Home > News > Ben Heineman Remembered
214 views 6 sec 0 Comment

Ben Heineman Remembered

- August 10, 2012

Ben Heineman, presidential troubleshooter and Lyndon Johnson confidant, has died at the age of 98. His NYT obit is here. Heineman was offered various jobs by LBJ, including the chance to become a department head or director of the Bureau of the Budget, but turned them down. However, he made an important study of the Budget Bureau in 1967 that LBJ did not release but which, along with other studies of that era, helped prompt the 1970 transformation of that agency into the Office of Management and Budget.  Heineman’s 1980 book with Curtis Hessler, Memorandum for the President, lays out some of the lessons he saw for the increasingly complex task of exeuctive branch management. See too Larry Berman’s 1977 Political Science Quarterly piece here (gated, except to JSTOR subscribers) on the Heineman report’s role in shaping OMB.