The Defense Roots of Dallin H. Oaks's Charity (ERI Pt. 4)

This continues my ongoing series about the Eyring Research Institute, BYU’s defense research arm in the 70s and 80s. I’ve written these so that you can jump in at any point, but check out the other three parts for more context. Pt. 1 gives a general overview of ERI’s history, Pt. 2 and 3 cover some of the ERI’s inventions.

Here's a bit of how the sausage is made. The majority of my ideas for articles come from randomly clicking around online, trying to make sense of Google Books snippet views, etc. Sometimes, if I’m bored, I’ll just type in “Eyring Research Institute” and see what comes up — that’s how I stumbled upon the textbooks of Dr. Richard McDermott. 

Immediately, I was intrigued by the tagline: “A tale of romance, murder, mystery, and… managed care.” Plus, McDermott was a former vice president of the Eyring Research Institute? I needed to know more about this guy.

It didn’t take long to trace Richard McDermott to Dallin H. Oaks’s charity, the Stella H. Oaks Foundation. Oaks — second in command of the Mormon church, shortlisted by Ronald Reagan for a Supreme Court judgeship, presumed next President of the church, and virulent homophobe — isn’t technically involved in the day-to-day operations of his foundation. But his wife is, the foundation is named after his mom, and it traces back to ERI defense research in the 70s and 80s — an organization he set up while president of BYU.

*

Actually finding what Dr. McDermott did at the Eyring Research Institute is challenging. From his own LinkedIn page (and the few articles I found about him), he was the ERI Vice President of Finance. Oddly, on his LinkedIn profile he lists his ERI experience starting in 1971, two years before the ERI was officially founded. That said, we’ve seen before that BYU didn’t have a clear distinction between the ERI and the school’s other research and defense organizations. Perhaps McDermott worked for a department that got rolled into the ERI later?

With the exception of the ERI, McDermott’s career is in the medical field. He started with the Health Services Corporation (HSC) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the church’s now-defunct hospital network. By the 70s, the LDS hospitals were crumbling, some needing up to $100 million worth of repairs. Simultaneously, the church’s missionary program was expanding around the globe, requiring greater financial investment. Bolstered by conservative paranoia over the Roe vs. Wade decision, the Mormons decided to divest themselves of their hospitals, dodging the maintenance costs and freeing up cash for the missionary program.

The fifteen HSC hospitals were given to a new non-profit, Intermountain Health Care (IHC). The new hospital system was supposed to be a charitable organization but did not even last a decade before tax assessors in Utah started noticing the IHC was not providing adequate medical care for those who couldn’t afford it, a key trait of a charitable hospital. IHC fought off multiple legal challenges throughout the 80s and still remains in operation today. 

McDermott came up during this time. Merely six months into his medical career (after a stint as an Administrative Resident), the HSC made him the Director of Rural Medicine. As HSC turned to IHC, McDermott stayed on, working as an administrator in former HSC hospitals.

Concurrently, McDermott worked for the Eyring Research Institute. At the same time he was running a rural medicine program for the church, he was running the finances of a defense research arm — bizarre double dipping for a doctor. It’s even weirder when you look at what he lists as his jobs while working at the ERI.

Minuteman ICBM guidance shows up a lot when you look into the Eyring Research Institute — it seems to be one of their main research projects. The guidance computer for the missiles was designed by TRW, an aerospace company that traces its history back to disgruntled Hughes employees splitting off to form their own company. James Fletcher, the Mormon NASA administrator, developed system analysis practices for the Atlas ICBM while working at TRW. Bruce Weidner, the unhinged ERI programmer, alleged that his software was used both for Minuteman guidance computers and for WordPerfect. I assume ACM, F4, and F26 computers are Minuteman hardware.

“Top secret communication systems for DOD” also stands out to me. This most likely refers to research the ERI did in support of the TACAMO system, a military communication link designed to survive a nuclear conflict and allow US commanders to formulate a counterstrike. The ERI also built ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) antennas for the US Navy. I plan to cover more of this in a future installment. 

Arguably, the most important person in the ERI was Dr. Carlyle Harmon, a former Johnson and Johnson chemical engineer who invented a polymer now used as absorbent material in disposable diapers. BYU hired him in 1971 — two years later, he put up half the cash to found the Eyring Research Institute. The other investor was Dudley Swim, whose son Gaylord founded the conservative Sutherland Institute think tank.

Harmon and McDermott became close friends while working at the ERI. In the obituary linked above McDermott gives quotes and the doctor also delivered an introduction speech when the ERI was inducted into the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum hall of fame. 

Within a decade of its founding, the ERI already had problems. In 1979, the Utah Supreme Court stripped the institute of its non-profit status (sensing a pattern?), which left it in the hands of the LDS church in accordance with the ERI’s bylaws. Two months later, the LDS church leaders spun the ERI off into a for-profit company. All those researchers sitting on new software had the green light to market their prototypes, fracturing the ERI into a web of competing high-tech companies. Still, the stripped-down company staggered on. McDermott left the ERI (but stayed on at BYU) in 1985 and Harmon was forced out in 1988.

**

The whole time he had been developing nuclear weapons, McDermott was also a medical doctor and, starting in 1983, a healthcare administration and accounting professor at BYU. He stayed with BYU for four years after leaving the ERI, switching to Weber State in 1989, where he worked for the next three decades. It’s during this time that McDermott wrote his romantic textbooks. McDermott also calls them textbook novels. 

Basically, from reading the reviews of his three books — Eleventh Hour, Code Blue (Health Sciences), and Code Blue (Accounting) — it seems like they are textbooks that also include a story. I assume that a topic like managed care accounting is one of the most boring things on the planet, so McDermott’s innovation was to include an interesting story while covering the dry topics. When I was in high school, my French teacher had us watch these sitcoms where the characters were using really watered-down French, the idea being that we would get entranced with the sitcom story and also happen to learn some French vocabulary terms. These books seem to be the same idea.  

From the tagline, readers should expect romance. I wonder what steamy romance scenes a Mormon doctor/weapons developer/accountant would write with the goal of teaching hospital administration. Horrific, I’m sure. 

McDermott’s co-writer, Kevin D. Stocks was also a BYU professor. The BYU schools have a weekly sermon on campus, delivered by a faculty member. Stocks’s speech introduced me to one of the most cursed phrases I’ve read: “spiritual cash flow.” 

“How is your spiritual cash flow?”  Things you ask when you are definitely, totally, a follower of Jesus.

***

Kicked out of his defense research institute, Harmon started a new project — providing scholarships and support for single mothers. This is, of course, a laudable goal. Like with the Eyring Research Institute, Harmon provided the upfront cash, a whopping $1,350,000 in 1980s money. Turns out building nuclear missile guidance systems and inventing disposable diapers is pretty lucrative. Harmon tapped McDermott to run the newly christened Harmon Hope foundation. Recently, McDermott had been approached by a divorced woman needing help with her finances. After helping her prepare a budget, McDermott realized that the best hope for this woman would be returning to school. A scholarship would take one more burden off her mind. Now with a cause, McDermott and Harmon started giving scholarships to single mothers so that they could return to school and get an education.

Providing the scholarships is good, but people experienced with Mormonism will notice an interesting implication to the problem they were solving. The Harmon Hope website discusses the financial toll to a woman after losing a husband through divorce or death, and (correctly) points out that if they don’t have a degree, returning to school is a good way to increase their earning power. But why didn’t the women have an education in the first place? Why does losing a husband necessarily wipe out their earning power? This is an artifact of the way the Brigham Young Universities treat their female students. Often, a woman getting a degree is seen as little more than insurance in case of a husband's death. Going to college, for a Mormon woman, is primarily a matchmaking experience. The goal is to find a husband, have babies, and be a content housewife. Education is a secondary goal, and entering the workforce after graduation is specifically frowned upon. As explicitly spelled out in the Family Proclamation — a quasi-canonical church declaration codifying traditional gender roles and LGBT+ exclusion:

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.

“Individual adaptation,” or in other words: if your husband dies, or you get divorced, then we can bend the rules a little bit, and you can get a job. You’ll need an education to do that, but since many Mormon women skipped education on orders of their church, they need the assistance of organizations like the Harmon Hope Foundation to get back into a degree program.

Harmon Hope started as a private foundation, accepting no outside donations, instead relying on Carlyle Harmon’s cash to provide funding. Unfortunately, even nuclear missile money can only go so far. After giving out 500 scholarships, the foundation needed public funding. Thus, in 2016 they decided to create a new foundation, the Stella H. Oaks Foundation. 

Stella H. Oaks is the mother of Dallin H. Oaks, the current second in command of the Mormon church and one of the most powerful Mormons in the modern age. He started his career in law, first working as a clerk for Justice Earl Warren and then as a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis, the powerful law firm that boasts such sterling alumni as Brett Kavanaugh, William Barr, Robert Bork, John Bolton, and Ken Starr. In 1971, he became the president of Brigham Young University. During his time, he hired the key personnel for the Eyring Research Institute and oversaw its founding alongside Carlyle Harmon. In 1981, Ronald Reagan shortlisted him for the Supreme Court. Reagan went with Sandra Day O’Connor instead, and three years later, the LDS church hired Oaks as an Apostle in the Quorum the Twelve, the top Mormon echelon. 

Harmon was long dead by the time his foundation morphed into the Stella H. Oaks Foundation, but presumably he had a close relationship with Oaks from their time at BYU. McDermott, being a close friend of Harmon and a key ERI figure, also probably had a good relationship. Attaching a prominent Mormon name to the new public foundation was a smart move, but it seems to have come with a catch.

Look at the leadership team. No Richard McDermott. He’s not dead though. In fact, he’s back at the Harmon Hope foundation, which still exists despite the Oaks foundation being intended to replace it. I’m not sure when this happened, but McDermott does have an Instagram account where his last post (from 2019) was about an event he did with the Stella H. Oaks foundation. Weirder still, the Stella H. Oaks' website doesn’t have a history section, so there isn’t a single mention of McDermott or Carlyle Harmon on the website. McDermott was definitely involved though: he lists himself as founder of the institute on LinkedIn and is mentioned on the foundation's Form 990. Oddly, Wayback Machine snapshots show that the website did have a history section until 2021. 

Another oddity: for a foundation with such a laudable goal and such a famous name in Mormonism, they don’t have much of an internet footprint. The only two news articles I could find were from KUTV and the official LDS church’s website — weird, considering that the Foundation’s website doesn’t mention Mormonism anywhere.

McDermott is out of the foundation, but let’s look at who is working with them to wrap this up. Elaine Dalton is president. Mormon readers will recognize her as a former Young Women’s General President, basically the head of the church’s teenage girl programs. Women’s general leadership does not get lifetime appointments like the top men do — she left general leadership in 2013, and now is the president of a top Mormon leader’s charitable foundation. Since then she remains an active participant in the Utah politico-religious scene, decrying the Women’s Marches following Trump’s inauguration:

We were in a cab, and as I watched those women marching and yelling ... behaving anything but ladylike and using language that was very unbefitting of daughters of God, my heart just sunk and I thought to myself, 'What would happen if all those women were marching and calling to the world for a return to virtue?'

Director of Operations is Sara Ebert. She’s a successful operations manager in the Utah political sphere, to quote:

Sara has worked as an event planner and operations guru for political candidates and nonprofits in Utah including events for President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, U.S. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Governor Olene Walker, and two Supreme Court Justices, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. She served as the Executive Director of the Utah Families Foundation and later joined the leadership team of the nonprofit Orrin G. Hatch Foundation as the Administrative Director.

Now for the board of directors:

• Bruce L. Olsen: A tax lawyer specializing in advising Utah nonprofits on how to set up everything to make the IRS happy. He advises “private foundations, private operating foundations, support organizations, universities, health care institutions, donor-advised funds, and other large and small exempt organizations.” Olsen was the principal draftsman for the Utah Revised Nonprofit Corporation Act.

• Kristin Oaks: Dallin H. Oaks’s wife.

• Andrea Clarke: A successful tech entrepreneur focusing in robotics who now works with nonprofits, including her own, the unsettlingly named Labor and Honor Foundation.

• Kathy Clayton: Wife of L. Whitney Clayton, a Mormon leader serving as a President of the Quorum of the Seventy, the third most powerful governing body in the church hierarchy.

• Louise Murphy: The Stella H. Oaks website doesn’t include much about her. It’s so vague that her bio includes her church callings and the fact that she moved from Connecticut to Utah. She is a leader for Rising Star Outreach, a charity to help people with leprosy in India.

• Lew Cramer: A former Ronald Reagan White House fellow that helped open up trade to Eastern Bloc countries in the late 80s. He is now a successful real estate investor, founding the World Trade Center Utah with Jon Huntsman and currently acting as CEO for Colliers International-Utah.

All in all, a pretty interesting team for a non-profit giving scholarships to single mothers. But that’s how the tangled web of Mormon business interests always is. You start with one weird thread (the concept of a romantic medical textbook) and then stumble upon all the ways that the powerful in Utah business and religion — if you even can disentangle those two interests — are interconnected. Add in nuclear missiles for spice.