Tales from the Bore War
Shapiro, Walter
Tales from the Bore War by Walter Shapiro Speak to me of infrastructures... Lawrence Simons began to speak: "It's a great pleasure for me to appear before you tonight—" Settle back, boys, long...
...I have a list of the cabinet secretaries, assistant secretaries, and other people we'd like to go to Fargo...
...Between elections there are many occasions when the incentive is equally obvious...
...What can we say about the costs associated with this phenomenon...
...But there are times when the wolves are at bay, and still we find the airports jammed with speakers en route to yet another remote rostrum...
...There is only one hitch...
...Hnnnnnnhhhh...
...Over time, the speaker absorbs the idea that people are actually listening and that he is doing the real work of government by speaking to them...
...No perk is more cherished than the opportunity to spend an expense-paid week gamboling in New Orleans, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami Beach...
...b) the airport got fogged in...
...That convention in Seattle— you know, the one where they want to give me that award—let them know I'll be there...
...It's widespread in Washington...
...I had to speak to 300 botanists, and I'm bushed...
...The tenor of the announcement is unmistakable and presents everyone in the room with a Hobson's Choice: either waste a day in Fargo or antagonize the White House...
...If you can't make the problems go away, the only alternative is to make yourself go away—and nothing is more welcome for that purpose than the out-of-town speaking engagement...
...These were strong words...
...Lay them end to end and they would reach to Dubuque and back, as they often do...
...If they don't get the president re-elected, they don't keep their jobs...
...The creamed peas grow cold while he wrestles with the remains of the secretary's ringing rhetoric...
...Anyone who has attended more than two conferences has had the experience of waiting to hear from one of the big guns of the administration, only to realize at the last minute that the vaguely adolescent-looking individual at the head table—the man who doesn't look quite right in a three-piece suit—will be substituting for the star...
...If we simply assume that the 535 members of the House and Senate make four speeches a month—a laughably conservative estimate— we have added 25,680 speeches a year to the executive branch's 6,160...
...But administration spokespeople have a range of incentives of their own, and when it comes time to reform, they follow the path of Senator Byrd...
...While that may not seem like much more than the cost overrun of a single GSA filing cabinet, keep in mind that we have not yet attempted to estimate all the costs associated with assembling everyone who has to hear the speeches...
...the Society of Spokespersons is counting on that...
...This yearly ritual would commemorate Adams's declaration, upon being appointed secretary of Transportation, that he would give no speeches during his first six months in office...
...The deputy then proceeds to demonstrate that he has not had time to look at the speech in advance, and that his Xerox copy is badly smudged...
...But we do not endure speeches for guilt and the IRS alone...
...Representatives of the executive branch are not permitted to accept fees for their speaking engagements...
...Lawrence Simons may have nothing to tell us, and we may not want to listen, but we are mightily pleased that he has honored us with his presence, because we need him...
...It wasn't great...
...No one wants to be found among the group of 75 hapless former-assistantsecretaries wandering around jobless after a change of administrations...
...we want Lawrence Simons to like us...
...Then there are 180 people like Lawrence Simons—obscure assistant secretaries and deputies and unders who comprise the sub-cabinet ranks...
...Fargo may not be high on anybody's travel preference list, but when an invitation arrives 'to speak to a group in Santa Fe or Tampa or San Francisco, who can refuse...
...The steel industry may be flat on its back, Chrysler may be taking a long count, but the convention industry has seasoned analysts agog...
...Suddenly, the Association of Synthetic Fur Exporters wants to name the assistant secretary Man of the Year...
...As you know, he was looking forward to a reunion with his many warm personal friends here in Anchorage, but just as he was on his way to the airport, (a) the White House asked him to meet with the president about the crisis in Ulan Bator...
...Not surprisingly, a full complement of administration luminaries will soon be found at the Ozark Airlines counter in Chicago, waiting for a plane change to Fargo...
...Put each of them down, conservatively, for 25 speeches a year...
...Bland indifference is vitally important to the perpetuation of the speechmaking syndrome...
...But just suppose you tried: Begin with a cabinet secretary like Ray Marshall, who averages 50 to 75 speeches a year...
...And there were the requisite arcane statistics: "NSA cities reserved 18,900 units, mostly sub-rehab, in FY 1979...
...land is costly and frequently hard to find...
...Indeed, our willingness to be benumbed may have as much to do with taking money from the Treasury as with avoiding payment to it...
...if you speak for the administration— Carter's or any other—you will speak whenever the invitations come in, wherever the White House wants you to go, you will speak on the beaches and in the hills and the towns, you will never surrender...
...and critical mass being the moment when every available speaker is talking simultaneously to indifferent listeners all across America...
...An international gathering of female architects, meeting in Seattle last October, learned from HUD assistant secretary Donna Shalala that "my office is concerned with housing...
...Now assume that the average speech involves 200 miles of travel at 25 cents a mile and eight hours of the speaker's time at $20 an hour...
...What the hell, even Cleveland looks good compared to staying at your desk burrowing through printouts...
...And a government lawyer, asked to address an American Bar Association conference, knows that a handsomely-crafted address worthy of a law review is the best way to let the world know he is partnership material...
...Suppose, for example, that we are members of the National Housing Conference...
...Groups like to corral congressmen to their conventions, for the obvious reason that congressmen vote on matters of importance— like whether to subsidize another study of another infrastructure—and congressmen like to accept, for the obvious reason that they get paid...
...A prominent government official would be invited, and introduced with fulsome praise...
...Part of the answer can be found in one of the great success stories of American capitalism in the 1970s...
...and it makes efficient use of the existing infrastructure supporting treated buildings...
...If you think these people are anonymous now, consider how obscure they were before being tapped for high office...
...The Three-Martini Speech Why do groups voluntarily subject themselves to the paralyzing boredom that is almost invariably the sole product of speeches by public officials...
...Travel: Although accepting fees is forbidden, government speakers will be reimbursed for travel expenses...
...Does this trouble the assistant secretary...
...Buried in the creamed peas, hardly anyone even noticed...
...It's one thing to go to Fargo, but an invitation to address the Aspen Institute on "Geopolitical Aspects of Global Interdependence in the 1980s" calls for rigorous preparation...
...By now, most convention planners know how to schedule things so that the government speaker can get his remarks out of the way on Thursday night.' Perhaps he meets with some of the delegates at breakfast on Friday...
...That's clear enough...
...We have nothing to report in this area because our accountants are in Omaha listening to Bob Bergland...
...Lawrence Simons may well have believed that speaking to the National Housing Conference provided a unique opportunity to educate citizens on the intricacies of the administration's urban rehabilitation programs, and Donna Shalala may have been convinced that her notion of non-sexist cities represented a major conceptual breakthrough for the women's movement...
...Hard to say—we may need another tablecloth to work this one out...
...What it was, was typical...
...Multiply that by 13 cabinet officers and you get 910 speeches...
...By the same token, the shrewd spokesman approaches different speaking engagements with different degrees of conscientiousness...
...letter from the League of Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area Comptrollers about their meeting next month in Fargo...
...After food, housing is the single most pressing need for any individual...
...Representatives from 23 different federal agencies have just given reports on what they are doing to advance the president's legislative goals...
...we want to shake his hand and tell him he is doing a grand job...
...If anyone ever emerged from the anaesthesia induced by the speeches, the rubber chicken, and the overheated meeting rooms, and actually thought hard for a moment, it would become clear that speech-writing and speech-delivering are more than just another growth industry in Washington...
...The Understudy: One of the perils of serving as a subordinate is to be next in line when the boss decides not to go...
...Sure Beats Working: Government officials tend to burn out after about 18 months...
...Are these one-time costs, redundant costs—and how do you factor in the effects of the Consumer Price Index...
...Conference of Mayors, assembled in Pittsburgh, learned that "housing is where people live...
...He would then stand mute before the entire auditorium for 30 minutes, after which he would sit down to thunderous applause...
...That, too, is part of the process: the sense that speechmaking is hard but, God knows, a necessary part of government...
...What about the fact that the furriers are trying to get federal help in their struggle against market encroachment by Botswana...
...Wait...
...The end product of this process is that people like Patricia Harris suddenly start speaking about the windfall profits tax...
...The record will show that this remark was not greeted with raucous laughter, catcalls, Bronx cheers...
...In fact, it may be safely assumed that whatever the undersecretaries of Washington know about the creamed-peas circuit, they learned from Capitol Hill...
...And it had "the existing infrastructure supporting treated buildings...
...Throw in the 15 White House aides who will go anywhere to talk to anyone sitting still (Sarah Weddington and Esther Peterson are legendary travelers) and you have another 750 appearances...
...Rehab, of course, offers a sound alternative in many situations to new construction—" Like to get my hands on the clown who designed these chairs...
...At a time when torpor permeates the boardrooms and cubicles of corporate America, management must provide more and more perquisites to keep its people content...
...It seems safe to say that when Simons sat down, the world was very much the same as when he stood up...
...Not quite so respectable is the fact that they often collect these fees from people about whom they are supposed to remain objective and impartial...
...Simons maintained a consistent style throughout...
...Cute waitress over there...
...Let's just settle for the very reasonable assumption that each speech requires a minimum of three person-hours to prepare at a median cost of $17.75 per hour (methodology available on request) including fringe benefits but exclusive of travel...
...We need friends in Washington...
...I was invited," he thinks to himself, "because word of my charm, my wit, my eloquence and my great record in administering Title 607(d)(3) has spread across an entire continent...
...It had the mandatory "pleasure-to-behere" opener, the tip-off that Simons's speechwriter had long since given up looking for fresh anecdotes and was in a hurry to get home...
...Since 17 of the 23 agency representatives have little or nothing to do with urban policy, the presentations have been a bit thin on substance...
...What we do not need is some maverick in Washington who might some day take a hard look at the subrehab infrastructure and discover swarms of consultants and self-styled urbanrevitalizers playing games with government grants...
...There were statements of the Extreme Obvious: "New housing is costly to build...
...Someone has to be found to speak at each of these gettogethers, and nowhere is there a larger reservoir of spokespeople than in the federal government...
...Speeches Are Hard Work: This is the flip side of "Sure Beats Working...
...For the equation to be complete, you must have a speaker with little or nothing to say and no particular enthusiasm for saying it, and, on the other side of the rostrum, two or more people who have invited the speaker to address them but have no interest in listening...
...Talk about growth—in convention centers like Washington, new hotel construction can barely keep pace with the escalating demand for conferences...
...2 pencils) we already have a program budgeted at $1,621,620...
...With any luck, one phone call does it all—gets you your speaker and establishes plausibility with the IRS...
...This requirement can be met without strain by loading the conference agenda with breakfast meetings, lunchtime symposia, and happyhour seminars...
...Speak or Else: Another meeting of the inter-agency coordinating committee on urban policy (or any other policy) is drawing to a close in the Roosevelt Room of the White House...
...Ego: Quick, name four assistant secretaries in the Commerce Department...
...Bring all the writers and talkers and ancillary personnel together in one room and you would have the equivalent of a middle-size federal agency...
...It's hard to assign a specific cost to a speechwriter who, armed with scissors and a modest imagination, cuts and pastes paragraphs from old speeches into a random pattern suitable for a Shalala...
...Lawrence Simons began to speak: "It's a great pleasure for me to appear before you tonight—" Settle back, boys, long night ahead...
...Ordinarily nobody in the audience will ask a question...
...Whatever zeal there was in the beginning has long since been replaced by a vast sense of futility...
...The very sight of the office in the morning is a painful reminder that the problems are never resolved and the meetings never end...
...This was to take effect in 1979...
...Looking Out for Number One: Washington is a city where job mobility is a way of life...
...Well, it was a hell of a hard day," he tells his wife on the phone that night...
...You will never do these exercises, of course...
...If Secretary Adams did nothing else worthwhile—and indeed that appears to have been the case— his initial reluctance to participate in the great charade of government oratory stands as a shining example to those who would end the charade...
...No new information had been conveyed...
...In the politics of Washington the rules are different...
...A Capitolist Tool The search for friends in Washington is as old as the republic, and it works to the mutual advantage of searchers and searchees...
...In 1979, he voted to leave the old law—with the $25,000 maximum—intact...
...And why do public officials accept these invitations, exposing themselves to the horrors of gastric distress and the nausea induced by laboring through the prose produced by their writers...
...Thus they are stripped of the kind of direct financial incentive that propels congressmen hither and yon and keeps Capitol Hill speechwriters working late on the immortal words that their patron will utter tomorrow to the New England Knitted Outerwear Association...
...Three meals a day, five maybe six days a week, two hundred and some-odd days out of the year, in Washington and in each of the great states and in many of the territories, at conventions and convocations and conferences great and small, they are out there—competing for attention with the creamed peas, and spreading the good word about the existing infraWalter Shapiro, who survived a tour of duty as a speechwriter for Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The benevolent corporation rewarding its workers rewards itself at the same time, by writing off these conferences as tax-deductible expenses of doing business...
...Fulsome Prison Blues Each year, the speech department at a major university should host the Brock Adams Lecture...
...to talk about rehabilitation and its beneficial effects on the existing stock of housing in this country...
...It had the necessary jargon—"rehab"--demonstrating that Simons was one of the boys...
...In a momentary shudder of zeal brought on by Watergate, the Senate voted in 1977 to cut back the limit on the amount of outside income its members could receive for such speeches—from $25,000 a year to $8,625...
...We do not need that...
...It's certainly better than getting caught slipping out to afternoon movies...
...There were references to HUD programs: "Section 312 and Section 23b—especially Project Rehab—demonstrated that federal efforts could target rehabilitation to renewal or revitalization areas...
...At about the same time he burns out, the assistant secretary gets the idea that making speeches is, itself, important work...
...If the signals are ambiguous, the secretary sighs with relief and sends a deputy...
...Everyone wants to go home...
...It is axiomatic that at every conference there is a rostrum, and behind that rostrum there must be someone moving his lips and making sounds...
...This was the message brought to them from Washington by HUD undersecretary Jay Janis...
...No one would long remember what he had said, nor would he have been able to repeat it later if asked...
...we may even listen to him, on the off chance that he will reveal clues as to how we might better phrase our grant applications to take maximum advantage of the latest HUD offerings...
...No new programs had been announced...
...I hardly need to tell you how important the comptrollers are...
...This happens all the time...
...Unfortunately, no serious reform seems likely, because no one would write the speech advocating it...
...Add these all together and you get a grand total of 6,160 speeches a year by representatives of the administration-27.4 speeches a day (assuming a five-day week...
...structure and the unswerving commitment...
...But then in 1978 Senator Byrd became one of six senators to earn the maximum $25,000 still allowable under the old law...
...In Maine among the Yankees it was once considered important to "speak only when you can improve on silence...
...Sipping sherry in the Rockies with the high priests of both the profit and non-profit world, the artful assistant secretary can make the kind of contacts that will pay handsome dividends later...
...The Senate's integrity was at stake, he said, when "business interests, unions, or other pressure groups affected by legislation pay extremely large sums of money for a short speech by a senator...
...The objective of these exercises is to keep wolves of whatever persuasion away from the door...
...People are shuffling papers, stuffing briefcases, looking out the window at the fading winter light...
...In politics, these chain reactions take place every day...
...A cabinet secretary who has been bullied by the White House into speaking at a remote conclave will take careful soundings to determine—as the day approaches—whether anyone at the White House still cares...
...The reform seemed certain to become an important protector of congressional virtue...
...Today this may be only a theoretical concept, but in an election year the theory will not be far from fact...
...This is mass communication with a difference—the difference being the measurable mass of speeches piled on top of each other (how else ,will the White House know we're doing our job...
...Inter-agency task forces often seem to do almost nothing beyond drafting, revising, and distributing "speech inserts"—thoroughly masticated cuds of hard information about soft programs...
...c) his speechwriter quit...
...What is the senior White House aide saying...
...Many senators collect $2,000 per speech—not as good as Bob Hope, but perfectly respectable...
...He rings for his secretary...
...instead, there will be polite applause...
...But it seems equally safe to say that he went to bed exhausted that night, as did his listeners, and that they all slept the sleep of the just...
...It wasn't really terrible...
...the secretary of Labor speaks to the AFL-CIO to reassure workers that the administration really does care about them, and on the same day the secretary of Commerce tells the Business Roundtable that the administration will never forget the sacrifices made by corporations—and so on...
...Lawrence Simons, one of the many assistant secretaries at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was the featured speaker at the National Housing Conference in Washington last November 20, and his speech serves admirably to illustrate the process...
...The Internal Revenue Service will accept the tax deduction only if business is actually conducted at the conference...
...Probably not...
...It had the reluctance to make a flat assertion: ". ..offers a sound alternative in many situations...
...Later in the same speech, Shalala—who has since been named president of Hunter College—advised her audience that HUD was spending its time "looking for' a non-sexist city...
...After that, the weekend is wide open...
...If you have your calculator with you, you will promptly see that without even attempting to quantify a whole range of related costs (Xerox, phone, Venus No...
...The resourceful government official always has a weather eye peeled for the right contact who will come through with the right offer at the right time—from the law firm, the university, or the foundation—to help make the transition from public to private life painless and, if possible, financially stimulating...
...In June 1979 the U.S...
...when he goes back to Washington on Monday, the Treasury will pick up the entire travel tab, no questions asked...
...The speaker may know nothing about the subject encompassed by the speech insert...
...We'll need to send seven administration speakers—and they need people for panel discussions...
...that gives you another 4,500 appearances...
...The line is always essentially the same: "The Secretary has asked me to convey to you his profound personal regret that he could not be here...
...It's easy to be cynical about the motivations of government officials, but what you find, close up, is that they are often entirely sincere even in the pursuit of goals that seem entirely worthless to the rest of us...
...This is one of the key advantages of membership in Congress...
...Here again, you must pause briefly to doodle some numbers on the tablecloth in order to appreciate the dimensions of the speechmaking structure...
...Add up their salaries, their travel expenses, their research costs and their Xerox bills, and you would have a figure larger than the gross national product of a respectable Third World nation...
...How else to explain satisfactorily the passion of many White House officials— Anne Wexler springs to mind as a prime example—for endlessly distributing "speech inserts" to top-rank appointees...
...Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd supported the change, noting that "public confidence in this body" had been diminished by the persistent appearance of conflict of interest...
...Here, alas, the data are slippery...
...Every four years the principal incentive is obvious...
Vol. 11 • February 1980 • No. 12
