TILTING AT WINDMILLS
Peters, Charles
Tilting at Windmills Usually we side with the politicians in t h e i r c o n t i n u i n g war with the bureaucrats, but John Crutcher, writing in The Washington Star, reminds us of a...
...The result was that the non-sked industry went into the seventies with six prosperous companies-Southern and its five paranoid competitors...
...Yearsago, when Bill Moyers was LBJ’s press secretary, he told me the leaker he feared the most was not the cabinet member who had been done wrong by the president but the cabinet member’s special assistant, who was separated at least another bureaucratic layer from loyalty to the president and who was not nearly so accustomed to the attentions of the press...
...The Civil Aeronautics Board deserves an award for its encouragement of lower air fares...
...Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, Mirk Van Doren, and others of equalprestigeand ability taught classes of 15 to 30 undergraduates...
...The reason for the book’s success is that it enables an organization to find out which of its members live in the districts of the congressmen it wants to lobby...
...Since it was not immune from inside resistance to change, inertia was perhaps predictable...
...They cite studies conducted by the Securities Industries Association, a disinterested organization if there ever was one, showing that “a reduction in the capital gains tax would create jobs, produce price stability, increase capital formation, reduce the federal budget deficit, and have other beneficial effects on the entire economy...
...How this right kind of snobbery came to exist should be the earnest study of us all as we seek to restore some connection between our children and the people who are supposed to train them...
...Did you know who ghosted Allen Dulles’ The Craft of Intelligence...
...The reason for the stoppage, according to John Leyden, the union’s president, is that the controllers were “fed up” with the refusal of Pan Am, TWA, and Northwest Orient to give them free flights overseas...
...The sane and unsuspecting got theirjust reward, bankruptcy and failure...
...A recent example was the front page story on June 7 in The Washington Post that began: “Last summer the General Services Administration found that, with only two months remainingin the fiscal year, it had spent far less money than Congress had authorized...
...Doesn’t the style and content remind you of our recent presidents...
...Stockbrokers are urging their clients to write their senators and congressmenin support of the Steiger Amendment, which is designed to broaden thecapital gains tax break...
...You shouldn’t have...
...Charles Peters...
...It is ironic how ignored these menare by the hot-shot Woodsteins of the local press...
...One reason for the short tenure of the assistant secretaries is that too many enter government out of a passion not to accomplish in the public interest but to add to their string of credits...
...The person on the other end of t h e p h o n e heard “harangued” instead of “arraigned,” and that was what all thejournalists and editorial writers who live in Washington first read about the speech...
...w h e n I start my school of government, I’m going- to have a -special division for journalists because so few of them understand the way the bureaucracy works...
...If skillfully done, such broadcasts might do more to deter Castro than all our threats of counterintervention...
...Organizations are finding out that thousands of letters and postcards from their members is the most effective lobbying technique...
...For his own part, Carter thinks his main need is to stop leaks by his subordinates...
...You should have blamed the CIA, the organization that has done more than any other to make paranoid conspiracy theories respectable...
...As Southern’s fortunes soared, five other non-skeds became suspicious and threatened to blow the whistle on the CIA...
...At Columbia in the forties, the prevailing winds of snobbery blew in the direction of teaching...
...Tilting at Windmills Usually we side with the politicians in t h e i r c o n t i n u i n g war with the bureaucrats, but John Crutcher, writing in The Washington Star, reminds us of a legitimate complaint of the bureaucrats...
...Neither the President nor his aides see his problems as related to the substance of government...
...Now we have at least part of the explanation: It seems that when David Broder of The Washington Post called in his story about the speech from Los Angeles, he said “Carter arraigned the legal community for failingtoserve thecause of social justice...
...Washington is full of job-hopping executives who care far less about doing good than they do about looking good-looking good longenoughto get a better job before it’s discovered that they did nothing in the last one...
...A couple of months ago, I wrote that we can no longer afford to pay money from the various federal compensation and pension programs to people who don’t need it...
...L a s t month we mentioned the unfavorable press reaction to Carter’s splendid speech on lawyers...
...Unless the rest of its money was spent quickly, it would be returned to the Treasury and future GSA appropriations might be reduced...
...Poor Chairman Mao...
...Yet things can be different...
...Here’s a quote from Carter at the recent Camp David summit on the future of theadministration: “If you’re sore, just bite your lip...
...Since it takes about 24 months for an assistant secretary to learn his job, this means that he seldom learns enough before he goes to be able to tell his subordinates what to do...
...The bureaucrats are moving so fast to undermine the best of his legacy that he must be spinning in his grave by now...
...Urge your senator tovote for this bill because it could help solve the problem-lack of socialsupport for parenting-discussed in Deborah Baldwin’s article on page 50 of this issue...
...Doesn’t this make you want to weep...
...Under the old system companies would submit unrealistically low bids in order to get a contract...
...Their latest move is to introduce tracking in t h e s c h o o l s . . . . Why doesn’t the International Communications Agency-the new name for the US1 A-start directing Tokyo Roselike broadcasts to Cuba on thethemeof why are your sons dying in Africa...
...It’s not just Harvard’s problem-it exists t h r o u g h o u t academic America...
...As further evidence in support of Janet Hook’s contention (see page 38) that our embassy in London is overblown, here is how it compares with our embassy in Moscow-clearly a more important post-in three categories: Moscow London Official Residence Expense $54,630 $132,913 Representation Allowance $1 1,878 $28,563 Servants for the Am bassador 12 18 D e a n Henry Rosovsky of Harvard recently required that all tenure nominations be accompanied by an assessment of the candidate’s teaching ability...
...Senator Howard Cannon, as a retired major general in the Air Force Reserve, gets $1,072 a month above his Senate salary...
...So instructions went out from GSA’s Public Buildings Servicewhich owns, leases and maintains federal buildings-to spend more money and do it fast...
...On domestic flights, bookings are running 40 per cent ahead of last year, and anyone trying to get overseas knows that it’s seldom been harder to get a seat...
...Then the cost overruns would begin, with the result that the government would usually get stuck with a much higher final bill than it-and the Congress and the taxpayers-had been led to expect...
...The new bestseller in Washington, according to Rebecca Leet of The Washington Star, bears the unexciting title of 95th Congress, Congressional District Zip Codes...
...Ordinarily my sympathies and often my prayers go out to our air traffic controllers...
...The problem he isattemptingto deal with is, as Susan Schiefelbein reminds us in The Saturday Review, that Harvard professors either can’t or won’t teach...
...To give you an example of the waste, 32 members of Congress, each making $57,500 per year, receive disability or pension checks from the federal government...
...What they mean is that it would aid the brokerage business...
...But their most recent work stoppage makes me wonder if they aren’t going the way of most whitecollar unions...
...Don’t pop off to your staff and let them leak it to the press...
...In 1960, according to Tom Redburn of The Los Angeles Times, the CIA bought a non-sked called Southern Air Transport and began steering a lot of business its way...
...If you prize independence, as I do, you will share my depression at finding out that the number of self-employed Americans has dropped from six per cent in 1970 to two per cent today...
...E you owned a non-scheduled airline in the early sixties and found your business and that of most other nonskeds dwindling while that of a halfdozen others was soaring, you probably shrugged your shoulders and said, “Well, they’re just doing a better job...
...It is that the appointees with most direct authority over thecivil servants, those at the assistant secretary level, stay in government for an averqge of only 21 months...
...Turkey farming brings to our mind pleasant rural scenes and images of Thanksgiving...
...All it does is guarantee a prompt election to determine whether employees want to be represented by a union and give the union legal access to the employees to present its case...
...But that’s not what it means to some of our wilier federal managers...
...The Defense Department is changing the way it selects contractors for major weapons...
...T h e New York Times of May 25 had a story by Terence Smith saying that Carter’s aides were urging him to travel to build up his image...
...The way to create jobs is to confine the capital gains tax break to new investment that willcreate newjobs and modern plants...
...In his Guardian article, Norton-Taylor quotes the 1968 Fulton Report on the Civil Service in England: “One of the main troubles of the Service has been that, in achieving immunity from political intervention, a system was evoked which until recently was virtually immunefrom outside pressure for change...
...Pendingthegloriousday when I open my school, I suggest that when they are doing stories on government agencies, reporters at thetwo Washington papers consult their civil service columnists, Mike Causeyat the Post and JoeYoung at the Star, who are both extremely knowledgeable, if excessively indulgent, about the rituals of bureaucracy...
...Those places are the farms...
...Why are businessmen so upset about the Labor Law Reform Bill...
...If individual departments or agencies do not use up their annual budgets,” he wrote, “then they are regarded in Whitehall as either not doing their job properly or not needing as much next year...
...their less productive subordinates are the turkeys...
...Free enterprise can work...
...Nowhere did the story say that the end of the fiscal year spending spree is an annual event in most government agencies, and that if there was ascandal in the story it was not confined to GSA alone...
...Howard Hunt...
...But deposit insurance could protect just the depositor, so there is no good reason not to have competition between banks...
...For the last 40 years the government’s policy has been to protect depositors by protecting their banks from failure...
...Now most of it is wasted on trading in old issues, which does nothing for anybody except the traders and their brokers...
...To keep them quiet, the CIA began throwing business their way...
...That kind of competition-free, riskfree, state-subsidized capitalism recently received another blow, this time from John Heimann, Comptroller of the Currency...
...But however inelegant these words may be, they do contain sound words of adviceforthe press...
...Barzun wrote a book called Teacher in America criticizing the professors who wanted to be called Doctor and wanted to confine their work to research...
...If the new program called “Four Step Source Selection” works, we’ll even forgive its name...
...What doesn’t work is our Mussolini-style state capitalism, with its high prices required and supported by the government...
...The House has passed a bill to require federal agencies to undertake test projects to determine the feasibility of more job-sharing and part-time employment...
...He actually proposed letting banks fail...
...Indeed, as Richard NortonTaylor pointed out in a May issue of The Manchester Guardian, the problem extends well beyond these shores...
...To them, turkey farming refers to the Integrated Personnel Act, which permits them to assign federal employees to universities and state and municipal governments...
Vol. 10 • July 1978 • No. 5
