Brookings the Broker

"A man can no longer operate on what he learned in college. Ours is a fluid society in which men move into positions of responsibility requiring training not previously received. Educational gaps become apparent at an age when a return to the classroom is no longer feasible." So says Robert Calkins, president of Washington, D.C.'s famed Brookings Institution, whose business it is to fill in the educational gaps of big men in the U.S. Government.

Last week Brookings. acting in its role as "broker in ideas and men." dedicated a new $3,900,000 Center for Advanced Study to bring together scholars, officials, politicians, businessmen and journalists--all of them sorely in need of a chance to see the forest for the trees. Under a plan costing $13 million in all, Brookings aims to create Washington's first real Delphi--a place for probing the hidden patterns of modern society and assuring the "intellectual preparedness" of key Americans.

Troubled Tycoon. Brookings has "given thought to coming events" ever since it was founded 34 years ago by Robert Somers Brookings, a patriarchal St. Louis woodenwares millionaire. Around the turn of the century he was among those troubled tycoons who tired of avarice and yearned for service. He was 46, unmarried, uneducated and worth some $6,000,000. Quitting business, Brookings gave the rest of his life to educating himself and others; he married for the first time at 77, died at 82.

After revitalizing St. Louis' Washington University, Brookings served as Woodrow Wilson's price chief in World War I, and was appalled at the lack of trained people in Washington. In 1919 he went to work for the Institute for Government Research, later helped found the Institute of Economics and began a graduate school to train men for public service. In 1927 he merged all three organizations as the Brookings Institution, envisioned it as a supergraduate "capstone to the education al arch of the country." Passionately Objective. Brookings was never quite that under its scholarly first president, Harold G. Moulton. It granted only 74 doctorates before dropping the program in 1936. But its economic research had a profound effect on national policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Brookings experts clarified and defined nearly every function of Government, from Indian affairs to forest control. Later they deflated many New Deal ideas, notably the theory that only pump-priming could make the economy grow. During World War II, Brookings went into everything from manpower allocation to postwar reconversion. In 1947, when Congress scrapped on foreign aid proposals, Brookings settled the fight with a plan that became the basic charter of ECA.

Since 1952 Brookings has broadened its scope underable President Calkins, 57, onetime dean of Columbia University's School of Business. Passionately devoted to objectivity, its staffers tackle anything tariff reduction, the Federal Reserve or U.N. organization. The main product: books on any problem of "broad public interest," all of them the last word on a subject. With U.S. problems mounting, Brookings is now producing at least a dozen hefty volumes a year. In the works are books on everything from higher education to the 1960 election.

Filling Gaps. President Calkins' new plans include more research, periodic foreign policy analyses and even a regular journal of public affairs. But his biggest effort for Brookings is the education of responsible men.

Finding the Government "very slow" to recognize the problem, Calkins in 1957 began hauling federal executives (assistant secretary level) off to quiet, colonial Williamsburg for several weeks at a time. They spent long days discussing leadership, science and democracy, reading books by Sociologist David Riesman and Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, listening to lectures by such old Washington hands as former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Asked what good it did him, one official replied: "It's like asking what good it did to read War and Peace" Another glowed over his "first chance to see the entirety of Government," said that his new view of a rival agency "managed to end a 20 years' war."

Year-Long Dialogue. Brookings then gave 550 junior federal executives the same treatment, was so successful that this year the Civil Service Commission took over the program. This month Brookings began another series of seminars for "middle management'' officials, is applying the same scheme to urban leaders in Cincinnati and Baltimore. One byproduct is more books; e.g., the transcripts of two hair-down sessions by Congressmen and corporation lobbyists on how they do their jobs.

To mix men and ideas even more, Brookings is particularly interested in bringing sheltered sociologists to Washington, where many of them confront "actual problems" for the first time. From business and labor, it will soon also recruit able young prospects for federal jobs, give them six months in Government to see how they like it. At its striking new eight-story center on Massachusetts Avenue, Brookings plans a year-long dialogue involving everyone from the Boy Scouts to the President's National Goals Commission. Whatever the outcome, it seems likely that Founder Brookings would have applauded the big ambitions of his unique little institution.

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