Confessions of a GS-2

...in the same mail, Mrs...

...Still, when I saw the other day on the Times obituary page that my first boss had died, it got me thinking gloomy thoughts—not only about aging, but also the part I played long ago in helping build up the national debt...

...I wish I could remember the details of what we talked about on all those hot afternoons...

...Watt...

...The next Friday I would drive an empty truck to HEW, load it up with the same publications I had delivered the previous week, and return them to Bethesda...

...The most visible manifestation of this process was that every morning when he opened the New York Times he turned first, by reflex, to the obituaries...

...It turned out that several of the women in the off ice had been going downtown almost daily to the Democratic National Committee and stocking up on literature, posters and buttons...

...Wart and his staff would never know what hit them, but 18-year-olds have a high tolerance for irrationality...

...The Eisenhower Administration was fading...

...After several hours in this environment, it was easy to believe the world had ended and all that was left of the United States government was one GS-2 surrounded by acres of junk four levels below ground zero...

...His name was James Watt, M.D., and while I worked for him he was director of the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of what was just ceasing to be the quiet Southern company town of Washington, D.C...

...But if you find me today occasionally casting a skeptical eye at hypertrophied institutions public or private, well, I learned it at the feet of Olive and the late Dr...

...I catalogued the contents of my bunker, restocked as necessary, and read a lot of novels in the cool silence...

...Every Thursday I would apply for, and receive, a slip entitling me to take a pickup truck out of the motor pool on Friday and drive it downtown to HEW...

...What the prisoners thought of these objects was impossible to discover, but we could never keep enough of them in stock...

...At the beginning of the summer Nick, the man I was replacing, insisted I take the government test to drive a pickup truck...

...My guess, although I really have no idea, is that Olive did her job very well, if in an unconventional fashion...

...That's one reason they make good soldiers...

...One, a fiery secretary from Chicago named Sandy, wanted to festoon the Heart Information Center with Kennedy election materials and gave up the idea only when her superiors reminded her that the Hatch Act forbade political campaigning by government employees...

...Every once in a while the White House would ask for a report bearing on some aspect of the Presidential ticker, and the Information Center would scramble for a few weeks to come up with the best way of presenting medical information to a man whose training had been in strategy and tactics...

...Much of the time there was not enough work to keep me busy, and like other civil servants I soon discovered that the Washington summer in a building with no air conditioning called for a relaxed approach to the public's business...

...Now he was passing me along to her...

...Needless to say, I had no significant role in developing these presentations...

...It paid, as best I can remember, slightly over $3,000 a year, except that I was there for only three months...

...Olive, a Southern widow who must have been about 60, presided over the Heart Institute's offices there...

...The next week we loaded up the truck and drove downtown to see Olive...

...My father, who worked for another branch of the National Institutes of Health, thought I should earn some money during the summer between high school and college...

...My storeroom had a door like a bank vault and was clearly intended as a bunker for someone or something valuable...

...Most of the employees at the Heart Institute were Democrats who supported Kennedy even before he became the party's nominee...

...Having answered the mail as best I could, I generally retreated in the heat of the afternoon to the underground storeroom...

...She took the posters home, but a lot of us wore Kennedy buttons after that...

...Once I got to the bottom, I made my way through what must have been nearly half amileof corridors filled with abandoned office furniture...

...What it did, for the most part, was coordinate and support research projects on heart disease, sometimes in uneasy competition with private charities...

...I never encountered another human being down there, just thousands of desks and chairs and filing cabinets nobody wanted any more...

...Watt's Institute...

...I would get requests from Miss Smith in Cedar Rapids for 30 Living Pumps to give her fourth-graders...

...One morning recently he nearly suffered heart failure upon discovering his own name prominently displayed...

...Whoever was nominally her superior must have had a difficult time until he tacitly agreed that everything she did would be done her way...

...It sometimes seemed odd to me that thousands of Living Pumps would survive Armageddon while Dr...

...Every couple of weeks I would have to order more Living Pumps from the Federal prison and drug hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, where they were printed...

...And what a business it was...

...Although a few years younger than the editor, I know what he means...

...It was Kennedy himself who described Washington as a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm...

...My memories of working for the Federal government have never been contaminated by further experience...

...The Heart Institute was a New Deal creation nobody in the government paid much attention to, until Ike had his heart attack in 1955 and its appropriations began to increase...

...So here, for the new age of budget-cutting, is a vignette from the last year of the Eisenhower Administration that should at least make you feel nostalgic about the deficits of the past...

...Being a child of the government suburbs, I took the Civil Service exam and was rated qualified for the grade of GS-2, clerk-typist...

...She had worked in similar offices since the New Deal and seen bosses come and go...

...Probably I'm forgetting some deliveries that served a real purpose beyond bringing me into Olive's presence...

...Jones of Anchorage requested 200 for all the biology classes in her district...

...At an impressionable age I found out how people adjust to life as parts of an enterprise that in 1960 was already too big, unfocused and ineffecient...

...Most of the people I worked with were well-intentioned and did their best most of the time...

...Depressingly, he found the page more and more populated not by his parents' generation but by his contemporaries...

...I had no idea what purpose such a qualification could possibly serve for a clerk-typist, but I was already learning that life in the government often made no sense, and I obediently took the test...

...There's no telling what other habits I might have developed in this setting if I had been a permanent employee...

...For me, at 18, it was entirely new...

...This fastness lay beneath a building that had been constructed with nuclear attack in mind...

...On alternate Friday mornings I would load the truck with-publications from the bunk-er.Then I would have lunch, drive to Olive's office, unload the truck, and spend the afternoon listening, like a young man out of a Faulkner novel...

...Most mornings I stayed in my office filling orders from school teachers for our most popular publication...

...She seemed totally in control of her environment...

...As you can see, though, I'm one of those people who helped create the burden of debt we labor under today...

...Without ever saying so, she conveyed through her demeanor that the government was on the whole too absurd to worry about...

...Besides a normal basement, it had four sub-basements reached by a freight elevator no one else seemed to use...

...That summer Senator John F. Kennedy was nominated for President...

...A number were women in their 20s and 30s who fell violently in love with him...

...After the convention these lunches occasionally reached the three-hour mark...

...Not that I feel in any immediate danger...

...As I look back, it's hard for me to believe what her way meant to my weekly routine...

...The Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as it was then called, had its headquarters on Independence Avenue...

...With genes like mine I figure to collect Social Security for 20, maybe 30 years...

...It sounds worse than it seemed at the time...

...What the publications were that I carried back and forth all summer I have no recollection...

...During June some people began to take longer lunches than usual...

...What I saw in the way of waste, fraud and abuse during that brief period was pretty small potatoes by the standards of today—or of the Pentagon even then—but every story reaches its moment of ripeness sooner or later...

...But I left the Heart Institute in September for my freshman year of college, as planned, and the chances of life did not send me back...

...Like the desks, however, it had been deserted years before I came on the scene...

...The Living Pump, a poster of a large red heart with all its valves and ventricles conspicuously labeled, was apparently the backbone of science education in elementary and junior high schools...

...As a temporary clerk, I spent my days keeping track of reprints from medical journals, answering requests for the Heart Institute's own publications, and cleaning out the primitive photocopier...

...It proved to be another person with the same appellation, of course, yet he has never felt quite the same about breakfast since...

...Yes, Virginia, Social Security will outlast us both...

...Instead I retain only the general impression of an aristocratic lady from a different world where manners and human contact counted for nearly everything and official procedures for nothing...

...She had been part of Nick's education in how to preserve one's identity in a huge bureaucracy...

...The possibility that anyone would object to these trips did not occur to me, and nobody ever did...

...That it did and does good—that all those Living Pumps served some purpose—I don't doubt...

...One of my enterprising predecessors had discovered that it made a good place to store the piles of reprints and publications for which we were responsible...

...politics suddenly took on a new interest for people who had stopped paying attention a decade earlier...

...A woman of great charm and humor, she liked young men who would spend Friday afternoons in her office drinking coffee and conversing...

...As I said, the summer was a slow time...

...Republican or Democrat, everyone in the building agreed that Fridays were not part of the week in the normal sense...

...The rest of the week might belong to Uncle Sam, but everything after lunch on Friday was her own...

...The temporary job I found was in the Heart Information Center of Dr...