How to Take Over the Government

...Thus at HEW Richardson turned to Jim Kelly, a friend from the days of Richardson’s service in HEW under Eisenhower,* and Undersecretary Robert Veneman, whom Richardson had gotten to know at the monthly undersecretaries meeting while Richardson was at State...

...The Richardson team passes this test nobly...

...Still, despite their pompous names, both the executive secretariat and the inspector general are reforms in the Richard Darmarl direction of openness, and I think the Richardson team was on the right track in being concerned about them...

...They had lots of momentum and we were going to have a hell of a time trying to make an impact of our own...

...Jonathan Moore felt pessimistic...

...This suggests that the executive secretariat idea requires care in its implementation to avoid the fudge effect...

...These are the non-career jobs that the new department head can fill with relative ease...

...and a set of organization charts...

...They live in constant fear that the man down the hall or over in the next agency has plots afoot to steal their programs or their jobs, or to make them look incompetent before their superiors...

...John Duffner’s selection for the Justice team probably owed something to the fact that he was close to Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and so could help with another key element in transition-the confirmation process...

...to resist Administration efforts to get him to fire people than to get approval to hire the people he wanted...

...Darman organized substantive staff work and prepared policy papers...

...They aren’t indifferent to the Constitution...

...Along with figuring out how each department works comes another central consideration-issues...

...You know they range from bureaucrats with a gift for obscuring any bright idea they touch to those who are dedicated to shooting down absolutely anything that might possibly reflect credit on you...

...Richardson observed, “What an irony-through the LEAA, the Department of Justice is supposed to guide states and local governments in the administration of law enforcement, while the Department itself is the scene of the greatest administrative chaos in the American government...

...But most important was his first press conference, in which he expressed with these statements the independence which should zharacterize an Attorney General: 1) the Plumbers were not justified, 2) he was not the President’s lawyer, 3) he couldn’t say whether the President was implicated and had told Cox to follow the evidence wherever it led...

...But figuring out what order to give is the trick...

...In the transition between HEW and Defense, for example, Jonathan Moore spent even more time on HEW than on Defense business, and Richardson, even after he had left the Administration last November, wrote Robert Bork a long letter explaining 15 reforms he had been seeking to make at Justice and trying to persuade Bork to pursue them...

...An issue on the table at the time of transition that the Richardson team could do nothing with was the Family Assistance Program, or “welfare reform” (words had to be found to disguise what it really was-a guaranteed annual income...

...Richardson became Under Secretary of State in January, 1969, then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in June, 1970, then Secretary of Defense in January, 1973, and finally, Attorney General in June, 1973...

...It was at once their most infuriating and their most reassuring characteristic...

...subject of this article, as is how the lesson of Albert Speer might require refinement in light of our experience watching the Richardson team in action...

...Why Saxbe Won’t Read In personnel matters, Richardson, like most bureaucrats, found it easier *The usefulness of his unusual capacity is illustrated by this account of the amount of material briefers can throw at you (from Changing Administrations by David Stanley): “The Army gave its new appointees a 150-page book on its philosophy, organization and activities-a booklet of personnel information for presidential appointees (tenure, benefits, conflict-of-interest roles, etc...

...However modest, these accomplishments exceeded the substantive actions taken at HEW and Justice, both of which were left awash in a sea of un-carried-out Richardson proposals...

...Smith was the guardian of the gate, controlling access to Richardson...

...ployee morale at State, HEW, and Justice...

...Who do we get rid of, keep, transfer, promote...

...Once they have received the inspector general’s report, they can no longer plead ignorance as a defense...

...It is clear, however, that Richardson made a real contribution to em*A sensible new federalism that combines an incomes strategy (giving people money directly to buy the things government had been buying for them) with a program of decentralization that provides incentives for local governments to deliver services more efficiently...

...The next step is the formation of a transition team...

...There is good reason for this suspicion...

...What do you want to accomplish, what do you want to leave behind when you go...

...It was decided to have Richardson do it, which left Richardson and his staff with the nasty job of implementing the closings...

...He wants to take the sharp edges off words and issues so that men can talk together with civility...

...An example of a pressing problem requiring immediate signals was the collapsed morale at the Department of Justice in the spring of 1973, after there had been enough Watergate revelations to make clear that a number of leading figures at the Department were involved...

...A Secretary of Defense from New England had the dubious honor of shutting down the Boston Navy Yard and the Newport Navy Base...

...a survey of current major problemsincluding priority decisions facing the new Secretary, a history of the Army...

...In addition to his early experience at HEW, he was the only Attorney General to have also served as both a United States Attorney and Attorney General for a state...

...Instead, he has to send the proposal through the executive secretariat, which would send it to you for comment and then forward the proposal with your comment to the boss...

...Whatever it was, Haig told us we couldn’t hire him...

...Moore also complained that there was too much direct connection between the Joint Chiefs and the White House, leaving the Secretary of Defense out...

...As the transition team and the new department head proceed to interview the people working in the department, they should seek to kill two birds with one stone by not only getting to know the veteran employees but also learning what the veterans know about the department...

...a three and a half inch book full of directives and statutory references...

...This was particularly important in the Justice transition, where Richardson had a tough time dealing with Senate demands for assurances that the Watergate special prosecutor would be independent...

...a booklet summarizing the backgrounds of key personnel...

...Richardson had a number of ways of strengthening bonds with his sub ordinates...

...Melvin Laird named Carl Wallace as his man and Richard Kleindienst designated Sol Linden baum...

...But if you want a professional civil service, you have to accept men in it who place a strong value upon survival, for the continuity that is an essential characteristic of such a service can come only from those who manage to survive...

...As he develops bureaucratic skill, he can also fill many Civil Service jobs with people of his choice and, if not fire people, learn to get rid of the ones he doesn’t want by transferring them or abolishing their jobs...

...The Nixon gang infiltrated more of its people into the middlemanagerial levels of government than any administration since the New Deal...

...He left his family in Boston and worked until midnight for the first six months to fill himself in...

...Darman calls this failure his greatest disappointment in government . Happy to Survive - Base closing at Defense was an issue on the table that the Richardson team took over and dealt with successfully...

...The main reason inspector general offices don’t work is that they are usually staffed by people whose primary loyalty is to the organization they are evaluating and who are strongly tempted to cover up truly embarrassing material...

...The ideal staffing for such an office would be journalists and lawyers with nonrenewable appointments not to exceed three or four years...

...Jonathan Moore puts it this way, “Who are the key people, are they for you or against you...

...One assistant described Larry Lynn, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HEW, as the most brilliant and innovative man he had ever known, while another said he was the worst son-of-a-bitch he’d ever met...

...When Richardson was going to Defense, he planned to make Moore Assistant Se cr etary for Internal Security 4ffairs...

...How to Take Over the Government by Charles Peters What might be called the lessonof Albert Speer-that sound principles of management can be put to evil useshas been much commented on as a result of the experience of the KennedyJohnson-Nixon years...

...Each of the bureaucracies we entered was byzantine,” according to Darman, “and one of our main objectives was to set up a decision-making process that would exclude ex parte special pleading and give everyone a fair opportunity to be heard.’’ At HEW, the Richardson team succeeded in expanding an executive secretariat that had been established by Finch...

...In the beginning he looks for people in the new agency whom he can trust to give an objective, insightful picture of what’s going on and to assess the capabilities of their colleagues...

...They have high competence...

...In mastering a new department, Richardson and his assistants all emphasize the importance of learning about its process and structure, or as Richardson says, “What are its structural arrangements for doing what it is supposed to do and for getting information about what it is doing...

...In other words, some leaders want to avoid official knowledge of the horrors their workers are perpetrating in the field...

...What he and his close associates learned about managing the people, processes, and policies of government is the Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly...

...And another, in describing the kind of memorandum that impressed Richardson, said that “Richardson preferred prose like his own, not overly succinct...

...Those guys at the Internal Revenue Service may have driven you crazy with their nit-picking forms and regulations, but you knew they were doing exactly the same thing to your neighbor across the street, applying the law equally to every man, not doing anything that was not strictly in accord with the letter of the law...

...This has produced a tendency, at least on the Left, to scorn the study of process, a scorn that also derives inspiration from the sterility of much of the literature of public administration...

...You become grateful for survival, for the fact that even though they don’t support your ideas, they don’t fire you, Gratitude for the right to speak one’s mind without penalty creates a state of mind in which it is easy to confuse proposal with accomplishment...

...He thus filled two human needs that often go unsatisfied in government, the need to know that the boss knows what you are doing and the need to know that he values what you are doing...

...I strongly share their interest in the inspector general, and in fact some years back wrote with Russell Baker one explanation of why such an office is needed: “In any reasonably large government organization, there exists an elaborate system of information cutoffs, comparable to that by which city water systems shut off large watermain breaks by closing down, first small feeder pipes, then larger and larger valves...

...He also added -or retained on the undersecretary’s staff-people who had the foreign office experience he lacked: Jonathan Moore, Morton Abramovitz, Arthur Hartman and Richard Moorstein...

...One test of this concern is their attitude toward briefing their successors...

...As Wilmot Hastings put it, “Find out what happened before, who had responsibility for what and why...

...William Saxbe, for instance, did not have the inclination...

...What else can you ask for-and reasonably hope to find in the men you select to work for you when you take over the government...

...Then come the beginnings of long-range thinking...

...One was to write comments on, say, page 36 of a 52-page memorandum...

...Its full title is Policy and Supporting Positions in the U S. Government...

...Richardson’s assertion that his MEGA proposal* at HEW represented his greatest accomplishment illustrates a psychological pitfall of working with superiors such as Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman...

...But Richardson appealed to Nixon personally, and Moore was permitted to go to Defense, not in the prestigious ISA job, but as a special assistant to Richardson...

...Thus at HEW, during the height of Nixon’s power, he was able to fight off White House attempts to make him fire Robert Ball as head of social security...

...Passing the Baton Everyone said the first thirlg that must be done is for the incoming official to designate his transition chief and to get his predecessor to do the same...

...Richardson told me he thought he had accomplished more at HEW than at any of the other departments...

...But the audience was soon quieted by Richardson’s soporific rhetoric...

...With an executive secretariat, your bureaucratic enemy can no longer sneak in the boss’ side door with a proposal to abolish your office...

...The place where the executive secretariat is most firmly established, the Department of State, was described by the late John Franklin Campbell as “the foreign affairs fudge factory...

...There are hardly any who would not have gone along, as Richardson did, with the Stennis compromke, or with Nixon’s inflammatory use of the busing issue or-and this was the one that hurt the reputation of the professionals the mostwith Vietnam...

...Richardson and his staff recognized its tremendous importance and fought hard for it but were undercut by the President’s desertion from the cause...

...Moore was one success-or at least partial success-that Richardson had against the White House...

...two of his assistants thought the least had been done there...

...At Justice, his effect on morale was spectacularly demonstrated when the week after the Saturday Night Massacre he appeared before a packed audience of employees in the Department’s Great Hall to receive an ovation that went on and on and on...

...One was an executive secretariat, geared to produce an orderly flow of paper, to involve all interested parties in the formulation of policy, to present to cabinet officer a concise statement of all the options and supporting arguments, to follow up to see that action is taken on the decision...

...Distinguishing between good and bad professionals is going to be an important activity during the next few years...

...Friends on the Hill Getting to know your congressional committees is an important part of the transition process, whether you have a confirmation problem or not...

...In that transition, confirmation was so time-consuming that during the first month Darman and Smith worked on nothing else...

...His national security experience at State helped prepare him for .Defense...

...Moore ranked first and functioned in the areas of politics and people...

...The other reason for having an inspector general is to deny the executive “deniability...

...According to both Richardson and Moore, Saxbe was the least interested of Richardson’s successors in finding out what Richardson and his associates had learned and were trying to accomplish...

...The wisdom of having an executive secretariat seems most compelling when you’re the victim of the proposal...

...Once the transition team is organ*In staffing the Defense transition team, Moore enlisted Darman and Mastrangelo, who had worked with Richardson, J. T. Smith (he had served with the CIA), and Morton Abramovitz (he had been on Richardson’s staff at State), who were experienced both with Richardson and the national security bureaucracy, and Robert Murray, who was expert in the inner workings of the Defense Department, and was a friend of Moore’s, himself an alumnus of Defense who thus combined knowledge of the boss with knowledge of the department...

...Their weakness is that they put too much emphasis on survival...

...At Defense this was not so clear because he succeeded Laird, a reasonably popular figure, and he sufficiently resembled McNamara to arouse suspicion that another round of whiz kids with slide rules was at hand...

...But he added an important distinction for those who have a “Seven Days in May” view of the services: “Anytime you can find out enough to give the military a sensible order, the military will follow it...

...The purpose of publicly designating one man is to avoid bureaucratic end runs, a great temptation to the Indians in the new department who are seeking to establish their own lines to the new chief...

...What are the key signals you want to give about those issues-both to the country and to your new department...

...He was, for example, the clearance point for all contacts between the White House and Department of Justice personnel...

...Richardson immediately set out to give the necessary signals...

...Some critics of Richardson’s platform ability contend that recordings of his speeches should be played at prisons and other points of smoldering discontent as a riot control measure...

...Richardson also sought to give recognition to those lower-level assistants who actually wrote the memoranda by insisting that they be identified as the authors rather than their chiefs, as is usually the custom in the government...

...agency...

...The good side of the approach is that it gets discussion off to a noninflammatory start...

...An air of laudable practicality accompanies the vaguest possible suggestion of what they are really talking about, which could be anything from closing down the federal prisons to imposing mandatory life sentences on all two-time losers...

...It’s easier to persuade the boys to reform when they need to increase their public support than when they already have it...

...Maybe he was just window-dressing all the time...

...Their comments amounted to a convenient guidebook for taking over a part of the government...

...We need to know who are the Elliot Richardsons and who are the H. R. (Bob) Haldemans...

...One of his assistants speaks of Richardson’s instinct for the capillaries...

...This is probably the reason there is such mutual admiration between Richardson and the civil servants...

...Darman said, “The important thing is to really have the inclination to find out the experience...

...Here one should look for a combination of people who know the new boss and people, \?rho know the new department.* Sdinetimes a special problem will dictate a member of the team...

...The object is to prevent information, particularly of an unpleasant character, from rising to the top of the agency where it may produce results unpleasant to the lower ranks...

...Richardson’s other accomplishments at Defense were reducing the enlisted aide-or free servants for the brass-program and telling the Navy it had to stop shelling the Puerto Rican island of Culebra, where a practice firing range had been shattering the eardrums of the local citizenry for years...

...Some interesting differences emerged from their accounts...

...A Bureaucracy That Can Say ‘No’ Still, nobody wants a civil service whose only standard is survival...

...Wilmot Hastings was borrowed from HEW to help with the search for a Watergate special prosecutor, and from inside Justice, Patrick McSweeney and John Duffner were selected...

...And in Richardson’s case it is at least arguable that formulating proposals was all he could do because he never had the genuine support of the White House in any of his cabinet jobs...

...It is less obvious when you’re the man with the bright idea-one that you know the time is right for and that you want to serve to the boss while it’s piping hot...

...What are the key issues that are pressing on you as you come in...

...Taking a Leaf from Gogol The Richardson team was fascinated by two administrative reforms...

...Jonathan Moore headed both the Richardson transition into Defense and the one into Justice...

...For example, John Kennedy named Clark Clifford and Eisenhower named Major General Wilton Perkins...

...asks Jonathan Moore...

...The importance of these groups is illustrated by the fact that at HEW they were the main obstacle to most of the reforms attempted by the Richardson team, at least in the view of most of its members...

...Each department has reporters who are regularly assigned to cover it, and they, too, must be met and charmed...

...A few yielded to the Nixon gang-but every professional is proud of the majority in the IRS who said “no” to the White House just as they are troubled by Helms, who wavered too long before saying “no,” and shamed by the Petersens and Pat Grays, who said “yes...

...The reason the man down the hall or over in the next agency has plots afoot is that he has been persuaded that other men down other halls and over in other agencies have plots afoot against him...

...The method for doing this was to involve Richardson in decisionmaking meetings from the start so that the division and bureau chiefs could see him in action, be impressed with the openness with which decisions were arrived at and, as Hastings put it, “have their negative preconceptions dispelled and the positive ones reinforced...

...They are very much alike...

...By late December, 1972, the base closing had been negotiated between Laird and the Office of Management and Budget, but the President felt that announcing it would not be the right signal to give Hanoi during the final phase of the Vietnam peace talks...

...Wilmot Hastings says of the transition into HEW, “What we tried to do was seek out and form bonds of mutual confidence with people who were the key to the operation of the *Prior service that equipped him with the knowledge of people and problems of his new department helped Richardson in three of his transitions...

...Your proposal, which you had envisioned reaching your boss as one snappy paragraph, now goes in weighed down with all the attached comments, and if your boss does not share Richardson’s zeal for perusal of the written word, its doom is already sealed...

...What other agency has Trident submarines in the works for 1983...

...Like the Chinese, who, instead of saying Chou En-lai is a goddam liar, refer vaguely to possible prevarications by a minor courtier to the Emperor Tsuin the early years of the third century, the professional civil servants have learned that one can live to fight tomorrow’s battle if one fights with indirection today...

...I talked extensively with each of these men...

...They resigned rather than betray Richardson’s pledge to the Judiciary Committee...

...Finally, we can ask for a concern with the substance of their work...

...Once these contacts are made, the new boss must win over the people he needs...

...ized, its primary priority should be personnel...

...Thus the executive at or near the top lives in constant danger of not knowing, until he reads it on Page One some morning, that his department is hip-deep in disaster...

...One was the a p pointment of William Ruckelshaus, who was widely admired in the Department (he had been an assistant attorney general before his appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency) as Deputy Attorney General...

...This confusion is made even easier when one reflects that many public servants don’t even have the courage to propose...

...Another signal was Richardson’s first message to the employees, which in its opening sentence spoke of his “respect for the integrity and competence with which you do your jobs...

...However, while it’s true that a mastery of process can lead to evil, it is also true that from time to time good men with good policies will come to office and be confronted with the problem of how they will go about doing their good deeds...

...Richardson and his men are good examples...

...A publication called “the plum book” has been the constant study of the Richardson transition teams...

...Richardson and his men are fond of technocratic usages such as this statement of a Justice Department objective: “Develop pos t-adjudication strategies which are cost-effective and which work...

...It sounded like a march to the Bastille was next...

...Only at State was he new to the game...

...Darman was more hopeful: “At Defense we had almost everyone in the country in agreement on reducing the defense budget.’’ Darman may have been wrong about that, but I think he was right in his next observation, which was that a limited budget would have given the Secretary power to say “no” to different services...

...Another area of disagreement was over how much they had even a chance of accomplishing at the Defense Department...

...It is with this thought in mind that I have looked for instruction at the unique experience of Elliot Richardson as he proceeded to take over major responsibility in four different departments of the executive branch...

...Most departments have an immediate c o nstituency -doc tors, educators, defense contractors, etc.with a large, practical interest in the way the department is run, and the team must learn about them, too...

...It’s like trying to give an order to a tank while running along beside it not knowing what is going on inside...

...In addition, I interviewed Richardson and two others who played important roles in Richardson transitions: Wilmot Hastings, now a Boston lawyer, who participated in the transition into State and was in charge of the transition into HEW (some say he was the most liberal of Richardson’s top assistants), and Richard Mastrangelo, who now schedules Richardson’s political appearances and was in charge of the logistics of the last two transitions...

...Suppose that the executive secretariat decides that there are 15 of your colleagues whose views should be sought...

...Secretariat’s Track Record In the article in which Baker and I discussed the need for an inspector general, we also explored one of the problems that an executive secretariat can solve: “Chronic paranoia is the common affliction of government executives...

...Smith had one other reason for thinking the Richardson group would have had little impact on the Pentagon: “So much policy is already made, so many programs are already in the pipeme...

...Richardson relied on a triumvirate of top assistants: Jonathan Moore, who is now Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, J. T. Smith, who is now associated with the Washington law firm, Covington and Burling, and Richard Darman, who has joined Richardson as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington...

...The participants’ perception of what went well and what went badly...

...Kissinger’s office leaked hostile material to the press accusing Moore of being a dove, and for a while it appeared Moore would stay at HEW...

...Key members of both your authorizing and appropriating committees in both houses must be cultivated...

...You also have to get to know the White House people-Domestic Council or National Security Council-who oversee your operations, as well as your Office of Management and Budget men...

...As often as conscience permitted, he would make the comments strongly favorable...

...He pointed out that the President and his chief man, Kissinger, were in very strong assertive control of State-Defense poli’cies...

...But there were large areas of agreement, especially on one subject about which the Richardson team became unusually expert-the process of transition...

...There was something else good that used to live in the hearts of civil servants-and that was a scrupulous regard for legality...

...Richardson doesn’t want to lead charges on the Bastille...

...Power to compel reform is greatest when you have a limited amount of dough to pass around...

...When they went to Justice, Moore again included Smith, Darman, and Mastrangelo on the team...

...They are men of their word...

...Jonathan Moore says, “We could never figure out whether it was because Freidman was a political opponent of Daley, whose support Nixon was courting, or because he was a friend of Charles Percy, whom Nixon couldn’t stand, or maybe it was because they wanted to show who was running things...

...Although one can’t help suspecting that occasionally he turned to page 36 right away, Richardson’s capacity for wading through written material was prodigious...

...The worst organized of the departments Richardson took over turned out to be the Department of Justice...

...it frequently turns out to be founded in fact...

...The other reform was an Office of Inspector General which they were proposing to institute at Justice at the time of the Saturday Night Massacre...

...J. T. Smith agreed: “The military really runs Defense...

...He told subordinates to err on the side of giving him more rather than fewer briefing papers, memoranda, etc...

...On the other hand, even when Nixon was weak, after Richardson had taken over Justice, Richardson was unable to overcome White House resistance to his appointing Robert Freidman, then HEW regional director in Chicago, as Assistant Attorney General for Administration...