Chapter 05: John Mendelsohn and the President’s Office

Chapter 05: John Mendelsohn and the President’s Office

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Description

Ms. Hale begins this chapter by explaining how she coordinated meetings with candidates for president of MD Anderson when Dr. LeMaistre decided to step down. She then talks about the transitions in the president’s office once Dr. John Mendelsohn took over. She notes that he had a very different temperament (a “researcher’s temperament”). As an example of the transition and intra-office communication, she explains how the staff was operating according to procedures established by Dr. LeMaistre, and Dr. Mendelsohn had to become aware of these policies and the rationale for them.

She tells a story about Dr. Mendelsohn carrying a reminder card to help him be collegial. She also comments on a shift in Dr. Mendelsohn’s persona during his first years at the institution. She notes some challenges he faced.

Identifier

HaleJ_01_20180419_C05

Publication Date

4-19-2018

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Overview; Overview; Portraits; MD Anderson Culture; Working Environment; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Building/Transforming the Institution; Growth and/or Change

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What about the transition to Dr. Mendelsohn?

JoAnne Hale:

When Dr. LeMaistre was going to retire, they didn’t want our office involved in anything for a new president. Well, they’d learned very quickly, that they had to have somebody to coordinate all of the visits, because we had 13 candidates. So, the Advisory Board consisted of people here at the institution, the Board of Visitors, they had like a representative from each of the committees, and then the community. So, they decided that I would do it, I would coordinate all of it, and all of the people were told, when I called and I said we’re going to have this meeting with this candidate at a certain time, whoever is on your committee is available to go does it. We’re not working around schedules because we had two months to do it. So, I literally had a candidate going out the back door and one coming in the front door just about. We did that and then they narrowed it down to four, three or four.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Can you share who those candidates were at the time?

JoAnne Hale:

Dr. Hohn, I think was one, David Hohn, Charles Balch, Ed Copeland, which I knew quite well, he was from Florida. He was the nephew of Murray Copeland that was here. And then John Mendelsohn. The interesting thing was they told all the candidates that you have to accept, if you’re offered—when they would bring them in and they made the final decision, you had to accept at that time, because a lot of faculty, when you bring them in, they go back and forth, well I’ve got my wife here to make—and I want this much money, I want this lab. All of that, you know? So, they were pretty well told that you have to accept or not.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Why was it such a strict timeframe, two months?

JoAnne Hale:

I don’t know whether it was because of Dr. LeMaistre leaving, because he was—I think they were selected in the spring, Board of Regents meeting, and he came onboard in July. I don’t know whether it was a timing thing, because I wasn’t involved. [Redacted] And so I don’t know how much of the—I don’t remember, at that point, candidates, because that was all done at a different level. It was done through… I don’t even know, I guess the system did it. Well the [UT] System was over Mendelsohn’s also. Dr. Mullins, Charlie Mullins, he was—it was his office that I worked with. It was interesting, Dr. Balch thought he was—he just knew he was getting it. I don’t know whether you know him or not.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

No, I’ve never—I mean, he’s been mentioned so many times, but I’ve not interviewed him.

JoAnne Hale:

He was just—just knew he had it, and he was going to fire all of us in our office. Another one of the local candidates, I thought was—he was on one of the committees that was going to interview another candidate. So, I talked to Dr. Mullins and I said, I don’t think he ought to be included in that, because then that gives him the advantage of knowing what questions they’re going to ask, and so Dr. Mullins told him he couldn’t attend. So I got, you know, backlash from him, but he later went on to another institution. He was a good guy, I mean he would have been a good president. Dr. Balch was a surgeon and he was going to fire all our surgeons. I don’t know all of the politics of that, I just know that he—and he was down the hall. He told me to make him the last [candidate interviewed], because he [didn’t want to be] the first—and I told him, I said it’s going to be when I can schedule, when the people can schedule it. He wanted his interview to be the last one, because I’m sure there’s scuttlebutt, and he would get some of the information off of that. But it went real smooth, I mean breakfasts, lunches and dinners, it went real smooth, all of it. In fact, when Galveston was looking for their next president, Dr. Stobo, Dr. Mullins asked them to have me come down and tell them how I did it, so it could move smoothly. But it was completely different because in Galveston, you have to sell the community and here we didn’t, you know it’s the staff. They were appreciative and everything, but I quickly learned that they had a more difficult time than I did, because of the situation.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Well, tell me about the transition to working with Dr. Mendelsohn.

JoAnne Hale:

Dr. Mendelsohn was an easy transition. It was really interesting, because when he first came, actually he was still at—I think he was the candidate, when he was here as a candidate, he came into my office and he said, “I want to see your airline guide,” and he looked up his own air flights. Dr. LeMaistre never did that. He said, “I’m sure Mickey did this all the time,” and I went, No, he really didn’t. The transition went pretty smooth, except Dr. Mendelsohn was not used to a big staff and he was used to having everything right here. It was very difficult for him to give up files. He was a true researcher, he questioned everything, ‘you don’t know anything,’ and so you kind of worked with that. Like I said, there was Micha, she was the one that kind of, between the two of us, broke him down to where he’s more human, you know, with people. Now, the one thing, getting back to Dr. LeMaistre, the one thing that always kind of bothered me. We had a situation when somebody came and wanted to talk to Dr. LeMaistre, we had to find out if they had talked to their vice president first and if there was any problem, and see if he could do it, because we had one individual, that his vice president said no, and he came to Dr. LeMaistre and Dr. LeMaistre said yes. Well that made it very, very difficult. So that’s when we had a process that if it’s a program that you’re interested in, you need to see… And then I would call the vice president and I’d say so and so wants to talk to him about this, are you aware of it. [Redacted]

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Interesting, yeah. What about John Mendelsohn in that kind of situation?

JoAnne Hale:

Mendelsohn didn’t get that much involved in that aspect of it, because he was very questioning, and so you really had to sell him big time on that. Also, that procedure, because he told me one time, he said I understand that you ran, you and Judy ran Dr. LeMaistre, and I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So, he brought up this instance about Dr. Bast, because he was a very good friend of Dr. Bast’s, and Bast had, I guess given him that information about [the Welch Foundation incident, and I said no, this was the procedure. And I said, I will—I go with what you say, I said that was the procedure and I just followed it. I didn’t have that connection with Dr. LeMaistre, to say do you know what this is about. I just didn’t have that kind of a connection with him at that point.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

So what was Dr. Mendelsohn’s response when you explained that procedure that you were following?

JoAnne Hale:

He said okay, he just said okay. Then, one time when he had—and he was very aware of his calendar, Dr. Mendelsohn was, and I remember Judy had told me to cancel this one lady’s appointment, she said she doesn’t need to meet with him. I don’t know who the physician was. So I canceled it, and so he came out and he said, “Why was this canceled?” I said, “Can I be candid with you?” I said, “I was told to cancel it,” and he said, “Can I be candid with you? Don’t ever cancel without asking me.” So we had that kind of a relationship and I could just say, can I do this. His biggest thing was, “I don’t have it,” and he might have it in his office, and he’d never admit it when he found it, except that by the time he left, he said well, if JoAnne says it’s in here, it’s in here. Towards the end, you could really, really talk to him. Personally, I mean as far as outside of the office, we didn’t have any connections or anything like that, but he was easy to… You could just say and he’d say why did you… I remember one of the girls, she would never accept a responsibility type thing. She’d always ask somebody else, Well what do you think I ought to do? I can’t remember what the situation was, but her office and my office were really close together, so he was standing at her desk and she told him, she said, well JoAnne said yes to this, and he looked me and he said, “Why did you do that?” Finally, I thought well, I don’t know, I just did, and so that’s what I said, I said, I don’t know I just did. He said, well don’t do it again, and I said, okay. But I mean, we just kind of had that, and Micha had that kind of rapport with him. He had this little card that he carried around, to be pleasant, and how to act, and she’d say, “Look at your card,” because he’d get really testy.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

So what was on this card?

JoAnne Hale:

She would know. I can’t remember, but it was treat people this way. There were three things that were on that, but I cannot remember, for the life of me, what was on it, but it was on how to treat people and to be kind.” [00:53:12 [Session ends abruptly.]

Conditions Governing Access

Redacted

Chapter 05: John Mendelsohn and the President’s Office

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