Tilting at windmills
Peters, Charles
Tilting Windmills Speaking to reporter Tim Larimer, Marlin Fitzwater offered this grim assessment of what it's like to be the White House press secretary: "In the end, in the White House, nobody...
...Friends in Arkansas were quick to let me know that Trooper Ferguson had not executed an affidavit...
...State says they would prefer to do SOWs in-house, but do not have trained personnel in-house to perform this function...
...Lightner is joining up with the enemy...
...It is also clear from many comments the Clintons made to friends that she felt considerable self-pity about the $35,000 salary he was making as governor...
...Flowers: "All right, darling...
...Because it's so hard...
...Sums like this are too much for most individuals and even many libraries to afford...
...I find the following excerpts especially interesting: Clinton: "I'm sorry that you ever had to put up with that [garbled...
...He assumed I qualified as an expert witness because I came from a similar state capital, Charleston, West Virginia...
...I think the reason I get so angry at government waste is because there are so many cases where we need to spend much more money than we're currently allotting to meet real needs, such as those water and sewer lines...
...Yet according to a just released report by Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies are doing a lousy job of monitoring contractors' performances...
...I mean my contacts have just sort of fizzled in Nashville...
...They can't...
...They tell you whatever is their idea, whatever helps their cabinet department...
...Can you believe that last year the East Palo Alto Sanitary Department spent more money for parties than it did for repairing worn se wer lines...
...The latest example comes from reports filed with the Federal Election Commission...
...Their latest triumph is an Equine Law Seminar sponsored by the the University of Kentucky School of Law on—you guessed it—the weekend of the Kentucky Derby...
...But it develops that this law has had no more effect than a similar edict by the Clinton administration had on Howard Paster and Roy Neel...
...Imagine how Ollie North must have felt when he got to order Fawn Hall to stamp something "Top Secret...
...Clinton: "Yeah, I never thought about that...
...Government data collected at taxpayer expense is being sold at outrageous markups by private "on-line" computer services...
...I really don't...
...The State Department indicated," says the report, "that in-house capability to develop adequate SOWs is so lacking that they have to resort to contracting for such services...
...Flowers: "If they could blow you out of the water they would have already blown you...
...She reminds me of the Cash-In King, Vernon Jordan, who parlayed a similar early career in good works (in his case voter registration in the South in the 1960s) into a fortune in directors' and legal fees for fronting for large corporations including RJR Nabisco, which endangers young blacks by luring them into smoking cigarettes...
...No one here ever reads the GAO reports," one Clinton aide told me a few months ago...
...But the diplomats' creativity is rivaled by the folks who think up medical or legal seminars that justify a tax deduction to visit a resort, take a cruise, or attend a sporting event...
...They don't directly solicit current congressmen's votes...
...When it comes down to finding the real facts about an issue, people are self-serving...
...If they don't, if they don't have pictures, and no one says anything, they don't have anything, and arguably if someone says something, they don't have much...
...Supervisors, it seems, had , failed to tell him precisely what they meant by "too slow...
...Attention is paid to the items on the president's agenda, or on individual staffers' personal agendas, and to whatever is dominating the week's news...
...Why are so few civil servants fired...
...Crimes will be prosecuted if the victim can pay the cost of the investigating—this happened in recent cases involving Northern Telecom and Continental Cablevision...
...You have to do the work yourself...
...If everybody kind of hangs tough, there's just not going to be anything...
...But my guess is that she wanted the prestige of the big firm— after all, she went to Yale—and the money she could make with such a firm...
...My answer was that, yes, there is a lot of that kind of corruption...
...This doubtlessly occurs just after they have returned from a Thursday prayer breakfast which ex-members attend with the current members or from a game of volleyball in the House gym to which the former members are admitted on an equal basis with incumbents...
...Flowers: "Well, you know, to be real honest with you, I'm not completely surprised...
...They devise lobbying strategies...
...Many attempted firings result in appeals and lengthy negotiations that often lead to reinstatement...
...others Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was founded by a woman named Candy Lightner whose 13-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver out on bail from a previous drunk driving charge...
...It seems that congressmen have used campaign funds, which after all are supposed to be used to pay for campaigns, to pay for everything from memberships to the House gymnasium to dinners in Singapore—lots of voters there—to Carol Moseley-Braun's $4,028 bill at the Four Seasons on Maui after the 1992 general election...
...Anyone who has ever worked in an agency that had the power to classify documents knows that far too many are stamped "confidential" or "secret" than need to be...
...Low repair budgets are the main reason for the lack of activity...
...105 billion will be spent by the government this year "contracting out" services ranging from routine maintenance to computer programming...
...If you don't pay attention to what they're doing and what they're charging, you're going to get gyped---"For a growing number of Americans," writes Jube Shiver, Jr., of the Los Angeles Times, "the vaunted information highway is already turning into a costly toll road...
...There is no great mystery to it...
...Knight-Ridder's Frank Greve recently revealed that in 1992 only 237 out of 2.2 million civil federal employees were fired for incompetence...
...A few years ago the Monthly published a piece about the U.S...
...In our Safe Answers contest, to go with "appropriate action" and "further study," one reader has suggested another Washington perennial: "at this time...
...In January, I wrote an article for The New York Times that before criticizing him for other ethical transgressions, acknowledged Bill Clinton's apparent exoneration by Trooper Ferguson's affidavit of the charge of having offered jobs in return for silence by state police officers...
...As I have tried to point out in this space, Hillary Clinton did not have to represent a state-regulated savings and loan while her husband was governor...
...There is a vast amount of law—involving, for example, contracts, crime, divorce, personal injury, and wills—that does not require action by state agencies or membership in a firm that wants to give potential clients the appearance of influence with the governor...
...Well, you hang in there...
...Washington recently experienced the worst water main break in its history...
...Another reason for the practice became clear in a recent Washington Post article that begins: "The latest version of a new presidential order on government secrecy would require for the first time that officials weigh the public's interest in the sensitive information before it is ever stamped 'classified.'" I hope you noticed "for the first time...
...If I can help you, you let me know...
...Clinton: "How do you like holding my future in [garbled] hands...
...If you aren't tearing your hair at this point, you should be...
...Why do they need special training...
...In Washington only 12 of 4,700 miles of water pipes were replaced last year, even though 60 percent of that pipe is of the cast iron type that is by far the most likely to break...
...Not only are cabinet members not eager to tell the president how their department is screwing up, but the White House itself is not equipped to uncover the bad news...
...For example, the status and text of pending legislation is available on-line to members of Congress...
...What it means is that few new employees are going to come aboard for a job that could just take 60 or 100 days...
...Buried in a recent article about Pamela Harriman in The New York Times was the fact that as our ambassador to France, she presides over a 1,100-member embassy staff...
...There is a general rule of contractors' behavior: It is that they tend to increase their prices as they decrease the quality of their performance...
...This comes close to being a slow death sentence for the Clintons...
...What do the former congressmen do for the firms...
...Flowers: "Because I don't know, I don't know where to turn...
...Tou've heard about the terrible consequences Proposition 13 has had for California's schools, but like me you may not have known about its effects on the legal system...
...I didn't think it would start this quickly...
...The affidavit is nothing more than another White House evasion, but it was clever enough to fool a lot of people, including me...
...One bureaucrat was reinstated even though it took him four months to complete tasks that took fellow workers two days...
...The reason we have so many people in places like Paris and London and Rome (which is another overstaffed diplomatic post) is because these are nice, glamorous places to live and the foreign services have dedicated themselves to creating the maximum number of jobs at such posts____ The imagination that the foreign services devote to dreaming up essential tasks that must be performed on the banks of the Seine, Thames, or Tiber is almost unequalled...
...One crazy result of all the over-classification is that we will have to spend millions to go through the declassification process because buried among the 99.9 percent of all the documents that shouldn't have been classified may be the one that identifies an agent in North Korea who would be shot if his identity became known____ —Charles Peters...
...For years correspondents covering the president have tried to keep this kind of information from the public as part of their effort to conceal the special treatment they have gotten from the White House Travel Office, which among other things has included first class-plus service with their favorite cocktails awaiting them as they board their specially chartered planes, meals that according to a Northwest handout "will please the most discerning palate," and special bargain fares that enable the wife and kids to go along to famous resorts and world capitals...
...You may also have been like me in thinking that the prohibition Congress enacted in 1992 on lobbying by former members would at least keep the revolving door from turning for a year...
...It could be made publicly available relatively cheaply, according to Shiver's article, but as of now the public must pay $1,900 annually to get the information from companies like Legislate, an on-line service owned by The Washington Post Company...
...Why do we need that many employees in Paris...
...As for the White House correspondents, they were upset when Northwest Airlines distributed a memo announcing that on President Clinton's journey to Brussels and Moscow the reporters would be provided with four "specially trained masseuses to help soothe the aches and pains you've accumulated from the rigors of the trips...
...Her organization deserves much of the credit for the dramatic progress that has been made in reducing deaths caused by drunk drivers...
...So really bad things can happen, like the S&L scandal, with no one in the White House knowing—or if anyone knows, he may feel it's better to say nothing and try to keep the lid on in hopes that public knowledge of the scandal can be averted until the president has been re-elected...
...You're alone...
...But as long as you say you've been looking for one, you'd check on it...
...Eighty percent of the procurement budgets of HHS, HUD, EPA, Education, and Labor is spent on these service contracts...
...Clinton: "I'll help you...
...Clinton: "All you need to do is let me know...
...As a government employee, I both supervised contractors and evaluated other government employees who supervised contractors...
...Flowers: "Well, when you can help me is when I decide I want to get the heck out of here...
...The Associated Press recently reported that Supreme Court justices have used the Court's security personnel to provide taxi service for visiting relatives, to work overtime at wedding receptions, and to push supermarket carts...
...She could have chosen a practice which did not rely in any way on her status as the governor's wife...
...In workers' compensation cases, prosecutions are subsidized by a fund controlled by corporations with an interest in holding down claims whether justified or not...
...This episode caused me to review the Gennifer Flowers tapes...
...Just the other day, a Washington reporter called to ask me if the Clintons' Little Rock was a place where, because everyone knows everyone else, conflict-of-interest corruption was accepted as customary and normal...
...When Warren Burger, then the Chief Justice, was accused of using a government driver to pick up his daughter's laundry, he indignantly replied, "It was my laundry...
...So nobody is swearing to anything...
...They will want something more significant in terms of the investigation's duration, both for resume and income purposes...
...Among the motives for overclassi-fication are avoiding agency or personal embarrassment and the classifier's desire to feel important or dramatic...
...They simply tell their lobbyist colleagues exactly how to do it...
...But I think, Bill, you're being naive if you think these other shows like 'Current Affair' and oh, what are some of the others—'HardCopy...
...Why can't normally intelligent people write a description of the tasks they want performed...
...But I emphasized that you don't have to be part of it...
...Do you like that...
...Nationwide 48 percent of the pipe is cast iron...
...The terrible significance of those words should have been brought home to us all by the recent revelations about the radiation experiments that were conducted for decades by the Department of Energy and its predecessor agencies under the cloak of classification...
...None of Clinton's promises to reinvent government is going to work unless he makes it easier for his government to get rid of its lemons...
...The answer, I suspect, lies with the White House correspondents, who have become so cosseted by perks that they don't know an egregious perk when they see one and a Washington officialdom that is no different...
...Tilting Windmills Speaking to reporter Tim Larimer, Marlin Fitzwater offered this grim assessment of what it's like to be the White House press secretary: "In the end, in the White House, nobody really helps you...
...In the end, you can never trust anyone entirely...
...The trick in the case of the congressmen who retired after the 1992 session is that, although only one has been accused of directly lobbying Congress, 40 percent have joined firms that do lobbying...
...Justice, it seems, is now on sale in the Golden State...
...Clinton: "I just want to know these things...
...The victim who can pay the expenses of witnesses to testify on his behalf is more likely to see the perpetrators punished...
...There is one way I feel sorry for the Clintons...
...Mrs...
...I don't mean to worry you, I just...
...She could have chosen a practice that might have been less lucrative and less prestigious, but she could have made a nice living—perhaps $50,000 to $85,000 a year—on her own or with a small firm...
...It is that Robert Fiske, the special prosecutor in the Whitewater case, has announced that instead of using Justice Department lawyers who are already familiar with the facts, he's going to hire an all-new staff...
...Part of the difficulty is that the original description of what the contractor is to do—the statement of work, or SOW—is unclear...
...embassy in London that revealed we had a staff of 700 there, larger than the ones in more important posts such as Tokyo, Beijing, and Moscow...
...But now Mrs...
...If they ever ask if you talked to me about it, you can say no...
...In the great tradition of those who first come to Washington to do good and end up doing well, she is cashing in by joining the lobbying firm for the American Beverage Association, where her first project will be to work against state laws tightening standards for drunk driving...
...The affidavit was signed by Ferguson's lawyer, who is swearing only to what Trooper Ferguson told him when the trooper was not under oath...
...What few people who haven't actually been there realize is how little the White House knows about what's going on down below...
...Unfortunately, such mishaps have become increasingly common on America's 436,000 miles of sewer and water lines, which are replaced at a rate of only half a percent per year...
...I have been wondering why so few members of the media or of the rest of the Washington establishment have joined us in criticizing the Clintons for using Vince Foster as their personal lawyer while he was being paid by the taxpayers to serve the people of the United States...
...This meains that, either consciously or unconsciously, they're going to be motivated to find that there is a case against the Clintons...
...Clinton: "You know, if all the people who are named deny it, that's all, I mean, I expect them to look into it and interview you and everything, but I just think that if everybody's on record denying it you've got no problem...
...Even the military did better than that—considerably better, as a matter of fact, dismissing 5,600 uniformed personnel for incompetence...
...What's involved is having a clear idea of what you want done, getting enough bids to know that you're not being overcharged, and then paying attention to what the contractor actually does and how well he does it...
...Flowers: "The only thing that concerns me, where I'm concerned at this point is the state job...
...And members of Congress are, of course, famous for their skill in abusing perks...
...Clinton chose to practice with a big Little Rock firm that did practice before state agencies and very much wanted to appear connected...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 3
