40 years of DAI

6
In the late 1960s, the relatively new Kennedy
School of Government offered a one-year
public administration program oriented more
toward economics and analytical studies than
administration. Many students in that era were
career government employees sponsored by
their agencies, unlike Sweet and Mickelwait.
So perhaps it was inevitable that the two would
meet. Mickelwait soon began to notice Sweet
walking around campus in a white rabbit-skin
coat. “He carried a briefcase and never went
to class,” Mickelwait said, and seemed to have
“five hundred close personal friends.”
Charlie Sweet was indeed what may be called
“a collector of people,” and Mickelwait was
soon part of the collection. Another was John
M. Buck, an honors graduate from the University
of Michigan and a Fulbright Scholar. As a
company commander in the Army during the
Vietnam War, Buck served two tours in combat,
one under Alexander Haig, with much of his
time in hot zones near the DMZ that (theoretically)
divided North and South Vietnam. Like
Sweet and Mickelwait, he was ready to follow a
new path, and had come to the Kennedy School
all on his own.
As the year progressed, Sweet gathered a group
of a dozen students interested in development
who came to be known as his “12 disciples.”
For endless hours they talked about how they
could create a new company to do development
work, a vision that Sweet believed in
fiercely. He was, in fact, so much a man of ideas
that he could hardly be bothered to write term
papers or study for exams. Instead, he talked
constantly and bit the stem of his pipe—you
knew he was excited when you heard the stem
cracking. Sweet likely cracked a lot of pipes
that year at Harvard. At the time, Mickelwait
was also more attuned to ideals than practicalities,
so the presence of the third man became
crucial. “In the midst of our flights of fancy,”
Mickelwait recalled, “John Buck could bring it
back to Earth.”
As the year at the Kennedy School drew to
a close, Sweet became obsessed with his
emerging idea to the exclusion of all else. In
fact, it seemed unlikely that he would earn his
master’s degree until the May 1970 shootings
at Kent State prompted Harvard to cancel all
final exams. When Sweet called for his disciples
to move with him to Washington, D.C., and put
their plans into action, most of them melted
away. While a dozen or so people did invest a
few hundred dollars in the fledgling firm—an
investment that was quickly repurchased from
most of them—only Mickelwait and Buck took
the leap and went to work for it.
Three Guys, Savings, and
Credit Card Debt
This decision was no mere pipe dream, for
Sweet had already incorporated a company.
Earlier that spring he had contacted David
Gunning, a corporate lawyer and an old friend
from undergraduate days at Cornell, who put
him in touch with some attorneys who knew the