George Graham, a leader at Brookings Institution
WASHINGTON -- George Adams Graham, a political scientist and specialist in public administration who helped lead the Brookings Institution and the National Academy of Public Administration, died Feb. 25 of progressive heart failure at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 100.
Dr. Graham also was a principal developer of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
As a teacher, researcher, and writer, Dr. Graham sought ways to increase government effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability at all levels. He believed governmental agencies and institutions could be more than playthings of politicians or the fiefdoms of balky bureaucrats. He worked to professionalize public administration.
He also put his principles into practice as an administrator for several agencies at the state and federal level, including the forerunner to the Office of Management and Budget (1942-45) and various Hoover Commission studies into Indian affairs, civil service, and other topics in the 1940s and 1950s.
Dr. Graham was born in Cambridge, N.Y., and received a bachelor's degree from Monmouth College in Illinois in 1926. He received a doctorate in political science from the University of Illinois in 1930.
He was a faculty member in the politics department at Princeton from 1930 to 1958 and was twice department chairman. During his tenure at Princeton, he wrote two books, ''Education for Public Administration" (1941, with Henry Reining) and ''Morality in American Politics" (1952). He also wrote 1960's ''America's Capacity to Govern."
As chairman of the politics department, he helped design the graduate professional program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which opened in 1948 and was named for the Princeton president often credited with early acknowledgments that public administration could be a profession. Dr. Graham admired Wilson and shared his sense of public administration's potential.
He left Princeton in 1958 to become director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, where he served for nine years.
In 1967, he became a founder and the first executive director of the National Academy of Public Administration, a Washington-based organization that evaluates the structure, operation, and performance of governments and government agencies.
The evaluation model he developed, known as the project panel approach, is used as the organization assesses such government agencies as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Under his direction, the academy also assessed graduate programs in public administration.
