James Morris

Scarpino:         Today is Wednesday, December 6, 2022. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University Indianapolis, Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center also at IUPUI. Today, I have the privilege to be interviewing Mr. James Morris at his home located in Indianapolis. This interview is part of a larger oral history project undertaken by the Tobias Leadership Center headquartered at IUPUI.

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that as part of my background research I talked to five of Mr. Morris’ professional colleagues, whose names and contact information he provided to me:  Stephen Brinegar, Terry Clapacs, Sue Anne Gilroy, Alan Kimball, and Curtis R. Simic. We’ll place Mr. Morris’s resume with the interview so that what follows is a summary of a long and distinguished career that offers a case study in leadership development and practice.

                        He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University, Bloomington, 1965, with a major in political science and a minor in geography. He also holds a Master of Business Administration from Butler University, Indianapolis, earned in 1970. His impact as a leader in both employment and service is national and international in scope.

                        We start with employment: His first job after graduation was with the American Fletcher National Bank in Indianapolis from 1965-1967. He then went to work in the office of Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar, serving as Administrative Assistant and then Chief of Staff from 1967-1973. He moved from the office of the mayor to the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis from 1973-1989. He advanced from Director of Community Development to Vice President of Community Development to Executive Vice President, and finally President from 1984-1988. His next position was with the IWC Resources Corporation and Indianapolis Water Company from 1989-2002, where he served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

In 2002, he moved to Rome, Italy, where he became Executive Director, United Nations World Food Programme from 2002-2007. He held the rank of Undersecretary within the United Nations. The World Food Programme was then and is now the world’s largest humanitarian agency. Mr. Morris was appointed concurrently by the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as Special Envoy for Humanitarian Needs in Southern Africa, which was facing a major food shortage. In 2003, he led the World Food Programme in carrying out the largest humanitarian operation in history, feeding 27 million Iraqis. The World Food Programme’s operations also addressed food shortages in sub-Saharan Africa and North Korea.

Since 2007, he has worked for Pacers Sports and Entertainment, serving as president from June 2007 to September 30, 2014; and vice chairman, September 30, 2014, to the present. Pacers Sports and Entertainment owns the Indiana Pacers and the Indiana Fever.

From 2007 to the present, he was also Professor of Philanthropy and Public Administration at Indiana University.

His record of service is impressive in longevity and scope and significance in terms of both philanthropy and leadership. His service includes numerous support in leadership positions: For example, Chairman of the Committee of Co-sponsoring Organizations for UNAIDS in Geneva, Switzerland; several corporate boards of directors, including Clarian Health Partners, USA Gymnastics Federation, Hulman & Company and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and the Indianapolis Power & Light Advisory Board.

He served on the United States Olympic Committee, he was treasurer and member of the Board of Directors, and a member of several executive committees.

National Collegiate Athletic Association, he was Chairman of the Foundation Board of Directors and a member of the Advisory Board.

He also has a long record of service to Indiana University, including IU Board of Trustees. The IU alumni first elected James Morris to the Board of Trustees in 1996. He served until 2002. He was then appointed as a Trustee in 2013 and reappointed in 2016 and 2019. He twice served as chair of the IU Board of Trustees. His service to Indiana University also includes membership on the IU Foundation Board of Directors, a member of the Advisory Boards for Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis, as well as the Schools of Business, Medicine and Nursing.

In 2009, he served as co-chair of the Indiana University Bloomington’s Matching the Promise fundraising campaign.

He’s been a leader in promoting Indianapolis as a center for amateur athletics, including Founder and Lifetime Director of Indianapolis Sports Corporation, which led the efforts to bring the Indianapolis, the Pan American Games in 1987, the Olympic Festival in 1982, and the NCAA Final Four in 1980, 1991 and six more times, and the move of the NCAA headquarters from Kansas City to Indianapolis in 1999.

He’s been a member of the U.S. delegation to NATO’s Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society, which led to Indianapolis hosting the NATO Conference of Cities in May 1971. The Conference of Cities also had significant involvement by the administration of Richard Nixon.

He has numerous honors and awards, which are both numerous and impressive, starting with the rank of Eagle Scout as a young man. He was also appointed by President George Bush to serve on the Commission on Environment for the Americas. President Barack Obama presented him with a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. On March 8, 2018, President Donald Trump appointed him as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the Executive Board of UNICEF.

He has numerous awards and recognitions given to him by Indiana institutions, including he has been named an Indiana Living Legend from the Indiana Historical Society in 2006. He holds several Sagamore of the Wabash Awards from Indiana governors. And he was honored with Indiana University’s Distinguished Alumni Service Award, the Herman B. Wells Visionary Award in 2011. And in June 2021, Governor Eric Holcomb presented him the Sachem Award, which is the state’s highest honor.

We’re almost ready to start, but I have to ask your permission to do the following: to record the interview, transcribe the interview, and deposit the recording and transcription in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, where both the recording and the interview may be used by patrons, including posting all or part of those things to the website of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives. And I’m also asking your permission to deposit the recording and transcription with the Tobias Leadership Center, where they may be used by their patrons with the understanding that they may also post all or part to their organizations’ website.

Can I have your permission to do those things?

Morris:             Yes.

Scarpino:         Okay. As I said when the recorder was off, we’re going to start with some basic demographic questions, and then we’ll shift to your education and so on. I want to get started, and I’ll say that part of the fun of doing these interviews is, I could start out with a set of questions but we never know exactly where we’re going to end up. But, basic demographic questions, and the first one is, when and where were you born?

Morris:             I was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, April 18, 1943, at Union Hospital.

Scarpino:         Did you grow up in Terre Haute?

Morris:             Yes, I did.

Scarpino:         Do you have any brothers and sisters?

Morris:             No, only child.

Scarpino:         Could you tell me about your parents? Who was your mother?

Morris:             My mother was Kathleen Estes Morris Sparks. My parents were divorced, and I lived most of my growing-up years with my mother.

Scarpino:         One of the things that we like to talk about is, you know, who were the individuals that helped shape somebody into the leader that they became. Can you talk about the impact that your mother had on you, particularly on the adult that you became?

Morris:             Well, my mother was quite a remarkable lady. She worked hard. She had a challenging life with my father. She worked at Indiana State University for many years in the Registrar Office of Admissions. She worked very hard. She was very instrumental in being sure that I went to Indiana University. I think she wanted me to have an experience away from Terre Haute, and so for that I shall always be grateful. She encouraged me in Scouting, very supportive, and was a good mom. Wonderful lady. Miss her.

Scarpino:         You mentioned Scouting, and I’m going to come back to people who shaped you as the adult you became, but what does it take to become an Eagle Scout? What’s involved?

Morris:             Well, it takes several years. I earned it when I was fourteen years old. And I joined the Boy Scouts, I believe, when I was eleven. Had been a Cub Scout prior to that from age eight until eleven. I belonged to Troop #8 in Terre Haute, which was initially sponsored by the Naval Armory, and ultimately moved to Thornton Junior High School. The requirements, as I recall, are twenty-one merit badges. Most of them are specified, but you go from Tenderfoot to 2nd Class to 1st Class to Star to Life to Eagle. So, I moved through the ranks of my troop. I went summers to Camp Krietenstein, where I also worked on the camp staff a couple summers. I ended up earning I suppose more than fifty merit badges. Every time you earned five more than you were required to earn for the Eagle rank, you received a Palm and you would put that on the Eagle badge. I then became an Explorer Scout. And the highest rank in Exploring was then called the Explorer Silver Award. And I earned that. And I may have been the last person in the United States to earn the Explorer Silver Award. It was eventually, I think, terminated, but Scouting was an important part of my life.

Scarpino:         In what way?

Morris:             Well, I learned to enjoy the outdoors, to camp, to hike. In the twenty-one merit badges required for Eagle, it’s broad. There were four citizenship merit badges, and a number of badges related to the out of doors, to a number related to aquatic swimming. I was a lifeguard. I earned my Red Cross Lifesaving Certificate. But, Scouting provides leadership opportunities as you get older, and it’s organized around patrols and troops and you can be a patrol leader and then a senior patrol leader, then other organizations within scouting, the Order of the Arrow, etc. And that was important to me growing up.

Scarpino:         Did you go to any of the national jamborees?

Morris:             Yes. I went to the 1957 National Jamboree in Valley Forge. Great experience. President Eisenhower was there, I remember that. And then I did catch what they had, they called the Asian flu, and I spent a few days in the hospital there at the, I think it was the Valley Forge Army Hospital. Then in 1960, I worked on the staff of the national jamboree in Colorado Springs. So, I went to two national jamborees. I also, I believe in 1959, went to the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. Great experience, where you spent a couple of weeks hiking through the Southern Rockies. It was wonderful. So, Scouting was important to me growing up and it gave me a lot of experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Scarpino:         I asked you about your adult role models, and you mentioned your mom. In middle school, high school age, were there any other adults that you encountered who really helped shape the person you became?

Morris:             I had a wonderful government teacher by the name of Brad Lorton at Terre Haute Garfield High School. I admired the principal of Terre Haute Garfield, a man by the name of Jim Conover, quite a man. My principal at Thornton Junior High School was the sister of a lady that became the principal at Garfield, and they were both impressive folks. But I don’t know that there was anybody beyond Brad Lorton who had a huge impact on me.

Scarpino:         You mentioned that you went to Indiana University at the urging of your mother. Where did you go to high school?

Morris:             I went to Terre Haute Garfield High School, which was on the north side of Terre Haute. It’s no longer there. It’s now Terre Haute North, or maybe North Vigo, I’m not quite sure, but it was on the north side. I lived on the far east side of Terre Haute in a small geographic area where we had our choice of going to any high school in the area. I went to Garfield. I liked that a lot, it was a good experience.

Scarpino:         Did you participate in extracurricular activities in high school?

Morris:             Yes. I played football, not very good. I played golf. So, those were my two sports. And then I was president of, I forget the... but it was a club that was interested in contemporary issues and public policy. I was active in that. That was most of my organized activities.

Scarpino:         When you were in high school, the four years that you were in high school, were there any events that took place either locally or nationally that had an impact on you?

Morris:             The first time I remember being interested in politics was the Eisenhower campaign in 1952. My father brought me an “Ike for President” button.

Scarpino:         It said, “I Like Ike,” didn’t it?

Morris:             “I Like Ike,” you got it. And so that was significant. I went to something called the Indiana Youth Power Conference in Indianapolis, where they had young people from all over come to a conference. That was an exciting thing. The Boy Scout work at the jamborees was when I was in high school, the trip to Philmont. I don’t recall any... I was always interested in issues related to my hometown. Terre Haute had been beaten up pretty good in the national media as being a tough place to live and full of problems. There were local civic initiatives to make Terre Haute better and improve Terre Haute’s image, and I was interested in that. And then I was interested in efforts to bring classmates together to have an evening dialogue at my home with members of the high school faculty. So that was good fun.

Scarpino:         Seems like an unusual activity for a high school student. Did you think of yourself as outside the bounds of what most high school students were doing when you did things like invite classmates and faculty together to discuss things at your home? Or your parents’ home, your mom’s home?

Morris:             Well, I liked doing that, and I think the teachers liked it. We would have good conversations. I was more interested in issues like that than I was trigonometry.

Scarpino:         Interesting... trigonometry was not my strong suit. If you can think back, when you graduated from high school, where did you imagine or hope your future was headed?

Morris:             You know, I don’t know that I ever gave it much thought. I had been a newspaper boy. I carried the Indianapolis Star in Terre Haute. And then I worked for Montgomery Ward. And then a couple of summers I worked for a couple of meatpacking houses in Terre Haute. But I don’t think I ever gave much thought to what I would do. When I was entering IU, I didn’t give much thought where my IU education might lead me. So, at IU, I was active in student government. I was president of the Young Republicans. I was president of the Student Senate. President of my fraternity. So, I had lots of leadership opportunities. Took a leadership class from the IU dean of students, Dean Shaffer, wonderful man. And I was more interested each year in politics. One summer I worked for Charles Hendricks, who was secretary of state...

Scarpino:         ... for Indiana.

Morris:             Yes... and I helped install the commercial code for the State of Indiana in the northern third of the state.

Scarpino:         What is the commercial code?

Morris:             Well, it’s the law that governs the sale of commercial items. He was running for governor at the time, and I think he hired me because I had been President of the IU Young Republicans. His daughter was my friend. So, that was the first political job I had.

Scarpino:         What fraternity did you belong to?

Morris:             Kappa Sigma.

Scarpino:         I hope I did this right: Counting backwards, I’m guessing that you started at IU in 1961, is that right?

Morris:             Yes.

Scarpino:         And you picked Indiana University because your mother urged you to do. You majored in political science and geography.

Morris:             Yes.

Scarpino:         Why did you decide on...?

Morris:             Well, I was interested in political science, and I was interested in geography. So, those were the subjects that interested me the most, and IU had a good reputation in both areas.

Scarpino:         They certainly did.

Morris:             I had made good friends on the faculty in both departments and enjoyed it a lot.

Scarpino:         One of the people that I talked to, and I mentioned this at the beginning about your career, was Terry Clapacs. And among other things, he knew you at IU, you were both students. And he mentioned your involvement with Young Republicans, and you talked a little bit about that. What attracted you to get involved with the Young Republicans? You had lots of choices at a big university...

Morris:             I was a Republican, and I was interested in politics. And I think maybe I was treasurer of the Young Republicans one year, then I was elected president. I was elected president, I think, for the 1964 year when Barry Goldwater ran for president. And there was a lot of student interest in his campaign. I had met Barry Goldwater when Senator Bill Jenner brought him to the campus. That was exciting. Then, there were a number of prominent, maybe celebrities that came to Bloomington that year to campaign for Senator Goldwater, and I was smitten with him.

Scarpino:         What did you find to be appealing about Senator Goldwater?

Morris:             Well, he was a strong, independent person. He was a gentleman. He was patriotic. I had read his book “The Conscience of a Conservative.” Hadn’t thought about that now for a long time...

Scarpino:         I don’t think it’s in print anymore.

Morris:             Probably not. But I, I suppose today he would be a moderate. But, I liked him a lot. The chapter advisor of our fraternity was a man by the name of Bud Faris, who owned a grocery store on the square in Bloomington, and he was on the city-county council. I just had a number of friends outside the fraternity house where I lived that were Republicans, and we had a great time together.

Scarpino:         Can you talk a little bit of specificity about what kinds of activities the Young Republicans engaged in while you were in leadership as treasurer or president?

Morris:             Well, I think we worked hard to get students registered to vote, and then to vote. We had campus rallies. I’m just trying to think, Rhonda Fleming, Jock Mahoney who had played the Red Rider, they brought a huge delegation to the campus. And then, the senators and the Indiana Congressional Delegation would come to campus frequently, and we were involved a little bit in providing manpower for the local municipal election. So, the practical side of politics was fun. It was good.

Scarpino:         Somebody has to do the work to turn out the vote and all of that.

Morris:             That’s right.

Scarpino:         You were involved with something called the Skull and Crescent social organization... what’s that?

Morris:             At that time, there were three honorary fraternities. I don’t know if they were called fraternities, but where one or two people from each fraternity was invited to come and be a part of a social group. Skull and Crescent was the group for sophomores. And there was a group called Falcon for juniors, and then the Sphinx Club for seniors. These were by-and-large people that were active in the campus activities, and a lot of good friends. I was also a part of… it was an organization the Big House Coalition, which was eight or ten fraternities who each sent a representative and would try to organize together to win campus elections and that sort of business.

Scarpino:         You got involved in campus politics and kind of learned the ropes as a student?

Morris:             Yes. Learned a lot. And then I was involved with something called the Little United Nations, LUNA I think it was called, and that was fun.

Scarpino:         If you think back on your years at IU, what kind of influences did you take away from that, that impacted the leader that you later became?

Morris:             Well, I greatly admired Herman Wells, the longtime president of IU. He was a marvelous human being. I greatly admired my father-in-law, who was over fifty years at IU. He was secretary of the Board of Trustees.

Scarpino:         His name was?

Morris:             Charles Harrell. Secretary of the Board of Trustees, and he was registrar or dean of Admissions. A very fine man, very impressive and a real gentleman. I had a college professor by the name of Dr. James B. Kessler, who was thought to be an expert on public finance. I had him for five courses my senior year, five honors courses, where it was a lot of self-study and self-research, self-directed research. He ran for Congress. I helped him in his campaign. He was a wonderful man. And then Dave Derge, who was a member of the faculty, and he was also a Kappa Sigma. I think he became president of the university. There was a group of political scientists; Joe Sutton, a foreign policy expert who became president. Joe Sutton and John Ryan and Dave Derge, and a couple of others were all good buddies.

Scarpino:         John Ryan later became president of IU.

Morris:             And John was national president of Kappa Sigma and became my good friend. His wife, Pat, gave his collection of memorabilia and books to the Kappa Sigma national headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia. And they asked me to speak at that event. There were, I don’t know, five or six Kappa Sigs over the years that were Kappa Sig Man of the Year, which I thought was a big deal; Branch McCracken, who was the basketball coach, won two titles, and John Ryan. Hoagie Carmichael, I got to know Hoagie Carmichael when he would come back to the Kappa Sig house. So, that was fun.

Scarpino:         You knew Hoagie Carmichael?

Morris:             I knew Hoagie Carmichael.

Scarpino:         Was he an interesting man?

Morris:             Wonderful man. He was a bit of a character. He always brought a little John Barleycorn back to the house when he would come, but I mean he is one of IU’s great heroes, we’re so proud of him, and he was a Kappa Sigma, and that meant a lot.

Scarpino:         You entered IU in ’61, graduated four years later with your bachelor’s degree. I was looking for things that were going on in the wider world while you were there. I’m just wondering if any of the stuff impacted you. One of those, of course, was the Civil Rights Movement. Did you know about that when it was going on? Did it have any impact on you, or any of the people that you knew?

Morris:             Yes, it had a lot of impact on people I knew. There was Vietnam, racial issues. There was a group called the Young Socialist Alliance which was a very… they garnered a lot of attention on the IU campus.

Scarpino:         I’m guessing you were not a member.

Morris:             No, I was not a member of the Young Socialist Alliance. Although, one of my dear friends, a great Indianapolis attorney, Jim Bingham, Bingham & Summers, who was a Kappa Sig, obviously thirty or forty years older than I am, his son was one of the leaders. He was not a Kappa Sigma, and he might have even been a transfer student from Wabash. But it was... all hell was breaking loose with that, and the war. And, I think it was the beginning of the drug culture. I had no interest in that and never participated, didn’t even consider it. But there were others around who were beginning to use marijuana and other kinds of dope. Interesting times.

Scarpino:         They certainly were. You mentioned the growing involvement in Vietnam, were you ever in a situation where you thought you were going to be drafted?

Morris:             No. I had two years of Army ROTC. And then I had a low number, or high number, whichever it was. And then, eventually, Jackie and I were married, and we had our first son, so I was exempted. I’ve given a lot of thought to that, and I think I would’ve been a better man had I had some military experience. I had none.

Scarpino:         Seems hard to believe, but, I mean, in full disclosure, I did have a low draft number and I was in the service. But all those issues that you mentioned, you know, Vietnam, civil rights, emerging drug culture, emerging counterculture, all that stuff must have created an interesting mix of turmoil and experience at IU.

Morris:             It did. I don’t have great, I mean, I don’t have perfect clarity, but there were frequent marches, demonstrations on all three issues. I was always positive in favor of civil rights for African Americans. I was not involved with Vietnam in any way.

Scarpino:         You then continued your education. In the summer of 1970, you earned your master’s in business administration from Butler. Do you remember when you started that program?

Morris:             I’m just trying to think; I worked for the bank for a while, a very interesting experience. While I was at the bank, the bank asked me if I would take a little bit of time and help a man, a wonderful man by the name of Alex Clark, who had been mayor of Indianapolis twenty years previous, the last Republican mayor. And they said, “Jim, would you help him a little bit?” Nearly all the young people in town were for Dick Lugar, and the bank asked me if I would help Alex Clark, which I did. Alex loses. I go back to the bank thinking I’ve had the shortest political career in history. And, in August of 1967, I get a phone call from Dick Lugar. And this voice says, “Jim, I’m Dick Lugar, you don’t know me, but I know something about you. Would you come help me in the last two and a half months of my campaign?”

Scarpino:         He was running for mayor.

Morris:             He was running for mayor. He had beaten Alex Clark in the primary and he was running against the incumbent mayor, John Barton, who was mayor and had been superintendent of the State Police, a fine man. So, I trot back up to the powers-to-be at the bank and I said, “You know, maybe this would be a good thing.” I spent the next ten, twelve weeks helping Dick Lugar as his driver, his gofer, whatever he needed. Dick Lugar wins, beats John Barton by about nine-thousand votes. And Dick Lugar said, “Jim, would you...” One evening we were actually headed out to Plainfield for a Rotary Club meeting, he was very devoted to Rotary, and the meeting was cancelled and so on. And either coming or going, he said, “Jim, I’d like for you to come and be a part of the administration.” I was twenty-four.

Scarpino:         Of course, all the time you were driving him around he had been trying you out.

Morris:             Yeah, he...

Scarpino:         I’m going to just...

(BREAK IN CONVERSATION)

Morris:             So, anyway, Dick Lugar asked me if I would come and be his director of special projects at a compensation of $10,000 a year plus a car.

Scarpino:         This was a full-time job?

Morris:             Full-time job. So, when he became mayor, I went into that, and I stayed on leave-of-absence from the bank for eight years. During that time, the bank did pay for me to go back to grad school and get my M.B.A. at Butler. I had a good experience doing that. Then I worked for Dick Lugar for six years. During that time, it was remarkable. At that point, I had a lung infection, which I had picked up in 1972, carried over into ’73, a virus infection in the middle lobe of my right lung. I spent a lot of time in the hospital here and in Chicago, and that was the point I left to go to Lilly Endowment.

Scarpino:         I’m going to switch gears here a little bit because I want to spend the last time we have together today talking about leadership. We’ll come back to your career, and I want to talk to you more about the mayor’s office and Richard Lugar and all the other things you sort of mentioned tangentially. But I really want to get this in the first time we sit down together. So, when I talked to the various people whose names you gave me before the interview, all of them, without a lot of prompting in one way or another, mentioned one of your strengths as leadership. You know, I always ask the people, “What does this person do well?” The other thing that all of them mentioned was your ability to bring people together and organize them and guide them in some sort of common purpose. So, I want to talk to you about some of those things. I want to begin by asking, do you see yourself as a person with vision who can bring together groups of people and encourage them to work toward a common goal?

Morris:             Yes, I see myself as someone who has high aspirations and expectations and hopes for the things that I am a part of that I care most about. And then I thoroughly enjoy, and I’ve gotten my strength… my ability to do this has grown each year over the years. Young people that I worked with when I was young, I had an unusual talent or ability or commitment to reach out to people who were different than I am, different parties, different careers, different races, to try to find common ground, to find... in other words, if we were working on the UNIGOV lobbying work, or working on programs for kids in the summertime, or trying to put together the NATO Conference on Cities, I… Dick Lugar would often say, “Jim, well who do you think we ought to get to do this?” And I usually was, I want to say this with humility, but I had a good ability to say, “Well, I think X would really be good at that.” So, at a very young age, it was a lot of responsibilities by most young people’s standards, I could say, “Well, Gene Sease ought to be the chairman of the Progress Committee, or Bob…” or whoever. So, I was good at making recommendations on people who could come to the team and be a part of the team. And then I was effective at figuring out how to keep them on the team and how to make them feel better about leaving. So, building teams of people, very smart people usually, very top talent, bringing folks together to do things that they might not have ever thought about doing has been my cache for a long, long time. That’s still my strength. Building relationships, it’s fun, it’s productive, it’s enabled me to know people very different than I am, wonderful people. And, you know, after you work with them on a small project, and the next year something bigger and... we had remarkable talent working on things like the Super Bowl or the Pan Am Games. But now, you know, it’s even better than that. Many of the legacies of things we all started are strong on their own.

Scarpino:         For example.

Morris:             Well, I mean the Indiana Sports Corporation is very strong. Riley Children’s Foundation is very strong. The Boy Scout Council is very strong. The IU Board of Trustees, very strong. So, I think I played a role in helping to move some of this along, and I think doing it in a way that those who were involved were not selfish or greedy. Dick Lugar wanted Indianapolis to be a great city, to get better every year, for everybody to be included, to especially work on issues and opportunities for young people who were at risk. So, I spent these years trying to figure out how do you build a Downtown Commission? How do you build a Convention Visitors Association? How do you build an IUPUI? How do you build the Sports Corporation? How do you build the Riley Children’s Foundation? And, it’s directly related to your ability to identify people that will be great partners, that will have the same passion, who already have great passion for building a great hometown.

Scarpino:         At what point in the trajectory of your development as an adult did you realize that you had a real talent for identifying smart people who could do things and then motivating them to get whatever the job wants done?

Morris:             I think Dick Lugar depended on me to do that, others too, I wasn’t alone, but I helped Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar was an extraordinary man, but I helped him build a lot of relationships that were important to his leadership and to his success. At the Lilly Endowment, it was a different kind of experience. Although it was very similar of identifying people who could help get something done, but a foundation usually depends on people coming to it to ask for money to do their ideas. When I was there, we did an awful lot of that, but I also felt that it was a great opportunity to sort of go to work and develop some ideas and bring the people around to get them done.

Scarpino:         Many of which had to do with developing Indianapolis.

Morris:             Yeah.

Scarpino:         You’ve been talking about bringing people together and so on and so forth. I want to talk to you about something that I’m going to take out of order, but I’m going to do it because it just happened, and that’s your duck lunch. And it fits in here because it fits in with some of the themes you just raised. I understand it’s an annual event, and this year, 2022, it was on November 23^rd at the Indiana Roof Ballroom. I did a little checking, and it regularly attracts in recent years several hundred people. I understand that it started as a luncheon with you and a few of your friends and grew from there. In fact, Sue Anne Gilroy told me, she said “The Duck Luncheon lifts people up.” And I said, “Can I quote you on that?” and she said, “Yes.” So, I want to ask you about that. One of the things I want to start with is, how did you come up with the idea for a Duck Lunch?

Morris:             Well, I generally don’t talk about this, to be truthful. Thirty-five, forty years ago, and still to this day, the University Club in downtown Indianapolis has a Duck Luncheon the day before Thanksgiving, and bring members, and members can bring guests. So, I started inviting eight or ten of my friends out to have lunch with me the day before Thanksgiving at the University Club upstairs in sort of a private dining room just for fellowship and to be together, to enjoy each other, and to be grateful and to be thankful for all that was given to us, and for the gift of living in this city and this state, and all the things that we were a part of. And, in that context, I guess I’m a fairly undisciplined person...

Scarpino:         That’s seems hard to believe, but...

Morris:             It went from eight or ten to twenty, you know, and I suppose the guest list this year was between six and seven hundred. I invite people that I work with that are my friends. But the purpose is the same, the purpose is to bring people of differing backgrounds together to celebrate what we have in common, and to be grateful, and to take time to think about all the incredible things that happened in our lives and in our community, in the places that we care about and for a lot of people to get to know each other. There are a lot of people that wouldn’t get to know each other, but over the years there have been a lot of friendships formed. So, I usually have someone give a little talk, short talk of gratitude and gratefulness and appreciation for living here and what it means. And then we usually have readings from the mayor and the governor. I’ve done it for a long time. You can’t invite everyone. In the beginning it was all men, now it’s men and women. But I think it gives the people that present a chance to reflect, and that causes people in the room to reflect and take time just to think about, you know, how did all these good things happen and why were we a part of it? How do we make it better? What’ll we do to take it to the next level, life in our community? It’s not a religious or evangelical experience, but it is taking time to say, “Boy, we’ve worked hard to make a pretty darn good community and here’s what we need to do to make it better.” It’s both a good time and a tough time to have it. So many people travel on Thanksgiving weekend. But I would say there are a lot of people that if they didn’t get an invitation and they had last year, they’d call and say, “Hey, why wasn’t I on the list?” I don’t ever take anyone off the list.

Scarpino:         You mentioned what you wanted to accomplish with that first Duck Lunch. But why was this called the Duck Lunch?

Morris:             Because duck was served as the meal.

Scarpino:         I could imagine finding ducks for eight people, but you had hundreds. Where do all these ducks come from?

Morris:             Indiana is the largest duck-producing state in the United States.

Scarpino:         I had no idea.

Morris:             And the Maple Leaf Duck Farm in northern Indiana provides the ducks. And now it’s a sliced duck breast. It used to be a half-a-duck, or a quarter duck, I forget. When I was in Rome for five years, I had the Duck Lunch there as well, and I had a good number of Catholic cardinals who would come. You know, I enjoy being with my friends, I enjoy the fellowship, and I enjoy building the bonding relationship with all sorts of people, and this has been a great vehicle to bring people together.

Scarpino:         One of the people I talked to, and you just mentioned the Duck Lunch was originally all male, but was it your daughter who suggested, what about the ladies?

Morris:             Oh, a little bit. In the beginning, it was just a bunch of guys that I was pals with. It was never any intention to leave women out. And I thought, well, if we begin to make this a couples event, it just doubles in size and expense. My daughter might have kidded me, but she was never pushy about it or anything. But I just knew that if I was having people that played leadership roles and people that wanted to be more involved that fifty percent of those are women. And some of our city’s great leaders are female, and it was unfair not to include them. Sarah Evans Barker talked one year. The Sassos have talked one year. Allison Melangton has talked one year. So, I try to be inclusive.

Scarpino:         I talked to you about the Duck Lunch when we did the pre-interview, but I’ve done a little reading...

Morris:             I invited you to come, by the way.

Scarpino:         You did. And I had a conflict I couldn’t get out of. I talked to your assistant.

Morris:             I thought you would have enjoyed it.

Scarpino:         I would have. And had I been able to rearrange my life, I would’ve been there, I promise you. It’s no secret that in the last five, six, seven years, the political landscape in the United States has become relatively rancorous, and, you know, people divided, less willing to work with each other than maybe in the past. How does the Duck Lunch fit into that kind of rancorous political environment that we see at least nationally?

Morris:             I suppose that, in your department at IUPUI, your colleagues that you know well, you’ve had a long relationship with, that political rancor is much less important.

Scarpino:         Probably, yes.

Morris:             My own belief is that, if you work at it, you can find common ground with almost anyone. And, at the end of the day, we share so much more in common than that which divides us. I mean, everybody that comes to the Duck Lunch wants Indiana to be a great state. They want us to have great universities. They want our kids to be healthy. They want to live in a great city. They want the Colts, the Pacers, the Fever, the Indians to do well. They’re all proud of the Speedway. They don’t want kids to be sick. They don’t want the poor kids to be terribly disadvantaged. They want our city to be safe. They’re proud of the Sports Initiative we have. For a city our size, we have the greatest cultural assets in North America. USA Today says we’re the top convention city in America. Eighty-thousand people are employed in that business. People are proud of the zoo, and the White River Park, and the symphony, and the Eiteljorg, and the Children’s Museum, the Art Museum. They’re very proud of IUPUI. They’re proud of the Center for Leadership Development. They’re proud that Indianapolis has done a better job of sustaining Black Expo than any city that’s tried to copy it in North America. The Center for Leadership Development has helped prepare forty-, fifty-thousand African American kids to go to college. Who’s not for that? There may be some social issues that divide us, but if we take time to think about where we want to live, what kind of place we want to live in, how we want to love our neighbor, and how we want to have win-win with our neighbor, there’s not a lot of disagreement. I dislike people that intentionally try to make life difficult for someone else, or to try to disparage someone else. It’s not the right thing to do. Most people are thankful to live in this city and this state and to be a part of the community. The Duck Lunch is to celebrate what we have in common, to be thoughtful about where we need to do more and do it better and do it together. It was my motto at the World Food Programme, “Do more, do it better, do it together.” But, if you have a new colleague in the History Department and you work at building a friendship and a partnership and a relationship, you can probably get it done. If you don’t work at it and just assume it’s either not important or you don’t care, you know, it’s... And, boy, when we’re all working together on the same page trying to achieve greatness and goodness, it’s a heck of a lot easier than intentionally being difficult.

Scarpino:         We started down this path because I wanted to talk to you about leadership. I’m going to just straight out ask you, how do you define leadership? How do you know it when you see it?

Morris:             I think leadership is about figuring out with others what needs to be done to make things better to move ahead and finding ways to do it together. I talk a lot about seeing your opportunities in their largest context. You can teach history and go home. Or, you can say, you know, I’m going to figure out how to motivate my students and help them to understand the implications of leadership and the lessons of history and help them understand that learning about history is leadership preparation for the future. You know, we can be about the business of running a basketball team, which we are, and to win, but we’re also about the business of building community, of bringing people together, of changing the city’s reputation, of having our players inspire young people of all different degrees of challenge, of inspiring teachers and coaches, of building a great downtown. I mean, if you see your calling in its largest context and begin to think what the opportunities are, that’s leadership. Leaders have the ability to bring the best out of others. The scripture says, “...whoever would be first among you must first be your servant.” I think the higher up you go in an organization or institution, your leadership is about supporting your colleagues, encouraging your students. It’s serving, you know, sort of the notion of the servant-leader, I believe that.

Scarpino:         Are there people that you look to as important or inspiring leaders?

Morris:             Well, Robert Greenleaf, who was my friend, wrote the series of monographs on leadership and servant leadership.

Scarpino:         You knew him?

Morris:             I knew him well. He’s gone now. Dick Ristine was a great leader. Herman Wells was a great leader. Ted Hesburgh was a great leader. Eli Lilly was a great leader. Dick Lugar was a great leader. There are terrific coaches who are great leaders. Mark Miles is a great leader at the Speedway and for the city. Ted Boehm, great leader, just smart as hell. Gerry Bepko was a good leader for IUPUI. Leaders, you know, sometimes... I don’t know what it is, it’s intangible maybe, but have the ability to bring something special. Bill Gaither is a leader, his music just lifts people up and brings the best out of them. There are lots of people like that. And I think it’s... they’re trusted... the confidence and the integrity of why they’re doing what they’re doing. And they’re likable. They care. They are not selfish. That’s an easy way to become a leader.

Scarpino:         Do you think of yourself as a leader? When you look in the mirror, do you see a leader?

Morris:             I don’t know.

Scarpino:         You could’ve been describing yourself in the last few minutes.

Morris:             Might have been... I care deeply about the things I care about. I think most people would give me credit for saying, you know, “Jim Morris cares about the City of Indianapolis, the State of Indiana. He cares about hungry children. He cares about his university. He cares about poor kids. He cares about racial reconciliation and fairness. He probably falls short frequently, but I trust that he cares about those things and it’s for real, that it’s not phony, or it’s not… that his interest in building a great city is absolutely unselfish.” I hope that’s the case. I’m seventy-nine, I’ll be eighty in April. You develop a reputation and you... someone said you’re known by the company you keep. People would know... now there would be people who would say, “Hey, slow down young man, you’ve used seven-x, don’t push us to get to eight-x,” and I understand that. I do ask people for a lot of money with letters and whatever, and I’m sure that there are people who say, “honest to god, when’s he gonna...” they don’t want to take a phone call because they know they’re going to be asked for something. If there’s something I want to get done, I might just go ahead and get it started and try to bring a group together to do it.

Scarpino:         I asked you about how you self-assess yourself as a leader, but as you think back over your life and your long tenure as a leader in various capacities, are there are any instances when you came up short of your own expectations?

Morris:             Well, there are examples of things where I wish that I could’ve been better at doing something than I was, and there are examples of where I wasn’t the smartest guy on the block or knew the most about the subject. When I went to the World Food Programme, an unbelievable experience, largest humanitarian agency in the world, eighteen-thousand employees, committed to having a world that doesn’t have hungry children or hungry people or people starving, or whatever. And maybe you feed a-hundred-twenty million people in the year, and probably needed to feed six-hundred million. And there were circumstances where we didn’t have the resources to do everything that needed to be done. When I was at the Endowment, I remember, we had a request from some people in Albuquerque that wanted to work on the issue of child pregnancy...

Scarpino:         Albuquerque, New Mexico?

Morris:             Uh-huh... and I said, “Well, I think we ought to be able to eliminate child pregnancy.” And, I mean, what a foolish notion. The older you get, you conclude you can approach problems and make progress, but there are a huge number of problems that we are confronted with that incrementally we might make some progress, but we’re not going to... I’m proud of the work of UNAIDS. I’m proud of the work of Bush and Randy Tobias on PEPFAR. It’s extraordinary.

Scarpino:         I’m going to ask you, for the benefit of somebody using this, which Bush are you referring to?

Morris:             Well, forty-three, but he had an enormous commitment to reducing AIDS in Africa, and he did it. It was a big-time accomplishment. You can go to Riley Hospital and say, “Isn’t it so sad that we have all these sick, struggling kids?” or you can go to Riley Hospital and say, “Isn’t it a great thing that we have this marvelous hospital that’s committed to the health and well-being and happiness of children?” It depends on how you look at it.

Scarpino:         We’re going to talk about the World Food Programme, but I think most people know that it’s fed a lot of people around the world and done a great deal of good. You know, hunger sometimes seems like an almost intractable global problem, did you ever look in the mirror and say, “Can we ever solve this?”

Morris:             Well, sure. I don’t know if I looked in the mirror, but I...

Scarpino:         I know, self-reflection...

Morris:             Sure, I know. You just sit there and say, well, can’t we do more? And is there an issue that ought to bring people together around the world more than feeding hungry children. I mean, there’s some jerks in the world, some bullies, some bad guys that are self-centered in one thing or another, but most of the leaders of the Western World don’t want kids to be hungry. It’s the greatest health issue in the world – hunger. But, then there are a lot of corrupt politicians in poor countries around the world that make it very difficult for progress to be made in their countries. There were places I would leave and say, “I think you care more about the well-being of their kids than they do.” That was frustrating.

Scarpino:         In talking about leadership, I’m wondering how you would describe your style of leadership?

Morris:             Well, I would, I don’t know... I would hope that it would be collegial, honest, focused, big-picture. I’m not a micro-manager. And, I would hope that it would usually be based on high aspirations, big thoughts. And I would hope that in part it would be based on eliminating child hunger; it would be principled, and it would be based on almost universal values. I would hope that I’m inclusive. We try to never have a group at our home that’s not diverse, and we’ve felt that way forever. And, I want IU to be the best. I want IU to be the best in the Big Ten.

Scarpino:         I asked you earlier who inspired you, and we talked about that. I’m wondering, as you developed in your career, your professional career but also your leadership trajectory, were there people who helped you along the way, who really helped with a... to use a figure of speech, with a leg up?

Morris:             Sure. I mean, lots. I’ve talked about Dick Lugar. I’ve talked about Dick Ristine. Tom Lake, I’ve talked a bit about. P.E. McAllister.

Scarpino:         A business person, P.E.?

Morris:             Yeah. He’s passed away now, but he was my pal forever.

Scarpino:         I interviewed him, he’s a very nice, interesting man.

Morris:             Great man. Glenn Howard was a good friend.

Scarpino:         Who was Glenn Howard?

Morris:             He was an African American state senator, quite a character. He was my pal. Bill Enright, our pastor. Earl Goode, my pal. Bill McGowan, Jerry Semler, Ted Boehm, Dave Frick... great, great people. And there are people who have given me an opportunity to be a part of something. Herb and Mel Simon invited me to be a part of presentations to persuade the Nordstrom Brothers to come to Indianapolis or to raise money for the mall.

Scarpino:         Which they did in the Circle Centre Mall.

Morris:             Right, yes. I don’t want to say this informal or casual, but there’s a difference in sitting down with someone and giving them a gameplan, or just being inspired by the way somebody lives their life or conducts themselves.

Scarpino:         I’ve asked you about people who have helped you along the way, and I assume in some cases involved mentoring, but do you ever think of yourself as a mentor toward others?

Morris:             I don’t know that I think of myself that way. I think, I get lots of, and it’s often a surprise from someone that says, “Thanks for being my mentor.” If you keep your eyes open and watch what’s going on around you, you can learn a lot.

Scarpino:         For you, do you think those observational skills are one of the reasons that you’ve been successful as a leader and a motivator?

Morris:             I think I’ve generally been focused on areas that have a lot of interest to other people. And I think people are drawn to big ideas. I mean, we wanted to eliminate child hunger in Indianapolis, and we did, unbelievable. They changed the standards for food SNAPs and things get bad again. And I have hooked myself up with lots of quite remarkable people who have good thoughts and become their partner.

Scarpino:         This question that I’m going to ask you is one that we ask almost everybody that I talk to, that is:  Do you see a distinction between leadership and management?

Morris:             Yes. Management is hands-on, executing a plan, and leadership is dealing with big ideas and bringing groups of people together and then managing them for whatever the intended results are. It’s a very good question. Management is more of a science, I suppose, than leadership is. I have to think about that a little bit.

Scarpino:         Let me come back to it... Do you think leadership is something that can be taught, or are people born to be leaders?

Morris:             No, I think you learn to be a leader. Maybe somebody is born with special skills to be a great quarterback, stature, size, strength, but I don’t know if humans are born with an innate, inherent instinct to be helpful, to care or to have integrity. And I think, through school, through your church, through your family, through your community, you learn to care and learn to think about what you hope for. And that’s acquiring the skill. I don’t think Herman Wells was born to be a leader. No, that’s wrong, I don’t think he was born with all the great leadership skills that he eventually had. But he was trustworthy, likable, people knew where he stood, what he cared about. He became a great leader. I think, you know, the leaders of the Lilly Company, now they become a part of that Lilly tradition, and they learn it as they’re moving up. You know, if you say that, “I was ordained with that when I was born,” I don’t quite think that’s right.

Scarpino:         Most people learn about leadership as their career and their life develops. People who write about leadership and talk about it and so on sometimes think that you can look at somebody’s career as a leader and oftentimes you can identify an event or an incident that really demonstrates their style of leadership. So, in your career, can you point to something that really demonstrates your leadership style?

Morris:             Well, I think I’m proud of the changes we made at the Riley Children’s Foundation to build a great serving institution with the resources needed to, you know, raise a lot of money to help more kids. I think the Sports Corp., that was significant. I’ll think more about that one.

Scarpino:         And I will also come back to that, but I’m going to ask you a few final questions to kind of wrap this up.

Morris:             I’m getting a little worn down, too.

Scarpino:         I’ll tell you what, we can stop now if you’d like.

Morris:             No, that’s okay, if it’s easy, I’ll...

Scarpino:         These are the hard ones. I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask you one question and then we’ll break, okay. I want to set this up, because if somebody is looking at this in the future, so... we think about the United States now, or the general state of the world today, and as we mentioned earlier, there’s significant political divisions within the United States. There’s some level of threat to popular sovereignty and democratic government. We’ve got climate change, and climate crisis, a direct result of human action. We have poverty in the midst of plenty, which you’ve mentioned several times, the war in Ukraine, and we keep spending that out. So, when you think about all these things, do you think we face a crisis in leadership?

Morris:             Yes.

Scarpino:         Could you talk about that crisis a little?

Morris:             I actually think we’ve had political leaders that have built their careers on division, on making the other guy appear to be evil. I was talking to Obama once about Lugar, and he said, “Jim, I just love that guy.” He said, “Lugar said to me one time, ‘You know, you ought to listen to what the other guy across the aisle has to say, you might learn something, and by the way, maybe he loves his country too.’” I think we’ve vilified each other so much that it makes it so difficult to come together, or to trust each other, to like each other. I don’t think our political leadership works nearly hard enough at trying to build a... George Bush last night was talking about his legislation, Leave No Child Behind, and how he invited Teddy Kennedy to come to the White House to see the movie of The Bay of Pigs. And by the end of the evening Teddy Kennedy said, “How can I help you? What can we do together?” And, I don’t think people work at that. You have to work at getting to know the other person to fully understand what you have in common. And then, I think if you’re focused on the common good, you ask yourself, what can we do together to get there? But if you’re a selfish, mean-spirited person, you’re thinking about me, what can I do to move myself ahead, and I don’t think that works very well.

Scarpino:         On that note, I’m going to say thank you. I’m going to shut the recorder in just a second, but while they’re still running, I want to thank you for sitting with me today on behalf of myself and the Tobas Center.

Morris:             Enjoyed it.

Scarpino:         Much appreciated.

Scarpino:         Today is January 5, 2023. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center also at IUPUI. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing Mr. James Morris at his home in Indianapolis. This interview is the second recording session with Mr. Morris; the first recording session took place on December 6^th, 2022. Both recording sessions are part of a larger oral history project undertaken by the Tobias Leadership Center headquartered at IUPUI. There is a biographical overview of Mr. Morris’ career at the beginning of the first interview, and we will also place his resume with the audio and transcription at the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives.

                        I’d like to ask your permission to record this interview, to have the interview transcribed, and to place the audio and the transcription with the Tobias Center and the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, where all or part of the audio and transcription may be posted to those organizations’ websites. And both organizations may also make the audio and transcription available to patrons. Can I have your permission?

Morris:             Yes.

Scarpino:         All right. Thank you. So, let’s get started. As I said when the recorder was off, today I want to talk to you about the time you spent at American Fletcher Bank and in the office of Indianapolis Mayor, Richard Lugar, and begin talking to you about your years at the Lilly Endowment. And if we have time, I’ll talk to you a little bit more about leadership, which we’ve covered some when we were together last time.

We’ve talked about your educational background and your views on leadership, so now we turn to your early career. Immediately after graduating from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1965, you went to work for American Fletcher National Bank in Indianapolis. You worked there from 1965 through 1967. For the sake of anyone using this interview, a bit of background on AFNB. In the 1960s, American Fletcher National Bank varied from being either the first or second largest bank in Indiana. It traded places several times in the statewide ranking with its main rival Indiana National Bank. In May 1986, American Fletcher National Bank merged with Ohio-based, Banc One Corporation.  It was renamed Bank One Indianapolis. The point here is that right out of college you joined one of the top banks in Indiana. First question is, why did you decide to go to work for American Fletcher National Bank?

Morris:             I was offered a position as a management trainee at American Fletcher. I had one year of law school between the time I left… By the time I graduated from IU, I went to IU Bloomington Law School for one year. Then, my wife and I were married. I did not like law school. I should’ve finished. It was one of the mistakes I made along the way. But I was offered a position to come to American Fletcher as a management trainee and was there until in January of ’68 I started to work for Dick Lugar full time after he had been elected mayor. It was a very interesting set of circumstances. At the bank, I was training in corporate lending and went through all the stages of management training; then was involved with some work in the correspondent bank departments statewide. In early 1967, the chairman of the bank, a man by the name of Frank McKinney Sr., contacted me and asked if I would help a friend of his, a former Republican mayor of Indianapolis, a fine man by the name of Alex Clark, who was running for... he had been a practicing attorney, he had been mayor, out practicing law, decided to come back and run again in the primary. And it was a time when the Marion County Republican Party was being challenged by a new organizational leadership team versus the people that had been in charge of the Republican Party forever. Frank McKinney Sr., who had been national chairman of the Democrat Party, but had this Republican friend, Alex Clark – there may have been some relation there, I forget. But he said, “Jim, would you go help Alex a little bit? He’s running in the primary against a young man by the name of Dick Lugar.” And most of the young people, if not all of the young people in the city were for Dick Lugar, “but would you go help Alex? The bank would appreciate that.” And so, I did. And Dick Lugar beat Alex Clark substantially. So, I go back to the bank thinking that I’d had the shortest political career in history. And sometime in August, early August of 1967, I get a phone call, and it’s, “Jim, this is Dick Lugar. We’ve never met, but I’m aware you were involved helping my opponent in the primary, and I’ve heard good things about you. Would you be willing to come help me for the last two-and-a-half months of the campaign?” So, I go back to Mr. McKinney and said, “I’ve had this call. This is something I think would be good for the bank, and something I’d like to do.” So, sometime around Labor Day, 1967, I head off to be Dick Lugar’s gofer, driver, right hand in his campaign. And he was running against the incumbent Democrat mayor, a fine man, John Barton, who had been mayor and had been head of the State Police prior to that. Good guy. And it was a vigorous campaign. The Republican Party had then elected new leadership in the county chairman, a man by the name of Keith Bulen, who was quite a political organizer. He had done a very good of recruiting candidates. So, I ended up working with Dick Lugar for two-and-a-half months. He wins by I think nine-thousand votes ballpark. After he had won, I’m trying to remember exactly how it happened, but Dick Lugar was very faithful at attending Rotary, that was an important thing for him. And he had missed a Rotary meeting for the Downtown Rotary Club. And we were driving out I think to Plainfield, Indiana, for him to make up a Rotary Club meeting that he had missed. We got there and for some reason the Rotary didn’t meet. We had dinner together there, and he said, “Jim, I’d like for you to join my staff in the Mayor’s Office and come on as my Director of Special Projects. And I’ll pay you ten-thousand dollars a year and provide you an automobile.” I mean it was quite remarkable that I had helped his opponent in the primary, and he ultimately asked me to come help. We had a great time together. And he became my best friend for fifty-two years.

Scarpino:         Wasn’t that one of his strengths, that he had an eye for picking out talent?

Morris:             Well, yes, the man was brilliant. He was a scholar. He cared deeply about everyone. He was just as concerned about the well-being of the CEO of Eli Lilly & Company as he would have been for the person that cleaned up the place at night. All of that led to all sorts of extraordinary things while he was mayor, but there was no big-shot-itis in him whatsoever. He was just a perfect gentleman, had a wonderful wife, four boys. He was the epitome of a public servant. He chose a public career. I don’t want to repeat myself from our earlier interview, but he met his wife, Char, and they were co-presidents of the student body at Denison College, in Granville, Ohio, as I recall. He became a Rhodes Scholar, studied at Pembroke College in Oxford, England. While he was there, he enlisted in the Navy and returned to Washington as an officer and became the intelligence briefer for Admiral Arleigh Burke when he was CNO.

Scarpino           CNO is?

Morris:             Chief of Naval Operations, the head of the Navy, not the civilian head but the...

Scarpino:         ... military head.

Morris:             Military head...

Scarpino:         I just wanted to make sure the recorder knew it.

Morris:             So, then, Dick comes back to Indianapolis and joins the family business with his brother, Tom. Tom was an equally impressive, wonderful human being. And they ran the Thomas L. Green Company, which was a company that manufactured baking equipment, baking equipment to bake cookies. And they did it for places all over the world. They were actually one of the first companies in the U.S. to earn the E Award, the Export Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce. But they had the family farm down in Perry Township, pardon me, Decatur Township. So, when Dick comes back, the Thomas L. Green Company is located out at 202 North Miley on the near west side of the city. And he became active in the Washington High School Men’s Club. He became one of the incorporators of Community Action Against Poverty. And then he ran for the School Board. He was very creative when he was on the School Board. He sought the presidency of the School Board and was defeated by a vote of four to three, and I think that spurred him on. You know, here’s this brilliant young man, businessman, interested in farming, Eagle Scout, Rhodes Scholar, perfect straight A average, Phi Beta Kappa. He was an extraordinary candidate. Indianapolis had an unusual history of not accepting any federal aid. None. That included not receiving/accepting money from the federal government for the School Lunch Program. It’s hard to imagine today. But he ran for the School Board to work on that issue, and to work on the issue of integration, and to work on the... He was a graduate of Shortridge High School, where he had worked on the student newspaper, was a student leader. He loved Shortridge High School. It was one of the great high schools in the country at the time. But while he was on the School Board, he really got focused on this issue of school meals for kids, especially poor kids, kids who were living at or below the poverty line. And he got that changed. But he lost the election for president of the School Board, I think it was by a vote of four to three. And he was defeated by some older gentlemen who were all old-line historic Democrats, although I don’t think it was a partisan election, but that’s who they were. So that motivated him to run for mayor. He ran, and obviously as I said, won by about nine-thousand votes. He had high, high aspirations for the city. He had a passion for the well-being and opportunities and success for young people. He wanted to bring the community together. He decided to have a consolidated government, merging the government of Indianapolis at the time, which was eighty-two square miles, with Marion County which was four-hundred-and-two square miles. And so we went to the General Assembly I think in 1969, and asked for their permission to reorganize structurally and geographically, Indianapolis. It was quite an experience. We did not have home-rule, it had to be an act of the General Assembly. Some very bright legislators helped get that done: John Mutz, Ned Lamkin, Charlie Bosma.

Scarpino:         So, what they got done was home rule for Indianapolis?

Morris:             What they got done was changing the geographical boundaries of Indianapolis to make the city and the county co-terminus, the same, identical. And overnight Indianapolis went from being – now, it was a bit of a fiction – but overnight it went from being the thirtieth-largest city in the United States to being the ninth-largest city, right between Baltimore and San Diego. And also, though, so this was a geographic expansion of new boundaries. It also reorganized the structure of the government. It gave us one mayor, who was the CEO for the city. It gave us one council that would make the laws, establish the policy, establish the budget. It gave us six operating departments. We maybe had a half-a-dozen places in charge of planning, half-a-dozen places in charge of transportation, but this pulled it all together. It did not consolidate law enforcement or public safety, and it did not consolidate the school systems. There are a thousand footnotes; it kept Speedway, Lawrence, Southport and Beech Grove separate from the city, where they elected their own mayor or their own town council clerk. But they also voted for the mayor of Indianapolis. So, if you lived in Lawrence, you’d vote for two mayors. It was a structural reorganization as well as a geographic reorganization, and it put the mayor in charge. We’d had a county council and a city council; we now had a city-county council. And a remarkable man by the name of Tom Hasbrook was elected president of the council. He was a man who had lost his eyesight in World War II and had worked for Eli Lilly & Company. But Dick Lugar wanted to bring the city together, that everybody who really lived in the real Indianapolis was a part of the community. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the most significant governmental consolidation reorganization in the United States for fifty years. It was not inspired by corruption or malfeasance or bad behavior.

Scarpino:         None of which I would associate with Richard Lugar.

Morris:             Dick Lugar was an honorable man. He was honest, brilliant. He understood the importance of politics and how to win elections, and the political organization was important to getting things done. But he was not a man that disliked his opponent. He was very friendly with people all across the board, and kind. Good stuff.

Scarpino:         I’m going to do sort of a right-turn follow-up on what you just said, and then I’m going to go back... back up quite a bit... Before I got in the car today, I was watching the U.S. House of Representatives fail for the seventh time to get themselves a leader, a Republican leader. As a man who’s been a lifelong Republican and a lifelong public servant, how does that current controversy playing out on a very public stage strike you? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been watching as much as I can.

Morris:             Well, in some respects it’s democracy in action. It’s the political decision-making process. The last I heard he had two-hundred-and-five votes, fifteen votes short of... You would think that ninety percent-plus ought to carry the day, but we also are a country that respects the right of every individual, and the rights of the minority. I don’t know what really is at the core of this. Family fights, as you know, are often more intense than fights between families. I wish they’d get this resolved. It should have been resolved some time ago. Government has sort of come to a halt, at least the House has. I thought some of the language yesterday was vitriolic, and I didn’t like it. Some of the folks on the side that have the huge number of votes were calling the other people terrorists. That’s ludicrous, actually. So, I don’t care for that. I’d like to get on with it. But there are a lot of things, I suppose, I’m uncomfortable with, but...

Scarpino:         Well, you were noted for both literally and figuratively working across the aisle and putting together coalitions, so on and so forth. How does the current political environment strike you when that seems less and less likely on both sides?

Morris:             Yeah, on both sides, I agree. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed the most, and am maybe proudest of, success in leadership or in life or at the university or wherever is about relationships and your ability to find common ground, and to do things together for the common good, the public good. And I do believe that if you work at it just a little bit, you can find common ground and shared values and shared purpose with almost anyone. There’s probably an increment that’s very difficult, but life is so much more rewarding and richer when you have a real diversity of relationships and friendships that begin maybe doing very simple things together, but as the trust grows and the partnership mentality grows, and as you are growing in success of doing things together, you end up with just the most wonderful panorama of friends and colleagues that can do extraordinary things. And Dick Lugar was good at that. He was very good at that. He was not an angry man. I rarely saw him ever get unhappy or angry about anything. Frustrated, maybe, but … We hardly ever invite anyone to our home where we don’t have a broad range of friends and all sorts of different people from different backgrounds, and we like that.

Scarpino:         We talked about your early career at American Fletcher National Bank, but I want to talk to you some about being in the Lugar Administration. You have already mentioned how heard about you even though you supported an opponent of his in the primary and reached out to you to serve. And you’ve given a very good biographical overview of Richard Lugar’s career here, so I’m going to skip that. You worked in the Office of the Mayor from 1968 to 1973, and Richard Lugar remained in the Mayor’s Office until 1976. I’m going to note one thing that you had in common with Mayor Lugar was that you’re both Eagle Scouts. During his first campaign for mayor in 1967, you were a campaign assistant. What were your duties and responsibilities as a campaign assistant? What does a campaign assistant do?

Morris:             Well, it’s pretty basic. I drove him. We had an old car and we drove around in an old green station wagon. I did some scheduling, and I did some advance work in preparation for places that he would appear. I kept notes of most of the meetings, of most of the public events. But I was, I guess, a gofer. I drove...

Scarpino:         Must have been a pretty fancy gofer.

Morris:             I was only twenty-four years old. And we had meals together. I got him started in the morning, took him home at night. I was his right hand, his helper, and I would help with some of the scheduling. And then there were a number of people running for the council, and at that time we had an elected city clerk, Marge O’Laughlin, a wonderful lady, just passed away a few weeks ago. I kept in touch with some of the political people, was often the go-between between the Republican County Chairman, Keith Bulen, who was sort of running the campaign.

Scarpino:         Lugar’s campaign?

Morris:             Lugar’s campaign, yes. So, I was a jack of all trades, but I was not the brains behind the operation. I was the little boy doing the work and driving him around. When he was elected, he had written, I don’t know, a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty letters to the people who lived in a neighborhood who had a drainage problem or a stoplight problem, or heaven only knows what it was. If there was a drainage problem in a neighborhood, he’d sent out a letter to everyone in that neighborhood saying, “If I’m elected, I’m going to solve that problem, and you can count on me.” So, my first job in the Mayor’s Office was to take on the responsibility to fulfill all those campaign promises.

Scarpino:         Were you able to do that?

Morris:             Almost. I would say we did ninety-five percent. We tried for everyone, and there were probably a few, less than a handful, that probably couldn’t have been done. Solving a big drainage problem is a tougher issue on the... I remember meeting with President da Silva of Brazil. We were meeting in his office, and there were thousands of people outside...

Scarpino:         You were in Brazil in his office....

Morris:             Right, with the president. And he said, “Jim, it’s just a hell of a lot more difficult running the government as opposed to out there criticizing.” Maybe there were a few problems that we couldn’t solve, but it was easier to say, “We’ll solve the drainage problem.” We made an effort with every one of them. It was quite a remarkable accomplishment, actually. He had made a commitment that if he... There used to be a large dump on the west side of Indianapolis where all the trash and garbage was collected and dumped. And then at four o’clock every afternoon they would light it on fire.

Scarpino:         This was the city dump?

Morris:             Yeah, the city dump. He said, “If I’m elected, we will close the dump and we’ll stop the fire.” It was a terrible pollution issue. And he did it that first day in office. Remarkable skill set. On Monday morning, he would always come in the office, and he would give me or someone a list of junk cars that had been abandoned, a list of vacant houses that had been abandoned. So, on the one hand he’s rethinking through UniGov, or thinking through narcotic problems, police department, but on the other hand he’s very detailed. He would make a note if he was out and about over the weekend, and often I was with him, or others, but he would give you a list and then a week later he’d say, “Hey, how are we doing on that list from last week?”

Scarpino:         So, he followed through.

Morris:             Um-huh, yes, he did.

Scarpino:         Mayor Lugar promoted you from administrative assistant to chief of staff.

Morris:             Right.

Scarpino:         How did that promotion entail a change in your duties?

Morris:             We had never had a deputy mayor before, and he asked really a fine man by the name of John Walls, who’d been head of the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee, who was not a political person, and who was a city planner. He had come from Pittsburgh, had been in Pittsburgh in the reorganization of that city. Devoted Quaker. Wonderful human being. And he was the person who knew something about operating the government. Dick asked me to be the chief of staff, which my job was to run the office and it had just one special project after another, and to supervise the staff, and to recruit the staff. I was only twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. I was learning as I was working. But I became his chief of staff. I usually traveled with him wherever he went. He had this remarkable experience, and once again don’t let me repeat myself... I forget what the year was, it was 1970 or ’71, but he went to a National League of Cities convention in San Diego. It was the first one he had ever attended. John Lindsay, who was then the mayor of New York City, was in line to be president of the National League of Cities. John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, Yale grad, very close to J. Irwin Miller in Columbus, Indiana, left the convention in San Diego for a day or two and went up to meet with Cesar Chavez, who was head of the Grape Pickers Union.

Scarpino:         In California...

Morris:             In California, in, I forget the name of the valley, but the great farm valley, agricultural valley. The National League of Cities is made up of every city in the country, the U.S. Conference of Mayors is made up of the big-city mayors, but it’s also made up of the fifty state and local Leagues of Cities. It was more of an average-sized American town membership. The folks there were saying, “Why did this guy leave us? Why does he expect to be elected our president on his first time coming to a meeting?” So, it was quite an effort led by a wonderful guy by the name of Ivan Brinegar, who was head of the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns. And he got a bunch of his buddies, and I helped him a little bit, and they nominated Dick Lugar as a candidate to be president of the National League of Cities. Now, maybe he was elected vice president, which was tantamount to the next year to coming in as president.

Scarpino:         You helped organize that…

Morris:             I helped a lot. So, Dick Lugar beats John Lindsay. I mean, this is devastating for Lindsay’s political career. And then suddenly Time Magazine wondered who the heck is this mayor of Indianapolis that just pulled this off? There were very few Republican mayors in the big cities, but this led to Dick Lugar having a national platform on urban issues, and he frequently was called on to testify. Richard Nixon brought his Urban Affairs Cabinet to meet in the Mayor’s Office shortly after, maybe in ’73. I’m not sure of the date. That led to Lugar being invited to speak to most of the State Association of Cities and Towns conventions all across the country. It was really something.

Scarpino:         And you were with him as an advisor during that time.

Morris:             I was his chief of staff, and I managed a lot of the interaction with the political people. He understood the political process. I suppose he would have preferred to not have to deal with some of the more challenging unhappy parts of politics, but he was a politician. He understood that you had to be successful in politics to have a chance to do the things that he wanted to do, and he represented the best of it.

Scarpino:         National League of Cities, he’s elected president over the mayor of New York who took it for granted and left the meeting. You helped persuade the delegates that Lugar would be a good person for it.

Morris:             I did help.

Scarpino:         What arguments did you use to persuade them that this unknown mayor from Indianapolis was a better candidate than the mayor of New York?

Morris:             Well, I don’t remember the issues, but I’m sure we said, “This guy will be your guy. He is doing this because he loves cities and understands how important they are. And he will be as concerned about Rockville, Indiana, as he would be New York City. Ivan Brinegar did a really good job of getting other Leagues of Cities of states like Indiana; South Carolina, Missouri - I haven’t thought about this for a long time - but to get behind Dick. It was a grassroots, I mean, it took on a life of its own.

Scarpino:         Although you were putting the fertilizer on the grass.

Morris:             I was helping, yeah, I was helping.

Scarpino:         Richard Lugar had a long career as a public servant and a leader, and you were with him for most of that. How would you characterize him as a leader?

Morris:             Well, I was with him through 1973, at which time I had a serious lung infection.

Scarpino:         But you were his friend after that, so, I mean you maintained contact and you knew what he was doing.

Morris:             Every day, yeah. He was absolutely trustworthy, absolutely unselfish. He was brilliant. He had high aspirations, and he cared deeply about everyone, but he had for a real passion for young people who were struggling. I used to say about him, he’d rather spend time with five high school students than he would five bank presidents, not to disparage the bankers. In the summertime, he would go out frequently in the morning and run with high school students at Tech High School. We had a remarkable program called Upswing for several summers where we opened twenty-five or thirty public schools, so they used to call it “The Lighted Schoolhouse Program.” So the school’s facilities would be available every evening, maybe during the day, for kids to enjoy the gym or whatever. And we recruited a huge number of companies to come in and sponsor a school and pay to keep it open. My friend P.E. MacAllister...

Scarpino:         I interviewed him, very interesting man.

Morris:             He was my closest friend for forty-five years. He and I played golf together every Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day for forty-five years. But he was the volunteer chairman of this thing called Upswing. We had James Brown perform on the City-County Building Plaza. Dolly Parton came to Garfield Park and performed with Porter Wagoner. RCA was a big deal here and they were able to do that. We had real efforts to employ kids in the summertime. And there were federal programs available, which the city probably would not have taken advantage of in earlier days. We took full advantage of that. One of my first assignments was, Indianapolis was the largest city that did not participate in the Model Cities Program. And he said, “Jim, would you get that organized and let’s go.” So, there was a wonderful guy by the name of Mike Carroll, who passed away in that airplane crash, but he took on the assignment of pulling together the Model Cities application, it was two-and-a-half, three-inches thick. And we were the largest city, as I said, that didn’t participate prior to his being elected, Dick’s being elected. So, we put this application together and we went to Washington, and Andy Jacobs helped us.

Scarpino:         That’s Congressman Andy Jacobs.

Morris:             Congressman Andy Jacobs, good guy, wonderful friend. I forget the name of the secretary of Health and Urban Development, HUD, but we went to Washington, and we met with him, and we made the case for Indianapolis. Quickly, we received a grant of six-million two-hundred-and-forty-three thousand dollars, which, it was sort of the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood that was the Model City neighborhood. A wonderful guy by the name of Dave Meeker, who ultimately became president of the American Institute of Architects, led the thing for a while. It was another transformative… Another one of my early assignments was down in the Concord neighborhood.

Scarpino:         That’s located where?

Morris:             On the near south side, south of Shapiro’s. There was a big controversy about, should there be an urban renewal project in that neighborhood. Some were for it, some were against it, and Dick said, “Jim, I want you to go down there and organize a referendum in the neighborhood. People can come vote; we’re for it or we’re against it.” And it failed, but the neighborhood prevailed. And it was quite an interesting assignment. There were lots of assignments like that.

Scarpino:         One of the many people I talked to, to get ready for this interview, Sue Anne Gilroy, and she told me that when Richard Lugar became mayor the first time that most of his staff were young people, under 30 young, including you. You were born in 1943; and, as you said, you were twenty-five when you went to work for Mayor Lugar...

Morris:             Twenty-four...

Scarpino:         Twenty-four... Was he making a conscious effort to hire young people as a way of saying, “this isn’t the same old same old?”

Morris:             I don’t know. I think he wanted people that were hard workers, energetic, that would become passionate about building a great city. The dynamism of the man, the quality, the guy he was attracted... now, I mean, I think it took a little while for people to know that this was a superstar or very unusual guy... The mayor of Crawfordsville, Indiana, Will Hays, whose father had been postmaster general under the Harding Administration, and he was the movie czar, the old man. Will Hays, the son, maybe he lived in Sullivan, Indiana, for a while. I don’t know if he went to Wabash, but ended up living in Crawfordsville, and he had been a principal writer for Ralph Edwards on that old TV show called “This Is Your Life.”

Scarpino:         Gee...

Morris:             And he was quite a character, a little guy. I remember once, Nixon had invited a bunch of mayors to come, and he invited Will Hays to come representing small towns like Crawfordsville. We arranged for Will Hays, as he sat around the cabinet table, to sit in his father’s cabinet chair after when he had been in the Harding Cabinet. Will Hays called me one day and he said, “Jim, there’s this very bright young lady from Crawfordsville who is about to graduate from DePauw, and I think you guys ought to hire her. She’d be great for Mayor Lugar.” So, we hired Sue Anne Gilroy. I had hired a guy before by the name of Dick Gilroy, who had gone to Spring Arbor College in Michigan and had graduated from Georgetown Law School, and he had been very close to a fellow at the Lilly Endowment by the name of Charles Williams. So, we hired Dick Gilroy to work in a variety of things, not legal. And so we hired Sue Anne this day. Dick Gilroy was off on National Guard duty in Michigan, the summer or after school was out, and I called him and I said, “Dick, I’ve just done you the greatest favor of your life. I’ve hired the lady you’re going to marry.”

Scarpino:         And he did.

Morris:             And he did. But she was, and is, very talented and smart and honorable. She ran for mayor and lost, but, so, we had a number of young people. We had a wonderful lady by the name of Nancy Foley, whose father had been an optometrist here in town. Dick Gilroy. We hired Steve Brinegar, who had been Ivan Brinegar’s son. We hired Sue Anne. And we put in place the first-ever internship program in the Mayor’s Office. We hired seven or eight college students to be interns. Several of them were from Harvard. Several of them were from Purdue or IU. Charlie Richardson, who’s now retired from Baker & Daniels, kids me about that he was in that first cohort, but it gave us a lot of brain power for fairly reasonable... Dick Lugar was a very conservative person financially. He and I probably had lunch two-hundred-and-fifty times at the IU Medical School cafeteria, and he had one of those little change purses you squeeze.

Scarpino:         A little rubber thing?

Morris:             Yeah. I think his lunch was ninety-seven cents, and two-percent sales tax. At the university the faculty didn’t have to pay sales tax, but other people did. He was always very religious about paying the sales tax and putting the penny back in the change purse.

Scarpino:         He told me he was very careful with money, but not quite that careful.

Morris:             I remember the first time he wrote a check and handed it to me for the United Way, and he contributed a hundred dollars that year to the United Way. I was big-eyed, I thought that was quite a gift he made.

Scarpino:         On his mayoral staff, particularly in his first term, there were some of you, like Sue Anne Gilroy and yourself, who went on to significant careers afterwards in politics or public service or the private sector. Were there any other folks on his staff who went on to similar significant careers after that sort of training ground on Lugar’s staff as young people?

Morris:             Dick Gilroy became a fine lawyer in town, and he was a lawyer that if a lady with a poor family background whose son was arrested and she came in to see him, he’d take his case and never worried about getting paid. Then, of course, Mitch Daniels took my place when I had the lung infection.

Scarpino:         Where had he come from? Was he straight out of college?

Morris:             Mitch’s mother and dad had been active with Keith Bulen in politics. In all the time Mitch was at Princeton, he, in the summertime, or he would help with the Marion County Republican affairs. I don’t where he was when he took my place. I don’t remember that.

Scarpino:         He was another one who went on to a significant career.

Morris:             Oh my goodness.  I mean it is quite remarkable. Mike Carroll ran for Congress and became a vice president of the Lilly Endowment while I was there. Wonderful guy. We had six departments: Administration, Metropolitan Development, Parks, Transportation, Public Safety. I forget the sixth one. Dave Meeker became head of the American Institute of Architects. Alan Kimball, who had been head of Public Safety, was an independent businessman. Owen Mahart came to… Public Works was the sixth one. And transportation. The Public Works guy came from Power & Light. Owen Mahart, as I said, came from the Lilly Company. There were probably no other people that took on, that had national, I could be wrong about that.

Scarpino:         Richard Lugar was sworn in as mayor in 1968, although he’d run in ’67. At that time, Indianapolis had a poor reputation as a city. It had been experiencing a rather economic decline... (dog barking) ... in the ‘60s... It was known by various pejorative names such as Naptown, India-no-place. Mayor Lugar and his team instituted a variety of policies and actions designed to improve the reputation and economy and livability of the city. What I wanted to do was talk to you about some of the Lugar era policies in a little bit more detail that took place while you were on his staff. But I want to begin with a few general questions for the benefit of somebody who might use this in the future. And you have mentioned the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee, which was created in 1965. Could you briefly explain what that was?

Morris:             The Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee was an effort to bring together leaders in the business-civic community and maybe the labor community as well. It was started by Mayor John Barton, the guy Dick defeated.

Scarpino:         A Democrat...

Morris:             Democrat, good guy. But he had a group of, I don’t know, Frank McKinney, Roy Echols... they were all business leaders and Democrats, mostly, who felt that there needed to be some vehicle to engage in a partnership mentality with the mayor, with the government. And the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee was formed, and it led, I think, to the creation of the Capital Improvement Board, which is the most significant government agency that was created in our city to transform things.

Scarpino:         In the Mayor’s Office...

Morris:             Well, no, it’s independent of the Mayor’s Office.

Scarpino:         Okay.

Morris:             It was created, I’m sure, by the legislature, and it was created to build a convention center, and ultimately built the football stadium, the basketball stadium, and the convention center was the major-major. We hadn’t had a convention center before. And, so, but Dick Lugar really energized it, and he appointed extraordinary leaders to be head of the Progress Committee, and they used task forces, and they met in the mayor’s conference room on a regular basis. And it was his way of having a non-political, non-partisan entity available to... I’m just trying to think, maybe John Walls was head of the Progress Committee at one time.

Scarpino:         I believe he was.

Morris:             Yeah. So, if he was interested in how we addressed drug abuse, or is it okay to have model cities, or if we wanted to worry about minority entrepreneurship, if we wanted to do UniGov, we had a vehicle that was not perceived as partisan. None of these things were perfect, by the way, but that he could use to bring people together. Gene Sease was chairman of it at one time. Bob McConnell was chairman of it. I think it was prestigious to be asked by the mayor to lead the Progress Committee.

Scarpino:         When Richard Lugar won the Mayor’s Office, he was, as you already mentioned, part of a reorganized younger segment of the Republican Party.

Morris:             He was very young himself, 32 or 34 when he was elected.

Scarpino:         This new wing, or part of the Republican Party, I would say, was headed and guided by Keith Bulen?

Morris:             Yes, it was.

Scarpino:         Can you say a few words about who he was, and what he represented?

Morris:             Well, he’s quite a guy. He was a lawyer, a very practical lawyer. He and his partner, Charlie Castor, the firm Bulen & Castor, and they had some young guys; Henry Dean, Ted Robinette, there might have been one or two more, but Keith was a brilliant organizer. I forget how many precincts we had at the time in Marion County, but he had a committeeman and a vice-committeeman. They had a ward chairman. He was very adept at… he started a company called Campaign Communicators that, instead of going to an advertising agency and paying them seventeen percent on top, these people did the advertising PR work for the campaign. And Mitch worked for them for a while, as I recall.

Scarpino:         Mitch Daniels?

Morris:             Mitch Daniels. But Keith was a very thoughtful, practical, successful, smart politician. He was an IU grad, he was a Sigma Nu at IU, went to the IU Law School. He served in the legislature for a term or two. He knew how to win elections. He chose good candidates. He gets part of the credit for choosing a Bill Ruckelshaus or...

Scarpino:         He served for what office?

Morris:             Bill Ruckelshaus was in the legislature; was leader of Republicans in the House; ran for the United States Senate against Birch Bayh, I believe, and lost. But he became head of EPA.

Scarpino:         First head of EPA under Richard Nixon, right?

Morris:             Yeah. And then he was the guy that, you know, the Watergate, he and the attorney general both resigned, but I mean he was a superstar, and the same with John Mutz and Ned Lamkin. He chose people that were very adept at being county recorder or county clerk. He had some moderate young Jewish lawyers in the legislative delegation. He had some very, very conservative ladies in the legislative delegation. I don’t think he was ever state chairman, but he was very effective in the state organization. Very effective. I don’t think he was Republican national committeeman, but the party, by those standards, was diversified. His vice chair was a lady by the name of Nola Allen, African American lawyer. He was flamboyant.

Scarpino:         In the interest of full disclosure, I met him a few times in his senior years.

Morris:             He was quite a guy. He loved horse racing. And Larry Borst, who was a veterinarian, president of the Indiana Veterinarians Association, they had this horse, I forget what the horse’s name was, but it was very successful. But he was a strong IU guy. And he was a good fund-raiser. I talked to him frequently, almost daily. He and Dick Lugar were good for each other, they were very different people.

Scarpino:         But he was the person who identified Lugar as talent, right?

Morris:             I think so. There were a group of guys...

Scarpino:         I mean, he told me that, but you never know for sure.

Morris:             Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s not true. There was a guy by the name of John Burkhart, who started the College Life Insurance Company that built the Pyramids out here... there was a guy, Harold Ransburg, who had an electromagnetic painting-fixing company. I assume P.E. McCallister was a part of that. It was... there was a guy by the name of Dick Petticrew, wonderful guy, who was number two at College Life. And there would have been a few more, I don’t know if Beurt SerVaas would have been in that original group, likely could have been. But these were the folks that got behind Dick Lugar, and financially they were... I’m sure Keith said, “This is our guy,” and they must have been impressed, and they put money into it. And Keith did the work, and he did it very well.

Scarpino:         Again, looking at your record of service to the Lugar Administration, if you just had to list the key accomplishments of his administration while you were in it, what would be on that list?

Morris:             Well, UniGov would be number one.

Scarpino:         We’ll talk about that in a minute.

Morris:             Indianapolis became an All-American City, which was a high honor for the city. He had a significant focus on the downtown. The Hilton Hotel was built. The Hyatt Hotel was built. And they were creative ventures. The Convention Center was finished, although the CIB under John Barton sort of germinated the idea. The IUPUI campus. I mean that you could never overstate the importance of that for the city. His commitment to young people, his commitment to the downtown, UniGov, commitment to the university, and changing the profile of the city. You know, we hadn’t had conventions, but suddenly we had the National League of Cities meeting here. We had the NATO Conference on Cities. Mayors from all over the world came here.

Scarpino:         In Indianapolis, yes.

Morris:             He gets a lot of credit for buying the land for the airport. I think that he gets high marks for that now. We had the Airport Authority, the mayor appointed most of the members of the board, not all; and he would not have been, but they hired a good professional leader at the airport, Dan Orcutt. And when you think of all the land that was pulled together...

Scarpino:         And he led the effort to purchase that land?

Morris:             He supported it, he made it possible. Those would be the things, I may have left something out, but...

Scarpino:         In 1968, the federal government awarded Indianapolis and the Lugar Administration a Model Cities grant, that you already mentioned, to aid neighborhood planning and renewal. John Krauss, John L. Krauss, who among other things, was deputy mayor of Indianapolis from 1982 to ‘91 during the Hudnut Administration, stated that you were directly responsible for Indianapolis winning the Model Cities federal grant in 1968. Model Cities was a part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty, and of course Johnson was a Democrat. I believe that John Krauss knew what he was talking about when he said you were largely responsible, directly responsible for winning the Model Cities grant. Can you talk about the role you played in helping Indianapolis win that Model Cities grant?

Morris:             I went through it a few minutes ago, but Indianapolis was the largest city that didn’t have the Model Cities Program. We were also the largest Republican city that didn’t have it, and there weren’t many Republican cities that had it, period. So, Lugar said, “Let’s go after this.” And I got Mike Carroll together, and Dave Meeker helped. I don’t know if John Krauss helped or not, I don’t remember that, but he could’ve. And we put together this application, as I said, it was that thick, had a black cover to it. I’m curious if I have one of them around here somewhere, but I doubt it, but we laid out a plan for the Model City neighborhood, which was sort of south of the Methodist Church there on Fall Creek. So, we get this money. The theory behind Model Cities was to make it possible to have maximum feasible participation from the neighborhood, the community. We had dozens of neighborhood meetings. I believe the name of the secretary of HUD was Robert Weaver, I’m not sure of that. But I called Andy, and once again, we were kids, you know, but I said, “Andy, could you make arrangements for us to see this guy?” So, we went over, and I forget who was...

Scarpino:         You went to Washington...

Morris:             Went to Washington. I met with the guy. He asked me questions, I don’t know, maybe Mike Carroll was with us, or Dave Meeker, I don’t think Dick Lugar went, but I remember he said, “Why do you want to do this?” He was very nice. And I said, “Well, we want to see if we can improve the neighborhood...” and I gave him what I thought was a good answer. I think he said to me, “Jim”, or “Mr. Morris,” he said, “that’s a perfect answer.” That was a real affirmation for me, for him to say that. So, pretty quickly… but they wanted to have a Republican city have it, too, for their own purposes. So, it happened very quickly. As I said, as I recall, it was six-million two-hundred-and-forty-three-thousand dollars. But then, that led to lots of other… in other words, if you were a Model City participant, that gave you a priority to participate in other federal programs.

Scarpino:         It was really like a foot in the door for a lot of other...

Morris:             Yes, it was. But our office was there on Central Avenue in that building. I can’t remember if Mike Carroll or Dave Meeker were the first – Dave Meeker was brilliant. He was a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. Mike Carroll was as fine a public servant as ever existed. One of them became head of DMD. The chair of DMD through all of this was Frank Lloyd.

Scarpino:         DMD is what?

Morris:             Department of Metropolitan Development. Frank Lloyd, there should be a statue built of him downtown, African American, medical doctor, head of Methodist Hospital, aspired to work for Lilly and that didn’t work out for him. He was smart enough to run Lilly, but he was head of the Planning Commission, and then he became the national chairman of the National Association of Planning Officials. Big deal. This is the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. He was a brilliant leader at Methodist Hospital, and a wonderful physician. There was another man involved by the name of Chuck Whistler, brilliant lawyer, I don’t know if he was Stanford or where he went to law school, but he was a key partner at Baker & Daniels, and he had been on the Planning Commission. Your point about drawing young talent in, you know, Frank Lloyd was a strong partisan Democrat, but he was publicly for Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar got about a third of the African American votes the second time he ran. But, I mean, to attract a Frank Lloyd or a Chuck Whistler really to be on the team and being in leadership positions - and they weren’t paid, they were just good citizens. He brought the best of the best like that.

Scarpino:         I’m going to continue a little bit along these lines, so I’m going to set up my next few questions by pointing out that in 1968, the municipal election brought Richard Lugar to the Mayor’s Office, but Republicans did very well overall, winning a majority of the Indianapolis Common Council seats and a majority of the Marion County government offices. Republicans also won majorities in the Indiana State Senate and House of Representatives. They won the governorship with the election of Edgar Whitcomb. In 1969, then, the legislature passed legislation reforming city government, known as UniGov. You mentioned this, but let’s get this in one place. Where did the idea for UniGov originate or what became UniGov, what we later called UniGov?

Morris:             By the way, don’t forget on April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Scarpino:         Yes.

Morris:             And Bobby Kennedy was here that day running for president. And April 4th happened to be Dick Lugar’s birthday. It was quite a... I believe this was Dick Lugar’s idea, to bring the city and the county together so that everyone who was a part of a real Indianapolis became a part of the city. I went through some of the details of it. It reorganized... We ended up having a twenty-nine-member City Council after UniGov for elected at-large twenty-five single-member districts. Heretofore, all of the, I don’t know if we had seven or eight or ten single-member districts in the county, or in the city, but they were all nominated at-large even though they had to come from a district. UniGov made it possible for only the district to choose their own member of the Council. Major change. At the time... UniGov has been criticized that its intent was to bring in the suburbs into the city and make it possible for people who lived in the suburbs at the time to vote for the Mayor of Indianapolis, likely more Republican than Democrat. And was this an effort to dilute the African American vote, or to dilute the Democrat vote?

Scarpino:         You’re right, that criticism... I mean I think it’s diminished, you know, as the original people involved have sort of aged out, but it was certainly alive and well when I moved to Indianapolis in 1986.

Morris:             And if you had a group of folks together, maybe a group of academics, they would still raise that issue. I was in the Mayor’s Office. The law had been written by the best attorneys in town from the five major law firms: Baker & Daniels, Ice-Miller, Barnes & Thornburg and two others, Bowes-McKinney, and the fifth one... I mean, the best, bright lawyers wrote this with some political input, political input meaning legislators who had to carry it. There was very little discussion at the time about, is this an effort to dilute the Democrat vote? Now, there was some, and there were some African Americans that were against it for this reason, and maybe other reasons. There were some far-right conservative people who said, “Well, this is centralized government, this is big government.” I think there were even some who said, “Well, this is tantamount to turning it over to Moscow,” or some damn thing like that.

Scarpino:         I’ve heard that.

Morris:             Yeah. But there were as many African Americans for this as there were, I mean, I don’t know the proportions, but, there was this notion of choosing our own Council members as opposed to having it all controlled by downtown politicians. I remember, it was almost I don’t want to say terrifying, but these requests would come in from a church group, “Would somebody come speak to our Sunday School class on Sunday morning and talk about UniGov?” And Dick said, “Well, Jim, would you go do this?” And I did. And it was, you became a fast learner. But, the first time he put me out there doing that, I was not very comfortable or prepared. We used the problems of Eagle Creek Park as an example. Who was responsible for the public safety? Who was responsible for transportation? Who was responsible for zoning? And it was unclear until UniGov came along to say who was responsible. The Parks Department had its own police department. So, Eagle Creek Park, which at the time was the largest city park in the country, although it was outside the city limits, the old city limits, became a model or a paradigm, or, I don’t know what the word is, but an example of why we needed to get organized to manage this asset.

Scarpino:         And it was a huge asset.

Morris:             A huge asset.

Scarpino:         And it’s still there on the northwest side of the city, heavily used.

Morris:             Wonderfully used.

Scarpino:         What role did you play in persuading the State Legislature to pass that legislation, UniGov?

Morris:             Well, we had very good Marion County legislators, and I think nearly all of them voted for it. There was a lady state senator by the name of Senator Joan Gubbins, very, very conservative, she may not have been for it. Statewide, most of the Democrats opposed it for what we’ve just been talking about. The Democrats in South Bend had been advocates for doing something like this in South Bend, St. Joe County, so they voted for it. But my job was to arrange for every legislator, in groups of three or four or five, to have lunch with Dick Lugar during the session. And we did all of them at American Fletcher National Bank, and we got the bank dining room. And we invited every legislator to come have a small lunch with the mayor to talk about why this was good for the city, and why what was good for the city was good for the state. It transformed the reputation, the economic dynamism, the viability of our city, and the nine-county area now is the heart of the economy of the State of Indiana.

Scarpino:         In order to get this through the legislature, because as you mentioned most of the Marion County delegation was going to support you, you had to persuade the rest of the State Senate in the House to go along with this. And, so, Richard Lugar met with those folks, more than a hundred, right?

Morris:             A hundred and fifty.

Scarpino:         I was trying to do it in my head while I’m talking to you...

Morris:             Right... fifty plus a hundred... now they all didn’t come.

Scarpino:         In small groups...

Morris:             Yeah.

Scarpino:         Most of them...

Morris:             Most of them came, and he was a thoroughly decent person, very cordial, but he wasn’t… small talk was not his forte either. We could talk about that forever, but... this became quite a deal. Doc Bowen was the speaker of the House, and he was from Bremen, Indiana.

Scarpino:         His first name was...?

Morris:             Otis. Good guy, medical doctor, became the Secretary of Health and Human Services for Reagan. But there were, as I say, far right-wing Republicans who weren’t for this, and they were giving him the business. We had a young guy by the name of Bob Beckman, who was the mayor’s press secretary, smart guy. It became very… it was heated, intense, and Beckman said, “Well, everybody wants UniGov,” and he gave out the speaker’s private phone number, Doc Bowen’s private number, and he said, “You folks, you call Doc Bowen and you tell him that this is what he ought to do.” And, of course, the phone calls that came in were from people who weren’t so happy about UniGov. Doc Bowen, to his credit, and, I don’t recall exactly what the relationship with Keith Bulen and Doc Bowen was, I just don’t remember that, but it was probably a little testy now and then. But Doc Bowen, to his credit, he could’ve stopped UniGov, period, but he let it go forward, he supported it. It was an amusing, oh not so funny over time, but he was a perfectly honorable man, a very good politician. Of course, he was elected governor twice, very popular and good guy. So, there were little footnotes like that, that made getting it done… Quickly after it was enacted, we filed a lawsuit in federal court, it was called a ‘friendly lawsuit,’ to raise all the issues that could be controversial, and so we controlled the lawsuit so that the lawsuit resolved all the potential legal issues. Then there were not legal...

Scarpino:         So, the administration launched a pre-emptive lawsuit to try to neutralize issues that you thought could raise problems.

Morris:             To resolve... but we had the same brilliant lawyers like Chuck Whistler and Harry Ice and others who put all that together. And the Chamber of Commerce was effective, and the Chamber was very supportive. These same people that reorganized the Republican Party were effective leaders of the Chamber. The Chamber was led by a guy, I think, Carl Dortch was there at the time. Carl was sort of a transition. His predecessor would have been one of those absolutely opposed to any federal money coming here for housing or anything. But the Lugar years were transformative for the business community.

Scarpino:         And the city.

Morris:             And the city, no question.

Scarpino:         I’m going to move on from UniGov, but there are two things I want to ask you before I do that. One is, I read an oral history interview done years ago with John Krauss, and I was particularly interested in what he had to say about implementing UniGov. In that section of the oral history interview, he described you as UniGov’s peacemaker. Do you think that’s an accurate characterization?

Morris:             I don’t know. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about all this for a long time. There were lots of issues, and our philosophy, Dick’s philosophy, was, ‘Let’s get this done. Let’s get as much of it done as we can get done. And let’s not let...’ what’s the saying, don’t let the great be the enemy of the good? We excluded schools. We did not try to merge the sheriff and the police department. And we didn’t try to merge the volunteer fire departments with the Indianapolis Fire Department. Now, subsequently, many of the fire departments have been brought in, and there’s a different relationship with the police and the sheriff’s office. But, you only paid property taxes for those services you received. So, if you didn’t receive X services from the Sheriff’s Department, you didn’t pay for them. But, then there were issues of personnel, of who got what job. I probably helped worked through a good bit of that.

Scarpino:         That’s fine. In the time that we’ve got left, I want to talk to you about IUPUI. Are you up for that?

Morris:             Yeah.

Scarpino:         Okay, so it’s another topic related to improving the city of Indianapolis in the Lugar Administration. Richard Lugar favored the creation of a university in downtown Indianapolis.  He worked with community and political leaders and the presidents of Indiana University and Purdue University, and his goal was to establish a downtown university. And what ultimately happened was that IU and Purdue agreed to merge extension programs that they already had in the city. In 1969, the Trustees of IU agreed to combine the programs they had in Indianapolis, and Purdue did the same thing. As a member of the mayor’s staff, did you play any role, or play a role in the establishment of IUPUI?

Morris:             Well, I don’t know. This was very important to Dick Lugar, very important to the city. He and I... maybe I kidded you about this before, but we used to say, “there’s no great city in the world without a great university.” And I don’t know whether I said it or he said it, but we gave him credit for it. And if I said it, I would have been inspired to say it because of him. IUPUI was, I think, about fourteen-hundred-fifty pieces of real estate were purchased to combine the campus, to make the campus possible. I don’t believe eminent domain was ever used. There may have been two or three, but I don’t believe so. Now, the threat was probably always there, but we had good support from the legislature. Larry Borst was very helpful, and he was chairman, and Maury Mills, they were chairmen of Budget and Finance. Larry Borst always dreamed of IUPUI being called the University of Indianapolis. And Gene Sease, he called me one morning about nine-thirty, ten o’clock, he said, “Jim, later today I’m going to rename Indiana Central University, the University of Indianapolis.” And Larry Borst to his dying day never got over that.

Scarpino:         He did launch a pre-emptive strike, didn’t he, to get that name?

Morris:             He did. He got it done. I’m sure I was involved in a hundred ways of helping, and sort of reflecting the mayor’s position on things. And I was a Trustee of IU for fifteen years and worked very hard to move all that forward. Still working on it today. IU, as you know, is the administrative manager of the campus right now. The Purdue faculty get an IU paycheck. But Purdue grads get a Purdue degree. The campus, I was trying to think, the campus in Fort Wayne was maybe always managed by Purdue. But, then the IU campus in Fort Wayne was an extension for a time of the IUPUI campus, as is the extension in Columbus, it’s only architecture there. In the middle of all this comes along this new model of medical education where, instead of starting another medical school somewhere, you can get your, then, first two years, and now all four years, got about six or eight places around the state – Terre Haute, Ball State, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Gary. I don’t know if Richmond and New Albany have that. Evansville now has that. That was very creative. You know, there was, I mean the politics of this... the people in Bloomington were unhappy, they felt this was going to dilute the resources coming to Bloomington. There were people here who wanted it to be completely independent right off the bat. And the notion that you could earn an IU or Purdue degree here made the degree more valuable than the University of Central Indiana or whatever. But the last forty years, two-hundred-sixty-, two-hundred-eighty-thousand degrees have been awarded. And most of those young people have stayed in the state of Indiana. IUPUI now has the largest research budget in the state, more than Notre Dame, Purdue or Bloomington, primarily because of the medical school. The Herron School was brought in. Obviously, the medical school, largest medical school in the country, largest nursing school, largest dental school in the country. There was a time when the Indianapolis law firms would never even consider interviewing a graduate of the IUPUI Law School. Now they clamor to get...

Scarpino:         Stand in line...

Morris:             Stand in line, exactly. There are pieces at IUPUI, the Lilly School of Philanthropy is as fine a program as there is in the country. The faculty, the liberal arts faculty is very good. The Kelley programs are very good. And, you know, Purdue has several thousand graduates each year in science, engineering, technology, so this has been a very good thing. I’m in favor of this sort of new, you know, what’s been suggested now, I think bringing more… they’re hopeful that more Purdue engineering students will come here. Purdue is not able to... the number of applicants Purdue has in engineering and science and technology has just exploded, and this will enable them to take more students. The same with Kelley. So, the potential to have really one of the great urban universities in the world is here. It’s exciting.

Scarpino:         Do you think that Richard Lugar had that in mind?

Morris:             Yeah, I do. I think he knew that if this was going to be a great city, we had to have a great university. I mean, if Eli Lilly and Company, which you could not overstate the importance, it touches every Hoosier every day, it has to have graduate education. You know, they speak fifteen languages at the Lilly headquarters. You’ve got students from all over the world now. There are a lot of footnotes, but he knew how important this was. Now, whether he grasped the entire magnitude of the opportunity and the need, the business community knows how important this is. I think they also don’t know exactly how to help get it there. And the politics of people that live in Seymour or living in Kentland, Indiana, they go, “well, Indianapolis gets everything.” And of course that's nonsense. You know we’re at the bottom of the distribution of highway funds, and compared to what we generate, and this is really important.

Scarpino:         In 1972, Mayor Lugar used a combination of public and private money to fund the renovation of the City Market in the downtown. I understand that Eli Lilly made a substantial gift to the city to help fund the renovation. Did you play a role in the negotiations that led up to the funding and renovation of the City Market?

Morris:             Yes, this is just a great story. When Dick was elected in 1967, there was a remarkable man by the name of Frank Murray. Frank Murray had been president of the Indiana Taxpayers Association. He was quite a man, quite a guy. He lived at about 3700 Pennsylvania, one of those big old square houses, and I spent a lot of time with him in 1967. He was for Lugar. But he had stopped every bond issue. He had the ability to go out and get a petition signed. So, Dick, masterful, gave him the job ‘market master.’

Scarpino:         Of City Market?

Morris:             And he became the head of the City Market. And he became as passionate about that as he was about stopping bond issues. He was a great, in the tradition of William Jennings Bryant, great orator, just talked. We were thinking about things to do with the magnificent catacombs under the City Market. Dealing with the tenants, stand-holders of the City Market, a very independent group, and they really would rather be left alone. And yet, if the slightest leak in the roof or whatever, they would be the first to be very unhappy. It was also the time that the train station, do we renovate that or...

Scarpino:         Union Station in downtown?

Morris:             Union Station, yes. Andy Jacobs had always been strongly opposed to that. So, Dick Lugar made an appointment with Mr. Lilly to go down and see him to ask for help on some of this. And Mr. Lilly had a great interest in historical landmarks, a wonderful human being. Dick had an appointment with him at nine o’clock in the morning. And Dick arrives precisely at nine o’clock. And, so I’m told, Mr. Lilly was overwhelmed, impressed, surprised that a politician would show up on time. So, Mr. Lilly, I don’t remember, I should, whether it came from the Endowment or him personally, but he gave five-million dollars to restore the City Market. On that, that moved forward, and then that became a part of the… one of the big decisions that we made was to build Market Square Arena. I remember going into the mayor’s office one morning about ten o’clock, stopping on the way to bring John Walls with me, and I said, “Dick, someday somebody’s going to build a new arena in our city. Either you’re going to do it and get it done, or somebody else will do it.” Dick Lugar loved the Indiana high school basketball tournament. When he was at Shortridge, he was a stringer for the Indianapolis Star for Bob Collins, and he was a stringer covering high school basketball games. He played on the basketball team at Oxford, at Pembroke College. So, he decided to build the Market Square Arena.

Scarpino:         That was your idea, or you encouraged him to move in that direction.

Morris:             I wouldn’t say... yeah, I strongly encouraged him. I don’t want the credit for it, but I strongly encouraged him. I said, “Hey, if we’re going to do this, then let’s get on with it, or we’re not.” And he said, “Okay.” But the high school basketball tournament finals had been moved to West Lafayette or Bloomington because Hinkle wasn’t big enough.

Scarpino:         Hinkle Fieldhouse on the Butler campus.

Morris:             Yes. And, so, he badly wanted the high school tournament to be played in the state capitol. He was also very interested in the Pacers. But I do believe, at the end of the day, the high school tournament was as important, if not more so, than the Pacers.

Scarpino:         And they were playing in the Coliseum up at the fairgrounds, which was not a palace.

Morris:             That’s correct. And it seated eight- or nine-thousand, and Market Square seated seventeen-thousand-five-hundred and was about two-hundred-seventy-five thousand square feet. Our building is eight-hundred-seventy-five-thousand square feet. So, this was paid for in large part by federal revenue-sharing. The deal was, it would be connected to the City Market, and the Gold Building on the northwest corner would be built. And then on the northeast corner there was to be a hotel. And it was sort of the precursor of tax-increment financing. The northeast corner was never built. It’s now been built, but we were able to... we owned a good bit of the land, so there was very little land cost. We bridged the street, so we didn’t have to pay for the air costs there. And then we connected into the City Market. I don’t think that was ever really effective...

Scarpino:         The connection to City Market...

Morris:             Yes. I could be wrong. But that brought the Pacers and all the entertainment, hundreds of events downtown. So, the Market gets improved, but the Market is a very different place than it was then. There were lots of stand-holders then. Big decision to move that downtown.

Scarpino:         To move the Pacers downtown to Market Square Arena.

Morris:             To build Market Square, yeah.

Scarpino:         What made it a big decision?

Morris:             Well, I mean, the downtown is the most important part of any community. When you go anywhere and travel, your image and impression of the city is based on what you see in the downtown.

Scarpino:         Right.

Morris:             And this suddenly brought many more people downtown to enjoy events. We had no restaurants to speak of, a couple. We had no hotels. And now, the last couple of years, USA Today has said that Indianapolis is the most important convention city in America. Eighty-one thousand people employed in the hotel industry and entertainment.

Scarpino:         Just so we get this in here for somebody who uses this, ground was broken for Market Square in ’71. It opened in September of ’74. It cost about twenty-three million dollars.

Morris:             About twenty-three million.

Scarpino:         The city contributed about sixteen million of that?

Morris:             And I think that came from revenue sharing, didn’t it?

Scarpino:         I believe so. When Market Square opened, it was the fifth largest sports arena in the United States. You mentioned it hosted the men’s college Final Four in 1980, and then all kinds of concerts and cultural activities and circuses. I went to the rodeo there when I first moved to Indianapolis...

Morris:             Elvis gave his last performance there.

Scarpino:         Were you there?

Morris:             No.

Scarpino:         Just curious. We’ve been going for a while. I’m having trouble reading this.... right at two hours. Do you want to stop at this point?

Morris:             How much more do we have?

Scarpino:         I wanted to talk to you… I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you about Market Square, then I want to talk to you about Lilly Endowment.

Morris:             Why don’t we finish the Market Square and save the Lilly Endowment for later.

Scarpino:         And then next time we get together for a final time, I want to talk to you about some of your, not just Lilly Endowment, but World Food and things like that.

Morris:             Okay.

Scarpino:         You talked about where the land came from. How would you assess the significance in terms of Lugar’s plan to revitalize the downtown and, of course, Mayor Hudnut after him, and the significance of building Market Square Arena in terms of its impact on improving downtown Indianapolis?

Morris:             You could not overstate the importance of it. It brought the major entertainment asset to the heart of the downtown. It led to the Gold Building being built. It was helpful to the City Market. It made a statement. This is very important; 465 ring-road, fifty- or sixty-mile circumference. Everybody, not everybody, but many people wanted to build Market Square, Lucas Oil, the Zoo, all sorts of things that have been built in the downtown, to build it on around the perimeter. And we said, “No, we’re going to build it downtown where it belongs to everyone.” And whether you live in Greenfield, Plainfield, Carmel, Greenfield, it’s... you know, downtown is the most important neighborhood of any city. We’re a city of four- or five-hundred different neighborhoods, but the downtown is the one neighborhood that belongs to everyone. It’s where we come together in the community. It’s the symbolism of the vitality. It’ the heart of the tax base. When the Pacers or the Colts play, everybody, wherever you live, whether you’re black, white, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat, you want the Pacers, the Colts, the Indians to do well. And, so, this decision first to do the Hilton, and then to do the Hyatt, then to do the City Market, and then to do Market Square – which came first, I think – it made a statement. It said, “We’re going to be a city with a great center, a great core, a great downtown, and we’re going to do it in such a way that it belongs to everyone.” And so, it was the core, the beginning, the genesis of what we are today.

Scarpino:         Well, and I’m going to add just for somebody using this, that Market Square was closed in 1999. The Pacers moved to what was then Conseco and it is now Gainbridge Fieldhouse, and it was demolished in 2001, so it had a good life, and it was then replaced by something else.

Morris:             It had a great life. It was something we didn’t have before. We had the Coliseum, not bad, and people have wonderful memories of the Coliseum. It’s sort of like the Hoosier Dome; we built the Hoosier Dome for sixty-million dollars. You couldn’t do that today for three billion. So, the return on investment, it was quickly fully depreciated. Now, it wasn’t the most… I mean, it didn’t have good concessions, it did not have suites, the aisles were pretty narrow. But Sinatra entertained there. Elvis entertained there. The Symphony entertained there. The Circus. Disney On Ice. The high school tournaments, basketball, wrestling, boys and girls. The Pacers. The Ice played there, the hockey team. So, I mean, it was... Birch Bayh used to say that the only thing people in Washington agreed on were the Redskins. And, you know, this had some of the same impact. And we did it. Dick Lugar, I remember him saying, “... and not one penny more...”

Scarpino:         For Market Square...

Morris:             Yes. Bill Spencer did a lot of the work, as did Bob Kennedy, who became head of the Department of Metropolitan Development. Bill Spencer was head of the Parks Department and had been city controller. They did a lot of the work. Bud Tucker agreed to build the Gold Building. He also agreed to do the hotel, which as I said, did not get done. But the theory was that the tax revenues from the other investments downtown would cover the cost so there would never be an expense to the taxpayer for Market Square, and I think that worked.

Scarpino:         It eventually paid for itself.

Morris:             Paid for itself.

Scarpino:         I understand that you had some health problems, you left the Mayor’s Office in 1973, and maybe we could pick up there next time. But while I’ve still got the recorder on, I want to thank you on behalf of myself and the Tobias Center for one more time being kind enough to open your home and your table and sit and talk to me about your very interesting life.

Morris:             You’ve helped me recall things that I hadn’t thought about for a long time, so, like most things, you get more good out of it than you contribute.

Scarpino:         Well, it’s certainly been my pleasure, and I will turn this off.

Scarpino:         As I said when the recorders were off, I’m going to read a short statement, and then one more time I’m going to ask your permission to do these things, and then we’ll get into the interview.

Today is March 22^nd, 2023. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center also at IUPUI. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing Mr. James Morris at his home located in Indianapolis. This interview is the third and final recording session with Mr. Morris; the first recording session took place on December 6^th, 2022, and the second on January 5, 2023. All of the recording sessions with James Morris are part of a larger oral history project undertaken by the Tobias Leadership Center. There is a biographical overview of Mr. Morris’s career at the beginning of the first interview. We will also place his resume with the audio and transcription in the IUPUI Archives and Special Collections.

                        I would like to ask your permission to do the following: to record this interview; to have the interview transcribed; and then to place the audio and the transcription in the Tobias Center and in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, where all or part of the audio and transcription may be posted to those organizations’ websites. And both organizations may also make the audio and transcription available to patrons. Can I have your permission for those things?

Morris:             Yes.

Scarpino:         Thank you very much. Again, like I said when the recorder was off, I have two follow-up questions from our last conversation and then we’re going to move on. One of the topics that we addressed in some depth in the second recording session was the founding and development of IUPUI. And I will remind the users of this interview that you are a graduate of Indiana University, Bloomington, and have remained engaged with both IU and IUPUI. You’ve been recognized many times for your service to IU and to IUPUI, so let me mention some examples. You were given the Bicentennial Medal in 2019; Partners in Philanthropy in 2011; the Bepko Medal presented by IUPUI Academy in 2007; Distinguished Alumni Award, Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences 2005; IUPUI Spirit of Philanthropy Awards twice, in 1995 and 2003; Kelley School of Business Alumni Fellows 2001; and there are more, but just to give an idea of the range. The question is, as I thought about these, as you think about your really long association with IU and IUPUI, are there are any of those awards and recognitions that really make you proud, that you really feel recognized something that you feel good about?

Morris:             Well, yes, there are. I’ve never thought about that before, but each of them is significant. I love Indiana University, statewide, Bloomington, Indianapolis. I had the privilege of serving as a trustee for fifteen years. Loved every minute of it. Indiana University is the single most important institution in the state of Indiana. It touches every Hoosier, every day of every Hoosier’s life. Remarkable. Nearly seven hundred thousand living alumni. IUPUI, something in the neighborhood of two-hundred-eighty-thousand degrees have been awarded since the campus was started forty-plus years ago. And nearly all of those folks have stayed in the state of Indiana or central Indiana. Largest medical school in the country. Same with nursing and dentistry. I can go on forever, but this place is remarkable. And I’m optimistic that its best days are ahead. The commitment of the university leadership to cause what will become IU Indianapolis as one of the really great urban metropolitan universities in the world, is powerful. I believe that will happen. I never know what to think about receiving recognition. On the one hand, it’s wonderful, probably rarely deserved to the degree of which the intensity comes with its presentation. And for every award that anyone receives there are probably ten thousand more that deserve it as much. And I’m not unduly humble, but sometimes it’s embarrassing. But receiving the Distinguished Alumni Service Award was special. My father-in-law had received it. When I was on the campus, I was I believe president of the Student Senate, and we always had our meetings in the Distinguished Alumni Service Award recipients’ room. And each recipient had a very handsome pencil sketch made of their face and shoulders. I used to sit in that room and marvel at the folks who had been so honored for their service to IU. So, then to be included in that was special. Once again, hundreds if not thousands would have been equally, if not more deserving, and I mean that. Secondly, to receive the award in the name of Herman Wells was so wonderful. I loved Herman Wells. I admire him so much. He’s one of a half-a-dozen great Hoosiers of the last hundred years. His whole life was IU and the state of Indiana. He came from a small town, Jamestown, Indiana. Didn’t have an earned doctorate. Was dean in the Business School. And he gets the credit for building the university. Others before and after have been very good, but Herman Wells had a passion for young people in the state of Indiana. He built the auditorium. The first time the Metropolitan Opera from New York ever left New York City to perform, he built the auditorium so kids from Indiana would have a chance to hear the Metropolitan Opera sing. He gets credit for just one thing after another. The nicest, most jovial man, and he saw his... I’ve talked about leadership, seeing your opportunity in its largest context, and if there ever was a better example of that, of seeing what the opportunity would be to build a great university and how you could touch so many lives, and he was a brilliant man. And the third honor, I really wish you hadn’t listed all of these, to be truthful.

Scarpino:         There are more, actually.

Morris:             You do nice to do so. To receive the Bepko Medal, essentially presented by the IUPUI faculty, that meant a lot to me. I love spending time with faculty in Bloomington and Indianapolis. I’ll be eighty shortly. My eyesight is not good, and I can’t drive. And I miss not spending more time in Bloomington, especially, where I have so many friends and so many extraordinary faculty. And the same with IUPUI, I mean, remarkable people. That is what is so great about a university; this collection of brain power that is welcoming and generally eager to be engaged and to have time with students and young people. There’s nothing like a college campus, the college experience. It’s such a precious opportunity. You know, I’ve been consumed with the idea over the years of, how does an institution like IU, and the same could be said for many others, convey the power, the significance, the importance of the opportunity it offers young people? How can it be sure that the message is conveyed, folks, make the most of every day, twenty-four seven, to be in this environment and to have the privilege of talking to incredibly bright, experienced, wise people in almost every subject imaginable and to do it with other young people, students from all over the world. It is the place where you get... Lincoln said, “I will study hard and prepare myself, and someday my chance will come.” I mean, this is, what a gift? And what a commitment of our country to make these incredible institutions of higher education available to young people who have made the commitment to be prepared to take advantage of it. In society, we have to remove, set aside every barrier that makes it difficult for a young person to go to the university. But the fact of the matter at IUPUI, or any of the IU campuses, any student that has been reasonably well prepared for the college experience, there is a way for it to happen. And that’s part of the genius of America. But, so, I can ramble on forever, and as my wife says, I usually do.

Scarpino:         Well, I’m going to ask you another follow-up. We talked at length again about your service in the office of Mayor Richard Lugar, which stopped in 1973. But the question that I didn’t ask you that I want to ask you now is, from all the years you spent in Mayor Lugar’s office in various capacities, what did you learn, or what did you experience that influenced the rest of your career? What did you take away from that?

Morris:             Your question deserves the most thoughtful answer I can possibly provide, and probably something I ought to take a day to write an essay on. Dick Lugar was the most incredible person; brilliant, hard-working, thoughtful, humble, honorable, decent. He cared deeply about this city. He cared deeply about most things that he was a part of, called to lead, to help. Dick Lugar served on the School Board. He was committed to the well-being of young people, but especially those that were vulnerable and at risk. He was one of the incorporators of the Community Action Against Poverty program. He changed dramatically the view of some of Indianapolis’ leadership about accepting federal aid. He worked hard to bring the federal aid school lunch program to IPS. He brought the Model Cities Program to the city. He was the leader of government reform in terms of merging the city of eighty square miles with Marion County of four-hundred-and-two square miles, and producing something called Unified Government, nicknamed UniGov, the most significant government reorganization in the United States for the last fifty years that wasn’t inspired by corruption. This was an effort to bring all of the citizens of the area, who in reality were a part of Indianapolis, to bring them together in one community, and to restructure government. Not perfect, it had a lot of things that could’ve been done differently, but it was quite remarkable. I always said about Dick Lugar, that he would rather spend his time with five students than five bank presidents. Not disparaging the bank presidents, but when he was… you know we started the first intern program, we had seven brilliant...

Scarpino:         In the Mayor’s Office...

Morris:             In the Mayor’s Office, seven brilliant students come one summer. It didn’t make any difference if they were Republican or Democrat or where they went to school, but he was serious about it. He loved spending time with young people. He did the same in the Senate. He spent a couple of hours every week with his interns, and knew them, and cared about them. The people that worked for Dick Lugar over the years were, and are, intensely loyal to the man. He would come in every Monday morning with a list of things that he had seen over the weekend, whether there was a junk car or an abandoned home or trash. He was very focused on the real job of being mayor, but he also saw the opportunity of greatness and high aspirations and expectations for Indianapolis. He was a very frugal, prudent, conservative fiscally individual, he would not waste a penny. He loved the Indiana High School Basketball Tournament. We built Market Square Arena in large part for the Pacers to come from the State Fair to the downtown. But it broke his heart when the high school basketball tournament was no longer played at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. He had an enormous commitment to the strength of downtown Indianapolis. He was a leader in bringing IU and Purdue together on the IUPUI campus. He had an enormous commitment to young people. We had summer programs we called, “Upswing,” for thousands of kids during the summer where we opened up twenty-four schools and the model of the Lighted Schoolhouse Program. He brought the Model Cities Program to the city. And then he was elected president of the National League of Cities, defeating John Lindsay. I remember once President Nixon brought his Urban Affairs Cabinet to Indianapolis to meet with a group of mayors. Spiro Agnew had a major revenue-sharing conference in the City-County Building auditorium. Dick was on the board of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. We had this conference in Indianapolis, I think ’71, I think was the year, under the auspices of NATO Conference on Cities. Intensely loyal to Denison; became a Rhodes Scholar.

Scarpino:         Where he graduated in Ohio...

Morris:             He graduated from Denison, perfect A average. He and his wife, Char, were co-presidents of the student body at Denison. Both played the cello. He was an Eagle Scout, he loved scouting. He was an achiever, but he never talked about himself. So, the lessons, you know, leadership, as you know, is so often learned by listening and by watching. To watch this man do his job, he was very articulate. When he would speak, he would speak thoughtfully and would share what was on his mind. A man of deep faith. He and his brother and others founded the St. Luke’s Methodist Church. I think he could have been a clergyman, that would have been on his list of things to consider. But St. Francis said, “Preach the gospel every day and use words if necessary,” and that was who the man was. He was mayor for eight years. He did understand the value of practical politics. He knew that to have the chance to be mayor and to lead, he had to win an election. And he had great respect for political people and was respectful of the political process. But he was also, he was a very civil man, always listened to what the other side had to say. I don’t hardly ever remember anything of a mean-spirited, unkind nature coming out of his mouth. That’s not who he was. He was a really good guy, and one of my best friends for fifty-two years. When he passed away, I, along with Vice President Pence, Mitch McConnell, Mitch Daniels, and Sam Nunn, the five of us did his eulogy at St. Luke’s Church in Indianapolis. I had never thought about life without him. You couldn’t have asked for a better friend. Quite an extraordinary man.

Scarpino:         And he also modeled leadership to you.

Morris:             Well, certainly, yeah. His integrity... I learned, which is not to say I have mastered or accomplished, but he demonstrated what it meant to be a caring, thoughtful, well-prepared, serving individual. He was very thoughtful in the use of his own time. He read almost everything that came into the office, and it would come, you know, maybe a stack-full a week from the Farm Bureau or the AFLCIO or the Chamber, or who knows, but he read it all. He paid attention to it all. He was not a person that enjoyed the five o’clock just shooting the breeze for an hour. He did not waste his time. But he loved his family. He loved his farm, the family farm down in Decatur Township. So proud of his four boys. He was just, his example of high aspiration, of understanding the political system is necessary to make progress, to bring people together, and to have support and partnership mentality with people of the other party. It wasn’t perfect, but he set the standard. And he was nice to everyone. He was a kind person. So, here was this man with this gift of brain power and intellect, he was a high achiever, he was proud to be an Eagle Scout. He was proud of all the things that… he was prouder, maybe even he was grateful for the opportunity. He loved bringing members of the citywide high school choral group to the office, or the statewide all-state basketball team. He loved sort of inspiring young people. And he was, you know, he was willing to take time to talk with almost anyone. Now, I think he didn’t want to waste time, and he quickly could discern foolishness from something useful, but he was a great example, as was Herman Wells. You know, others feel the same way about Father Hesburgh at Notre Dame.

Scarpino:         There was an interesting man.

Morris:             Great man. You know, I learned a lot from Dr. Frank Lloyd at Methodist Hospital. I learned a lot from Dick Ristine. I knew Mr. Lilly, but I didn’t know him as I knew these other folks. I knew Irwin Miller, and I admired what he stood for and what he cared about.

Scarpino:         Irwin Miller from Columbus.

Morris:             From Columbus, the Cummins Engine Company, but a great man. So those were gifts.

Scarpino:         I want to talk to you about the Lilly Endowment. For the benefit of anybody who uses this in the future, in 1973 you left the Lugar Administration, you moved to Lilly Endowment where you held several positions, which I assume represented promotions between 1973 and 1989. You were Director of Community Development from 1973 to ’77; Vice President of Community Development from 1977 to ’83; Executive Vice President from 1983 to ’84; and then you were President of Lilly Endowment from 1984 to ’88. For the benefit of anybody who uses this in the future and may not even be from Indiana, can you briefly explain what the Lilly Endowment is? But, before you do, I’m going to poke your dog. I’m recording all his snoring on the thing. Is that alright? Can I see if I can get him to stop? It’s alright if he doesn’t, but I...

(PAUSE...)

Scarpino:         Can you briefly explain what the Lilly Endowment is?

Morris:             The Lilly Endowment, a remarkable family foundation created by Eli Lilly, his brother J.K. Lilly, and their father in 1937 to share their ownership in Eli Lilly and Company and creating a foundation to pursue work in the areas that they cared most about – religion, education, and community development. And since 1937 through 2023, the Lilly Endowment, unlike almost every other significant foundation in the world, has stayed very faithful to honor what the family intended for the Foundation to do. Its work in religion is unprecedent, and its work is not in an evangelical proselytizing way, but it’s to do things that strengthen the role of religion in our country and our community, to strengthen the faiths, to strengthen the preparation of their clergy leaders. The work in education has been primarily in the state of Indiana, but the Lilly Endowment is the single largest supporter of black colleges in the United States, and they’ve been steadfast to that forever. The work in community development has been focused by and large in the state of Indiana. Huge interest in the state of Indiana, in the city of Indianapolis, but a real commitment to issues related to young people, to the cultural life of the community, to building community, and to be sure that opportunities were available here; to essentially build a great, caring, inclusive city. And it today is one of the two or three largest foundations in the world. But it was motivated by a family that wanted to share their success. They were generous. They were unbelievably humble. I suspect had they been able to do what they’ve done anonymously, they would have chosen to do so. But the Lilly Endowment has made all the difference in the world in the areas I’ve described, but all the difference in Indianapolis and the state of Indiana being the places that they are. They helped create a community foundation in almost every county in the state of Indiana. Enormous commitments to private higher education, and more recently to public education, and doing its work with the most integrity, the most thoughtfulness, the most humility humanly possible. It’s an incredible place.

Scarpino:         Why did you decide to leave the Mayor’s Office and go to Lilly Endowment?

Morris:             In 1972-’73, I developed a very serious lung infection. I spent the better part of six months in and out of the hospital with a virus in the middle lobe of my right lung. Leaving Dick Lugar to go elsewhere was… I’ll never forget the day that they had a little event for me when I left. But my doctors had said, “Jim, you’ve got to slow down, you need to get this cleared up.” And, so, the Lilly Endowment, the tax laws had changed and their giving requirement by IRS regulations was altogether different. So they were in the process of building a staff, and I had worked with the endowment on a variety of programs in Indianapolis, so I had this opportunity driven by health concerns to go there. It was a very difficult decision. I mean it was an incredible opportunity to do this, but my friendship with Dick Lugar stayed the same. I always tried to be helpful and tried to... You know, I considered myself a part of his family and one of his team forever. But to go to the Endowment, it was driven by the health issue but by the opportunity.

Scarpino:         You held several different positions. I want to start by having you briefly explain what each of these entailed, and then I’m going to come back and look at some things in detail. You served as Director of Community Development for the Lilly Endowment from 1973 to ’77. What were the duties and the responsibilities of Director of Community Development? What were you supposed to be doing?

Morris:             It’s a long time ago.

Scarpino:         But that was the position that actually, that you took when you first went there.

Morris:             Yes... it was to, you know, the Lilly family had an enormous commitment to Indianapolis. My job was to work on the grant portfolio that supported things in Indianapolis. Lilly’s the largest supporter of the United Way, of the cultural activities and youth-serving agencies. But innovative programs that dealt with homelessness, with tough issues related to kids, with drug abuse, with programs for kids in the summertime. So, my job was to work on that portfolio of its work.

Scarpino:         And then in 1977 you were promoted to Vice President of Community Development, and you stayed in that position until 1983. Did that entail a change of responsibilities?

Morris:             Well, I probably continued to work on many of the same projects and program areas. By then we had a larger staff, and I would have had several colleagues working with me. And there would have been some national, some programs that had impact beyond Indianapolis that I would have been involved with.

Scarpino:         For example...

Morris:             Oh, internship programs for young people to work in local government. Housing projects/programs that might have emanated from the Ford Foundation that we would have helped elsewhere in the country. We then did have a brief couple of years with international programs; Landrum Bolling, who became president of the Endowment, had a great interest in international affairs. And I worked with a good number of NGOs, non-government organizations, that were dealing in relief and development, so I would have helped there.

Scarpino:         Then in 1983, you were promoted to Executive Vice President, and you just held the position for a year. Again, did that promotion reflect a change in your responsibilities?

Morris:             Yes. I suppose at that time I would have then had some responsibility for the work in education and religion, although, we had very able vice presidents in each of those areas. And, so it was probably more of a leadership role for the whole enterprise, and I suspect that it was a preparation step for me to become president eventually, which I did for four or five years, six years. I was always involved with Indianapolis programs, things like the Indiana Youth Institute, Center for Leadership Development, the White River State Park, the programs at IUPUI and things statewide. So, it was an expansion of responsibilities.

Scarpino:         Then, in 1984, you became president of Lilly Endowment, and you stayed there until 1988 when you left the Endowment. We’ll talk about that in a bit, but what was the job of the president of Lilly Endowment? What were you supposed to be doing as the leader, as the president?

Morris:             Well, I remember that I had some responsibility for putting in place a youth committee to coordinate our work with young people across all of the divisions of the place. The same with Indianapolis and Indiana programs. I had more responsibility for preparing the overall agenda, although the people that were responsible for religion and education and community development, you know, prepared the work. It’s a very collegial environment and we work together. We had a board chair, Tom Lake was the board chair, and he was the number one, and I guess I would have been the number two.

Scarpino:         Tom Lake was the chair of the board of directors of Lilly Endowment while you were president?

Morris:             That’s correct.

Scarpino:         Okay. Technically, in a system like that, the president works for the board. Is that right?

Morris:             Well, yes, but I also reported to Tom Lake. He was the chairman. I don’t recall if he used the CEO title or not.

Scarpino:         Now, what I want to do is to connect your work with the Lilly Endowment to the development of Indianapolis. We probably talked about this before, but beginning in the 1970s political leaders in Indianapolis really started a sustained effort to revitalize the city. Part of what they did was bring athletic teams, events and governing bodies to the city as they were looking for a way to revitalize the economy of Indianapolis and central Indiana. You and I already talked about Market Square Arena that opened downtown in 1974, but what I want to ask you about is something called the Indiana Sports Corporation, which played a huge role in developing the sports industry in the downtown. It was a not-for-profit organization founded in 1979. It was the nation’s first sports commission. And in 1979, you were Vice President of Community Development at Lilly. Did you work for the Indiana Sports Corporation in your capacity as vice president?

Morris:             Did I work?

Scarpino:         Was your Foundation at least a financial partner in their work of revitalizing Indianapolis?

Morris:             Yes. I think you have to put this in a much larger context. Indianapolis was… there were a lot of folks that were very interested in doing together what could be done to make Indianapolis a great city. We were always very effective with sort of the public-private partnership model where government, city and state, civic community and the business community worked together to cause extraordinary things to happen. And as I recall, the notion was for Indianapolis to build a great downtown, to build a great public university on the theory that no great city in the world doesn’t have a great university. And then to make Indianapolis the best city possible for children, to raise and to grow up and to have opportunities. And the notion was that if we could have those three points of focus and develop some of our strengths, could we become the most important center in the country for athletics and fitness; for health and medicine; for agriculture, food and nutrition; for education; for culture? So, we had those areas to exploit, in the best sense of the word, and to do it always with a focus on the downtown, the university, and opportunities for kids. The Sports Corporation was founded as a piece of this. The federal law as it related to amateur sports in our country had changed, and we had been the headquarters of the Amateur Athletic Union, the AAU. It moved here from New York, but the Congress, the law had said this must be broken up and that each sport must have its own national governing body. We were focused on trying to keep as many of the AAU governing bodies here as we could. Colorado Springs was the headquarters of the Olympic Committee, and they were eager to have as many go there, and other cities as well. So, the Sports Corporation was founded to bring conventions, trade shows, events, to bring headquarters, to bring facilities, and to have the best programs for young people in sports and fitness possible. It was a multipronged effort to say we want to bring the events here, the trade shows, the conventions. We want to bring the headquarters here. We want to have enormous opportunities for our kids, and we want to have great facilities. And great facilities example, the Natatorium at IUPUI, hosted lots of Olympic trials, lots of NCAA championships, lots of IHSAA championships.

Scarpino:         IH... tell us what that means...

Morris:             Indiana High School Athletic Association.

Scarpino:         Thank you.

Morris:             But if you and I wanted to go there and swim, it was also available to us. These were public facilities. And we built the Velodrome, the track and field stadium, the Natatorium, ultimately the Hoosier Dome, a rowing course at Eagle Creek Park, and others. And that led to our hosting the sports festival for the Olympic Committee, led to our hosting the Pan American Games in 1987, and something approaching five hundred national and international championships. And the economic impact grew to a point, setting of side events, to be something in the five- to six-billion-dollar range each year. The Pan American Games in 1987 was a sporting event, and it was important for our country to host it and do it well. But it also brought forty-thousand volunteers from the state of Indiana together to produce this event with a partnership mentality, and it built relationships and trust and friendships that serve the community to this very day. We had a statewide game called the White River State Park Games on the campus. Had a special commitment to the Special Olympics. But then, we created something called the Indiana Institute of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition. The cultural life of the city, you know, there’s no city our size that has the cultural assets that we have. All of this benefited the downtown, the university... The Children’s Choir was started, thirty-five-hundred kids singing today. The Metropolitan Youth Orchestra, two-hundred young people in the orchestra. But, this was a partnership mentality that, and it was all focused – everybody wanted to build most of these places, including the new zoo or the state museum or the White River Park, somewhere out around I-465. And we said, no, no, it’s going to be built downtown where it belongs to everyone, and it becomes a part of the university. And if you live in Plainfield, Greenfield, Greenwood or Carmel, you know, the downtown is the most important neighborhood of any city. It’s the one neighborhood where we come together. And, so, it was an exciting time.

Scarpino:         It prevented Indianapolis from becoming what is facetiously called the ‘donut city,’ nothing in the center and everything on the periphery.

Morris:             That’s correct. UniGov was the first step of that. And then the commitment to build a great downtown with great facilities where they could be enjoyed and shared by all with a special commitment to young people. It was brilliant.

Scarpino:         Then there is also a multiplier effect. People come down for an event, they want to eat, they want to...

Morris:             Right. I can remember when Indianapolis did not have a single hotel, maybe two or three restaurants. And today there are eighty thousand people employed in the tourism industry in our city. USA Today said it was the top convention city in America. New York Times said it was one of fifty-two places in the world everyone should visit. That’s a heck of a long way from where we started.

Scarpino:         It certainly is not ‘India-no-place.’

Morris:             That’s right.

Scarpino:         I want to ask you about a few specific projects, because this is an oral history project sponsored by Indiana University. You mentioned the IUPUI Natatorium, which opened in 1982. I looked it up, it was twenty-one-million dollars in 1982 dollars.  It’s located at the southeast corner of the intersection of New York and University Boulevard, which in 1982 was Agnes Street. And the Lilly Endowment made an important contribution. So, for anybody who doesn’t know about the Natatorium, when it was built it could hold forty-seven-hundred spectators. It had a fifty-meter pool, with eight competition lanes. It had moveable bulkhead so you could convert swimming to long course and short course. And the reason I’m saying this, there were underwater windows for coaching and cameras. In other words, it was set up for international meets and national meets, and not the IUPUI Swim Team, or the IU Swim Team. There were Olympic Diving Trials there in 1984, ’88 and ’92, Olympic Swimming Trials in 1996 and 2000. So, here’s the question: Why did the Lilly Endowment elect to give funding for such a world class swimming and diving facility on a campus of an emerging and little-known university on the edge of Indianapolis?

Morris:             It was a partnership of resources from the state of Indiana, from the Economic Development Administration and the U.S. Department of Congress, and other private funding sources including the Lilly Endowment in the community. And the objective was, Indianapolis had always had a great swimming tradition. Indiana University had had great swimming and diving. Doc Counsilman had the same success as Johnny Wooden had at UCLA in basketball. But this was to be an asset for the downtown, an asset for the university, an economic development investment, an opportunity for young people from here to enjoy and benefit from the facility. There were actually two fifty-meter pools and a diving tank. The fifty-meter pool, which is the practice pool, is the one that had the hydraulic jacks; you could raise the floor up level with the deck. And people at the med school who had arthritis or rheumatism or handicapped could be in a wheelchair and have it wheeled into the raised floor at the deck level, have it lowered, and they could enjoy therapeutic activities. This was something that benefited everyone. And it was a great gift to IUPUI and a great gift to the city. I was never sure that IUPUI fully appreciated what had been given to them. I was never certain that IUPUI saw it as the asset that it was, or fully appreciated the opportunity it represented, or cared for it as it would care for something else that it might have considered more fundamental to the university. But we ultimately built the Carroll Track Stadium, which was the finest track stadium in the country.

Scarpino:         Also opened in 1982.

Morris:             Yeah. These helped do the sports festival. It helped do the Indiana State White River Park Games. It did the Pan American Games. But we used to have the annual track meet; Indianapolis was the headquarters of track and field. And every year they had the meet with the Soviet team. The Olympic Trials in ’84 were there, maybe the greatest track meet in the history of the sport. People on the faculty at IUPUI could run there at noon. Classes were held there. It could be used for soccer and other sports. I doubt that there has ever been a more thoughtful multi-purpose planned program for facilities that was the case with the Natatorium, the track stadium. And on the edge of the White River State Park, this led to the building of the National Institute of Fitness and Sport, which was, you know, it was a great issue in our country about the health and well-being of young people. Indiana doesn’t do very well in some of these statistics. And it was intended to be an asset for the med school for preventative health care, but to be a center of research for the country on how to improve the health, wellness and fitness of young people. It was done with a partnership, but the university had a change in presidential leadership and a new president came along and wasn’t quite as interested in it as the old president was. But you had the national governing bodies, ultimately the NCAA and the National High School Federation. the American College of Sports Medicine, plus track and field, football, gymnastics. We had a couple more that we lost, we lost rowing, and we lost synchronized swimming. I think U.S. Diving is still on the campus. The community asset, the community building asset, the building of the campus, the building of the downtown, the building of the convention business, that led to hotels and restaurants and tens of thousands of people being employed. And, to say nothing, you know... the networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, ESPN used to say they spent more time televising from Indianapolis than any city in the country. And it changed the reputation of our city. And it changed the sense of pride and confidence and esteem which people had who lived here. It began the process, which still needs to be pursued, of establishing, strengthening the community, the state’s pride in IUPUI as a great university. I mean, this did a lot of things. We’d had the tennis stadium there for many years. And then we built the Conference Center and the hotel...

Scarpino:         On the IUPUI campus...

Morris:             On the IUPUI campus. These were unusual things to do, although most universities, great universities have conference centers. We lost the tennis stadium. Once again, it was never properly cared for, and I’m not sure anybody ever figured out who actually owned it, therefore, no one took care of it. But it’s a shame that that was lost. That was one of the top two or three tennis events in the world.

Scarpino:         There were some great meets there.

Morris:             Yeah. People should have taken better care of it and kept it going. It’s a real loss that we don’t have it now.

Scarpino:         1983, the U.S.-Russia joint track meet in Indianapolis, just for context, joint track meets took place between the two countries from 1958 to 1985. In 1983, the Cold War was still on, and the Berlin Wall didn’t come down until ’89, ’90, the Soviet Union didn’t break up until 1991. So, you were at the Lilly Endowment as Vice President of Community Development when this joint meet took place. Did the Lilly Endowment play any role in that? We’re talking about bringing the Soviet Union to Indianapolis.

Morris:             Once again, I think the context was to bring important things; events, conferences, trade shows, organizations to be headquartered here and to take place here. I don’t think there was any intent to try to solve the Cold War problem by having a...

Scarpino:         I was wondering more about the obstacle of bringing a Communist country to Indianapolis.

Morris:             I don’t think there was an obstacle. USA Track and Field at the time was led by Ollan Cassell, and he was a leader in track and field in the world. And the US-Soviet track meet was a big deal. To have it here, we had the World Indoor Track and Field Championships at the Convention Center, but this was a big deal to bring this here. And it went very well, well attended, people were thrilled to have it here. There was no anti-Soviet or anti-Russian hostility expressed. I don’t remember anybody complaining that we were bringing the Russian Communists to Indianapolis. I think it was, you know... under-girding all of this are the sports, in large part. Sports brings people together. Black, white, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat, suburbanite, urbanite, you want the Pacers, the Colts, the Fever, the Indians, the Fuel, the Eleven to do well. The principles of the Olympic movement say, the young people in the world ought to have a chance every couple of years to get together to compete, to get better, to exhibit fair play, good sportsmanship, to get to know each other and to respect each other, and to play according to the rules which they’ve all agreed on in the first place. And there aren’t many things that bring the world together. And right now, you know, eventually we didn’t go to Moscow, they didn’t go to Los Angeles. We have to work hard at finding those things that bring us together that we have in common. In fact, humanity has a hell of a lot more in common than those artificial things that we’ve created to separate us. Having the Pan Am Games with thirty, forty countries here, with the World Basketball Championships, the World Gymnastics Championships, the Indoor Track Championships, lots of several-country meets. We had the regional Volleyball Championships here from this hemisphere. I mean, this did begin to give Indianapolis... Eli Lilly and Company today, they speak fifty-eight languages in the corporate offices, and it’s important that Eli Lilly and Company attract the best young scientists in the world. And the fact that we’ve had these things here, that people around the world enjoyed them, heard about them, watched them on television, that becomes for Indianapolis and Indiana an asset in terms of our attracting talent and winning the competition. The same would be true for the Cummins Engine Company. We’re one of the exporters of agricultural products in the world everywhere. This all ties together. And I think it was the beginning of, or it was a step forward in enhancing the reputation of our city and state as a place in the world.

Scarpino:         I’m going to point out, obviously, that Lilly Endowment was involved in much more than sports in Indianapolis while you were there. Before I move on to another subject, do you want to mention any of the work that you were involved with other than sports?

Morris:             Yeah, well, exactly. The investment the Lilly Endowment made in programs for young people and programs for higher education, you know, there’s not a city our size that has the world’s best Children’s Museum. I’ve said before that we’re the smallest city in America with a full-time, eighty-six-member symphony orchestra. The Eiteljorg is one of the two or three best Western museums in the country. The Indiana Repertory Theatre. The Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Children’s Choir. We’re now the headquarters of the American Marching Bands, the American Percussion Association. The National Marching Bands competition is held here every year. MacAllister Awards for opera competition. The World Violin Championships...

Scarpino:         That’s P.E. MacAllister...

Morris:             Yeah, P.E. The top competition for violin is here. I could go on forever, but Indiana Black Expo. It so happens that today the Indianapolis Star devotes half its pages to sports, and sports gets a lot of attention. It gets a lot of attention. But the Endowment was not a sports foundation. It saw this as a piece of the community development strategy to strengthen the economy, to strengthen the reputation, to strengthen the excitement, the attractiveness of Indianapolis for the best young faculty at IUPUI to want to come here because they were coming to a city, or the med school, a city that was exciting and dynamic. And, by the way, it was a place where everyone could help put on the program, do it together. I said it earlier, but forty-thousand people did the Pan American Games. What value can you put on a community enterprise where forty thousand people of every one of the dualisms of our time come together to do something together in community? And, you know, what, forty-five years later, forty-six years later, those relationships are still... and that built the city’s reputation as a place that could do Final Fours, that could do the Super Bowl, that could do Olympic Trials, that could have an NFL football team. But, at the Pan American Games, the symphony played at the opening ceremonies. So, you just have to struggle and force yourself to see these things in their largest context.

Scarpino:         If you think back to, say, your first couple of years in Mayor Lugar’s office, you think about the changes that have taken place in the city since then, how would you assess the impact of those changes?

Morris:             I think they’ve been terrific. But, I mean, the downtown is a much different place. IUPUI is a great university with the most powerful internal commitment from the university to take it to true greatness, with its partner at Purdue, than it’s ever had. The five medical systems in our community, IUPUI has the largest research budget in the state of Indiana. This medical school is just headed right to the top. There are so many more opportunities for kids today. Now, the other side of this is that our competition... the best young faculty at IUPUI, or the best young doctors at the med school, or the best young scientists at Lilly, you know, there are a thousand examples of how to talk about this, but they can live anywhere in the world they choose. You can live in Denver, you can live in L.A., you can live in Tokyo, you can live in Bangladesh, you can live in Mexico City, you can live in Vancouver. You want the best young faculty to join your department at IUPUI, and for all the obvious reasons. And why will they come? Well, they’ll come for all the reasons that are significant or obvious, but Chicago is working very hard every day to win that competition. So is Denver. So is Columbus, Ohio. We’re blessed with some remarkable core assets, but boy we have to help them. We have to love them and encourage them and support them and nurture them, and there’s just nothing more important than being a place where bright young people will want to come live. And there’s nothing more important that everybody has a chance to be a part of the play, to participate. So that every young person regardless of ethnicity, or faith, or parentage, they have a chance in this dynamic place to be successful and fulfilled. So, the city is dramatically different today than it was in the early 1960s by every indicator. We still have a long way to go, and to stay competitive we’ve got to... when I was at the World Food Programme, our motto was ‘let’s do more, let’s do it better, and let’s do it together.’ And that’s the mindset we need now, here.

Scarpino:         One more question about the Endowment. I mentioned how long you were there and the positions that you held, but how does an official of a major endowment exercise leadership?

Morris:             Well, I suppose it’s no different than exercising leadership anywhere else. Leadership is fundamental to building an honorable, trustworthy institution of integrity, decency, fairness. Leadership is about bringing talent to work on the agenda. Leadership is about collaboration and being prepared, being very thoughtful to be sure that those resources are used in a wise, productive, fair, important way. So, you’ve got the integrity issue, you’ve got the program issue, you’ve got the talent issue and the fairness issue that the larger public can participate. And there’s the tough issue, the folks at the Lilly Endowment are as good as any group could be, always have been. They want great things for the areas of work that they are engaged in. And how you balance moving ahead and getting it done with the notion of collaboration and inclusion and fairness – wisdom does not come with money or wealth, opportunity does. The Lilly family was a family of great humility. I’m sure they wanted the Endowment to get great things accomplished. The Endowment makes a lot of decisions about the allocation of resources, about the partners and institutions they choose to work with, areas they choose to work in, geographical considerations. They’ve done it better than most.

Scarpino:         In 1989, you moved to W.C. Resources Corporation, the Indianapolis Water Company. And you were there from 1989 until 2002, where you were chairman and chief executive officer. So, why there is the first question, and then I want to ask you something about leadership. But why did you decided to leave Lilly and go to the Water Company?

Morris:             I had a great friend by the name of Robert Greenleaf, who had written extensively on leadership, trusteeship, and servants, service... He always felt that a person should not stay in a foundation leadership position for longer than ten years, that after ten years you have a tough time knowing who you are, and if you hadn’t made the difference in ten years, you might not ever make it. I’d been at Lilly Endowment almost fifteen, sixteen years. Loved every minute of it. Great people. I mean, you could not possibly work for a better organization. I’d had the opportunity to go to the IWC Resources a couple of times, and I had declined. It was a chance to probably make more money, to have a different experience in running a publicly traded, shareholder-owned enterprise, to diversify a company that had been mostly in the regulated utility business to a company that had half its revenues from unregulated sources. And there were travel restrictions at the Endowment, places that I might have wanted to go that I couldn’t go. And I suspect I had made all the contribution that I could make there, and it was time to do something different. So that was a good opportunity. I had had other opportunities to leave the city, but I did not ever want to leave the city. This is my home. I love it here. So, for those reasons, I....

Scarpino:         In 2002, you actually did elect to leave the city. You were appointed Executive Director of the World Food Programme, which took you to Rome, Italy, from 2002 to 2007. We’re talking about the United Nations World Food Programme where you were Under-Secretary-General with a rank within the U.N. I read that you visited all the World Food Programme’s major operations around the world in the wake of a tsunami, Pakistan earthquake, Niger, Darfur, Iraq, Southern Africa, so on. You traveled to more than eighty countries where the World Food Programme is operational, and so on. Number one, I’m wondering if you can, just briefly for the sake of somebody who’s going to use this thing, explain what the World Food Programme is.

Morris:             Well, the World Food Programme is the largest humanitarian agency in the world. There are a number of things associated with the U.N. called Funds and Programs, and I had the privilege to be a part of both UNICEF and the World Food Programme. And the World Food Programme’s mandate is to reduce and eliminate hunger in the world, to respond to relief, disaster situations, but also to play a role in developing the world’s food supply. So in ’01, I guess, I forget... we sold… The Indianapolis Water Company was approached by NiSource in northern Indiana, shareholder-owned utility, that wanted to get in the water business…

Scarpino:         NiSource...

Morris:             NiSource... to buy the company. And it was shareholder owned, and we had quite a good offer made so that our shareholders would benefit, an Indiana company would own the business, and so that worked out very well. I stayed for a while. After you’ve been the CEO of a publicly traded company and somebody else owns it, things are different. So, I probably thought that I would go... I was on the board of the Red Cross and the Boy Scouts of America nationally and thought I might go to either one of them. But I had this opportunity; the president asked me to be the U.S. ambassador to the three Rome food agencies…

Scarpino:         And which president asked you?

Morris:             Bush 43… which I accepted. And Jackie and I went through ambassador training, two weeks at the State Department. And on the last Friday afternoon, I was sort of summoned to the seventh floor of the State Department and said, “Jim, how would you like to run the U.N. World Food Programme?”

Scarpino:         Who was asking you this?

Morris:             Well, it was Colin Powell, who was Secretary of State at the time. The two people, Dick Armitage, who was Under-Secretary of State, and a terrific guy who was the Under-Secretary for Management and Budget and had been the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, name escapes me. So, I was overwhelmed.

Scarpino:         You had come to the attention of the leadership.

Morris:             Apparently. The United States has already been interested in having an American lead the World Food Programme and lead UNICEF because they’re such an important part of our humanitarian work around the world. So, Jackie and I had dinner that night with Dick and Char Lugar, and Jackie said, “What went on at the meeting?” And I said, “Well, let’s talk about it tonight.” And I was dumbfounded. So, they put my name forward...

Scarpino:         For senatorial confirmation?

Morris:             No. It’s a U.N. appointment, it’s an appointment made by the secretary general of the UN and the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization. And I was acceptable to Kofi Annon and a guy by the name of Jacques Diouf, who was the head of FAO.

Scarpino:         Kofi Annon was head of the U.N.

Morris:             Yes. Wonderful man. I’m sure that my long relationship with Dick Lugar was the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. So, I was confirmed by the board of the World Food Programme although no one there had ever heard of me and wouldn’t have known me from a load of hay. So, I did it for five years, ’02 to ’07. During that same period, the secretary-general asked me to be his special envoy for the humanitarian crisis caused by HIV and drought in Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia. So, I did both jobs for five years.

Scarpino:         That’s in West Central Africa?

Morris:             South Africa.

Scarpino:         South Africa... I did a little background on this, and I found somewhere where you said, “Before joining the World Food Programme, I did not realize how devastating the lack of good nutrition is for so many people who are not necessarily caught up in emergencies but are quietly slipping away in dusty villages, like the one I went to in Malawi.” Now, I want to ask you about this, but for the benefit of anybody who listens to this, where is Malawi?

Morris:             Malawi is in southern Africa. It’s bordered on Zimbabwe, but it’s in southern Africa.

Scarpino:         Was that your first trip to Africa when you went to Malawi?

Morris:             No.

Scarpino:         It obviously had an impact on you. You didn’t realize how devastating lack of good nutrition was until you went to Malawi. What did you see in Malawi that caught your attention?

Morris:             Well, think about this. Suddenly you have the responsibility to lead the largest humanitarian agency in the world, dealing with the most important difficult humanitarian issue in the world, and in a world where there are more than eight hundred million, maybe more, hungry, poorly nourished, at-risk people, and mostly women and children. I mean, think about having that responsibility handed to you, and then suddenly you... I mean, I had no idea the magnitude of the problem. I had no idea of the devastation, the hunger, and all the appendages of that have on the world, on children. Kids are dying every day of hunger. Hunger is the greatest health issue in the world, the World Health Organization would tell you. And knowing that there are probably enough resources in the world to feed everyone, but the imbalance of where the resources are, the disparity and political will to go to work on the agenda; the issue of selfishness, of incompetence, of dishonesty, and the impact of that kind of behavior on kids... I visited dozens of orphanages, hospitals, health centers, hospices, where you would see... you’d hold a little child and they’d say, you know, “Come back next week, he or she won’t be here,” or to visit in the back yard of a family and mom and dad are dead because of HIV and the little girl is pointing to their burial plots.

Scarpino:         In the back yard...

Morris:             In the back yard, and she’s twelve years old and she’s got five brothers and sisters and she’s in charge. And then, I was overwhelmed by the notion that in southern Africa eighty-five percent of the agricultural work is done by women. You wonder where the hell the men were. And yet we could feed a child for nineteen cents a day at that time, and you feed that little girl in Malawi and make it possible for her to go to school for five years, everything about her life changes for the better. Hunger, especially as it relates to children, is an issue that black and white, Republican, Democrat... you know, the Republicans and Democrats don’t see hunger any different, it’s a unifying theme. They might have an incremental different view of how it ought to be distributed and managed, but... and I was always so proud of our country. The United States does a better job of doing more for more people in places that our motivation is simply to make life better and to address the moral imperative that kids shouldn’t starve. We want the world to think well of our country, but it’s done for the right reasons. And, so, I get carried away, rambled a little bit... We had eighteen thousand employees all over the world. On the one hand, we accomplished a lot, made good progress, but still you go to bed at night knowing there’s still millions of people that are at risk. It doesn’t have to be that way. If every country had Purdue University and had the food technology and the science and the research and the preparation of people to lead extension systems, it would change everything. But every place is not as fortunate as the U.S. in terms of their infrastructure or their political leadership.

Scarpino:         Do you think Americans understand that?

Morris:             I don’t know. We live in this blessed country with this extraordinary economic system that has given us the resources to share here at home, to give a boost, an opportunity to those who are on the margin. And we have the resources to help around the world that everyone doesn’t have, and we’ve got the moral fiber to want to do that. I learned so many lessons; you know, I’m a middle of the road Republican, and I’d always been curious about George McGovern. I didn’t know what kind of a guy this fellow was. I got to know him very well. He came to my home. He’s been here. I gave the McGovern lecture out at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, South Dakota, for him. And he is one great man. I learned, don’t form an opinion about somebody until you know what the hell you’re talking about. But he had been the Ambassador to the World Food Programme before I got there. You know, so little goes far. We had thirty-two hundred partners at the World Food Programme, half faith-based, half secular, incredible people around the world trying to make a difference. And incredible people from around the world that had been educated in the United States and gone back to their countries to try to make a difference. But, boy, did I learn to appreciate the role of American higher education and American leadership.

Scarpino:         In Malawi, I read that the World Food Programme provided food for about twenty-seven million people, and I don’t know if that’s right, a lot of people, millions of people.

Morris:             We would have provided food for twenty-seven million people in those six or seven countries in southern Africa. I don’t know what the population of Malawi is.

Scarpino:         How did you do that? Where did the food come from and how do you get it there?

Morris:             Well, we provided food for two years for the entire population of Iraq, and we had forty-four thousand points of distribution. We probably had eight-, ten-thousand vehicles we used to distribute it. It was brought in to eight or ten points of entry in the country. In southern Africa, we would have had lots of NGO partners. My job was a big fundraising job, by the way. WFP or UNICEF don’t receive money from the core U.N. budget, so you had to raise money from member states. And I started a significant private-sector fundraising effort. You have to raise the money and then you have either, through WFP or through partners, have systems of distribution. You would try to buy as much as you could locally, or in the region. But some countries have restrictions that the food must come from U.S. farmers and must be transported on U.S. ships. It was a big logistic... and WFP did a lot of the logistical work for all of the United Nations, did a lot of logistical work for UNICEF. We had brilliant people that knew how to… we would have places where storage facilities. We had country offices. We’d often then have regional offices. We had five or six or seven regional offices around the country. We had a very big office in Johannesburg, had a hundred-sixty employees there. But then we had country offices everywhere. And, you know, all sorts of political problems. You would have to make the case that things were so bad and so risky and difficult in X country to get the attention of the donor countries to give the money and the food. And yet when you would say that things are so bad in X country, the leadership of X country would become irritated that you’re portraying their predicament in a very negative way around the world. We tried to distribute, and we did, by and large through non-governmental organizations, or we would distribute it ourselves. We tried not to distribute it through host government channels. We didn’t want it being used for political purposes. We wanted to feed hungry people, we didn’t want their political leadership saying, ‘Well, I love Joe more than I love Bill, and I’m going to feed Joe and to hell with Bill.’

Scarpino:         You were with the World Food Programme for, what, about five years?

Morris:             Five years, it was a five-year term.

Scarpino:         Do you feel like you made a difference?

Morris:             Yes, I felt like we had a heightened emphasis on young people. We tried to bring the American School Feeding Program, which sort of was put in place by McGovern and Dole, their partnership, to feed kids. That was a priority for me. We fed the entire population of Iraq, a third of the population of North Korea. When you go to a country that had a high HIV prevalence rate, the first thing they would ask for would be food and water. Without food and water all the anti-retroviral medicine in the world doesn’t work. So, I feel like we made real progress on the HIV issue and feeding children. We made real progress in setting up a private-sector fundraising program. I feel like we did a good job, we put an internal auditor in place. We got universal health insurance. Before I got there, the health insurance program was only for the international staff. When I left, every employee had health insurance, including HIV coverage for people in Africa. I think it was remarkable the breadth of what we did, the places we responded to. I’m very proud of the work we did in the six or seven southern African countries. I got along very well with the Cubans, with the Syrians, with places that might be challenging for an American to work with. When Mugabe won his last election in Zimbabwe, which he probably didn’t win, the State Department called and asked if I would call Mugabe and ask him to step aside. And they said they had looked at their records and that I was maybe the only one they thought could talk to him. Ultimately, we decided that wasn’t a good idea to do.

Scarpino:         When was that election?

Morris:             I don’t know, ’08, ’09.

Scarpino:         We can look it up.

Morris:             He was a very difficult man to deal with. Great story, the last time I was in Harare with him, he said, “Jim, would you meet with me at the headquarters of my party?” I believe it was called ZANU-PF. So, I went to the tenth story of the building and he said, “Jim, we are grateful what you’ve done for us...” and it had been very difficult, almost beyond description, but he said, “... we’d like to make you an honorary member of the ZANU-PF party.” And I said, “Well, Mr. President, I’m flattered and honored, but I’m a middle-of-the-road Republican and my politics are already committed, and I wouldn’t be able to accept that.” So there was a man there, just the three of us, a big man who had been their foreign minister whom I had worked with, and an easier guy to work with, who was now their minister of higher education. And he said, “Jim, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for forever.” He said, “You know, 1976 was the greatest year of my life.” I said, “Well, how’s that?” He said, “1976 I was a visiting professor of African history at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.” And he said, “Did you ever know a history professor by the name of Gus Liebenow?” I said, “Well, I know of him.” And he said, “Well, he was my mentor, and he looked after me, and it was just extraordinary.” So, Mugabe said, “Ohhhh,” he said, “I know Indiana University.” He said, “They’ve got the greatest music school in the world.” He said, “They have the best collection of Zimbabwe folk music that exists anywhere,” he said, “far better than anything we have in Zimbabwe.” He said, “I’ve had a Jesuit priest studying at the music school the last seven years, and I just brought him home.” But I frequently had experiences like that. That was a little more exaggerated, but it was really something. So, I felt like we were feeding… in Zimbabwe we were feeding five-and-a-half-million people, population thirteen-million. Average life expectancy had gone from the middle 60s to the middle 30s.

Scarpino:         Because of hunger and HIV...

Morris:             Yes. felt like, you know, there was so much to do, and it was so complicated. We had a board of thirty-six countries, twelve developed, twenty-four developing, trying to balance everything. It was a monumental job.

Scarpino:         In the United States, HIV-AIDS emerged first identified as a disease of gay men, but in Africa it was primarily a disease of heterosexual people, and the spread of the disease has to do with people’s sexual habits and proclivities and the role of men and women in a society and so on. How do you persuade people to address the behavior that contributes to the spread of HIV-AIDS?

Morris:             Well, that, mercifully, was not my job.

Scarpino:         I didn’t mean you personally.

Morris:             I was chairman of the UN-AIDS board of UN-sponsoring organizations for a while. And Randy Tobias, of course, was the AIDS czar. Extraordinary what he accomplished with Bush’s support, incredible actually. There were huge PR campaigns. Some governments acknowledged that they had a problem, others refused to acknowledge that they had a problem. What we could do was to see that food and water was available. If you had the flu today and you had a prescription from your doctor and you hadn’t eaten in three months, the medicine is probably not going to work. So, we could see that people were fed and had water, and it helped make the medicine work. The IU program in Kenya, at Eldoret, AMPATH, today they’re probably treating… well I don’t know what it is today, but they were treating a hundred-sixty-thousand HIV-positive people. But they realized that they had to have food and agriculture production to get at the HIV problem. So, we helped there, and Randy helped to get the medicine there. So much of AIDS was transmitted by truck drivers driving across the country. We worked very hard at trying to improve the behavior of truck drivers. But there were a whole range of things people were trying to do. Anti-retroviral drugs made all the difference, but food and water made them successful. And I suppose, well, that’s a good enough answer.

Scarpino:         I’m going to respect your time, so I’m cutting here a little bit. You were the U.N. Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Southern Africa that led to the effort to bring a U.N. humanitarian agencies together to fight to the combined threats that you talked about; food insecurity, HIV-AIDS, the loss of capacity which I assume means infrastructure and the ability to get from place to place.

Morris:             But human infrastructure, you know, in Malawi, a huge percentage of the president’s cabinet and the parliament had died of HIV.

Scarpino:         So, there was no leadership.

Morris:             It was a declining leadership.

Scarpino:         How do you exercise leadership in a program like the World Food Programme? That’s a huge organization spread over the entire globe.

Morris:             Well, you have an incredibly talented staff, and a staff that had their pulse on the world, that knew where the problems were, that had the relationships with the principal funders, that had the structure to raise the money, and had the HR system in place to prepare the talent to go do the work, and then to build the relationships with all of the stakeholders so that they would have confidence and trust in the organization to be a good partner. Leadership is about relationships, trust, preparation, wisdom, partnership, focus, and I’m sure there’s more. WFP could not have possibly been all things to all people, it needed to stay focused on food. And then there was always the tough triage issue; do you feed the starving baby that’s hurt by the tsunami who might die tomorrow if you don’t feed him, or do you use those same resources to build an agriculture productivity program that over time will feed five or six people for the same dollar that you spend to save the kid’s life today. I mean, there are just so very... and, you know, there are all sorts of things people think about as vehicles and mechanisms to address hunger. And, you know, the Brits would see it one way, the Japanese would see it another way. How do you balance all of that? And then, how do you build… you know, if the leadership of Angola is focused on their responsibility to the leadership of North Korea, their responsibility to feed their starving population, what kind of a commitment are they going to make to do the work and build the infrastructure to get it done? I left North Korea often feeling that I cared more about the well-being of their kids than they did. The human tragedy of this is beyond comprehension. And then, you know, there’s so much more violence, or more wars or conflict. In Uganda, you know, kids twelve years old would be soldiers in a civil war.

Scarpino:         When you think about the various issues that you just mentioned, North Korea, Uganda, the trouble spots that you’ve been involved with around the world, where’s the failure of leadership? Is it in those countries or in the developed countries, or...?

Morris:             Interesting question. Failed leadership, or not very competent leadership, or maybe not very caring leadership in a lot of places, in many places is at the root of so much of this. I think it’s a challenge to use to use resources of a developed country for the benefit of folks that are struggling around the world. You ask the American people, do you want kids to starve in Uganda? They would say no. Do you want the American people to use their tax resources to fund programs in a corrupt country in Africa with bad leadership? They’d probably say no. I’ve felt that there are an awful lot of places that could have done an awful lot more. There were places where… Bangladesh did a pretty good job of working its way out of serious problems. Cambodia, always problems of corruption. A lot of countries where leaders were focused on their own well-being, and if there was bad behavior at the top, that sort of permeates the whole environment. That’s why American leadership is so important in the world. What we stand for is a country who we are and who we want to be, is the shining light on the hillside. So, some of the other large countries didn’t do their share. The Scandinavian countries were very generous. Japan was very generous. Canada, very generous. Most of the European countries, very generous. But, I suppose it’s not easy to get a consensus at the faculty centered at IUPUI.

Scarpino:         Not it’s not.

Morris:             So, I don’t know how you… it’s not easy. You have to work at it. And I do think issues like those that UNICEF deals with, or the WFP deals with, or the World Health Organization are unifying issues. I used to visit with President Bush about this now and then.

Scarpino:         I’m going to ask you, which President Bush?

Morris              Forty-three.

Scarpino:         Okay.

Morris:             And you’d talk about the poor child who’s heading a household because of mom and dad gone with AIDS. You know, he’d tear up.

Scarpino:         I’m going to mention just to get this on the record, you were appointed the permanent representative to the Executive Board of UNICEF by President Trump, and I’m actually not going to talk about UNICEF, I’m just putting that in the record because I want to ask you something else before our time is us. June 2007 through the present, you’ve been involved with Pacers Sports and Entertainment. How did you go from the World Food Programme to Pacers Sports and Entertainment?

Morris:             Well, I’d been close to Herb Simon, my pal, my friend.

Scarpino:         One of the owners?

Morris:             Yes. And I had helped them buy the team years ago. The Pacers, when I came back, they were just coming out of this problem with the escapade in Detroit.

Scarpino:         Ron Artest.

Morris:             Yes. So, Herb said, “Jim, why don’t you come and help us out a little bit?” And, I thought to myself, well, why would I do this? Because I was old enough to retire. So, well, what do you care about? I said, “Well, I care about community, people getting along, reducing adversarial relationships, finding common ground. I care about the well-being of kids, especially at-risk, vulnerable. I care about my community, its reputation, its competitiveness.” And I said, “Everything that I care about I can work on with the Pacers and the Fever.” I said it before, but everybody wants the Pacers and the Fever to win if you live here.

Scarpino:         Pretty much.

Morris:             You know, it brings people together. If our players behave and are great examples, I mean, Tamika Catchings, she could not be a more inspiring person. And we’ve got lots of people, Reggie Miller, Darnell Hillman... we have a chance to inspire kids. The Simon family is incredibly generous in terms of causes in the community and especially things that deal with the city. The sense of unity. But in terms of our game tonight with Toronto, there will be a story in every paper in the world tomorrow morning about Indianapolis playing Toronto. So, there was a CFO there was recruited at One America. He had been to Indianapolis to attend the Big Ten Basketball Tournament, and that told him what kind of a place we were. So, building the quality of life, building the reputation, building a sense of community, helping young people; everything that I had cared about, I had a chance to work on. To use my own words, I saw the opportunity in its largest context.

Scarpino:         And seized it...

Morris:             Pardon?

Scarpino:         And seized it...

Morris:             And then tried to take advantage of it.

Scarpino:         I’ve got a couple of wrap-up questions and then I’ll close out. You’ve been involved in a range of public and not-for-profit and for-profit activities for a long lifetime. As you look back on your lifetime of work from Mayor Lugar’s all the way to the World Food Programme, Lilly Endowment, the Pacers, how do you feel about your accomplishments? What stands out to you as, I really, really did some good here?

Morris:             Well, I think working with Dick Lugar. I mean he changed the mentality in the city, changed the geography of the city, changed the structure of the city, he changed the priorities in the city. He focused on the downtown. He focused on building a university, an enormous commitment to children and their well-being. He caused Indianapolis to think of itself as big-league important, high-aspirational. The work at the Endowment, I think the Endowment played a big role in the transformation of the city and the state. I’m very proud of the work done with young people. The Center for Leadership Development, the Indiana Youth Institute, the Children’s Choir, the revitalization of the downtown, the building of great facilities. I’m very proud of the work at the Endowment. Now, the Endowment did it, and I was an employee there. The work at the Water Company, we built a good company. I used to kid people at Eli Lilly and Company, I’d say, “What do you think is the most important healthcare institution in the city?” And they might say, “Well, Lilly,” and I said, “Well, no, it’s the Water Company, because if you don’t have a safe, healthy, clean, reliable water supply, you’ve got problems.” But we achieved our objectives of diversifying, and we made a lot of money for the shareholders, and we were a good citizen along the way. I feel good about the work at the World Food Programme. And the Pacers, I don’t get the credit for this, but I was a part of it. The Simons, we’ve had good coaches, Rick Fuson is terrific. We have a great facility. We’re building the new Bicentennial Unity Plaza. The economic impact has been extraordinary. Its commitment to diversity. It’s a good citizen. I think people think highly of it, think well of it. I think people wish we’d win a championship, as I do, but it continues to bring people together. We have a great facility. And I would dare say we’re more community-minded than almost any franchise in the NBA, or maybe any than most professional sports. Every year at Christmastime, one of Herb’s buddies give us fifty-thousand toys which we give to kids that are struggling or poor, or their parents are in jail, or serving in the National Guard. So, I mean, I also feel I could have done better, could have done more, should have studied harder, should have learned more. There are things I could have done better and made more of the opportunity. But I would also come back and say I’m proud of my, I’m not sure we’re supposed to be proud, but I’m proud of my work with the Boy Scouts, Indiana University, IUPUI, Riley Hospital, the Salvation Army, Gleaners Food Bank, the general quality of life in the downtown, the Children’s Choir, the Urban League. I was chairman of the Health and Hospital Corporation for eight years. I could’ve done it better, every step of the way I could’ve done it better. Had I studied harder in college, probably I’d have been better prepared to do it better, but I did care, and I’ve been willing to take on fundraising. I was chairman of Goodwill for a while. I’ve got a great wife, great family, great kids, great spouses, great grandchildren, wonderful friends. Pretty lucky guy.

Scarpino:         Is there anything that I should’ve asked you that I didn’t?

Morris:             Not that I know of.

Scarpino:         Is there anything that you wanted to say that I haven’t given you a chance to say?

Morris:             No.

Scarpino:         While the recorders are still on, I want to thank you for taking the time to sit with me on three occasions and share your observations on leadership and your storied career. So, on behalf of the Tobias Center, IUPUI, and myself, I thank you very much.

Morris:             Thank you. I hope that the opportunities for everyone to do more, to do it together, to be focused on the toughest issues of the day… and if we just are thoughtful about peeling the onion back and seeing new opportunities, we can all do so much more and do great things, and to make life better. But, I’m very focused on, not focused, but I’m very curious or hopeful how we have a better dialogue around the world, around the community, how people sit around the table and figure out how to solve the problems without being so damn mean or angry or shooting or whatever. It’s not intended to be that way, and we do have it within our own ability to cause it to be better.

Scarpino:         Thank you.

Morris:             Thank you, sir.

Scarpino:         You’re welcome.