Thursday, April 26, 2012

Great Bureaucrats: Bob Mondloch

Bob Mondloch and I (and Les Fredrickson) worked together in the early 70's on the MAP (Management Analysis Project--think Business Process Reengineering 20 years before that buzzphrase came in existence). Bob was a good man, sharp, hardworking, good judgment, sense of humor.  He'd been detailed from whatever the conservation division was called in those days--must have been when Nixon and Earl Butz were trying to kill the Agricultural Conservation Program to MAP as its executive director. At that time he was either assistant to the director of the conservation division or deputy, but he may have become director right before he died. He died very young, or so it seems to me now, probably in his early 40's, I think of a heart attack, and probably before 1976. 

Bob was one of a group of youngish men who moved from the field to DC in the 60's to replace the generation which had run the agency since the New Deal days and WWII.  Some found other jobs as the Republicans downsized ASCS and the boom in commodity prices seemed to be making the agency obsolete.  Some stayed on and led the agency through the 70's and 80's.

Anyhow, I ran across a reference to Mondloch House and tracked down this page, which offers a side of Bob I never knew about, but which is no surprise at all.  A notice of the marriage of a son in 1991 says Bob's widow was chaplain at Mount Vernon Hospital.

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