Former President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1977, marked not only the arrival of the first democratic administration in eight years but also the departure of many Harvard faculty members to Washington, D.C.

With Carter’s electoral victory in 1976, local media ranging from The Crimson to the Boston Globe speculated for a year over which members of the Harvard community would be called upon to work in Carter’s White House.

Almost two decades earlier, when John F. Kennedy Jr. ’40 was elected in 1960, McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) left Harvard to become special assistant to the president for national security affairs.

And Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ’38 was a professor of history before Kennedy appointed him as the special assistant for Latin American affairs.

The Kennedy administration alone created a demand for the Boston-Washington shuttle flight.

Similarly, famous statesman and academic Henry A. Kissinger ’50 left Harvard’s government department in 1969 to become Richard Nixon’s national security advisor and, later, his secretary of state.

The Harvard professors that Carter tapped for his administration came from a wide variety of academic fields, ranging from health sciences and medicine to government and economics.

Harvard To Washington

Julius B. Richmond, Macarthur professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School was among the first faculty members to depart for Washington. He left Cambridge in 1977.

Under Carter, he became a member of the newly formed Commission on Mental Health, the assistant secretary of the department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and the administration’s surgeon general.

Richmond says Carter was interested in health care reform.

“I found him to be very intelligent and very concerned about the health of the American people,” Richmond says.

Richmond was no stranger to work in the public sector. He worked for Former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964, and worked to create public health programs that would aid local groups directly rather than channeling resources through state health departments.

In 1965, Richmond became the national director of Project Head Start, a child development program designed to serve the children of low-income families.