Originally prepared in 2024 and revised on June 21, 2025
My brother Michael always used to complain about the funerals he attended that
failed to tell something about the deceased person’s life. He wanted to know
what they did, what they accomplished, what they took pride in. He thought that
the nice memories of a trip or platitudes by family members should be saved for
the reception.
I start, then, with a hope that whoever is charged with getting my grave marker
produced uses these words:
Godfrey (Jeff) Harris
At Least He Tried.
Those few words sum up my life as I assess it. I was someone who tried but never
quite made it all the way to success.
As someone with an ambiguous name — “do you prefer Godfrey or Jeffrey?” — I
tried to make a difference, to do notable things, to make every activity
undertaken memorable in some way. Yet, so many undertakings seemed to end short
of what they could have been as I saw it. Know that I tried very hard to make my
involvements reach a level of success that others would see as worthwhile.
Only a few of us are given an advantageous platform from which to launch our
hoped-for successes. I had one. My platform was built by my father, Alfred
Harris, and should not go unnoticed here. It contributed to the launching of
most of our family.
Alfred was an extraordinary person that I hope I always honored in what I did.
He was a person of limited education but enormous intellect and great humor. He
was willing to take a risk for a major payoff: Bringing the family to America
just before World War II, buying a garment area building in New York when
clothing was still rationed, offering fine art items to people used to buying
more mundane merchandise, going seamlessly from the scrap metal business to
antiques to the pepper trade to real estate.
Every stop a financial success. That success permitted his wife to live in
comfort until she was 100 and allowed his kids and grandkids the better start
and the extra income that has made a difference in the quality of their lives.
It was the income that Alf Harris earned from his hard and varied work that
allowed his two sons, Michael and Jeffrey, to attend Stanford University. He did
so without a peep of protest or even a firm understanding of what his investment
would eventually bring.
Two notes here: (1) He put his eldest son, David, into the antique business when
any academic inclinations failed to materialize. But David wanted to move down
his own path in life and went into the brand-new field of computing. And (2)
Because Michael had chosen Stanford, I never considered any other university or
applied anywhere else. I mention this because of the multiple university
applications submitted by today’s high school graduates. I can still see our father sitting in the den at Glenbarr at the end of each
Stanford break writing four checks — two for $250 each for Michael and two for
$250 each for me. $1000! That was the cost of tuition and room and board for the
both of us. We both were so conscious of the high cost of a Stanford education,
then and now, that both of us had the grades to allow us to take extra courses
to finish our four-year requirements in three to save the $3000 a fourth year
would have cost Alf for the two of us. I think Alfred was greatly pleased with what the Stanford money eventually
bought. It gave Michael the background he needed from UCLA law school to succeed
at the Mirisch Company and it gave me the grounding I needed to enter the U.S.
Foreign Service. He saw everything in English terms and having one son as a
barrister in Hollywood and another as an American diplomat — Jewish, yet! — gave
him enormous pride.
I look back on my years since Stanford in waves, each one having at least one
accomplishment worthy of note. The first wave took me into the Army on the way
to the US diplomatic corps. After a series of training assignments, I served as
the Intelligence Officer and Headquarters commander at Ft. Hancock on the Sandy
Hook peninsula on the New Jersey shore. I learned a ton about bureaucracy in the
Army before I left to join the Foreign Service. I was also determined that every
one of my soldiers would earn the equivalent of a high school diploma (they did)
and have the opportunity to take college courses on base. (I brought Rutgers
University in to offer them those classes.)
After language, area, and basic diplomatic training, I served assignments in
Washington, Bonn and London. Because of work I did on a JFK-approved project to
give Ambassadors greater control of the Federal agencies housed in their
embassies, I was given a choice of where to serve my first time aboard. I chose
London and after a lot of objections from senior career officers, I became the
first foreign born diplomat to be sent to the country of his birth in the 20th
century. As such, I had the task of overseeing non-State Department agencies in
England as Executive Assistant to Ambassador David Bruce. During my tour, I also
played a major role in the funerals of Winston Churchill and Ambassador Adlai
Stevenson.
I left the Foreign Service to engage in the second wave of my career at the
Budget Bureau in Washington. There, my major assignment was to become part of a
three-man management team that helped bring the Department of Transportation to
fruition. It was then, too, that our family became fully formed. My high school
girlfriend, Linda Berkowitz, was the girl my father said I married for her
“Mommie” (rather than her “money” since foreign born U.S. diplomats had to have
native-born American wives.) Although a fully qualified teacher who created the
Santa Monica Alternative School and became an education administrator, she
dedicated herself to raising three boys who themselves would make a difference
with their own lives. I leave it to Greg, Ken and Mark — or their progeny — to
tell their own stories at the appropriate time.
Linda and I spent 22 years — and 9 household moves — together before deciding to
go our separate ways into the future. From 1984 to the present, I have been
married to Barbara (DeKovner-Mayer) Harris, a former professional dancer, movie
star (Can Can, Rock Around the Clock), painter, journalist, and writer who
matched my interests and energy from our first date. Her three kids from prior
marriages — Michael, Mari, and Greg — have welcomed me as a stepfather and I
have enjoyed and benefited from the relationships that developed with each of
them.
When James Roosevelt, then U.S. Representative to the International Labor
Organization in Geneva, accepted a private sector position with Investors
Overseas Services, he asked me — as a former diplomat and management specialist
who had once worked in his Capitol Hill office — to join him. I did. Our task
was to bring new investment opportunities to developing countries.
As a result, I created a private savings plan in Panama, called FutuRico, that
combined the incentive of a national lottery with the investment goals of a
savings bank. The venture got off to an exciting start in 1973, attracted
worldwide attention, but ended prematurely. A Panamanian Labor Court, on a case
we think was supported by the National Lottery, required the company to pay
hourly wages to those who sold our lottery tickets (making us akin to an
insurance company) rather than commissions that newspapers paid to their sales
forces. Hourly wages turned out to be too expensive for us to manage.
At the same time that FutuRico was coming to life, I began the third wave of my
post-Stanford career. I started a public policy consulting firm with best friend
from foreign service days, Jim Ragan. Harris/Ragan Management Group set out to
make private sector innovations available to government agencies. For all of its
years — we just went by our 58th anniversary — we have shared offices with
Rogers & Harris, Michael’s law firm and subsequently with R&H Investments, the
law firm’s successor entity.
Although we clearly had separate interests, we purposefully shared a lot of
clients and projects over the years. As just one example of our effort to link
the private and public sectors, we introduced Yellow Page advertisement (for
passport information) to the State Department and to other federal agencies such
as the National Park Service for reservations. While it may seem quaint now in
light of what the Internet can provide in terms of information dissemination, it
was considered highly innovative and novel in the day.
The concept for turning loose change in Panamanian pockets into investments in
Panama’s growth — the essence of the FutuRico concept — was a winner. The
company became the largest single trader on the Panamanian stock exchange. It
also led to the early high-level Panamanian-US discussions concerning the future
of the Panama Canal.
Later, my analysis of US defense facilities and needs for General Omar Torrijos,
Panama’s de facto leader at the time, led to a change in Panama's fundamental
negotiating position. That change opened an irrevocable path to the eventual
Panamanian assumption of responsibility for the Canal. Later, I was deeply
involved in Panamanian/US relations involving the George H. W. Bush
Administration’s efforts to remove Manuel Noriega from his leadership position
as the head of the Guardia Nacional. That effort ended with the US-Panama War of
1989-1990; it also eventually ended my direct involvement in Panamanian
politics.
Soon after closing the FutuRico operation in Panama, I became involved in
international tourism projects with another close friend, Kenny Katz, in London.
On one trip, Barbara and I were walking from our temporary flat in Pimlico when
I noticed an advertisement on one of the dozens of parking meters on that block.
I studied the shape and the wording and was utterly fascinated. What a brilliant
idea, I thought. It provided information to the public about a product — the
essence of advertising — and I assumed added non-tax income to the government
controlling the parking meters.
So we created MeterMessages in the United States. We introduced the concept to a
number of municipalities, sold the idea to St. Louis through its elected
Treasurer who was looking for new sources of income, raised some money from
family and friends for the supporting company, and took a team of helpers to map
the St. Louis meters and begin selling the space to advertisers.
The key advertiser in St. Louis is Anheuser Busch, brewer of Budweiser and Bud
Lite beers. After our presentation to advertising specialists at the company, we
were told to wait until the head of the department returned from a trip to
Europe including London. If anyone would notice new advertising, he would and if
he liked its potential, Budweiser would be prepared to advertise in every city
where MeterMessages had meters available. Unfortunately, we were told he never
saw the advertising on parking meters in London and although we involved more
cities in the project, including Huntington Beach and Las Vegas, without a major
advertiser ready to support the enterprise in each city, it was not able to
survive financially.
It was my involvement with Kenny Katz and MeterMessages that made me aware of
the power of word-of-mouth advertising to foster tourism development for smaller
destinations. That revelation led to writing and promoting a series of books on
word-of-mouth techniques and providing seminars and lectures on the topic and
tourism in general in many countries.
My involvement in publishing encouraged me to write books on management and
public policy topics. I have written 76 with a couple of more not finished in
the time allotted to me. I am also delighted that about a dozen were translated
into foreign languages including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Czech, and Turkish.
But I think I am proudest of six titles that gained some traction in the
marketplace — Talk is Cheap (with your narrator, Gregrey J Harris), The Event
Planning Kit, Promoting International Tourism (with Kenneth M. Katz), The
Panamanian Problem (with Guillermo de St. Malo), the Fascination of Ivory, and
Lobbycratic Governance.
I have also written one novel — Credit the Crocodile. I tried this genre to
appeal to younger people to become involved in conservation matters. The book
was great fun to develop and write. It had encouraging reviews, but it didn’t do
much for conservation. I am proud, however, that it became the first novel to
include an index of all the factual names, places, events and things referred to
in the book — an advance that I think all historical and political novels should
offer to their readers.
During the 1990s, my career took a new turn. Wife Barbara had started a
non-profit organization called Friends Assisting Friends. Its purpose was to
help those in the former Soviet Union trying to cope with the economic changes
that the switch from a command to a demand economy entailed. I helped her with
the organization’s administrative needs. On a trip to Moscow in 1992, I was
introduced to a Russian innovation that used high powered electrical discharges
to eliminate air pollutants. I agreed to introduce the technology to the
American government.
Interest at the White House in the Russian technology led to a contract with the
Department of Energy to produce a pilot project. The machine met the DOE’s
original specifications for air pollution control equipment but fell just short
of revised DOE standards for eliminating surface pollutants. At the end of the
Clinton Administration, interest in further work on the pollution equipment
faded in an on-going bureaucratic tiff between executives in Washington and
Energy Department civil servants stuck in its relocated research headquarters in
West Virginia.
But we weren’t through. The two principal Russian scientists showed me how the
technology could be used to extract gold trapped in rock formations. I
immediately contacted a California gold mine that my father had once invested
in. We discussed the intriguing possibility of extracting gold from the tailings
left behind after the original cyanide processing. Not only did the scientists
hold out the prospect that 30% more gold was still trapped in the rock, but the
rock itself could be cleansed of its cyanide coating and then sold for gravel.
We formed a company, raised a lot of investment money, began intense discussions
to test out the methodology in the field, but soon came to a stunning halt. The
Interior Department insisted on a new environmental impact report — at an
estimated cost of $750,000 — before any activity could begin. The Department
wanted to know what new “damage” our effort might cause even though we saw the
project as doing overall environmental good. After all, we would be eliminating
the tailings and the cyanide in the process of extracting the hidden gold.
Eventually, we decided to abandon the project rather than spend the time and
money on what we saw as an unnecessary EIR.
Soon thereafter, I was attending the Frankfurt Book Fair when an Italian friend
told me about an exhibit of replicas of the machines that Leonardo da Vinci had
designed. He was about to show the machines in New Zealand and Australia and was
looking to bring the exhibit to the United States. Would I be interested in
managing the stops of a U.S. leg? I said yes, called my friend Kenny Katz in the
hope he would partner with me in the venture, and within days we were making a
presentation to the Palm Springs Air Museum. Six months later it became a major
attraction for the Museum’s 30th anniversary celebration. From there, we took
the exhibit to museums and display areas in San Diego, Sacramento, Las Vegas,
Provo, Utah, and Hollywood.
From the outset, we put our own touch on what the Italians had provided. We
acquired a full array of high-quality reproductions of Leonardo’s most famous
paintings, placed the machine models in prime locations to encourage hands-on
visitor interactions, developed a children’s craft area, brought in original Da
Vinci Experience souvenirs to sell, and more. But high rents, competition from a
copycat exhibit, and space availability forced us to end what was a fascinating
time with an underused alternative form of education.
As my involvement with the Da Vinci Exhibit was winding down, I became aware
that the Obama Administration wanted to ban all trade in ivory objects or
objects containing ivory. I thought that would have major negative effects on
collectors, museums, and our cultural heritage. That led to the final wave of my
career. I created the Ivory Education Institute, a non-profit organization
dedicated to bringing about a greater understanding of the historic, practical,
and cultural importance of all forms of ivory. Our purpose was to counter the
prohibitions on all forms of ivory trade advocated by the animal right
organizations (PETA, WWF, IFOR).
After failing to get CITES, the UN’s wildlife agency, to reconsider its ban on
trade in elephant tusks and rhino horns, I suggested that the southern African
states form a League for Sustainable Conservation. It would be a way to work
around the CITES prohibitions through the establishment of legal auction
markets, recognition of conservation advances, presentation of art fairs, and
the introduction of therapeutic tourism. While some of the governments were
impressed with our approach, none were prepared to go beyond “studying” the
proposal further.
Rather than wait for an outcome that could be years in the making, we decided to
join with the United Democratic Movement, a left of center political party,
contesting the 2024 parliamentary elections in South Africa. The party
introduced our word of mouth techniques to their campaign, used our theme
(“Corruption Destroys our Freedom”) and was able to increase UDM’s parliamentary
clout by 50%. The party’s leader, General Bantu Holomisa, was subsequently
chosen for a cabinet post as Deputy Minister of Defense and War Veterans. But
the Government of National Unity in South Africa proved to be more of a trap to
hold the status quo in place than an avenue for change. Traditional graft and
corruption took precedence over a renewed introduction of the never-lose lottery
(and never lose casino from Malta days) in the age of the Internet.
As all of this was coming to a conclusion, I came down with a severe case of
sepsis as a result of a needed blood transfusion, landed in the hospital on my
88th birthday for a 7-day stint, and decided that was all that I had to give. I
shut down Harris/Ragan in June 2025 after nearly a sixty year run and tried to
rest a little bit.
That is where I am now. Mopping up the residue of ideas and contacts in the
public policy consulting business. I hope someone will see the path I have trod
in Southern Africa over the last several years as a way to enhance the economic
well-being of rural areas and to reverse the suffering of wildlife from
starvation, overcrowded reserves, and the effects of climate change. Many of the
concepts are explained in published articles my collaborator in South Africa,
Emmanuel Koro, has written.
For many, the fact that I am still trying to make even a slight difference after
passing my 88th birthday comes as a shock. But why not? Retirement is for those
who no longer have the physical strength or mental capacity to meet the needs of
the marketplace. Unfortunately, I have the mental strength to keep on going,
just not the physical strength to make the on-going effort effective. I can no
longer do sufficient justice to the words — AT LEAST HE TRIED. More accurately,
I feel that HE IS DONE.
