosing new faculty. The candidates at least. The faculty itself chose the
people who succeeded. It meant putting together
material that attracted students, explained what
we really were. Essentially dealt with choosing
the students who made it as far as management goes. I'm talking about graduate
students in that case. We were just starting
a graduate program. We had it, but they were
handful of people. We were just beginning and I
thought the graduate program was going to-- I could see the evidence from
the Executive Programs that we had something to teach
there that was really very important. But we had to demonstrate to the
rest of the Institute that the academic content
was powerful. These were not simple courses. They were as demanding as
the other courses were. All that sort of fell into the
associate dean's lap, those kind of problems. And Pen was approaching
his own retirement. Those were the days when
65 was typically the retirement age. You could go on as a lecturer
but have problems teaching. So when he asked me, I thought
I could do that. And during that same
time I got tenure. The normal. I had reached the age at which
we made the tenure decision; about to become 37 I guess
that would have been. Yes. And I had been associate
dean a single year. I gave myself-- these are all
very frank statements-- almost zero chance of being dean. I didn't have the age. I didn't have the
time and grade. But to my surprise,
the president-- Dave Forrester at that point,
since Jim Killian was on leave-- asked me whether
I'd become dean. That was the real jump. I was a young dean. In those days, we had an
Academic Counsel: the five deans of the five Schools. People like Harrison and Brown
and Belluschi, kind of barons in their own fiefdom. They had a lot of power. And just imagining me in that
game, I wondered whether I could do it. And the other deans weren't so
sure I could do it either. As I said these are
frank statements. But I really enjoyed
it from day one. We met once a week. We'd have lunch, talk over
the big problems. The president was
the chairman. I found myself occasionally,
maybe sometimes often in disagreement, with policy issues
facing the council. INTERVIEWER: This is the
Academic Council? JOHNSON: The Academic Council. That was a small group. It's much more smaller
than it is today. INTERVIEWER: Did you and deans
of the other small Schools like architecture, humanities,
did you band together against the--? JOHNSON: Well, we did. But the trouble is we often
disagreed the most. John Burchard was the
dean of Humanities. Interesting guy. I think I may have said
this in the book. When I met him in that role,
he said, here comes the Republican to replace
Pen Brooks. I didn't correct him because
I was a Republican. In other words, it was a typical
hazing, needling of a new dean, which I later
found goes on. But I enjoyed each
of those people. And we got along very well. But the idea of coalescing--
because after all, the School of Engineering was roughly 50
percent, maybe a little more in those days., of the faculty
and the student body. The Science was between 25
percent and 30 percent. And the remaining little over 10
percent was made up of the other three Schools. Architecture, very small. Architecture and Planning as
we called it then, was city planning they meant. And then ourselves. I can still see those men,
because we were together for in all seven years. But they didn't quite stay
intact for seven years. Burchard retired and kind
of a reorganization. But most of the seven years,
we were got together and worked out our problems
very well. INTERVIEWER: Do you ever feel as
though in Academic Council or in meetings the faculty,
because of your age, that you were a lamb walking into
a wolves' den? JOHNSON: Well, certainly at
the beginning you had that feeling, but it soon changed. They were very open-minded
about that. And I was doing a lot of
European traveling at that point and they were glad
to see me I think. I think we got along. We remained good friends for
the-- they're all gone now, of course, but we were
good friends and we knew their wives. It was a wonderful group. And Stratton did a great
job of chairing it. He would pose a problem and
then we'd discuss it. INTERVIEWER: You were there at
interesting time because Stratton was the appointed
resident, while Killian-- Jim Killian-- was down
in Washington. There was no provost for
a long period of time. How did academic-- JOHNSON: Well Van Bush
was present. Van was almost an interim--
well, he was never interim president, but he
was chairman. And that took on a new role
with Bush because of his reputation and standing. And it was my first real
association with Bush. I had heard of him
since the war. He was a man I'd put ahead
of Alfred Sloan. There aren't many I do that,
in terms of brightness. And we got along very well. But he was a very powerful
figure in that. Very powerful figure in that. INTERVIEWER: So the
responsibilities that would typically be assumed by a
provost, were those split among the various deans,
or did someone else? JOHNSON: The deans had it. And then in 1964, Charles Townes
was appointed provost. But it took him a full year to
arrange his departure from his previous institution. And a brilliant, abled- man. I'm glad to say still alive. I see him once in awhile and
we are good friends. He is on the West Coast, so I
don't see him all that often. But Charlie came on, and
essentially said in his quiet voice, I am the provost and
I will set the agenda. That was, I suppose, because
we were kind of free movers before that in certain way, that
came as a shock to the deans who suddenly
had do bring key decisions to the provost. The provost became, at that
point, a very important job at MIT and has remained so
since those mid-'60s. But it was tough for
some of the deans. INTERVIEWER: Tell me how you met
Jerry Weisner, the first time you met him or as
you met him as a dean in Academic Council? JOHNSON: Well, I'd known him--
where did we meet? First of all, I will say, I
regard Jerry Weisner as one of the finest people
I've ever known. And we worked very closely
from that time. As close as that in
many, many ways. He found my range of interest
and my kind of way of acting and decision making
very useful. And I found the range of the
things that he was really deeply knowledgeable about
to be just fascinating. We got along extremely well. But when did I first meet him? Well, he didn't become dean
until after he returned from Washington. But he was head of the
Department of Electrical Engineering before that. A big figure at MIT
before that. And I came to know him. And it wasn't one
big incident. I think he was interested in--
especially after he came back from Washington-- you know,
those problems of big budgets and problems of deciding on
budget weren't really his game before he went down there. And when he came back and I
asked him if he'd become provost after he
was dean for-- I think he came back in '64-- so
he was dean for two years. We worked together there. He had topics that he
was interested in. I had topics that I
was interested in. It was a kind of it natural
coming together. Although I was much
his junior. But I asked him to become
provost in 1966. After thinking about it for--
and I thought there was an even chance that he might not
because he would be more administrative then he cared to
be, more fund raising than he cared to be. I was very frank about
the nature the job. But he said yes. And of course that began
a long alliance. After he became president and
I was chairman, we continued to work very close together. And till his death,
I saw him often, worked with him closely. We traveled a lot together. We found it easy to
work together. I miss him still. INTERVIEWER: Maybe tell me all
about the growth that was happening in universities in
the late '50s and the '60s. JOHNSON: Well there-- INTERVIEWER: Or in your
School especially? JOHNSON: The growth was gigantic
all over the country. And I think, to a certain
extent, all over the world. But largely, our country. I suppose it was the
wave of veterans. I suppose it was
the G.I. Bill. I suppose it was after the
war, everybody wanted to really become themselves
again. Jerry was in the civilian
business in Washington most of that time. But he was involved in projects
of various kinds. But he and I really
came together. And we watched the
growth around us. MIT, of course, took a
an initial wave of undergraduates. Graduate education was
not big at that time. But we, if you can imagine it,
we have not grown because we kept essentially a cap
on undergraduates. We still have essentially 1,100
graduate students-- I mean undergraduate students. The graduate population
has grown. We could have doubled, tripled,
and quadrupled our endrollment. But the faculty remains
about the same as it was when I was president. And I think that was
a good decision. It was a conscious decision. I think the growth in the total
population relates to research, graduate students,
and we took on projects for the country and got out
of some projects. But the decisions were
conscious ones. And that, I think,
was a good idea. I see these-- most of the Big
Ten is now 40,000 plus. The state of Wisconsin, which
I used to know pretty well, has half a dozen sub-colleges. Florida, which I tend
to know, has 12 now. Illinois has many. In the main campus,
40,000 students. The entire Big Ten
is in that range. I think that would have been a
very difficult problem for us if we had made that decision. And we simply said no to it. But we, in many ways, get the
cream of the crop of the students we want. And I think the country
benefits from that. INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that
it was somewhat of an accomplishment to balance
the Sloan budget. That there was some faculty
who felt that that couldn't be done. Even though this whole era is
kind of always thought of or remembered as being so flush
with money, that funds were so available. Why was it so hard to balance
the budget or what priorities were you trying to balance
or what sacrifices needed to be made? JOHNSON: Well, I'm very
budget conscious. And in the case of the Sloan
School, nobody worried about that topic. And I discovered that we were
kind of running in the red. Because our tuition is high,
we didn't get the contributions that the big
laboratory institutions. The School of Humanities and the
architecture School and we were all in that position. But I didn't find it a
comfortable position. And so we got Mr. Sloan to help
a bit with that, with endowment funds. And mostly though, I got the
Institute to give us credit for the undergraduate students
we were teaching. Anybody could take a
course at Sloan. Another student could
cross-register. And we got no credit
for that at all. I asked that we essentially
be credited with funds representing that net
student body. And so in a way, it was just
counting correctly. But we also added-- we began
to get additions to our funding, contributions
from alumni. That kind of thing had not been
big before and now it is. It worked pretty well. INTERVIEWER: So in all that,
you were dean for almost eight years-- JOHNSON: Seven. INTERVIEWER: --Seven years. And during that time, I imagine
you were probably offered many other positions
at other universities and organizations. Why did you continue to cast
your lot with MIT? JOHNSON: There were a
couple of offers. I never considered the business
offers up until the time that Federated
came along. And there were other
factors there. I really enjoyed MIT. I didn't think there was a
job that I would be more interested in. I was offered a couple of
presidencies of colleges, universities, and I couldn't
imagine one that had the character of MIT. That is a statement of fact. I had no illusions about
becoming president of MIT. I thought that had
zero prospect. But I enjoyed being dean. And the pattern across the
country was deans remained deans for life in
a certain way. Now that's no longer true. Deans move around a bit. But the deans at Harvard
were lifelong. Our one case was that. I had no interest that way. And I had come to really enjoy
MIT and Cambridge and Boston and New England in general. INTERVIEWER: Maybe you could
tell us why-- what factors contributed to your interest
in a Federated offer? And-- JOHNSON: Well I write that in
some detail, because I think it's an interesting question. It was so out of character
from my past. I thought I'd stay in academics
for my life. I was doing what I thought
was worthwhile work. And I really hadn't seriously
considered any other job. I'd been invited back to
Chicago several times. I was invited to the University
of California. And I tended to shut offers
off very quickly. I knew I wasn't going to go
there, so I had no interest. I was on some visiting
committees, a number of them, and I thought it was important
to sort of learn how other people were doing it. But the story of Federated is
unusual and fairly, I think, straight forward. I didn't initiate it. And normally would
not have found it interesting, I don't suppose. But some factors came up. One is, I was going
in my 7th year. And unlike the lifetime
deans, I was, by that time, in my 40s. That seems awfully young now but
I felt I'd been in there. And as a I think I've mentioned
some place, the shibboleth about if you can't
do, you can teach. Well, occasionally somebody
would ask in the course of my teaching, do you think you
could run a company? You're so smart about telling
us how to do it. And I must say that was a
bothersome question and you always wondered whether
you could do it. I can't say I wondered about
it, I knew I could. But you gotta prove it. So that was in the
back of my mind. Elting Morison used to say, The
presidency of MIT, he told me this and he repeated it
years later, he says, the presidency of MIT is one of
the-- he uses a number-- 'eight most important
jobs in the country. And he said, it's tougher
than running US Steel. That was back in the days of
when that was a good job and a complicated technical
spread job and union problems of all kind. And he said, but I think it's
even better than that. Well, that comes to my mind now
and I haven't thought of that in years. But you always have those
little things. And I knew I was not going
any further here. That wasn't an issue really. Because I always thought that
when we had a new president, it was going to be the dean of
Engineering if we wanted to stay on the inside. And we always had in a
way, or had recently. Or the dean of Science. No question in my mind those
would be the jobs. It certainly wouldn't be
Humanities or Architecture. And we were so new on the block
that I can't imagine it being Management, although
I could have made a case for it I suppose. So that was all weighing. And I have to say, and I have
said frankly, I thought our new president would likely
be the provost. Now I, for things I've already
said, while I had a good professional relationship with
Charlie Townes, working for him was different than working
for Jim Killian or Jay Stratton or Vannevar Bush
as I could imagine it. That wasn't Charlie's fault. It's my fault if anything. But other deans had that same
problem, so I didn't think it was unique. All that I suppose, when a
consultant came to me and said, we want to talk
to you about something rather serious. He had some people with them. And they made it very
interesting offer. It was essentially-- and
Federated was then the largest, and I guess still is,
the largest of the department store business. Wonderful decentralized
business, spread out all over the country. And they were talking then in
those days about going to Paris and London. It was involving a lot of people
and a lot of money. It had been run by a family and
the family was running out of gas, I think. They offered me initially a job
that would be attractive, and steps beyond that that would
make it very attractive, if you're interested in that. I've never been motivated, I say
this frankly, never been motivated by money or you don't
go into academics to begin with. But the way they put it seemed
really interesting. And I decided I'd like
to prove that. I'd already proved all
I could as a dean of a first grade school. Sloan School had by '66 become--
there was Harvard, and then who else? Well, you could probably name
a couple more, but MIT would certainly be among them. And so we had come a long way,
a long way, and I was very pleased with it. Good people. Good people. And besides that, I knew a lot
of the-- because I supposed of the academic counsel-- I know other people. I'd done some federal things
at that point. The Cold War was on and that
task, interesting. I just saw it as
a side- light. The only way that we were-- we,
the United States-- was keeping connections with
the Soviet Union was the field of science. Scientists could speak
to each other. We had the moon project and I
was on the Executive Committee of the Apollo Project. And the other field
was management. The Russians understood
management and they had huge manager problems. They didn't even have a word for
management in those days. They called it 'management'. And we knew and I, for various
reasons, I went to Moscow on several occasions. So those things promised to both
keep me as a dean, but this other thing offered
possibilities. I talked to Stratton. I didn't think he'd mine. We had candidates to
take my place. I had a couple of proposals
along those lines. I did think I'd be
missed that much. And so they announced
to the faculty. I persuaded them that the
Federated people were anxious for me to come over and be the
executive vice president, one step away from the president's
job, who is going to retire soon. I thought it was occupied
an interesting idea. And they put the announcement
out. And then suddenly I was asked by
the committee that had been searching for a successor. And I don't really choose to
talk too much about that. Why I don't know. But they had made some efforts
along those lines. It was overdue literally. The group came in and asked
whether I would accept the job if I were offered it? Or that wasn't the way the
question was put, the question is, something along the lines
of, do you think you should be elected president of MIT? Interesting question when
you don't expect it. I didn't answer-- the best thing
to do is not answer the question when you need
a little time. But in the long run I felt it
was a duty and of course it was a different job that
they were proposing. And literally within weeks of
that event, yeah certainly would be within weeks, we had
already moved my wife and children so they could make a
school deadline in Cincinnati. And we changed everything. And that's how that happened. The faculty was surprisingly
positive about it. The Sloan faculty
was surprisingly negative about it. They wanted me to say if
I were going to stay. But it put a lot of strain on
us-- my wife and on me. Because it's a tough decision to
make and it really did come up, from our point of view,
although it'd been discussed obviously for a long time. It was a long distance from
me and there were no-- the grapevine was not functioning. INTERVIEWER: So it was a
complete surprise for you that you were even been being
considered for this post? You'd mentioned that you didn't
even consider yourself a dark horse. JOHNSON: I never considered-- I never said it that way. That was in Science Magazine. And they make that statement
that I was not even considered. Well somebody obviously
was considering me. And it turns out that the deans
all came to me in one way or another separately. And I got a tremendous reaction
from the faculty when it was announced on that
special meeting. And, by and large, it worked
out pretty well. INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that
you took this-- it was not an obligation, but you
felt that it was a duty. JOHNSON: I do. INTERVIEWER: Does this go back
to Vannevar Bush's idea that one of the eight most important
jobs in the country? JOHNSON: Yeah, I think
I could not say no. And there were many
pluses to it also. And I was still young enough
to give it a real play. I'm still young enough. That's the thing that surprised
me the most. What I didn't count on-- this is
1965, December of '65 when I was elected. Took office in '66. What was happening, a long way
from us, the beginnings of the upheavals of student bodies and
that culmination of the Vietnam War. That all hit the University of
California before it hit us. But it worked its way west. And by the end of '67, I think
we knew that unlike the agenda that I had in mind,
it was going to be a different agenda. It was to hold an academic
structure together, productive, and advancing. And we went through a number
of very difficult times. They're written up enough so
unless you have questions I won't begin to, because
it's a long story. INTERVIEWER: We'll get there. What does the president do? Was is the president of MIT's
responsibilities to the nation as you mention? As being a-- JOHNSON: MIT's responsibilities
are a little bit broader, as are the major
universities, or let's say the 10 major universities,
are very complex. More so even for a typical good
college, there you have the human issues of keeping the
faculty, of the choosing the faculty, and building the
faculty, encouraging the faculty, and all the machinery
that involves. The trustees hold the responsibility for the charter. That means you have to
carry the trustees. So you've got the faculty
and the trustees. But I always thought
you had the student body to worry about. And the country was showing
it at that time. You've got, in our
case, a large and vigorous alumni body. And then, MIT perhaps more than
most, we have a respond-- we're a major world
university. Many people have told me and
I've seen data that if you take careful polling of
appropriate kinds of audiences around the world, MIT is surely
in the top two or three, regarded as in terms
of quality institution. You don't stay in that job
by watching time go by. You really have to be-- the
president has to visualize where the institution's going. Every member of the faculty
has a different vision of that, or another vision
I should say, not necessarily different. And you have to bring
them all together. Of course you have structures
of deans and provosts and faculty who really carry the
major responsibility for the quality of the instruction. And for us, of course, we
have the research front. It's very important. We have to make-- we have to
advance the field or we're not doing our full job. We have to raise the
money to fund it. And the president carries
finally the big responsibility there. You then have things that
you have to do well. I felt that we had to build our relationship with the community. Boston, Cambridge,
but beyond that. And we have to make clear to
every girl and boy that we, if they're bright enough and if
they work hard enough, we want them to think about MIT. And we mean that. So you have a lot of
responsibilities and you have to keep on top of information. The biggest decision in terms
of content that I made, I haven't talked about this but
it seemed to me that we were going to go into biology
in big ways. The evidence was there but
we were not there. We had a Department of
Biochemistry and a Department of Biology, but we
were not there. And now we're there. And we have a lot yet to do. The queen of battles when I
became president was still physics and computers,
kind of. But now we're big in computers
and we had to be a lot bigger. I don't mean bigger in size,
I mean bigger in impact. And we've got more competition
than ever before. And that's a good thing. And I feel a responsibility,
I shouldn't say that in the present tense. But the president has a
responsibility for I would say international relationships. I feel badly-- I really feel badly that we
don't have a closer connection with the Middle East . That's why I was interested in
getting a start in India. That's why I became a regent
at the University of Qatar. I try to understand
those things. We've spent time in Egypt and
we've spent time in-- and that began in my time. And Jerry, of course,
was all for it. Although our interest was
largely in Europe, Germany-- it's hard for you fellas to
imagine what Europe looked like still in '66. And we tried. We, MIT, tried, and other
institutions were also involved, in rebuilding the
great technical universities of Germany. And we got around a little
bit in other places. We failed in Latin America. I say failed because we tried. And the technical institution,
some of them are quite good now, Monterrey in Mexico
is very strong. But Nacional in Columbia is
not where it should be. Argentina is not as strong
as it should be. Now they are a lot of
other institutes. I'm not putting it all
in the first person. We don't have to do all that. But I feel that we have
responsibilities. And superseding that, making
sure we're doing our share right in our own country. We are a national institution,
not just an international one. And if I may say so, I envy
fellows like you, just starting out. The world is your oyster. You've got a lot to do. I really mean that. INTERVIEWER: If you'll indulge
me, I want to read a quote from Dean Harrison who
was describing the responsibilities of a
college president. He says, if a college president
were to take an oath of office that set forth
literally the requirements on his attention, the results might
resemble a medley of a marriage service, the vows of
a monastatic order, and the research contract with
the Air Force. Besides swearing to forsake all
other interests than those of his institution, he must make
mental vows of personal poverty, intellectual chastity, and social obedience. No bevy of medieval angels
clustering on a point of a needle require so nicety
of a balance. How accurate is he in-- JOHNSON: Well, he's blatantly
wrong in some of those, but the tone of it is good. The tone means you devote
all your energy to the Institution, seven days a week. And I did. And I think President
Hockfield, does. You're just drawn into it. And if you don't-- but I don't
know what he means by intellectual chastity. I think you have to
be very careful about taking on boards. I refuse to take one on except
Federated, which I was a board member of. But I got, and I'm sure
Jerry Weisner got, a dozen big board offers. I said no. When I became chairman, I said I
would take on four boards, I think it was. And they were in fields in which
I thought I could make an intellectual and a management
contribution. One in the field of environment,
that was a paper company that owned 2 million
acres and I think-- well, that's not important. A chemical company, DuPont. I stayed with Federated although
I did not do anything that I would have called
worthwhile in the field of management there. Karl Compton had been a board
member of an insurance company, which is interesting
from the actuarial point of view, John Hancock. I found it interesting because
we were talking about building that skyscraper, that glass-- I still think the prettiest
building in town-- building. That's essentially-- oh, my
field I was interested in financial questions. Had become very interested
in funding an institution like this one. So I joined J.P. Morgan and
that was a wonderful experience. INTERVIEWER: What were others'
reactions, either from other college presidents or academia
at large to having someone who is quote unquote a social
scientist leading the premier technical institute during
a time of great technological upheaval? JOHNSON: That's a good question
and it may sound odd, but I never had a negative
reaction to that question. It was a time also when
questions were around of, are our technology people
too tunnel-visioned? Aren't the social sciences,
which includes economics, certainly includes a knowledge
of history, those things important? And I found-- and of course
within the Institution itself, that was the one I was
interested most in. The faculty was very
positive about it. I note that they haven't
appointed a social scientist since then. But I don't regard that
as a strong negative. I think they were they were
initially surprised, but I'd had enough exposure to them so
they were positive about it. INTERVIEWER: You mentioned you
served in capacity on the Executive Board of the Apollo
Program when he came on board and I imagine that was
very exciting. What roles did you serve? JOHNSON: Well, there were there
were 11 members of that committee chaired by the vice
president, who was originally Lyndon Johnson and then when the
president was assassinated in '63, and so Hubert Humphrey
took that post as chairman. But the 11 were essentially the
principal chief executives of the companies that
had the major responsibilities for the shot. That means Lockheed
and the booster builders and all of that. It was an interesting group of
people, who were expected to appear for the two- day
meeting once a month. And because of the kind
of person Lyndon Johnson was, he-- I remember one of his first
comments when they took over was he says, any of you fellows
who turns out to be the high pole in the tent
is going to get a lot of scratching from me. In other words, if
you were slow. We were there, the only
university represented. And I was expected to
be at the meeting. No excuses, no replacements, no substitutes, two days a month. Because of the Guidance Program
run by Draper and what was still called the
Instrumentation Laboratory at that time. And I found it fascinating. We were often in Houston, but
typically in Washington. And I was there the night that
Gus Grissom and the two fellows burned up
in that trial. We went down to Canaveral. And that took some time too. The whole thing took
some time. But I knew we couldn't-- we
were right at in the month when the successful moon lander
took place, where that was in July of-- INTERVIEWER: '69. JOHNSON: -It was an exciting
time and I came to know the other members of
that committee. They were all there. They were there. They were replaced from time to
time when they lost their jobs, but they were there. And I was replaced of course,
but I was present until well past the shot. INTERVIEWER: Did you have any
difficulty wrapping in your mind around the enormity of
getting to the moon, the logistics the management,
the technical? JOHNSON: My principal assignment
was management structures. And the technical-- I had to report on, and every
other person did too, on the-- and we were concerned with
the guidance system. The guidance system to the
shot itself was pretty straight forward. But the idea of then taking the
module and circling the moon and landing on the moon and
then getting back to the larger circling return
vehicle, those posed interesting problems. And incidentally, Jerry Weisner
was the president's science adviser under Kennedy
and he'd remained so under President Johnson for
a short while. And then his place was
taken by another MIT background person. But that's-- you asked earlier,
when did you really get to know Weisner. I guess I would say that was
the time, since we already knew each other. I spent a fair amount of time
with him during that period. He, interestingly enough, he
had deep worries about the success of the plan,
as he's said on more than one occasion. That it succeeded so brilliantly
was for all of us I must say the biggest lift
that I've ever had. And that's true of the people
who were even more deeply involved than I. I don't know whether we'll ever
duplicate it in our time with human beings. My own view would-- we should
be using instruments in our time to do that. The technical problems of
putting a human being and getting him back, and the risk
of not getting him back, is going to really take a long time
pass your time, I think. INTERVIEWER: All these
developments in the 1960's with Apollo occurred against
a larger backdrop of social movement with Civil Rights
and Women's Rights and Environmentalism and
Anti-War protests. How aware of-- JOHNSON: Racial questions,
all those issues. Those were all-- you'd put those
on, just as you have, right on the agenda. The whole country
was changing. The way people dressed, the way
the students dressed, the music we all sang,
all changed. It what was a flip of culture
that was really striking. And there's no question in my
mind looking back-- nobody's really written about it yet. They're been books like mine of
people who were presidents during that time. Douglas Knight at Duke
has written about it. It's interesting to me that
nobody yet can quite face up to a full understanding
of that. But there's no doubt in my mind
that the Vietnam War was the main spring, one of the-- I was against it fairly early. It's like being it
against Iraq now. I'm amazed that more presidents
have not spoken out against that. Different war, different time. That was really a big one. That was really a big one. Lots of people killed. And look, it's all-- the
Vietnamese have adapted to that terrible war. And in terms of their reaction
to the United States, it amazes me how positive
that relationship is. INTERVIEWER: How did the opening
of McCormick here on campus and-- I believe it opened in '63-- and
[INAUDIBLE PHRASE] in '66 and the incoming women students,
how did that change the campus and the
student body-- JOHNSON: It changed
everything. It's worth mentioning that even
before the opening of the first, which really, you're
quite right, it was finishing up in '63. But it didn't really become
functional till about '65. And then we, at the same time,
we got the money from Mrs. McCormick to build
a second one. And that was just coming
on in my term. And of course it made all of a
difference to have women on the campus and it's made all
the difference ever since. Faculty, and of course mostly
student body, the thing that alumni mention first to me when
they come through here, they can't get over all the
women they see on the place. It's taken us longer with
faculty, but that will come surely as night follows day, as
the supply time increases. But I think currently the
biggest problem of course is diversity in general. And you think of African
Americans, where we have not made that the much progress. We hit that point early
in my term. We haven't been able to
get much beyond it. I think that's still
a slow path. A little bit of headway, but. INTERVIEWER: You describe in
your book that you went down with Knight from Duke and you
visited Secretaries Ross and Clifford and you had Mc-- Bundy with you as well. JOHNSON: Yes. Good for you. INTERVIEWER: You were talking
about you the Vietnam War and that you had both taken
a pretty strong stance against it. Maybe talk about your sort of
almost activist role or the duty that you were providing
you felt to the country in taking a stand at that time. JOHNSON: We we're spokesmen for
a group of about five or six of us that would meet,
often by telephone, that included Brewter at Yale, Goheen
at Princeton, the two people you've mentioned,
Perkins at Cornell. That's five. There may be another one there
that'll-- not Nathan Pusey, he refused to get involved
in that. University of Chicago was
preoccupied and their president was a biologist. He didn't see this as
his major problem. But anyway, we did speak
for the presidents. We were speaking on the point. The Secretary of Defense who
proceeded Clifford was proposing that we add another
several hundred thousand people to the American Corps. We took the position, speaking
only for the college campuses, that's the campuses would really
blow up if anything like 200,000-300,000 more
service people. Clifford, who turned amazingly
to be brand new in the job, gave us a couple of hours. We had a very I would say
unsatisfactory meeting with the Secretary of State. But the Secretary of
Defense listened. And I am convinced-- I'm not convinced-- but I'm sure
that our visit made a big difference to Clifford. He was brand new in the job. And he changed his mind within
a week after that meeting and took the position in the Cabinet
that we should bring that war to a close. But I'm not sure that it made
all that difference. I think it would have come
to a close, anyway. But we made a big difference. That is, speaking out for
the universities. We were not, I have to say-- if
you walk into the lobby of Building 10, you don't see a
list of MIT people who were killed in Vietnam. We didn't have any of the--
you could get deferments relatively easy at
a place like MIT. And so, we did not have a big--
and the same was true of other universities too. All the universities were
in that position. And MIT, it was an individual's
decision. And we have a short list. I insisted that we
put our list up. But that was a bad time
for this country. It makes the Iraq issue, except
in it's broader context of all the other Middle
Eastern countries. It was small in scale. We lost in the end, 55--
something like, don't hold me to the exact number-- 55,000 people killed,
Americans killed. God knows how many people
from Vietnam. Certainly multiples of that. So in terms of personal
disaster, anyway it was a tough time. And the campus, you could
imagine, was in a constant state of uneasiness. And living in the middle of the
campus, you could have a thousand people on
your doorstep without too much trouble. They weren't all from MIT, but
MIT was right on Memorial Drive, so we could get
lots of people. INTERVIEWER: What qualities
of the student body or the students who are unique to MIT
either resisted or facilitated the kind of activism and
protest that you saw. Is there something about MIT
students that made them especially prone to activism? Or that they resisted the more
kind of extremist positions? JOHNSON: I think they resisted
the extremist position. We had a body. Some of them, I think, never
returned to acadame. There was one man I
can see, I wonder whatever happened to him. He was a very angry man. But I think MIT were normal
reaction type people. They were they were torn
by the these things. But MIT people also,
especially those in engineering. Our tuition is high. The work is demanding. The pressure to finish
their degree work, the pressure is there. And so I always regarded that
as a retardant to daily displays of anger. But there's one thing that
always kind of impressed me. We had very little graffiti
on our buildings. Almost none. You could go-- I visited Stanford and
they burned the president's library down. And-- no that was Berkeley. I'll get this right
eventually. Wally Sterling at Stanford, his
library was burned down. And when I would go to Berlin,
the so-called New University, they couldn't keep a window in
that place because they'd be broken the day after
they were put in. And other institutions. And it didn't take the so-called
elite schools. After all, the National Guard
was present at Kent and there were shots fired there. And at Wisconsin, in a
laboratory building, there were a couple of students killed
by angry demonstrators. I like to think and I believe
that MIT has a certain-- they're no less concerned. They are common sense types. And they're aware of their
responsibilities in ways that I could count that I find
quite interesting. I can't explain all
of that question. It's a good question. Maybe someday we'll
have an answer. INTERVIEWER: Maybe you can
describe a few episodes in this kind of tumult that was on
campus in the years then. You mentioned in your book that
Governor Francis Sargent came to speak at Kresge for
Earth Day and there was a-- would you describe
that episode? JOHNSON: Well that was the first
really big Earth Day which still goes
on, of course. It was one-- not the only-- but
it was an institution that really had a major
play that day. Far greater than
our neighbors. And I think Frank made a
big contribution to it. I called him. I said I was going to speak. I thought the issue was
very important. It was a new issue for campuses
across the country. But I really needed him. The governor was very good, he
would always show up if you said you needed him. And Sargent, an MIT
alum-- architect-- was a very good helper. And he did it in a way that
was so effective. The typical way to stop a
speech, if you got Kresge full of people, is for them to just
shout until the poor guy up there with his speech ready
to give just retreats. And that happened a couple
of times unfortunately. Because of the subject matter,
and because of a couple of students who also were prepared
to speak, that event went very well. But I'd give Frank Sargent a
large part of the credit. Here is a governor-- few
governors would show themselves in the public
in those days. He did. And there was somebody
who commented-- Luria writes it in
his book, he said he was really impressed. And he was a kind of a leader. Not a leader, but he approved of
the opposition so to speak. Although we were good friends. We were trying to get biology
really moving. Lots of conflicting issues
on a college campus. And we had ROTC and we were
doing so-called war research. We had complicated,
very complicated. INTERVIEWER: But that there were
protesters who came into Kresge who were trying to shout
them down and Francis Sargent said-- JOHNSON: Yeah. When it came time for his
speech, he stood up. And he's a man with a kind of
a New England accent-- he's now long dead, of course-- and
he said, now, I've listened to you fellows-- there were mostly
men in those days and around in that issue, except
for a poet named Denise Levertov, I wonder what's
happened to her-- and he said, now, you gotta listen to me. And surprising enough, everybody
quieted down and listened to him. And he said he didn't
expect that. And I didn't either. I was standing there with him,
but I was expecting to get something thrown any minute. But I wasn't going
to leave him. INTERVIEWER: Then there came
this issue of, there was an AWOL soldier and the
establishment of sanctuary in the student center. Maybe you can tell
me the kind of-- JOHNSON: Well, we'd never
faced that before. And if you can imagine
it, it's a tough one. There were deserters like
there are I suppose. And the opposition-- there were
lots of them-- offered him a safe place, safe haven. I don't know he got to them, but
of course there was a lot of things going on. And the first we heard about
it was that this young man, wasn't more than 19 or 20. I talk to him briefly,
but he said, no, it's too late to go back. This was in the early days. And of course he was surrounded
by probably initially two or three hundred
people from MIT. They'd bring in food. And of course the campus patrol
was not eager to get him. and I said, we, don't
want you to get him. The Cambridge cops said, if
you want us to get him, he obviously is a deserter, and
we've got this rush squad. They had a group-- well-trained
group-- for Harvard and MIT and presumably
for other institutions. We only used them once. But they said, we'll get him. And I considered. The council got together
and the deans. And they essentially said,
well, they were split. Some said, you oughta
do it at midnight, nobody will be there. I remember one dean saying, to
leave him there is just an invitation for more
such people. And, of course, the poorest
institution. Even though we tried to make it
less attractive to get in, how do you keep a student from
going into the student center? Didn't want to do that. And they had a lot of support. After all, it's a pretty
innocent case, you know, on the face of it. Here's this-- but I took the
position that we didn't want the police on the campus
unless we really called them for some. If it was a campus issue, we'd
take care of it with the campus patrol. And so we asked them
to stay away. And that's what they did. And after a few days, it lost
its TV appeal, it lost its newspaper appeal. Newspapers were big in
those days still. Headlines disappeared. This was not important. And most of all, the opposition found it pretty dull. The kid was kind of dumb. He was an ordinary solider. He had no great speech
to give. And that's when I-- just
thought of this, I haven't for years-- Noam Chomsky made a speech in
some place, maybe in the student center. Said, what MIT should do is give
this young man a four- year scholarship to MIT. He turns himself in-- he thought
he was doing a good thing there-- turns himself into
the military, but when he finishes his whatever MIT will
give him a scholarship. Well that struck everybody, but
certainly including me, to admit somebody with those
qualifications. With no questions about where
do you stand academically, would just put him in a terrible
situation, even if he accepted it. Which I don't think he would. So I made a statement that
that didn't make any sense to me. Soon after that, they began to
get down to a small group. And it did remain
a small group. And the commanding officer of
the area called me, came over late at night to the
president's house. And he said, I appreciate the
way you're handling this. And this is no request or no--
you keep running your institution and I'll
keep running mine. But if you ever want us to pick
him up, we'll do that. And I'll promise he'll
get a fair hearing. And right now people are very
sensitive to these issues. So we picked a midnight
and they sent an ordinary shore patrol. He happened to be an admiral
and they rotate that assignment. And so they had a shore
patrol who looked just like any shore patrol. About 10 of them. And I think it may be
Walter Ronsenblith. But some brave soul walked
in with them. And the opposition
melted away. It took only 10 people,
I think. And they escorted him out. We had a Navy car
right outside. No hidden cars. And that ended that. And I know, I'm sure-- less sure
at the time, as I think about it now, I'm surer than
ever-- if we had had the police go in there, it would
be the worst message, the worst blow up. It would be like University
Hall. It'd have just ignited that
kind of situation. We had an-- and and I'm not
interested in talking about unless you are-- we did have,
the following January, I think I'm right in that month. It was during the thing that
we initiated of having the month off, you know, it's called
independent study or something like that. I'm not sure, but it was during
that period when a group of about 20 or 30 or 40
people I suppose was more than that, occupied my office. INTERVIEWER: Yeah go ahead, that
would be the next story. JOHNSON: Well then I'll
make it short. It was during January, because
for the first time in a year or more I could see some days. And I used to get proposals that
I'd take a few days off. And a fellow named Paul Stick
says, why don't you come down and stay at our place
in Florida? And a great man, I'm sorry you
never got a chance to meet him, Constantine Simonides he
would know the background of everything we're talking
about, he was all over. He was my assistant and
then a vice president. Was my assistant when I was
dean and I brought along. He and his wife and Betty
and I went down. We barely got to this
very pleasant house. We didn't stay a night. We got there in the
early afternoon. The phone rang and it was Ken
Wadley, and he said, Jerry Weisner's very uneasy about the
pressure that building up among a group who was practicing
about how they can get some attention and
take a position. And we think it'd be better
if you've got here. I said, well a couple of days? He said, no, come tonight. We got back at midnight,
Constantine and I. The ladies stayed for another two days to
put away all the stuff that we had [INAUDIBLE]. And I got back at midnight. Heard the whole story. Went into a little room we had
that had a lot of phones it. That was all you needed
in those days. And Jerry and I were talking. We had catching up to do. And Walter Milne and John
Wynne were on the phone. They said, a group were around
the president's door. And a new group-- a masked group
of six man-- had come up with a battering ram and gone
right through your extra door. I could show you that door
if we were around the president's office. Incidentally after that
we left doors open. But it was a terrible thing. Betty Whittaker was in there. I had nothing, had not had
anything, in this. That desk was my desk. But they kicked a
leg off a table. They didn't mean to
do it, I'm sure. But they occupied that
for nearly two days. Both the other office, Killian
was there, and my office. They didn't steal anything. The two things they stole
they returned by mail. That was another case I knew
they were MIT people. But it got a lot of attention. But once again after the first
21 hours, there were so many office takeovers
at that point. The famous one was Columbia
with a guy smoking a cigar with his feet on the desk
of Grayson Kirk's desk. And once again, people want
to go in and get them. A lot of advice from
alumni, who had been veterans, I suppose. I had the advantage of having
been a veteran. And I said, that's
a dumb idea. They thought we should use the
bayonet, as one of them said. We're not going to do that. We don't want immobilize
everybody if we do that. And I wouldn't use that office
again if we did. I'm going to-- So it soon became old hat. We didn't let, after the first
hour, we didn't let any new reinforcements go in or changing
of the guard or anything like. That was easy to do. But it was an unseemly
and unhappy scene. But after shouting. And we had people who pretty
much identified everybody who was in and came out. And they left and regrouped. And there never was any real
steam behind the physical. That doesn't mean to say that
everybody was for the war. Far from it. But it ended there. It ended. And the people involved who were
guilty of, and who could not deny it, of breaking and
entering and things like that. I think a coup-- two people
served 15 days, but they never got it. And I think we handled it. If you could ever say you
handled something, that'd be the way I would recommend. Don't use force. They're just students. They're decent people. They're not trying to-- they're
doing dumb things, but maybe we are too. And so it melted away. And it took its toll on people
like me and the provost. But Jerry could get away for
a few days at a time. He was-- INTERVIEWER: We have
like a minute left. JOHNSON: --Please. Well, the story is that it
took a lot out of people. Out of the professors
and deans. A lot out of them. But I think we were stronger in
the end because we showed you could deal with
things like that. But it took a lot of my time. And it had a part in my decision
that-- as Cecil Green once told me, each of your years
have been the equivalent of three years. and I think
that's about-- maybe the number's bigger than that. So I became chairman and was it
for the next 12 years and we had money to raise and
patches to put on wounds and everything.
