George Adams Graham, 100, a political scientist and an expert in public administration who helped lead the Brookings Institution and the National Academy of Public Administration, died Feb. 25 of progressive heart failure at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He also was a principal developer of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
As teacher, researcher and writer, Dr. Graham sought ways to increase the effectiveness, efficiency and accountability of government at all levels. He believed that governmental agencies and institutions could be more than the playthings of politicians or the fiefdoms of balky bureaucrats. He worked to professionalize public administration.
George Graham helped to shape Princeton's public affairs school.
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He also put his principles into practice as an administrator for several agencies at the state and federal level, including the forerunner to the Office of Management and Budget (1942-45) and various Hoover Commission studies into Indian affairs, civil service and other topics in the 1940s and 1950s.
Dr. Graham was born in Cambridge, N.Y., and received a bachelor's degree from Monmouth College in Illinois in 1926. He received a doctorate in political science from the University of Illinois in 1930.
He was a faculty member in the Politics Department at Princeton from 1930 to 1958 and was department chairman on two occasions. During his tenure at Princeton, he wrote two books, "Education for Public Administration" (1941, with Henry Reining) and "Morality in American Politics" (1952). He also was the author of "America's Capacity to Govern" (1960).
As chairman of the Politics Department, he helped design the graduate professional program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which opened in 1948 and was named for the Princeton president often credited with early acknowledgements that public administration could be a profession. Dr. Graham admired Wilson and shared his sense of public administration's potential.
Frederic Cleaveland, who studied under Dr. Graham at Princeton and who became his colleague at the Brookings Institution, recalled his friend as a "supporter and wise counselor of graduate students," many of them veterans returning from World War II.
In remarks at a March 3 memorial service, Cleaveland noted that Dr. Graham "was committed to the development of an interdisciplinary approach to advanced learning, blending science and economics, history, sociology and anthropology, thereby achieving an open curriculum of considerable breadth and depth in the social sciences."
He left Princeton in 1958 to become director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, where he served for nine years and, in Cleaveland's words, "conducted an examination of government in action." He also became interested in how Congress functions, or doesn't function.
In 1967, he became a founder and the first executive director of the National Academy of Public Administration, a Washington-based organization that evaluates the structure, operation and performance of governments and government agencies.
The evaluation model he developed, known as the project panel approach, is still in use as the organization assesses such government agencies as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Under his direction, the academy also assessed graduate programs in public administration around the country.
Dr. Graham concluded his career at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as professor of public administration. He retired in 1985.
Living in Chapel Hill in retirement, he and Cleaveland, a longtime professor of public administration at Duke University and at the University of North Carolina, formed the "Plato Loft" group, a lively biweekly discussion forum modeled on Princeton seminars and composed of former students and colleagues and retired diplomats who live in the Chapel Hill area.
His first wife, Rosanna Grace Webster Graham, died in 1985. A son from the marriage, Andrew Allen Graham, died in 2001.
Survivors include his wife of 18 years, Elisabeth Childs Rowse Graham of Chapel Hill; two daughters from the first marriage, Lora Graham Lunt of Potsdam, N.Y., and Mary Graham Jenne of Scarsdale, N.Y.; seven stepchildren, Ruth Rowse Dahl of Geneseo, N.Y., Martha Rowse Kelder of Peterborough, N.H., Margaret Rowse Michaelson of Los Angeles, Mary E. Rowse and Patricia Rowse of Washington, Robert Rowse of Portland, Maine, and Carolee Rowse of Chevy Chase; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
