How can we make sense of the the rapid changes that so profoundly influence our own lives and work? Get our bearing? Chart a path through this maze? Better grasp “the options” and “probable answers” for those working within public administration?

History certainly cannot provide the answers to such questions, but it may help to enrich our understanding about these problems in several ways: first, American public administration mostly deals with the here and now. Its pragmatic, hands-on methods are admired for getting the job done efficiently and effectively, and our schools of administration brim with foreign students from every nation who come to learn American administrative techniques and technologies. But this comes at a price: running the trains on time will not insure that they are headed in the right directions. Concentrating mainly on getting the job done can cause one to forget to reflect on the purpose for doing the job. Technologies and techniques, no matter how many nor how sophisticated, will not yield normative purposes in and of themselves. Rather, human context and cultural meaning define purposes, goals, and values. Here, reading history can help to enlarge the context as well as to discover invaluable meaning for public decision makers—where did the idea, event, or institution derive from? How did it evolve? In what ways did it shape the options and available solutions for administrators? Robert Dahl in his classic 1947 essay prodded our field to incorporate historical analysis in its research and practice, but regrettably we, for the most part, still ignore his prescient argument.

A sense of history not only provides administrators with longer and deeper time perspectives, it may also offer an avenue for stimulating creativity and insight. For some, administrative creativity and insight is an oxymoron; it does not exist, indeed is a contradiction of terms. Yet, like all of us, public administrators are caught up at their workbenches in coping with the daily grind, which has accelerated into a frantic, mind-numbing pace due to our globally-interconnected, wired world. Thus, it is even more imperative now than ever before for administrators in all walks of life periodically to lift their minds and eyes off their work, look up, and reflect upon “the big picture.” History, especially if it is well written and relevant to public administration, can help to remind us that others have faced similar situations. How they saw events and dealt with them can, in turn, aid in broadening and enriching our own understanding about the problems we confront today. Ironically, history may show us new ways of thinking and coping with our present dilemma, or at least help us avoid another’s mistake. As Voltaire put it so well, “History does not repeat itself, people do.”

Third, history gives a necessary counterbalance to the quantitative perspective that consumes so much of modern administrative life. It can sensitize us to “the value problems” or the constitutional, political, and cultural issues that may often seem invisible in the background but are no less critical to making sound administrative choices. Unfortunately, much of what is taught today in American public administration is bundles of quantitative skills—an approach that the French Sociologist Jacques Ellul (1964) once brilliantly criticized as leading into binding, pervasive imprisonment by “the technique.” Make no mistake, applied skills are and will remain “bread and butter” staples in the kitbags of public administrators. Quantitative analysis skills are essential tools for fulfilling various lines of their assigned work. Yet, “soft skills” are equally vital. As an individual moves up the bureaucratic hierarchy, he or she must navigate through increasingly complex “competing ethical codes” (Barnard 1938, 272). Too few are trained to properly handle such ethical overload. So, here also history can come to our aid as an indispensable tutor. Well-crafted, thought-provoking histories, unlike other academic disciplines, can enable us to “walk in the shoes of another” and feel what it is like to wrestle with tough, demanding problems. How they dealt with the ethical challenges in their day successfully—or if they failed, why, and what went wrong? Like no other approach, reading a cracking good historical tale can put one in the catbird seat of someone confronting the awesome demands of a seminal command decision.

Happily, several solid, relevant histories have recently appeared that are well worth students and practitioners of public administration perusing. To be sure, no one size fits all. The following books must be selectively read with an eye toward utility, even pleasure. Thus, let’s begin by looking at the most personal and applied histories and move toward the most abstract and theoretical texts.

First, Ferrel Heady’s One Time Around is the sort of reflective autobiography that is a delight to read. Heady of course is well-known as one of America’s gifted administrative scientists who in the post-World War II decades led the development of a new academic subfield, comparative public administration. He is also one of the nicest gentlemen who, in more ways than can be recounted, remains a true friend of the field. To be sure, several fine autobiographies by leaders of public administration have appeared in recent years (such as, Simon 1991), but Heady’s One Time Around is special, for it not only gives a well-balanced perspective on our field during the last half of the twentieth century, its most turbulent and creative era, but new students as well as old hands will find much wisdom in its pages. Those interested in academic administration should review especially carefully the account of his presidency of the University of New Mexico during the campus turmoils of the 1960s and 1970s. Heady provides in these chapters a surprisingly balanced participant–observer case analysis of academic crisis management during this difficult period of his tenure. Reading it, one gains some insight into the attributes and skills it takes to survive, indeed to achieve a reputation as an effective, fair-minded leader. For those more intrigued by Heady’s academic career, chapters one through four reveal much about the personal story behind the development of his scholarly methods, orientation, motivations, and chosen routes. All this is recounted in straightforward prose without puffery or self-congratulations. Certainly, Heady’s book will not appeal to everyone. Some will find its length and detail imposing, but if anyone wants to hear “the story behind the story” of a major figure in American postwar public administration, One Time Around is a must read.

The Mysteries of Development by Herbert Werlin is a kindred volume to Heady’s because it contains ample autobiographic background related to the author’s extensive academic and practitioner career largely in development administration. Though unlike Heady’s reflective autobiography, Werlin imaginatively weaves together his personal experiences from a wide range of consulting, government, and university jobs here and abroad to formulate an applied theory or way of thinking about development administration. In the author’s words, his book introduces a unified theory “in two ways: 1) reconciling contradictory theories and 2) presenting a single direction for political development, regardless of culture or form of government” (1). As Werlin adds, “without it, students of development, as well as practitioners, will remain haunted by the title of this book, ‘the mysteries of development”’ (1).

In the tradition of Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Reinhard Bendix, and other sociologist “greats,” Werlin draws together an impressive swath of theoretical research and practical firsthand observations to synthesize and advance a political elasticity theory or “political software” that emphasizes “what works has to do more with ‘subjective factors’ than ‘objective ones”’ (12). The bulk of the book articulates the details of political elasticity theory, its key elements, and pragmatic applications in development administration. Whether or not Werlin succeeds at making a convincing case for his theory, each reader must decide, but from the standpoint of history and its use for applied administrative theory building, Werlin demonstrates how autobiography, ideas, and experiences can be mixed, analyzed, then judiciously related to seminal academic issues of our time for theory building as well as problem solving.

Biographies, much like autobiographies, have long been standard routes for learning about leadership and management (for instance, Freeman 1942; Caro 1974; Doig and Hargrove 1987). Life stories present important role models, even moral tales of instruction, for fresh recruits as well as “old hands” in public administration. Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer belongs among the best on any short list of essential biographies in public administration. Albert Speer of course is well known as one of the most powerful twentieth century administrators. As Nazi Germany’s Armaments Minister at the comparatively youthful age of 36, he had 28 million workers under his command and was Hitler’s closest colleague, even considered his likely successor by many. Speer’s administrative genius was so respected by the Allies that in 1945 he was the only high ranking Nazi whom Americans wanted to capture and interrogate immediately. Speer came close to being hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes. Because he, alone, admitted to the collective guilt of the Nazi war crimes, he escaped the hangman’s rope and subsequently served 20 years in Spandau Prison. Released in 1966, he wrote three reflective and rewarding books: Inside the Third Reich (1970), Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976), and The Slave State (1981).

Despite these internationally bestselling publications, countless radio and television interviews, as well as many books and articles about Speer, questions always remain why a man of such obvious talents, culture, and education should succumb to Hitler’s charm and work so unstintingly and effectively to sustain such a vile regime. Speer himself was profoundly plagued by guilt over what he had done for the Nazis. George Casalis, the French Protestant prison chaplain at Spandau, a man who came to know Speer possibly better than anyone else, observed that Speer’s personal guilt led to an intense “battle for his soul.” He wrestled with his guilt for the rest of his life—both to confront his terrible past and “yet deny—or block it.” “He was the most tortured man I had ever met,” said Casalis (13).

Gitta Sereny, who lived in France during the war, and worked for the resistance, became close to Speer during his last years. She interviewed him extensively, talked with his circle of friends, and was given open access to Speer’s personal papers and archives. She writes a gripping biography, one that is hard to put down. It focuses upon his attraction to Hitler, rapid rise to power, survival among cutthroat Nazi leaders, blindness to their millions of victims, failure to resist, and so on. It is impossible not to admire the author’s diligence in facing so many roadblocks as she attempted to uncover the truth about “his battle with truth.”

For modern-day American public administrators, there are poignant lessons from her sad tale—namely what Guy Adams and Dan Balfour recently referred to as “the masks of administrative evil” (1998). The masks, Sereny ably demonstrates, are very real and yet they are so complicated to unmask, even for a dedicated historian willing to devote 20 years of hard work. Sereny does her level best to penetrate Speer’s masks, yet many puzzles about Speer remain elusive even at the end of her 756-page tome.

For this reviewer, Sereny ultimately sends a powerful personal message, perhaps best summed up by the award winning American Film Director George Stevens’s comment after his stint in Germany during World War II: “When a poor, hungry dirty man grabs me and begs, I feel the Nazi in me because I abhor him and want him to keep his hands off me. The reason I abhor him is because I see myself as capable of arrogance and brutality in keeping him away. That’s the fierce thing to discover in oneself” (as quoted in Richo 1999, 260). Biography, at its best, can convey such gut-wrenching feeling. Sereny reminds us that we all carry within ourselves a bit of Albert Speer, which makes her work simultaneously so fascinating and frightening.

A fourth recent example of historical analysis is the policy case study found in Theodore Marmor’s The Politics of Medicare. To be sure, numerous superb policy cases have been published over the past several decades, from Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision (1971) to Jacob Hacker’s The Road to Nowhere (1997), and Marmor’s text belongs on any short list of the most outstanding. His book is a second edition; the first edition appeared in 1973. This new edition is divided into two parts: part one is the first edition with little change, covering the origins and enactment of Medicare in 1965. Part two includes four new chapters that focus upon its evolution, politics, and institutional performance since 1966 to the present day. In any new edition pieced together in this manner, shifts in tone and emphasis can be anticipated, and Marmor’s book is no exception: its first part is more straightforward, even optimistic about Medicare. The new second section seems more reflective, even slightly pessimistic about the program. Yet, in fairness to the author, the 1980s and 1990s hardly witnessed many big health-care reform successes; indeed the reverse is closer to the truth, as Marmor’s book reveals by the torturous chapters seven to ten on the budgetary struggles, ideological clashes, and the complicated programmatic puzzles and problems.

The author’s thoroughness is illustrated by the ample graphs, data, references, glossary, endnotes, and bibliographical essay, which may make it too detailed for some readers, but a rich feast of information for healthcare policy specialists. What his careful scholarship underscores, however, is how invaluable “thinking in time,” to cite Neustadt and May’s apt phrase (1986), can be for policy makers and policy making. It enriches our time-bound perspectives about the conundrums surrounding policy issues and the possible public choices that are available today. In the case of Medicare, we vividly see how this program began with a small, well-defined concept—to provide federal hospital insurance for the elderly—but expanded quickly in the midst of President Johnson’s Great Society initiatives into far broader, more comprehensive health care programs for seniors, well beyond the scale and cost projections of its original proposal. Since 1966, however, according to Marmor, Medicare’s story is “primarily the politics of the program’s administration” (180). As the author concludes, right now Medicare is left with two types of policy disputes: “first, the relatively narrow policy disputes where the ideological cleavages in the larger public are largely irrelevant and second, those relatively rare but important disputes where the deepest divides in the American polity are crucially relevant” (181–2).

Jerry Mitchell’s The American Experiment with Government Corporations, in contrast to Marmor’s policy case study, is institutional history that concerns the origins, development, and current practices of one of the most powerful, pervasive, yet largely hidden, American bureaucracies—the government corporation. Mitchell’s book belongs to a distinguished company of institutional analyses written by some of America’s ablest administrative scholars (such as, White 1948, 1951, 1954, and 1958; Gaus and Wolcott 1940; Mansfield 1939; Van Riper 1958; Mosher 1979). These enduring works serve as crucial knowledge-building blocks for our profession because they provide a keen appreciation of how public institutions begin, grow, change, and help ultimately to make American democracy work today. They engender pride in what public administration does for society—its importance, purpose, and significance. They also present the stark realities of the downsides—its problems, challenges, and limitations.

Authoring readable institutional history is not a simple job. Just lumping facts together will merely recount a boring tale. A writer needs to find a theme that connects the details in a way that gives meaning and a sense of integration to the story line.

Mitchell’s book is well-researched and well-written. More importantly, it provides a concise, interpretive synthesis of the facts concerning public corporations in relationship to the broader themes of American political history, engages us in the debate over the pros and cons of this variety of government organization for doing the public’s business, and speculates about its possible future directions. In short, Mitchell gives a much-needed sense of meaning and understanding to current controversies surrounding government corporations. If there is a minor “nit,” and it is minor, Mitchell expands his definition of government corporations to cover federal corporations, state authorities, and local special districts, which is quite a stretch, given their vast differences and individual complexities; on the other hand, neglect of some specifics may be the price one must pay in any institutional history for making broader connections and theoretical generalizations.

In A Necessary Evil by Gary Wills the use of history shifts from analyzing institutions to ideas. Here the roots of the most crucial ideas threatening contemporary American public administration are examined in depth, namely pervasive ideological hostility toward government, or in the words of the book’s subtitle, “A History of American Distrust of Government.” The author has made a distinguished professional career of writing several compelling, readable American histories such as the award-winning Nixon Agonistes, Lincoln at Gettysburg, and Reagan’s America. Wills’s talent is to challenge the reader to see an old familiar topic in a new way, a way oft-times radically at odds with accepted facts or established beliefs. Not infrequently, Wills uses counterintuitive reasoning to reformulate conventional wisdom.

A Necessary Evil contains vivid portraits of America’s most famous radical antistatists—from the minute-men, nullification advocates, and Brook Farm inhabitants to modern-day SDS, NRA, and term-limit hotheads. Wills links these fun to read mini-case portraits together via their common values (individual rights over civic duties, open political participation as opposed to government by experts, local above national orientation, fundamental antistatism over institutional support). Wills argues that the deep American suspicion of government derives less from “the localism of colonial history” than from a distrust of human nature based upon ingrained American Protestantism. The Protestant faith was almost unanimously accepted as “a given” by the American Founding Fathers who believed “that a better world than any that had ever been known could be built where authority was distrusted and held in constant scrutiny” (237).

Wills’s book is both timely and topical, especially in the aftermath of Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing. However, at times he tends to push his arguments to the extreme. One example of such eyebrow raising assertions is his claim that the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers originally aimed, not to limit power, but to make government more efficient. Really? Was efficiency the thesis of The Federalist Papers or Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management? Wills may well make the shades of Taylor and his disciples smile, but Madison certainly must be rolling in his grave. Ideological history, even in the hands of a master like Wills, appears to run the risk of overstatement.

David Lindenfeld’s The Practical Imagination is the most demanding theoretical book of this cluster. It is also one of the most important for the advancement of our academic field. In some respects, it may rank with Herbert Simon’s Administrative Behavior or Dwight Waldo’s The Administrative State in both its level of abstraction and its potential intellectual value. Such a bold assertion may seem odd since the book says nothing about American public administration. Not only is the subject remote and the volume long, but a proper appreciation of its contribution demands some background in German history—and a dogged determination to plow through the details of many long-dead German administrative theorists, their ideas, careers, and influence. This text is neither for the fainthearted nor casual reader. Probably very few serious academics will bother to explore its contents, which is a shame and our loss in American public administration. Why?

Because in the best sense of Barbara Tuchman’s phrase, Lindenfeld holds up “a distant mirror” for us to gaze at—an academic field of more than a century ago that is not unlike our own today. How German administration as an academic field emerged and came to be defined? Its scope and contents outlined? Its research purposes and place in the university justified? Its role and worth to society articulated? These and other central questions that American public administration scholars wrestle with now were also argued then—often in more depth, intensity, and intellectual breadth by many of the greatest German theorists such as Kant, Stein, Weber, and Mohl. The parallel between the dialogue of Americans today and German administrative scientists of yesterday is striking, and Lindenfeld, a first-rate historian who culled every scrap of evidence from German archives, private correspondence, even lecture notes, and course catalogues, judiciously analyzes their meaning and significance in the context of German intellectual thought of that era. His book, thus, is a remarkable achievement that may ultimately provide for us a sort of Rosetta Stone. It can serve as a key to deciphering modern American administrative sciences by allowing us to see ourselves in comparative perspective. Obviously, twenty-first century American scholars cannot and should not import nineteenth century German sciences of state to these shores, but Practical Imagination is intellectual history at its best and offers surprisingly relevant insights into our present academic conundrums.

Finally, Jos Raadschelders’s Handbook of Administrative History is also well-worth reading and owning, at least for serious students in our field. A historian by training, a European by background, a prolific contributor to administrative sciences, and now the Bellmon Professor of Public Administration at the University of Oklahoma, Raadschelders authored a one-of-a-kind volume that furnishes a dragnet overview of everything (well, a lot) written about administrative history, not just in the West but from all over the globe. Not only an authoritative reference, his Handbook conveniently categorizes major divisions of administrative history and provides thoughtful and thought provoking analytical “prefaces” to each one. By simply reviewing these chapter introductions, a person can learn a great deal about administrative history as an academic field. For Americans, especially Americans who are highly pragmatic in their outlook and training in public administration, this Handbook can be an eye opening, professionally enriching book that immensely broadens our intellectual horizons. Nonetheless, there is a downside; like the Lindenfeld tome, it is “high theory” and so can be a tough read. Yet, it still is well worth the time and effort to peruse its pages with care.

So what lessons, on the whole, can be drawn from this cluster of eight recent books? What issues does public administration, as both theory and practice, face today in using history to enrich the field as a whole? Where do we go from here with the study of administrative history? Five lessons and issues that come to mind involve: 1) historical methodology, 2) graduate research, 3) MPA education, 4) case development, and 5) use at the professional association level.

First, these books demonstrate that there is no one best method for applying and using history in our field. Rather, there are numerous methodological approaches to administrative history: the reflective autobiography, applied theory building, critical biography, the policy case, institutional history, ideological analysis, intellectual history, bibliographical description, and possibly many more. However, collectively, these texts emphasize an important issue: put simply, how tough it is to write such books, for in my view these books are significant for our field precisely because they meet essentially four difficult criteria: 1) readability: all tell their stories in clear, understandable prose, written mainly for the general audience, not for professional historians; 2) relevance: all relate in one way or another to public administration as this review essay has attempted to underscore; 3) researched with care: all endeavor to discover the basic facts related to their topics as thoroughly and carefully as possible as a basis for writing their histories; and 4) revisioning emphasis: all challenge us to reconsider previous conceptions of aspects of public administration. None seeks to recount facts just for the sake of recounting facts in order to produce some idealized Rankean history. At its best, and these books are some of the recent best, administrative history ultimately makes us think or rethink fundamental assumptions and ways we view things. No easy chore!

A second lesson and issue relates to graduate research in our field. Greater inclusion of historical research offers the field a better sense of what it is, why it exists, and what its fundamental human and societal purposes are. As already pointed out, Americans may excel at pragmatic, technical problem-solving but often are weak in appreciating the time dimensions related to what they do. Certainly each of the books in this review ably demonstrates how invaluable historical research counterbalances our tendency toward “presentness.”

Yet, while these books may only underscore the need for such writings today, none of them were written as graduate theses and so here is our peculiar American challenge (unlike European administrative study): Ph.D. programs, where most basic research is rarely generated in our field, if ever, permit such historical research. Empirical social-scientific methodologies all too often throughout graduate work hold a lock on allowable dissertation options. Thus how can graduate students pursuing doctorates find the necessary support and opportunities to work on fundamental historical studies to enrich all aspects of public administration? Indeed, even be encouraged to consider tackling history as an option for doctoral research?

Third, at the MPA training level, treatment of history faces another difficulty. MPA education throughout the United States is increasingly moving towards competency skills that stress career-oriented training in budgeting, human resource management, information technology, etc. Such “bread and butter” topics will undoubtedly remain at the core of professional education, but by concentrating upon “hard” skills and technologies, “soft” approaches such as history and values can be neglected, even crowded out of the MPA curricula. Simply scanning recent introductory public administration texts reveals largely short, simplistic accounts of administrative history. Indeed a recent survey of MPA accredited programs shows only one-fourth require ethics or values training as a separate course offering (Bowman and Menzel, 1998), although COPRA’s accreditation standards require identifiable instruction in such qualitative topics. So more questions: what should be the appropriate balance between the quantitative and qualitative in NASPAA accredited programs? Specifically, how and where can historical knowledge from books such as those in this cluster review be added to MPA education? How can instructors be better trained and equipped with a keener sense of history to bring to their classes, no matter what topic they teach?

A fourth lesson and set of issues related to administrative history pertain to case development. From almost the beginning of our academic field, case studies have been a major way to apply history for training public administrators. First, there was the Public Administration Clearing House “capture and record” effort in the 1930s, and then in the postwar era, the Inter-University Case Program led by Harold Stein and later, Edwin Bock. Today, the JFK case program and the new University of Washington “Electronic Hallway” carry on this important case development activity. Their cases attempt to provide a “slice of administrative reality,” usually centered around an administrative dilemma, that forces students to wrestle with administrative decisions for which there are often no easy answers. Many see cases as the most effective tools for bringing classrooms alive with debate and controversy, not to mention a vehicle for bringing administrative reality into the classroom. As Edwin Bock wrote, “The case study has been exceptionally useful ...for reconnaissance, exploration, and discovery that can be applied to the study of momentous or inconsequential matters of public affairs and to the effective communication of such data in ways that carry precision and understanding” (Bock 1970, 22). Bock adds, “its literary form in the hands of a skilled writer may be used to communicate nuance and complexities of action more than any other” (Bock 1970, 37).

However, in recent years, JFK case writing, for example, has moved to writing shorter, less nuanced or complicated cases, and so here again questions and more questions: what should be the appropriate balance of the here-and-now versus the long-term perspective with all of its complexities covered as part of “good” pedagogical cases? How much historical background is needed to give context and depth to MPA material without jeopardizing the necessity for immediate decision forcing, practical applications?

Finally, on the professional level, both lessons and questions emerge today related to application of administrative history. Whether within the American Society for Public Administration or other professional associations in the public sector like the ICMA, a sense of history on the part of its members can nurture corporate identity and ethical values. Joining a professional association or reading its code of conduct will only go so far at inculcating both corporate and ethical frameworks. Building professionalism requires institutional memory, an awareness of the profession’s achievements, the ideals of its prominent leaders of the past, and its role in creating modern society. In our intensely commercial society, history, like no other alternative, can instill and inspire a special sense of “publicness” among associational members. Yet, here too, several issues are apparent: how can public professions better foster historical awareness among their membership? How and where can history find a role in their publications, at associational meetings, or within official statements? What ways can history serve to inspire members to fulfill the highest ideals of public service? To dedicate themselves to the ethical values and corporate norms of their “calling”? To acquire a pride in their crucial contributions for their communities? And for America?