Cal Mackenzie
Title
The Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of American Government, Emeritus
Information
Address
5306 Mayflower Hill Waterville, Maine 04901-8853
Areas of Expertise
-
Presidential transition and the appointment process
-
American politics
-
Ethics in government
- American presidency
Personal Information
Cal Mackenzie holds an endowed chair as The Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of Government at Colby College where he has taught since 1978. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he served as a Trustee from 1986-1998, and he has a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard.
Mackenzie’s professional work focuses on governance and public policy, with a special interest in presidential transitions and the politics of presidential appointments. He has been a consultant to presidential personnel staffs and congressional committees on those matters. Mackenzie frequently testifies on personnel and ethics issues before congressional committees and special commissions and has led seminars on government ethics for senior executives of the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service. During and after the presidential transition in 2001, he was Senior Advisor to the Presidential Appointee Initiative in Washington while serving as Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. In 2002, he was Senior Advisor to the National Commission on the Public Service chaired by Paul Volcker.
In 1985, Mackenzie was elected President of the New England Political Science Association. In 1992, he was appointed to serve as a chair of Maine’s Board of Arbitration and Conciliation. In 1996, he was elected chairman of Maine’s Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices. During the 1999-2000 academic year, Mackenzie was the John Adams Fellow at the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London. In 2004, he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University in China. In 2012, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences in Ha Noi.
Mackenzie served with the Army’s First Cavalry Division in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971. From 1985 through 1988, he was Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations at Colby. He is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.”
Publications
Mackenzie is the author or editor of scores of articles and more than fifteen books. Among those are The Politics of Presidential Appointments, The House at Work, America’s Unelected Government, The In-and-Outers, The Irony of Reform: Roots of American Political Disenchantment, Bucking the Deficit: Economic Policy Making in America (with economist Saranna Thornton), Innocent Until Nominated: The Breakdown of the Presidential Appointments Process, and Scandal Proof: Can Ethics Laws Make Government Ethical? The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s (co-authored with historian Robert Weisbrot) was one of two finalists for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History.
His latest book, The Imperiled Presidency: Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century, was published in 2016.
Scandal Proof: Can Ethics Laws Make Government Ethical? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002)
Innocent Until Nominated: The Breakdown of the Presidential Appointments Process (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001). Selected by CHOICE magazine as an “Outstanding Academic Book of 2002
The Politics of American Government (with Stephen Wayne, David O’Brien, and Richard Cole) (New York, NY: St. Martin’s, third edition, 1999)
Other Book Titles: “The State of the Presidential Appointments Process, The Brookings Review (March, 2001)
Editor, Special edition of The Brookings Review on “The State of the Appointments Process” (March, 2001)
“Can Government Be Honest and Effective, Too?” Keynote Address, Annual Conference of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, March 12, 2003
“Old Wars, New Wars, and the American Presidency” paper presented at the British Library Conference on the American Presidency, London, May 13, 2003. To be published in George Edwards and Philip Davies, ed.,
New Challenges for the American Presidency (Longman, forthcoming)