Chapter 11: Presidents and a Senior Vice President
Files
Description
In this overview of key MD Anderson administrators, Mr. Pagel first describes R. Lee Clark as a powerful individual who recognized everyone in the institution personally –and who was also feared. Mr. Pagel explains that Dr. Clark was very concerned about his centrality to the institution and would evaluate others’ actions based on how they influenced his position. Dr. Charles LeMaistre, he says, was very supportive of Scientific Publications and had a habit of allowing good people to lead themselves. He says that while Dr. Clark’s leadership was based on charisma, Dr. LeMaistre may have had more affection for MD Anderson people. He describes Dr. John Mendelsohn taught the institution how to be successful in an aggressive way, turning MD Anderson into a business. His style was to “float above everyone else,” Mr. Pagel says. Mr. Pagel describes the warm welcome he received when going to meet Dr. Ronald DePinho, the institution’s fourth president, and speculates the scientific writing may be personally very important to Dr. DePinho, who quickly sent the Department articles to edit and was quick to praise the results. Mr. Pagel then describes Dr. Stephen Tomasovic, with whom he worked for fifteen years. He recalls that it was Dr. Tomasovic who challenged him to “do something” and succeed in the area of education, when it was clear that writing needed to be addressed in the institution. He states that Dr. Tomasovic “gave everything he could to this institution.”
Identifier
PagelW_02_20120810_C11
Publication Date
8-10-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Walter Pagel, ELS (D), Oral History Interview, August 10, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Key MD Anderson Figures Portraits Critical Perspectives Professional Practice The Professional at Work Collaborations Leadership Giving Recognition Critical Perspectives
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It’s gone. All right. I was wondering if you would comment on the series of administrators that you’ve worked with over the years, because when you came R. Lee Clark was still here and you’ve gone through all of the presidents. Now you’ve been with Ronald DePinho. Would you be willing to give us your observations on their leadership styles—similarities and differences?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I’m willing and don’t know what—I’m not close to any of these people, and you will never—you will not be surprised at anything I say about Clark. Everybody will say this—that he was a powerful figure who nevertheless acknowledged and recognized people no matter what their standing in the institution or their status in the institution. He would say hi to the lowest of the low and the highest of the high in a way that made you feel like he really knew who you were. And I never had a meeting with him, so I can’t say much about that. Dr. LeMaistre [Charles A. LeMaistre, MD [Oral History Interview]]was a less-feared president let’s say.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s interesting. I’d never—I mean I don’t mean to derail you, but I’d never heard that R. Lee Clark might have been a feared person.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Oh, yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How so?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Very—he was very concerned about his own—I hate to be so simple as glory, but his own—his own centrality to the mission of the institution and whether others were contributing to it or not, and people he thought should or were—I hate to say this because I don’t really know this from personal fact but from personal observation—but I understand that people who he thought were hogging more glory than they deserved often felt his wrath. I don’t know that to be true though.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting observation though.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It was not my observation. It’s others’. My observation is that he was feared. My boss feared him. When it was heard that he might come down to our offices, we were told to clean up our desks and look busy. Dr. LeMaistre did not come around to offices, but he met with the boss then, and when the boss came back she said she was in love; that she had shown him what we did and that he saw that we were valuable. And I’d say Dr. LeMaistre let people lead themselves. I do not know how he shaped the institution even truthfully, and there were many people who felt he wasn’t shaping it at all, and I think that they’re probably wrong. I think that he—I’m guessing—I’m believing in retrospect that he let good people lead, and when other people didn’t like the way those good people were leading, they wished that Dr. LeMaistre would step in and do something about it. That’s my guess about all of that. And then in retrospect Dr. LeMaistre was a person to be very fond of. He seemed in some ways fond of us. Dr. Clark’s ability to lead people was based on a tremendously outgoing and involving personality—charisma beyond belief except that DePinho may have that same charisma. Though he outwardly was extremely friendly, I suspect that Dr. LeMaistre really had more affection for people than Dr. Clark did. In retrospect Dr. Mendelsohn’s arrival strikes me as the sort of reincarnation of the dispute in Europe these days between austerity and stimulus. So when Dr. Mendelsohn arrived at MD Anderson the belief was that we should embrace prospects of austerity and to begin to look at how we could survive with less, and Dr. LeMaistre somehow—not LeMaistre excuse me, Dr. Mendelsohn somehow figured out that no, that’s not what we need. We need stimulus. We need to grow. We need to expand. We could be successful in a different way, in an aggressive way. Instead of accepting the judgment of consultants who—I don’t know if he didn’t respect them or he had different opinions or what—but Dr. Mendelsohn never, ever showed up in our department, rarely showed any interest in it, was somewhat of a person who floated above everybody else and did not—again, this is—I don’t—I never worked closely with him but I did not—I saw him in some meetings and I actually had meetings with him but—and he was—he was respectful, although I saw him be disrespectful of people. I never felt a personal connection with him at all, and there is much talk of course that he turned MD Anderson into a business; and acknowledgement by many that if he hadn’t done it we might be nothing and dismay from other people who don’t like being a business. I can’t tell you anything about Dr. DePinho that you can’t read every day in the faculty blogs, so I have nothing to say about that. But I did have a meeting with him that was supposed to last fifteen minutes that lasted thirty. I think I may have hinted to this about—hinted to this—hinted to you about this, but anyway I arrived at the scheduled time for my meeting. I was waiting in the waiting room or waiting area. At the appointed time he didn’t send out somebody to tell me it was okay to go in now. He came out, he stuck his hand out, and he said, “Walter, it’s so good to meet you.” And he showed me into the office, and he sat down not in the chair opposite me on the table but in the chair beside me, and we discussed the things that I was interested in, and he said—and I believed him—that he understood the importance of these things and he believed—he thought they were—that they were important to him and to his group, and he did understand the difference between editing that was useful and editing that wasn’t. He since has sent one or two pieces to us and was very quick to praise the effect or the effort—success, really. I felt the whole time that he was completely engaged with me and with issues that in the normal scheme of things probably wouldn’t be of much interest to a president—although perhaps to him publishing is extremely important. Dr. Mendelsohn— publishing in the general literature was not important to Dr. LeMaistre—not important to Dr. Mendelsohn personally—important to Dr. Clark because he knew that made a difference in the institution’s reputation, and that was extremely important to him. But I suspect that to Dr. DePinho that it’s personally important. He sort of dismisses his success in publishing in Cell and Science, PNAS and so on—that’s no big deal. That’s baloney! He loves it. He’s so proud that he’s been published in these places, and it’s not—it’s false modesty, I’m sure of it. It may not even be modesty. It may just be his way of bragging without seeming to.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It can never be unimportant to have published in all these places.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Not at all. Is there anyone else in the administration that you’d like to comment on in terms of their style or working relationship, the impact they’ve had on Scientific Publications?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
[Steven] Tomasovic had—have you met him?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. He was the first person I interviewed, too.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Okay. It took me a while to get used to working with him. He was very unemotional and focused on facts so much that I couldn’t read him, which I wanted to. I suppose I shouldn’t have wanted to and I’m thinking that he himself never felt the need to read somebody. He just did what he was supposed to do. But over the fifteen years we worked together, we became at least professional friends and discussed many issues of various levels that were important to him or important to me in a useful—well, I don’t know about useful—but in a way that indicates that you care what the other person thinks or knows about this particular issue, so I’d say he and I were an ideal pair eventually. I think he softened over the years. I’ve been reading recently that people just do. He often—well, several times challenged me and most especially in the education area to succeed. I think I said that earlier. I showed him the article that we had written with the expectation that he would say, “Well gosh, that is—that’s quite tough. I don’t know what we’ll ever do about it.” He didn’t say that. He said, “What will you do about it now?” That was terrific. He has had to calm me down once or twice for this, that, or the other thing—usually being disrespectful to people I’ve found not worth respecting, which is not the way I’m supposed to act. And he had the softest touch when he did something like that. I don’t know Oliver [Bogler, MD]. He’s totally different from Steve. I suspect eventually that the same thing would happen if I were still to be here—that we would reach a kind of agreement that we knew each other well enough to trust each other to do what the right thing was to the best of our ability at that time. I don’t think we’re there right now, but I don’t think that matters. Well gosh, how long has he been here?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Less than—a little less than a year.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yeah. I was still worried that Steve was going to find a typo in something I wrote because he was like that. If he found a typo he would mark it in something you thought was just trivial. Come on! That’s not what this is about. You could count on him to find every error you made. And it was very annoying at the beginning. I wanted to just tell him to leave that stuff alone.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Right.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
And I got to—I got used to it eventually.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. I think it’s a difference in people who are more centered in big-picture thinking versus people who are—they balance big-picture and detailed focus. It kind of drives me crazy too when somebody goes for those details when I just—I just—just tell me the overall impression.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yeah. You just messed it up with that mistake you made.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, there we go. Anything else about Dr. Tomasovic?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t think so.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I think he’s happy. He’s told me so. I believe he gave everything he could to this institution. I believe when he saw a job he did it. I think in that sense he’s just like me. I don’t think we are the same, but I think there are many things that are the same in or are like each other, and I do think he had courage in the face of disagreement. The person in that job gets mortared by the faculty all the time because they’re in—they have offices that report to them that affect the day-to-day lives of the faculty, and every single one of those people on the faculty expects those things to run a certain way. If they don’t they’re certain that it’s the senior vice president’s fault. And yet the senior vice president—or fault may be even down to having made a decision that leads to something that they think is stupid. I got that—those kind of comments from faculty when Bowen was that person and when Tomasovic was that person. I haven’t been around long enough where people have other gripes that are bigger than the senior vice president these days. I don’t want to trivialize it because these were important day-to-day things for them that weren’t being handled the way they thought was sensible, and they may well have been handled that way because of law or regulation. It may have been handled that way because the vice president saw that if it was handled the way they wanted it to be handled something else would be screwed up or somebody else would have to do more work than they should have to, or whatever. I don’t know the reasons. I just know somehow or other that person gets mortared all the time. I don’t know whether Oliver has yet, but I’ll bet he will if he hasn’t.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, it’s a tough job. A very tough job.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
In a way, pleasing all the faculty and while pleasing senior administration who want you to make sure that there are no mistakes made anywhere. Chapter 12
Recommended Citation
Pagel, Walter ELS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 11: Presidents and a Senior Vice President" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1280.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1280
Conditions Governing Access
Open
