President in the 1946–1947 year. He sat on the board of a number of other organizations, including the American Society of Public Administration (of which he was a founding member), and served as the editor of Political Science Quarterly. After officially retiring in 1958, MacMahon moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, but traveled frequently teaching and lecturing in Turkey, India, Uganda, and Argentina. In 1978, MacMahon entered a nursing home, where he lived until his death in 1980. Scholarly work MacMahon's scholarship covered a wide number of areas, including foreign policy, political economy and political theory, but his primary focus was always public administration, but he was "best known as one of the pioneers who led to the development of public administration." Most of his influential works focused on that area, and almost all of them involved public administration at least tangentially. Federal Administrators In 1939, MacMahon and his colleague John Millet published the book Federal Administrators: A Biographical Approach to the Problem of Department Management, which focused on the "day to day experiences of assistant and deputy department secretaries", analyzing their performance. The book was immediately recognized by reviewers as "one of the most significant books of the year," and quickly became a widely cited and influential text, considered by its reviewers to be "a lasting enrichment of the study of public administration in the United States." In the book, MacMahon and Millet concluded that government departments needed "both political and administrative leadership." This conclusion in time became "a fundamental enunciation of departmental policy" for the US government and continues to shape the way the federal bureaucracy is run today. Government management After Federal Administrators, MacMahon continued to study "the relationship of the administrative expert to the political authority" in works such as Administration in Foreign Affairs (1953), The Administration of Federal Work Relief (1939) and Autonomous Public Enterprise (1940). In these works, MacMahon also examined the role of "uninformed popular opinion" in shaping government policy. The Administration of Federal Work Relief In The Administration of Federal Work Relief, written with John Millet and Gladys Ogden, MacMahon presented a detailed history of the Works Progress Administration, with an emphasis on "how the confusion and uncertainty that prevailed in the preliminary planning and legislative stages of the program were carried over into its administration." MacMahon also analyzed the management structure of the WPA and the proper role for political authorities, particularly