Scope and Content Note
The papers of Alice M. Rivlin (born 1931- ) span the years 1963-1988. The collection consists of correspondence, memoranda, reports, speeches and other writings, printed matter, newspaper clippings, and photographs. The papers document Rivlin's career as an economist, her lengthy association with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., her years at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare between 1966 and 1969, and her directorship of the Congressional Budget Office between 1975 and 1983. The papers are organized into five series: Correspondence, Subject Files, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Writings, and Miscellany.
After receiving a doctorate in economics from Radcliffe College in 1958, Rivlin joined the staff of the Brookings Institution, becoming a senior fellow in 1963 and later serving as codirector of a research program in the economics of education. In 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed her deputy assistant secretary for program coordination at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). Two years later she was named assistant secretary for planning and evaluation. While at HEW, Rivlin helped introduce cost-benefit analyses of the department's operations in response to the Johnson administration's growing interest in Planning, Programming and Budget Systems (PPBS). The Department of Health, Education and Welfare series contains correspondence, memoranda, reports, and printed matter pertaining to PPBS applications for evaluating the department's programs. Researchers interested in HEW during this time should also consult the Writings series for speeches, congressional testimony, articles, and editorials written between 1966 and 1969.
Correspondence, memoranda, and reports in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare series contain useful information on social unrest in the late 1960s. Letters from scholars, including Daniel Bell, John Hope Franklin, Charles E. Fritz, Herbert J. Gans, Neil J. Smelser, and James Wilfred Vander Zanden, analyze social factors that led to race riots in the summer of 1967. The HEW series also contains memoranda detailing staff reactions to recommendations on education issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (Kerner Commission). Finally, memoranda and reports discuss meetings between HEW officials and representatives of the Poor People's Campaign march on Washington in 1968.
Rivlin left the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in March 1969, shortly after Richard Nixon assumed the presidency. Included in the HEW files is a series of memoranda regarding the transition between the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Rivlin returned to the Brookings Institution where she was a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program until 1975 when Congress named her the first director of the newly established Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Through the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the CBO was created to provide Congress with nonpartisan information and analysis essential to the legislature's examination of the federal budget and its determination of fiscal priorities. As the CBO's first director, Rivlin succeeded in the challenging task of creating a durable structure, which soon rivaled the Office of Management and Budget in both size and influence. While striving to maintain the CBO's nonpartisan character during her years as director between 1975 and 1983, Rivlin became a leading national voice alerting Congress and the country to the vital importance of reducing the federal deficit. Correspondence, memoranda, travel records, and newspaper clippings concerning her seminal role as the CBO's first director are found in the Correspondence, Subject Files, and Miscellany series. Speeches, congressional testimony, articles, and interviews in the Writings series provide valuable insight into contemporary budget and economic issues, as well as CBO operations under Rivlin's directorship.
In her presidential address before the American Economic Association in 1986, Rivlin argued that the primary objective of economists should be "to help us understand how the economy works and provide choices among economic policies." In addition to her years of federal service, her scholarship and active involvement in various organizations reflect this belief. In 1983, after leaving the CBO, Rivlin became director of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, and her correspondence and subject files document the activities of this liberal "think tank" during the 1970s and 1980s. The papers do not document, however, her presidency of the American Economic Association.
Subject files also contain material pertaining to Rivlin's participation on the boards of various organizations and academic institutions. Her interest in education is reflected in the material from her membership on the boards of Bryn Mawr College and the Black Student Fund in Washington, D.C., her tenure on the board of overseers of Harvard University, and her participation in the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. In 1978 Rivlin traveled to China as a member of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education's study group on the relation between education and work. Her papers include correspondence about the trip as well as a notebook in which she recorded her impressions of sites visited. Material relating to social policy and research includes files from the Ford Foundation's Project on Social Welfare and the American Future (1984), National Research Council's Committee on Federal Agency Evaluation Research (1975), National Conference on Social Welfare's Committee on Federalism and National Purpose (1984-1985), and the Brookings Panel on Social Experimentation (1972-1975). An "issues book" compiled for presidential candidate Edmund S. Muskie by Rivlin between 1970 and 1972 is of political interest.
The Writings series contains speeches, articles, editorials, congressional testimony, interviews, and reviews on such subjects as the federal budget, economy, education, health, welfare reform, social experimentation, aging, income maintenance, and planning, programming, and budget systems.
The papers include correspondence from fellow economists, Brookings Institution colleagues, members of Congress, state governors, and federal officials. Included is correspondence from Gardner Ackley, John Brademas, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kermit Gordon, William Gorham, Walter W. Heller, Clark Kerr, Bruce King, Daniel P. Moynihan, Edmund S. Muskie, Joseph A. Pechman, William Proxmire, Charles S. Robb, Charles L. Schultze, Elmer B. Staats, Paul A. Volcker, and Timothy E. Wirth.