The Truman Scholars Association is excited to announce two new volunteer positions within the TSA community: Class Co-Chair and Regional Captain. Both positions are aimed at helping the TSA Board with planning, growth, communications, and development. All members of the TSA community are eligible so please consider volunteering!   

To submit your name for either position, please send your name, year, and selection state to tsaprogrammingcommittee@gmail.com by midnight on Monday, February 6. Please include a short statement (200 words max) to explain why you would be best for the role with ideas for what you would do when serving.  If you are nominating yourself for a regional captain position please include which region you live in, how long you have lived there, and how long you plan to remain in the area (we do not require that you plan to remain there permanently to fill this position).  

Class Co-Chair (two chairs will be chosen from each Truman Class): The role of the Class Chair is to cultivate communication, interest, and support for the TSA. They will serve as the representative from their class to the TSA board.  Responsibilities will primarily be focused on keeping classmates’ contact information current, but may occasionally include assisting with TSA fundraising campaigns to increase giving amongst the class, and promoting TSA events for the class. This is a lifetime appointment, however, should extenuating circumstances arise and you can no longer fulfill your obligation, the TSA may nominate a successor. 

Regional Captains (one captain will be chosen from each region): The role of the Regional Captain is to build excitement, plan events, and assist the TSA in reaching all scholars living within the borders of the region.  They will serve as a regional representative to the TSA Programming Committee.  Responsibilities will include: assisting the Programming Committee in planning regional events, participating in the finalist dinners in your region (when applicable), and promoting TSA events for residents in the region.  Regional events may also be planned outside the direct implementation of the Programming Committee.  Regional events could include two annual service events, dinners, or happy hours. Regional Captains have the opportunity to also form their own committee of volunteers in the region.  This appointment will last until you no longer live in the region, or can no longer fulfill your obligation.  Regional Captains will determine their successors with the input of the TSA board.  The current regions are based on those for which google groups exist at this moment in time -  these are not set in stone and could change based on the locations of members of our community.): Boston; Chicago; Los Angeles; Midwest (e.g., IL, MO, IA, IN, KS); Minnesota (e.g., Twin Cities); New Haven, CT (including the Northeast); New York City; Oxford, England; Pennsylvania; San Francisco/Bay Area; Seattle (including OR); Southeast (e.g., TN, KY, MS, LA, AL, GA, NC, SC, FL); Southwest (e.g., NV, UT, CO, AZ, NM, TX); Washington DC (including MD and VA); and Wisconsin.

When was the last time you updated your Truman.gov profile?  Was it at TSLW?  Did you not even know you had a Truman.gov profile?  Well you do and you should keep it current!  The Truman Scholars Association and the Truman Foundation are working together to update contact information for all scholars.  Those with out-of-date or missing data will be contacted in order to obtain current information.  Please save yourself and us time by logging in to www.truman.gov and updating your profile.  

Thank you!

Congratulations to Melissa Boteach (MD ‘04) and Anthony Vitarelli (NJ ‘04) for being named to Forbes 30 under 30 for Law and Policy. As the magazine writes, “These are the people who aren't waiting to reinvent the world.” Keep up the good work!

Check out the story here.

“Carolyn Lerner had the Air Force’s top four-star general boxed in.

“Gen. Norton Schwartz was reeling from revelations that the Dover Air Force Base mortuary had lost and sawed off body parts and mishandled other remains of America’s war dead. In the glare of television cameras, the Air Force chief of staff was forced to issue mea culpas for the scandal in November.

“Lerner, the newly installed federal lawyer whose tiny office uncovered the gruesome findings, was ready for a fight.

“Lerner accused the Air Force of deflecting blame — and a mortuary official of lying and obstructing the probe by firing one of the workers who blew the whistle. When Schwartz declared that Lerner’s Office of Special Counsel had prevented the military from notifying the families of the dead service members for more than a year, she dressed him down to the news media.”

Jina Moore, a freelance writer and regular contributor to the Christian Science Monitor, recently won the 2011 Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize gold medal for best reporting on the United Nations. The award recognizes her coverage of a new UN approach to ending war and promoting peace: peacebuilders, an idea distinct from both peacemaking and peacekeeping. Below, we excerpt the article.

Michael von der Schulenburg drove deliberately into the riot. Angry men filled a main road here in Freetown; they quickly surrounded his car. They were members of the APC, the All People's Congress, and their leader, Ernest Koroma, was Sierra Leone's president. They were in a dispute with their opposition over a local election that had taken place a day's drive deep into the countryside.

That rural dispute turned national and urban, and threatened to turn violent in Freetown. Thousands of APC men thronged toward the headquarters of the opposition party. They were drunk, and they were being used. Men here are cheap – a beer buys a vote – but they are not usually violent.

Mr. Schulenburg, the United Nation's top man in Sierra Leone, hadn't been in the country for long, but he did know this: So many men don't gather by accident, nor do they spontaneously decide to fight over such a paltry political event as a rural vote. Schulenburg didn't know who had reported the crowd, or why. He's friendly with Sierra Leone's "Big Men" – he chats daily with Mr. Koroma by phone. But that day, no one would take his calls.

As he approached the action, he wondered: Was this the kind of raucous discontent typical of Sierra Leonean politics, or was the street rumor right? Could it be the moment that the war comes back?

Read the full article here.

"Mayor-elect Daryl Justin Finizio is about to announce the head of his transition team.

"Finizio, who won the mayoral election Tuesday, has called a press conference for 3 p.m. at his home on Ocean Avenue to elaborate on transition procedures and timelines.

"He is also expected to announced he is closing out his "Finizio for Mayor'' campaign account, and thank William "Billie" Bourque for his services as campaign chairman and treasurer.

"Bourque will not be part of the new transition team, Finizio said, in keeping with his promise that those who worked on his election or contributed to his campaign would have no role in the new administration."

Click here to read the whole article.

"Greg Stanton launched his candidacy for Phoenix mayor in December, surrounded by supporters in a restored, historic warehouse downtown. Thousands of handshakes, 50 debates and 11 months later, Stanton's journey ended Tuesday at the same place he started - this time celebrating victory.

"Stanton will become the 52nd mayor of Phoenix. Unofficial election results showed that he had a comfortable lead over rival Wes Gullett, who conceded the race to Stanton about a half hour after the first results were posted.

"Stanton, a 41-year-old attorney and father of two, will be Phoenix's first new mayor in eight years, replacing Phil Gordon, who is term-limited."

Click here to read the rest of the article.

By Westbrook Murphy, General Counsel, Truman Scholarship Foundation

Today's Washington Post carried two stories about Carolyn Lerner (MI '84) the new United States Special Counsel appointed by President Obama.

The first details how in just four months she is restoring the damaged reputation of the Office of Special Counsel in its role of protecting federal employees who become whistleblowers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-diary-whistleblowers-g...fender/2011/10/18/gIQAtnvfvL_story.html

The second interviews Carolyn about changing how Hatch Act's prohibition on partisan political activity applies to employees of state or local governments which receive federal funds.  Here's an example from the interview:

"We've [the Office of Special Counsel] talked about a guy who's in a K9 unit in Pennsylvania, and because his dog is funded for federal money, couldn't run for school board. We had to be in the position of telling this gentleman who wanted to run for school that he couldn't because his dog was funded from federal funds. That's ridiculous, that's absurd."

Carolyn also speaks to other issues, including updating the Hatch Act to deal with use of social media that did not exist when the Act was passed in 1939.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/is-it-time-to-up...e-hatch-act/2011/10/18/gIQAcRJNvL_blog.html

Albert Cho, Tempe, AZ. Albert Cho most recently served as an executive at Cisco Systems, where he directed environmental innovation projects and led development of a new approach for monitoring global deforestation. Prior to Cisco Systems, Albert was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, where he helped found the Sustainability and Resources Practice and advised clients in the aerospace, industrial, high tech and financial sectors on strategy and risk management. He has also worked at the United Nations with Jeffrey Sachs on a global plan for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Albert volunteers as a strategic advisor to the Nobel Prize-winning Green Belt Movement in Kenya and as a consultant to the World Resources Institute. He serves on the board of the Telluride Association, an educational non-profit, and is a trained crisis hotline counselor and hospice volunteer. Albert has lived, worked or traveled in over 70 countries, including a year supporting financial sector reform in north Africa. He is a Rhodes and a Truman Scholar, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a Visiting Business Fellow at Oxford. He received an M.Sc in development economics and an M.B.A. with distinction from Oxford, and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College.  Placement: U.S. Department of State

Official Announcement: http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/fellows/2011-2012

Hi Scholars,

Dear Scholars,

As the Truman Scholars Association closes its 2010-2011 year, I wanted to share with you our 5-year strategic plan that the board has been working on all year.  Those of you that attended the 2011 National Conference have seen it, but to the rest of the community, keep reading.

Starting with a two-day in-person meeting in October, the board spent significant time developing a 5-year strategic plan for the organization.  This plan draws from where we have been as a community and guides us as we continue to grow and evolve.  I would like to thank former TSA board members, former Foundation Executive Secretary Fred Slabach (MS ’77), and Scholars in the community at large who put a great deal of thought into TSA as an organization.  Your comments, encouragement and vision contributed greatly to the final plan this board put to paper.  To this year’s board, thank you for taking on such a huge project on top of the National Conference.

TSA also started on some of its 5-year goals, including the Lost Scholars Project, TSA’s initiative to obtain updated contact information on all Scholars.  This year we updated contact information for over 100 Scholars in the Truman Scholars Database.  Thanks to Jane Rock Constanza (WY ’91) who helped with the project and to all of those of you who submitted updated contact information for Scholars on our website. 

TSA is an all-volunteer organization, and I am humbled by the commitment, passion and work that so many of you put into it.  We’ve done a lot this year as a community, and I’m proud to have been a part if it.  I hope this strategic plan will serve future boards well, and that you all will get involved with TSA at whatever level you can, be it the board, committees or small projects.

Sincerely,

Adair Ford Boroughs (SC '01)

President

Truman Scholars Association

- During President Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration, he helped to organize the civilian effort that won World War II.

- In the Truman Administration he—along with my father Charles Murphy—began the first-ever structured government-wide approach to creating a Presidential legislative agenda.

- President Eisenhower appointed Elmer to be Deputy Director of OMB.

- President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to a fifteen-year term as Comptroller General of the United States, heading the General Accounting Office.

- President Reagan appointed Elmer to his first of three 6-year terms as a Truman Scholarship Foundation Trustee (and the Trustees elected Elmer to be Chairman).

"Elmer Staats was the first real head of what was then called the [BoB’s] Division of Legislative Reference...

"Very early on the president [Truman] approved the concept of trying to get together a total picture of what legislation might be recommended to the forthcoming session of Congress.  Accordingly, the Budget Bureau annually called for the legislative programs from all of the departments and agencies; subsequently the bureau’s staff separated the proposals into several categories.   First there were those items important enough to be considered by the president for inclusion in his legislative program.  Then there were items which were of a minor nature, but about which the president certainly had to know since he would be asked to support them in his budget.

"Another category consisted of items which had to do with expiring laws. . . .  Before Elmer and I started working on this operation there had been a number of instance in which the White House in an earlier era had been caught short with a sudden realization that a law would expire in the thirtieth of June and that nothing had been done about setting the stage to get it continued.

"And finally, there were those items which seemed to us, on the first go-round, to be so far afield that they should not receive serious consideration by the White House..." (1)

"[G]iven the close adjunct relationship which this function had with the [White House] special counsel’s office. . . , we were never quite sure who we were working for, the budget director or the counsel, but that didn’t really make too much difference.  The only time the budget director said we had to come back and check with him was if a very large amount of money was involved; otherwise we went ahead and worked with Clark Clifford and Charlie Murphy." (2)

"I worked closely with four presidents on the budget, and am often asked which of the four was most deeply involved in the budget process.  It has been an easy question to answer: President Truman.  He understood the budget process, having served on the Appropriations Committee in the Senate; he had a retentive mind and could remember figures from one year to the next; and he did his homework. . . .  [He] was the only president of the United States who ever held his own press briefing on the budget." (3)

- A founding member in 1939 of the American Society for Public Administration, which he later served as National President;

- A founding member in 1967 of the National Academy of Public Administration, which established an award in his honor; and

- A member or chairman of more than a dozen government commissions