The Shriver Prescription: How the Government Can Find Out What It's Doing

...Banishment...

...Because his civilian colleague reported it and because he himself had reported only the military situation as set by guidelines from MACV...

...It was a program instituted by a bureaucracy, but the essential sabotage was that a few lawyers, filing a lot of suits, would change communities in ways that monstrous federal agencies had not...

...McNaughton pours his doubts out to one trusted friend in the Pentagon, Michael Forrestal, and then a few moments later, confronting a few colleagues who are using precisely the same arguments that he expressed to Forrestal, he tears his arguments to shreds...

...Through the five-year plan at the Peace Corps, he challenged the tenure system...

...Almost every bureaucrat in the capital is hired to facilitate work somewhere out in the hinterlands...

...Robert Seamans, Secretary of the Air Force, was concerned that the public might lose confidence in the military when it learned that some guy was wiping out a country without Pentagon knowledge...

...That, with its blind loyalty and totality of self-abnegation, meant bureaucratic power, and John McNaughton wanted power...

...Shriver’s role as antibureaucrat has mostly gone unnoticed, or else it has been taken as evidence of his poor abilities as an administrator...

...That approach missed the point, since he left and they stayed...

...So, when Shriver set up the same thing in OEO-where it was called the Office of Inspection, he immediately ran into problems with the Community Action Program (CAP) people...

...light like coral in heat-that is one of the dilemmas Shriver confronted...

...When bad news gets into the papers, the superiors will read it too...

...Did the major agree with the civilian appraisal...

...You couldn’t support Inspection, and the shake-ups it might cause, without believing that programs could conceivably be reformed or even canceledand you had to accept the second role of government for that...

...Later, after the war had been escalated and he had become more confident of his relationship with McNamara and more sure that the war was wrong, some of his close aides began to wonder what would happen if the President ever asked him what he, John McNaughton, thought about an escalatory move, not what the Defense Department thought, not what McNamara thought...

...As a by-product of this public relations move, grass-roots problems of the agency would be brought to his attention, and many of them would be solved...

...The boss’ lack of awareness that his hireling was bombing the hell out of a country might be grounds for charges of incompetence, but Stennis found it reassuring, even laudable, that Abrams didn’t know...

...The machinery and the meddling of Inspection was the level on which the whole Conway-Shriver tussle was debated, but underlying that debate was the role of government itself...

...The gratitude that the field generally has toward all this aid was summed up in a report that HUD commissioned last year on the effectiveness of its field support activities: “The Assistant Secretaries seem to get much more out of Field Support than does the Field...

...Too well-understood to elaborate...

...That and being extremely ambitious, and wanting, now that he was operating in the big and fast world of Washington, to remain there...

...That’s the kind of thing we’ve got to take a look at,” Seamans said...

...Halberstam describes the hypnotic effect that Robert McNamara had on one of his most articulate advisors, Harvard Professor John McNaughton...

...For a government that bases its claim to wisdom on superiority of information, the recent record is startling-generals didn’t know about Mylai, the Nixon finance committee didn’t know about the Mexican bank accounts or how hundreds of thousands of dollars got into its hands, the antitrust people didn’t know about ITT’s talks with the White House, the secretary of agriculture didn’t know about people benefitting from grain deals-the roll of ignorance is endless...

...Was government to be a place to live, a secure provider of jobs, a national iron lung that must be protected from jolts and shocks so it could continue to pump out its sustenance to all those who depended on it...

...But Shriver’s idea was different from the whisper-in-the-king’s ear approach to government information...

...You ended up with a multilayered sandwich (dissident-loyalistdissidentloyalist...

...CAP also started leaking stories to the press about Shriver’s “poor administrative ability,” and curiously, it was the liberal press that picked up on the charges...

...T’he whole GS system is powered on the energy generated by everybody caressing the bottom of the chair of the person above...

...The way things are going in government, the only accepted defense these days is ignorance...

...There might have been a lot less intense opposition to their reports if they had provided the CAP a courteous early look-but the struggle that ensued does point up the power that such information has within an agency and the potential threat that it represents...

...Halberstam outlines the forces that move the McNaughtons to keep even their most passionate opinions to themselves: In 1964 McNaughton was very unsure of his relationship with McNamara, he was newer in his position than McNamara was in his...

...Clogs in the System Shriver-style inspection has a very short future in bureaucracy because it runs against all the grains...

...But the presence of outsiders did have an effect on the regular staff investigators, who wanted to make sure they turned in an uncompromising account this year because I. F. Stone might be sent to the same place next year...

...CAP mounted enough resistance to Shriver that the 1965 conference of U. S. mayors came close to adopting a resolution accusing OEO of “trying to wreck local government by setting the poor against city hall...

...Halberstam says that on one of his first trips to Vietnam, McNamara was confronted with a barrage of glowing reports, until finally he arrived at a province in the Delta where: Rufus Phillips’ people had reported enormous Vietcong progress...

...But the method did work in the Peace Corps and OEO, and while the entire bureaucracy won’t unravel when one string is pulled, Shriver also yanked at a couple of others in the process...

...He talked of investing Air Force inspectors with more credibility by separating them from the line of command...

...He pointed out that there might be a problem in the fact that the Air Force inspector general closest to the Lavelle case was also the vice commander of Lavelle’s air base...

...This may seem like a trivial measure, and something that had already been practiced by everybody from the Incas (spies for the sun king raced around gathering news of potential uprisings) to the Spanish, the British, and even Stalin’s secret police...

...Often it was less a matter of facts than a matter of culture...

...The Field Syndrome...

...The whole process of putting out evaluations gutsy enough to make CAP people mad was encouraged by the idea that Shriver would not only read them, or possibly reward somebody for producing them, but even might take action on them...

...Tell Me On My Own Terms...

...Yes, sir...

...Faking Out Jack Anderson It is ironic that Shriver’s Inspection office ultimately gave him a bad press, because newspaper clippings were largely the reason the office was established in the first place...

...They further enraged Conway by bringing up their reports of false statements on CAP applications at a senior staff meeting, a surprise attack that gave the CAP forces neither advance warning nor a chance to prepare a defense...

...The New Republic slashed at Haddad’s attack on “administrative order,” a criticism that was probably true...

...Shriver found a special way to deal with the career problem in the Evaluation offices, where many of the reports were written by journalists and other outsiders under part-time contract...

...The five-year plan, however, had no future at OEO, which was set up by normal, level-headed bureaucrats, and it has about as much chance of being adopted in any other part of government as the Gay Liberation Front has of getting invited to a White House dinner...

...The Sandwich...

...The Conway iron lung view was essentially the same as that of the people who support Lockheed-give them the money even though the planes aren’t working, don’t make trouble because jobs are at stake...

...Information from the field flows up, but almost e very thing else-pay checks, status, power, influence, GS ratings, rewards -flows down...

...In the Pentagon Papers, McNaughton comes off as the most strident hawk of all, but Halberstam shows him as one of the most intelligent and troubled doves during the early years of escalation...

...Or was government a catalyst, an experimenter, a change agent, a gambler that would cut in or out of projects at will, depending on whether those projects were working or whether the goals were still valid...

...the field people were concerned that their views would be understood about as much as a German pun translated literally into English...

...Some of them were worried about how those facts might be mangled and twisted on what seemed to be the increasingly distant trip from the field to the home office...

...Neither was it a trivial idea to the Peace Corps or the OEO, the only two U. S. agencies that have tried it...

...Haddad’s people didn’t have to handle it this way...

...One thing he did recognize was that career instincts are the main cause of all the backing and filling and covering of tracks...

...Pumping the Iron Lung Shriver’s slap at bureaucratic etiquette was also a challenge to CAP’S view of the agency as Santa Claus...

...The few people who did look into the way he ran the Peace Corps and OEO were more interested in his character than in the nature of the forces he was fighting...

...These were mainly cash-flow supporters who saw OEO as a kind of long drainpipe extending from the Treasury...

...Had the major, McNamara asked, read the report of his civilian colleague in the Hamlet program...

...Certainly not the inspectors, whose past performance will be brought into doubt...

...Shriver saw Inspection not as a way to change OEO’s mode of thinking, but as an “early warning system,” to get the bad news from his own Jack Andersons before the real one caught him in The Washington Post without ‘a defense...

...One of the beauties of Shriver’s technique was not that it brought information from the field-which thousands of bureaucrats were doing every day-but the kind of information it brought...

...The traditional bureaucrats didn’t like Evaluation because Shriver’s inspectors ruined the whole elaborate sanitizing system that made information gradually more palatable as it passed from the field on up the line...

...So he became at once the man in the government where two powerful currents crossed: great and forceful doubts about the wisdom of American policy in Vietnam, and an equally powerful desire to stay in government, to be a player, to influence policies for the good of the country, for the right ideas, and for the good of John McNaughton...

...Decentralization is accomplishing this, and there will be more and more reports from field offices, but they will sound more and more like the ones already concocted in Washington...

...Why, then, asked McNamara, hadn’t he reported it himself...

...Legal Services was thought to be Nixon’s one stab at a return to self-reliance, individual action, and non-paternalism...

...The Assistant Secretaries seem to get much more out of Field Support than does the Field...

...Shriver is one of two Western leaders in recent times who has actually tried to do something a bout bureaucracy - the other being Fidel Castro...

...I. F. Stone On Your Heels These five bureaucratic tendencies to squash information are formidable obstacles to making inspection work in other agencies around the government, where the rubber cement is thicker and the GS trenches are deeper, and where the bosses are less willing than Shriver to admit their own mistakes, or to look closely at those made down the line...

...As a result, the agency was able to attract noble transients with no niche to protect...

...This sanitizing occurs in all government agencies, largely because if your report to your boss doesn’t enable him to write an optimistic report to his boss, then your boss will be out of a job, and so, presumably, will you...

...John Rothchild is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Certainly not top staff people like Abrams, whose protective decapitation from the rest of the military is often their only defense...

...Through Project Headstart he astounded traditionalists by taking what was supposed to be a demonstration project involving 100,000 kids in 300 communities at a cost of $17 million and jacking it up to include 56 1,000 kids in 2,300 communities for $85 million...

...Lavelle got away with the actual bombing for the same reason his superiors later escaped any reprisals for it-Lavelle said he hadn’t told the higher-ups, and they said there was no way they could have known...

...This happened in the Peace Corps, where early programmers would go to a foreign country, talk to the minister of agriculture, agree to send 30 cattle experts into an area, and come home confirmed that they had accomplished some grassroots-level planning...

...If the heat is on and there might be leaks in the pipes, the best thing to do is not to send any adverse information through...

...so that information from any Indian could not get any further than the next office...

...Like the general public, the top people are pleading increasing ignorance about what their agencies are doing...

...The thought that internal muckrakers would fan out from the agency and pick up the raw scum, right from the silt bottom, and return it to the director’s office in unrefined form, with everybody stepping back or ducking for cover-was not comfortable to traditional bureaucrats...

...Any doubts he had were reserved for McNamara, virtually alone, and perhaps one or two other people that he knew and trusted, who would not betray him with gossip, so that the word would not go around Washington that McNaughton was a secret dove...

...If bureaucracies weren’t seen as careers, there would be no need for all the self-protection through inertial force...

...The fact that the commander of the U. S. forces in Vietnam hadn’t the foggiest idea what Lavelle, the commander of the Seventh Air Force, was up to, was enough to convince Stennis and most other senators that Abrams was qualified for the top post in,the Army...

...He was almost mesmerized by McNamara: he had never seen anything like him and admired the Secretary without reservation, being almost slavish in his subservience...

...His bombings brought a strange chorus line to Senator John Stennis’ Armed Services Committee, all in a scramble to prove their ignorance...

...Inspection, the five-year rule, and legal services were hardly enough to turn Shriver into a bureaucratic abolitionist, but the amazing thing is that they were the only attempts at getting around what is a growing problem for everybody...

...The CAP forces, led by a former auto union executive named Jack Conway, soon ran into Haddad and the inspectors, who had discovered, among other things, that white applicants for OEO funds had reneged on promises to hire black staff members...

...But Inspection also helped Shriver learn where his Pakistans were, so his people could enthusiastically lead reporters away from them...

...This meant trying to cut off money...

...Pause...

...This happens a lot, because the solution to the field problem-from the bureaucratic point of view-is always to bureaucratize the field as much as possible...

...Both the public and ‘the agency’s directors end up suffering from the same ignorance...

...The Shriver Prescription: How the Government Can Find Out What It’s Doing by Jack Gonzales and John Rothchild Sargent Shriver is best known as Kennedy memorabilia and for his ability to win appointive positions, but to some of the old bureaucrats around the Office of Economic Opportunity, he was much more threatening than that...

...Though he was a Harvard law professor, there was no more skillful player of the bureaucratic game than John McNaughton, for he understood the bureaucracy very quickly and how to play at it, and he learned this, that his power existed only as long as he had Robert McNamara’s complete confidence, and as long as everyone in government believed that when he spoke, he spoke not for John McNaughton but for Bob McNamara...

...While McNamara could be enraged at the system that kept lower-level people from getting their points across, he reacted in the following manner (a year after the Phillips incident) to this CIA briefing: Fitzgerald, an old Asia hand, was made uneasy by McNamara’s insistence on quantifying everything, of seeing it in terms of statistics, infinite statistics...

...Shriver’s experience tells us how far we have to go, especially since it was rewarded with the lasting impression that he was, in the end, a bad administrator...

...Shriver’s antidotes stand out because nobody else in government leadership over the last decade has done anything except start new agencies or talk about cutting down the size of old ones-which never happens, for predictable reasons...

...But the Administration has taken strong steps to hinder the one program that really fits Nixon’s anti-bureaucratic prescription...

...Taylor was standing there impressive, asking helpful leading questions: Major, we know what a good job you’re doing and that this situation is under control, and we wonder if you could tell us about it...

...Whether or not their story is true, the situation, as we will see, might not have arisen had Shriver’s first bureaucratic antidote been applied...

...He did this without the usual planning studies, authorizations, and crowhatchings that normally take 10 years...

...In any other agency this fact would probably not have made it to the director’s attention, since it would have had to rise through the hands of the very people who were busy pouring the money downward...

...There will probably be very little of the kind of reporting that Shriver had in mind...

...It was a hard lesson for officials to learn, as David Halberstam shows in his upcoming book on the makers of Vietnam The Best and the Brightest...

...But even if he didn’t establish it for precisely the right reasons, Shriver’s Inspection office underscored the deadening effect that fear of the press can have inside the bureaucracy itself...

...Beyond the Evaluation staff itself, Shriver proposed, and won for the Peace Corps, the stipulation that no employee could stay around longer than two two-and-a-half year stints...

...They feared any bad news that might impede the flow, regardless of where the money might end up...

...But that optimistic conclusion misses a central point: even when accurate reports filter to the top, there is that final and most important barrier to the officials’ understanding of the news-his own mind...

...The reports of his fact-gatherers were public within the agency and everybody had a chance to react to them, correct them, and to confront the accusers...

...McNamara had tried to penetrate these briefings in the past without much success but this time he was prepared, he had read a pessimistic paper on this same province...

...They would much rather follow a strict find- em, field-em, fund-em, and forget-em policy, where there is no danger that an irate local official or a government caseworker who doesn’t understand the system, will make trouble for the higher levels...

...The Chiefs and then Rostow signed on...

...The generals were just like the public-in the dark about it all...

...the magazine also indicted Shriver for “administrative weakness.’’ These charges were echoed in various ways through newspaper accounts of the OEO chaos, and you got the sense from reading them that the place was falling apart for lack of respect for the machinery...

...The 30 volunteers would arrive in their area to find that there was no cattle farming in that region...

...This was fine as far as it went: here was McNamara, finally cutting through to the truth, and presumably he would no longer be duped by the self-serving military reports...

...In 1966, when the question of bombing the oil depots at Haiphong came up, and the President was going around the room trying to get a consensus, one after another they all signed on, McNamara said yes, it was time to take them out...

...And finally Johnson turned to McNaughton, who had been arguing violently in private against this, and McNaughton said simply, “1 have nothing to add, sir...

...Shriver supported the Haddad forces by refusing to sign Community Action grants unless Inspection approved them first...

...This technique was perfected in the Peace Corps, where many inquiring journalists were pushed off to the success story in Ethiopia while there was a volunteer revolt going on in Peru...

...CAP, meanwhile, went to its client communities and contacts with complaints about Shriver’s disregard for channels...

...For Shriver is one of two Western leaders in recent times who has actually tried to do something about bureaucracy-the other being Fidel Castro...

...The Shriver Inspection office was based on the second view-in projects like OEO, government was not a warm tit...

...Shriver’s final stab at bureaucracy was through the OEO legal services program, which sent young lawyers to communities throughout the country...

...Most agencies have cleverly devised the questions so that the answers deliberately hide the real story without actually lying...

...Lavelle’s supposedly unauthorized sorties occurred while the Administration was trying to negotiate, and the North Vietnamese took them as evidence of bad faith...

...The Office of Evaluation was something that Shriver concocted with William Haddad, an ex-newspaperman, during the early Peace Corps days...

...Without such strong support from the boss, the report-writing system would never have worked...

...Several have tested out well over the last decade: The whole GS system is powered on the energy generated by everybody caressing the bottom of the chair of the person above...

...Dissident Indians were recently brought into the Bureau, but their questioning was effectively buffered by putting a traditional Bureau supporter on either side of a critical Indian...

...CAP officials, particularly Conway, never forgave Haddad, and in the eyes of many bureaucrats he became just another Jack Anderson-with fink overtones since Haddad was inside the agency...

...It is doubtful that the military brass ever heard of Shriver’s inspec-’ tors, but the Lavelle case caused some of them to think of the idea on their own...

...McNamara just nodded curtly, and it was the last time he asked Fitzgerald to brief him...

...CAP partisans didn’t see the point in digging up dirt about a program, since they believed that grants should be given even if the recipient used them in contradiction of the, purposes of the agency...

...One day after McNamara had asked him at great length for more and more numbers, Fitzgerald told him bluntly that he thought most of the statistics were meaningless, that it just didn’t smell right, that they were all in for a much more difficult time than they thought...

...The most recent example of this comes from General John Lavelle, who was able to dump all over North Vietnam while his superiors had authorized only reaction strikes and the bombing of limited targets...

...A copy of the Phillips report had been made available to McNamara in the morning when the military briefing began...

...For their part, Washington officials are uncomfortable with the people they are actually supporting...

...On another level, Washington, D. C. police officials didn’t know that the crime statistics were being lowered by a deliberate undervaluation of larcenies by cops on the beat...

...And in a sense, Shriver’s little war may be the more instructive of the two-for while Castro merely shut down his ministries and sent the unemployed into the cane fields, Shriver had to pick and twist from inside the bureaucrats’ home territory, hoping not to arouse alarm...

...From an agency perspective, the bureaucrat’s main job is not only to hide facts from the public, but also to keep them from fellow bureaucrats up the line...

...This was supposed to make the reporting tougher and more independent, but in the Peace Corps, at least, the outsiders’ evaluations tended to be less critical than those done by permanent staff people...

...It came through OEO courtesy of Haddad and his snoopers...

...The McNaughton Effect...

...Far from finding ways to get more unpleasant information to the top, the bureaucratic market in finding ways to avoid just that is growing very fast...

...Inspection won’t be adopted in most agencies because it makes it harder for officials to deny that they knew what was happening all along...

...There is also a sense-at local levels of agencies-that keeping Washington out of things is a good idea, both because you ought to be able to solve your own problems, and also because once Washington gets into it, complications generally arise...

...There are also reasons that people along the line might not want their views to get to the top, especially middle-level officials who derive power from knowing the important players...

...The bureaucrats always stay, of course, multiplying in the artificial Jack Gonzales is writing a book based on some of the material in this article...

...It also turns out that the greater the potential for being burned in the press, the less government officials want to know about what is happening at the lower levels...

...The question is, who’s going to look...

...The idea was to establish an independent reporting outfit, completely separate from the normal chain of command, to roam the field, find out what was going on, and report directly back to Shriver...

...We often think of the struggle between the press and the bureaucracy in terms of information hidden from the public-that they are all sitting over there, in smug knowledge, joyously slamming our fingers in their file cabinets...

...Which brings us back to Lavelle...

...And unless somebody else starts scratching down where Shriver began, it will matter less and less about the character of the people at the top...

...Finally the officer said yes, he did...

...Shriver’s inspectors in OEO and the Peace Corps found that people working out on the end of government’s fingers often were not all that anxious to get the facts back to Washington...

...Put in inspectors who would get all this muck back to the top, and administrators everywhere would flee from the reports as if they were so many subpoenas...

...You set up enough chains of command and memo flow charts so you know you are talking to a real office down there in Topeka, and not to somebody who only works out on the streets...

...Higherlevel bureaucrats also make the mistake of thinking that a lower-level bureaucracy is actually the field...

...If the lawyers forced a city to revise its housing policies, for instance, there might be no need for gargantuan, lumbering HUD programs that would end up solving the problem by doing nothing...

...The usual fate of whistle-blowers and others who persistently demand that an agency do what it is supposed to...

...The chain of command could be dragged in later to argue and explain itself, but the evaluation reports wouldn’t be filtered through it...

...Ball dissented...

...As discovered by reporter Frye Gailliard after investigating the Bureau of Indian Affairs...