As Fairfax grew, so did George Mason. In 1978, the university hired a new and highly entrepreneurial president, George W. Johnson, who avidly cultivated “relationships with the CEOs” of the area and then helped them convince the federal government to outsource work to local corporate contractors. “Johnson knew,” reports a history of Fairfax commissioned by the developers themselves to tell their story in their own way, “that if these [Beltway] ‘bandits’ could band together, they could help combat the anti-contractor bias that was rampant in many Washington circles.”
