Memorandum for Chairman Macy:
I found your report on the operation of the new Executive Seminar Center both interesting and encouraging. I congratulate you, your Civil Service Commission colleagues, and all who have worked to make this unusual interagency experiment in career development the success that it has been.
I am pleased by your report that the Center is making significant contributions to the excellence in the public service for which we strive. I am also pleased to find that the Center draws on the intellectual resources of the academic, business, labor, and Government communities to enrich the trainees' educational experience and broaden their perspectives by exposing them to the divergent ideas, views, and approaches the varied visiting faculty brings to the seminars. I hope, and I have confidence, that the performance of seminar participants in the years ahead will bear out your observation.
It is important that you continue to emphasize to agencies the need to make careful selections of seminar participants. They should be sure to nominate not those who can most easily be spared, but those who ordinarily can't be--the men and women who show real potential for assignment to career positions of greatest responsibility. Only in this way will the Seminar Center fulfill its high promise.
I will watch with continuing interest the course of the Seminar Center. I will be particularly interested in hearing more of your plans for establishment of similar centers in other areas. Please keep me advised of future developments and progress.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
Note: The report, in the form of a memorandum from John W. Macy, Jr., Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, was made public by the White House on July 23, 1965. It stated, in part:
"Established by the Civil Service Commission under the Training Act of 1958, the Executive Seminar Center represented a significant new concept in career development when the first group of 35 mid-career executives began the first two-week seminar on 'Administration of Public Policy' in the fall of 1963. With the 31 subsequent seminar sessions, the soundness of the idea has proven itself to the Commission, the participants, faculty members and a distinguished Committee of Visitors. The consensus is that the Center constitutes a significant step forward in preparing promising executives for increasingly responsible assignments in the Federal service...
"The curriculum is composed of ten related two week courses designed to develop knowledge and understanding in three basic areas--public administration, Federal policies and programs, and management and organization ....
"Our experience so far leads me to believe that the Executive Seminar Center program has made and will continue to make a significant contribution to the achievement of excellence in the public service. It will continue to aid in attaining more efficient and effective management and in development of executives who can understand and help to solve the complex problems our Government must meet in the years ahead."
Lyndon B. Johnson, Memorandum in Response to a Report on the New Executive Seminar Center. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241383