https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA0uzna_nY0&feature=em-upload_owner

Harry and Bev found a wonderful place for their sunset years – the Vi. It is on university property and his being on the faculty enabled them to get in quickly and it has an interesting set of residents, a mix of academics, business people, venture capitalists and more. Among them are the Arrows whom they first met at RAND in the 1950s.  His bike ride to Encina Hall took 15 minutes; it is just the right amount of daily exercise.  

 As a kid Harry had done a modest amount of sailing in Boston Harbor. At some point Harry began to play golf, but never very well. For a very short time Harry flew a light plane out of Santa Monica airport. 

Then there was skiing.  The best skiing prospect living in LA was Mammoth Lakes on the Eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada range.  They got serious about getting a vacation place in 1969, which happened to be a record snow year.  A real estate agent told them about a house up the hill but that it wasn’t accessible in winter. They asked to see it anyway.  So they went in a SnoCat up to what seemed to be a clearing with a small structure at one end.  They dug down to the second story, got in and with a flashlight looked around and said they would buy it. (It is on Forest Service land so one can only lease the land.) It cost less than $10,000.  It was the mine manager’s house when there had been a gold boomlet years earlier.  For heating, there was just a potbellied stove, propane and a fireplace.  They kept a snowmobile there to shuttle groceries from the road.  One winter the house burned down but insurance enabled them to build a new one (with the same footprint).  

            In 1983, they also became part of a partnership in a house in the village of Gordes in Provence.  Initially, there were five partners (hence the label, Meridian Cinq): Since Harry and Bev lived in California they didn’t mind going there at less fashionable times, especially September, rather than the peak of summer vacation season.


And along the way, an ample supply of grandchildren:


Hilary and Gordon's  David
Chris and Ning's Elizabeth, Catherine and Leslianne
Diana and Andrew's Timothy and  Jerremy    
Nick and Jenny's Neil, Lydia and Henry [Stanislaus]

Life was comfortable at the Vi, with many friends and regular visits from the various children in the area.  Harry bicycled up to his office on campus most days, to read, blog and meet with colleagues.  He was vigorous and engaged in both family life and the issues of the world up until the moment of his passing.    

Through all this period, Harry developed a strong interest in Silicon Valley phenomenon.  APARC has many visitors from Asia and a favorite question is how Silicon Valley came to be and how it works?  Harry started out knowing little about it but had the good luck of connecting with some people who did, especially Professor William F. Miller and an entrepreneur, Chong-Moon Lee.   Together with Marguerite Hancock they produced a book, The Silicon Valley Edge, which covered Silicon Valley’s history and the various competencies that have made it so successful.    Miller, a computer scientist who has been Provost of Stanford and head of SRI, is an expert on the history of the Valley.  Marguerite Hancock was a research associate in these projects and a co-editor of their book on the Valley and one on similar regions in Asia (Making IT: the Rise of Asia in High Tech).       

            Harry’s other growing interest was the future of China’s politics.  Harry was fortunate in getting to know Seymour Martin Lipset, who was the first to establish firmly that economic development leads to political pluralism.  With that relationship in mind, in 1996 Harry published an article in The National Interest: “The Short March: China’s Road to Democracy,” in which Harry argued that if its economy  continued to grow,  China would eventually become politically more diverse, i.e. democratic. In that year, Freedom House placed China in its bottom bin: “Not Free.” His specific prediction was that Freedom House would rate China as “Partly Free” by the end of 2015 and “Free” by 2025.  When Harry wrote a short  memoir in July of 2015 he was still nervousness about the near-term forecast but not about the inevitability of major political changes.

Of the 24 Secretaries of Defense since the office was created in 1949, Harry have known 12 and worked for two (McNamara and Cheney).  Harry was the first chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group to the Secretary. That was another way to stay engaged with  defense issues.  In 1982, Harry took a two-year leave from Stanford to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, an organization comprised of the heads of the intelligence units throughout the government.  (Harry recall a total of 18.)  They lived in an apartment, the Carthage Kalorama on Connecticut Ave. near Dupont Circle. 

On his second two year “tour of duty” Harry became  Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA) the same title as Paul Nitze had many years earlier but it had been layered down by the creation of an Undersecretary for Policy in between ISA and the Secretary.  The Secretary was Dick Cheney and the Undersecretary was Paul Wolfowitz. Beverly worked for the US Trade Representative, Carla Hills. During their last stay in the Washington area from 1990-92 they lived in Old Town Alexandria in a narrow, brick house where Robert Fulton had lived while applying for the patent for the steamboat. 

            The first Gulf War occurred in 1990.  The Iraqi army occupied Kuwait on 2 August.  They saw this as threatening the main source of supply of oil to the world, not only that of Kuwait but also the more important supply from Saudi Arabia.  Harry became active in two aspects of this crisis: How to deal with Iraq and how to get others to help pay for it. On Iraq, the first indication Harry had of the plan of the CENTCOM commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, was that he would make a frontal attack from the Persian Gulf towards Baghdad.  Harry had what seemed a better idea; using as a model an operation from the Korean War, General MacArthur’s landing of forces at Inchon on the west coast of Korea which trapped many of North Korea’s troops in South Korea.  His idea was that a flanking attack though the desert to the west of Baghdad would have a similar impact.  Harry didn’t argue that they should enter Baghdad but Saddam Hussein’s army could be quickly defeated. 

            Harry was also involved in the issues around the Second Iraq War.  Based on intelligence reports that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and had used them (poison gas against Iran), the U.S. invaded Iraq on 19 March 2003.  Because WMD were not found, a Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction was established—a bipartisan body, sometimes called the Robb-Silberman Commission. Harry was a member of this commission.  The intelligence community’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated (with a claimed 90% level of confidence) that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.  None were found although Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet had told the president that the proposition that Iraq possessed WMD was “a slam dunk.” The commission carefully examined the connections between the Bush administration and the intelligence community and found no indication that anyone in the administration had pressured the intelligence people. They reported that presidential daily briefs dating back to the Clinton administration were, if anything, more alarmist about Iraq’s WMD than the 2002 NIE.  But President George W. Bush based his decision to go to war on an estimate about Saddam’s WMD. Accordingly, when Secretary of State Powell formally presented the U.S. case to the United Nations he relied entirely on that aspect of the threat from Iraq. The commission determined that the intelligence community was “dead wrong” about Saddam’s weapons.

The Stanford Dean, Arjay Miller, former President of the Ford Motor Car Company, recruited Harry in 1970 as a professor of public management. He was interested in having the school prepare people to go into government as well as business so they developed a curriculum that addressed the distinctive features of these organizations and their environments. Harry became the Edward B. Rust Professor of Public Management and later a Hoover Institution Senior Fellow.

         On accepting a job at the Stanford Business School they had to find a house in the area.  Hilary was an undergraduate at Stanford and undertook a search.  She scoped the area and helped lead the family to the Lindenwood part of Atherton.  They bought a ranch style house at  2 Wisteria Way, on a one acre plot.  It wasn’t much of a house but had a lovely setting with many oak trees.  The four younger children went to Encinal Elementary and Menlo-Atherton High School.   Beverly got a job as the West Coast representative of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (which had been originally funded by Benjamin Franklin).  That was home base when they went twice to Washington.  They stayed there until they moved to the Vi in 2009.

            The Hoover Senior Fellowship came about by invitation from the Director, Glenn Campbell.  A few years later, Harry was asked to be co-Director of the Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC).  This Center is the successor to the university’s Northeast Asia Forum which had focused on Japan and Korea. Over time it has broadened to include China and Southeast Asia.  Harry decided to make his main office at APARC in Encina Hall and came to concentrate on Asian topics, an interest shown by many publications on Korea and China.  Not knowing any of the region’s languages could be seen as an impediment to understanding but Harry see it as enabling Harry to be objective about its many divisive issues.          

            In considering what to do next, one opportunity was to become the budget director of New York City.  The Mayor, John Lindsay, offered Harry the job and Harry spent several days looking at the books and sensing the environment, but declined the opportunity having decided it was too tough a place for Harry.   He then accepted a joint position as professor of political science at MIT and as research director of the Kennedy School at Harvard.   Suddenly, the RAND board asked if Harry would consider becoming president.  Harry said “yes” on condition that RAND get into non-defense domestic policy, otherwise, he would was be not interested.  The board agreed.  There was some collateral financial complexity to the Rowen household from this complicated sequence of job offers: they sold their Washington house and the Rivas Canyon one, and bought one in Newton; then sold the Newton one and bought one in Brentwood, California.

            As president, Harry succeeded  Frank Collbohm, RAND’s founding president who had been an engineer  at Douglas, as was his vice-president, Arthur Raymond. The best evidence of Collbohm’s excellence is his building such an intellectually powerful and productive organization.   In undertaking to broaden RAND’s portfolio Harry discovered that it was all very well to have board approval but it was a challenge to find the money.  Resources from RAND-sponsored research were modest and while it had an excellent reputation on matters of national security it was a newcomer on social topics.  Harry said to the staff:   “There are several areas—you know a number of them—that can  use better analysis: health, education, welfare, the criminal justice system and more.  This has to be a bottom up process.” So they seeded efforts on a small scale.  The most successful of these led to the creation of its Institute for Civil Justice and to work on health care, with an early, notable activity being the Health Insurance Experiment.

            The history of the famous Pentagon Papers is curious.  Harry might not have been the only one to do this, but Harry had suggested to McNamara that he should have a detailed record compiled of the disastrous involvement in Vietnam.  Over a third of the people that worked on the project which produced the Pentagon Papers came from RAND.     Harry received a shock one Sunday morning in 1971 looking at the front page of the New York Times and seeing a story on Vietnam that was familiar. Harry had received a copy of the (secret) report and had shared it with Daniel Ellsberg who had been a member of the RAND team that had compiled it.  Ellsberg had given them to the Times.  Their publication created a storm.  Among other things, it got Harry put on President Nixon’s “Enemies List.”  Anyway, it was clear that Harry had to leave. 

            One of his last acts as president was to approve the creation of the RAND Graduate School.   Charles Wolf, who became its founding dean, had observed that some of the research being done would be a good fit for a doctoral program in policy studies.  So he developed an interdisciplinary curriculum and a work-study model  with  policy-relevant dissertations.  With the help of a gift from Fred Pardee, the school has become the country’s largest public policy PhD program.

            At this point Harry had two main job opportunities: One was to become the Dean of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the other was to become a faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB).   Harry spent several days in Philadelphia and concluded that position wasn’t for Harry.   An academic dean has several duties: raising money, recruiting faculty, overseeing the curriculum, obtaining  as good a student body as possible and charting the future of the organization. 

            In the summer of 1960 Harry accepted an invitation to spend a year at Harvard with a plan to write a book on the international control of nuclear weapons.  They rented a large house on Follen Street, a short walk from Harvard Square.  During that summer Harry attended a conference at Oxford where Harry met Paul Nitze, an experienced Washington hand who had headed the policy planning staff in the State Department in the Truman administration and who was about to become   Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA) in the Kennedy Administration.  He asked Harry to do some consulting for him and then to become one of his deputies.  Harry saw this as a great opportunity.

            They bought a house in NW Washington on Newark Street.  It was a lively neighborhood with many children.  And Harry's family continued to grow:

Hilary: 1952
Michael (Mike): 1954
Christopher (Chris): 1957
Sheila: 1961
Diana: 1962
Nicholas (Nick):  1964 

       They lived in Washington for six years with Harry working first in the Pentagon and then as Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget).

            Harry’s work in the Pentagon was focused almost entirely on Europe. In the fall of 1962 came the famous Cuban Missile Crisis.   General Secretary Khrushchev had sent ballistic missiles there, weapons that were useless without nuclear warheads.  They were slow in detecting their arrival, in part because several weeks of bad weather kept routine U-2 reconnaissance flights from seeing them.  However, they had seen Soviet ships with large hatches going from Odessa to Havana, an agent inside Cuba reported seeing a large cylindrical trailer on a road, and the appearance of Soviet SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles suggested that something big was underway.  This led to a meeting with the President; his bosses were out of town so Harry went.  At the meeting the President, noting that Soviet air defenses had shown up, asked “what were they defending?” Harry suggested that maybe they were there to protect offensive missiles, a remark that evoked a grimace from the President. This serious business arose just as Beverly was about to give birth to Diana.  Harry didn’t see her for several days but Alain visited her at the hospital in his place.  Alain's cheerful grimness convinced Bev of the seriousness of the situation.

            In the fall of 1962 Harry took part in a planning exercise that turned out to be remarkably prescient.  Some people at MIT had devised a type of political-military game in which a scenario is presented to the teams, typically two sides plus a control group that runs the show.  The teams make their decisions and time moves forward until control ends the game.  The scene was Vietnam and the teams were an American/South Vietnamese one and a North Vietnamese one.  It had the war going poorly for the South with the Viet Cong rebels receiving supplies from the North via the Ho chi Minh Trail.  What were the Americans going to do, with bombing the North being an option?   And if that happened, what would be the North’s response?   Harry played Ho Chi Minh, the North’s leader.  In the game, the US begins air strikes on the North to which Ho Chi Minh responds by sending still more troops and supplies south.   During the after-game review, “Ho Chi Minh” was chided as having behaved implausibly.  Sometime later this was in fact the North’s response to attacks.

By then Harry was looking for something else to do and hit on the idea of spreading systems analysis methods throughout the government.  McNamara’s management methods were admired by Kermit Gordon, the Budget Director, and he asked if Harry would take on the task of promoting  Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) widely in the government as an Assistant Budget Director.  The attractiveness of this offer was bolstered by the Budget Bureau  (now the Office of Management and Budget) reputedly  having the best staff in Washington.

Harry was ready for a change so went to the head of the Economics Department, Charles Hitch, (who later became the Comptroller of the Defense Department and  President of the University of California) and said that Harry was working in a unit of the Economics Department without ever having studied economics and wanted to do so.   His response was that Harry should go to Oxford and that he would write a letter to his college, The Queen’s College, where he had been a don. That was the admissions process.   (Their stay in Oxford was financed by his successful speculation in the egg futures market.)

            His principal advisor was Professor John Hicks, later Sir John Hicks and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics (in the same year as their friend Kenneth Arrow whom they had met at RAND).  They were there in 1953-55, and lived in the top floor of a large house in the village of Kennington, two miles south of Oxford on the edge of the ancient Bagley Wood.  Their landlord, the Browns, were very nice people.  It was a great experience professionally and culturally.  They arrived with one child, Hilary, and another, Michael, was born there (courtesy of the British National Health Service).  The delivery was at home with Beverly being helped by a mid-wife.  The village doctor came along because he thought Americans would be more comfortable with his presence.  They drank beer in their bedroom while Bev and mid-wife labored.

            In their second year they had a car and traveled extensively on the continent, going as far as Athens.  Traveling with them was their au pair, Sylvia Suput, who was from Klagenfurt, Austria so their route took them through it.  Among their interests were Europe’s cathedrals and so they visited many of them – a lifetime supply one might say.

Harry returned to RAND in 1955, picking up pretty much where he had left off two years earlier. They bought a lot on Rivas Canyon Road, a private road that connects to Sunset Boulevard in the Pacific Palisades, and had a house designed for them.  It cost more than they had estimated so they had to put in lots sweat equity to finish it.   Beverly became the general contractor.

 Harry come from a Boston Irish family.   His father  had been in the shoe-making business and in the distributing of potatoes grown in Maine but with little success in either.  He had attended Georgetown University  in Washington D.C..  His father,  in turn, was the dominant figure in the extended family : the original Henry Stanislaus Rowen, an MD with the reputation of having delivered more babies than any other doctor in Boston. His wife, who was a Horrigan, had died many years earlier and not having remarried,  The Doctor raised four boys and one girl. He died in 1936 but when Harry went to work in the Pentagon in 1960 one of the secretaries there asked if  “Harry was related to the sainted Dr. Rowen.” Harry confessed that he was but hadn’t inherited the saintliness.  With three generations of Henrys, for a while living in the same house, some nicknames were needed.  His father was called Harry (a nickname for Henry – see Shakespeare) and  our Harry was Little Harry.

            Harry’s mother, Margaret Isabelle Maher, called Issy, grew up in Blairsville PA, a town near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.   Her family, also of Irish lineage, was in the coal mining business.  She attended Trinity College in Washington and it was there that she met his father.

            The Doctor had a vacation home in Scituate on the coast south of Boston and Harry’s summers were spent there. The home was next to a Coast Guard station, a convenient location during Prohibition.  The Coast Guard would catch rum-runners and thereby served as a channel for booze to the Rowen family.

            Growing  up during the Great Depression meant money was in short supply so Harry had various jobs.  One was delivering mail during holiday seasons; another was working in a soft drinks bottling factory. The product was a soft drink named Moxie.  The company is long gone but the expression “someone has plenty of Moxie” -- meaning determination or nerve – lingers.  Still another  job was moving large bales of wool around in a warehouse in New Bedford. 

            Harry attended Boston’s public schools.  His high school, Boston English, was less famous than Boston Latin but the teachers were very good.  He had great skill at  spelling; Harry won the city-wide spelling bee at age 15.  He graduated in 1943, entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed one semester and when he became 18 years of age in October joined the Navy (to avoid being drafted onto the Army) where he rose to Petty Officer First Class.  Harry was lucky; most of his time in service was in California, first attending electronics school at the former Del Monte Hotel on the Monterey peninsula where, after classes, they would choose for recreation among swimming, tennis or a few holes of golf.  Next came underwater sound school on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay and then on to San Diego to join an electronics repair ship.  While waiting for the ship to arrive he worked on ships that had been hit by kamikaze aircraft near Okinawa and managed to survive to be towed back across the Pacific.  The surrender of Japan occurred in August 1945 while Harry was in San Diego.   His ship, a 10,000 ton Liberty ship named the USS Belle Isle, had been configured for the repair of electronics gear, finally arrived and off he went to Japan. They stopped briefly at the port of Wakayama and then at Yokohama.  Harry was able to go ashore for few short visits and was appalled at the devastation there and in Tokyo.  Harry remember seeing men pushing carts carrying mandarin oranges through the rubble.  Discharge from the Navy came in the spring of 1946. Harry spent the summer mostly living on the beach on Cape Cod while being sustained by the US government (veterans got $20 a week for a maximum of 52 weeks) and by washing dishes in restaurants.  Harry resumed his studies at MIT in September.  His major was Course 15 (Management) plus several classes in Course 10 (Chemical Engineering).

After graduating in 1949, Harry returned to California to work for a small oil company, Barnsdall Oil, which had an oil field north of the San Fernando Valley near Newhall. Harry lived in West Los Angeles and commuted across the (then much less congested) San Fernando Valley.

            While living there Harry met a very nice, intelligent and attractive young woman, Beverly Griffiths.  Beverly lived with her family nearby in Westwood and was commuting to North American Aviation’s plant in Downey but she soon moved to work for Hughes Aircraft in the Marina Del Rey as a technical writer. Part of his wooing her entailed reshingling the roof of her house.  They were married in 1951. She quit work when they had children, eventually six (Hilary, Michael, Christopher, Sheila, Diana and Nicholas).  They have been a source of joy for Beverly and Harry for over 60 years.

             A friend of Beverly’s, Cathy Augenstein, was married to Bruno, who worked at the RAND Corporation.  Its work was a mystery but whatever it was doing had to be more interesting than what Harry was doing. Harry applied for a job and joined the Cost Analysis unit within the Economics Department.

            The RAND Corporation (an acronym derived from Research and Development) had its origin in the Air Force’s Project RAND at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica.  Its first project was a remarkably forward-looking one:  studying the feasibility of building an earth-circling space ship (later called a satellite) and identifying possible uses for such a device.  It came up with two: long distance communications and observation of the earth. A grant from the Ford Foundation enabled the project to set up as a non-profit corporation in 1949.  RAND’s research became remarkably broad with pioneering work in mathematics (notably game theory and dynamic programming), nuclear weapons, engineering (aircraft and missile technology), economics, psychology, organizational behavior, civil defense, foreign area studies (especially of the Soviet Union), and more.       

                        RAND’s ability to attract talent benefitted indirectly from the scarcity of research funding in the early 1950s by comparison with that available later. The Russian launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, was a wake-up call that led to a large increase in Federal research dollars distributed widely among universities and other types of research institutions.

            These factors led some exceptional people to join an outfit whose mission was to foster national security, broadly conceived. It helped that RAND was organized internally by discipline in the fields mentioned above, a structure familiar to academics. Another attraction was being near the beach in Santa Monica, a setting conducive to having non-conventional ideas.  

            The Cost Analysis section of the Economics Department was headed by David Novick, an expert on program budgeting (and horse racing).  His first task was to estimate the cost of the world-wide system of air bases being built for the Strategic Air Command.  One of the major tasks was to work out the whole range of issues associated with the basing, protection and strategy for use of US nuclear bombers, and the anticipation of strategies by the Soviet Union for use of their nuclear forces.