Letters
Letters “Tilting at Windmills” in the June issue (which I’m just seeing on return frQm abroad) is delightful and useful. But in the Bobby Kennedy item you omitted the point-which he used to...
...HUGH HECLO STEPHEN HESS HERBERT KAUFMAN Washington, DC Heclo, Hess and Kaufman are senior fellows at the Brookings Institution...
...He had to bargain away appointments to powerful political interests for their sup4 port, and the appointees felt beholden to their sponsors, not to the President...
...On the other hand, people who are hired-and can be fired-by elected officials have a reason to be responsive to the public...
...My friends also demonstrate a flawed grasp of recent history...
...When Bobby told some more experienced Washington hand how impressed he was at the number of Justice employees who had come in on the holiday, that person reminded him of the Washington’s Birthday sales in the downtown stores...
...When the federal government had a spoils system, the President’s control of the machinery of government was weakened, not strength’ened...
...The autonomy of a protected civil service is a problem the country must try to solve, but your solution would simply make things even worse from the President’s point of view...
...Charles Peters replies: My friends say they don’t look down on politicians but then proceed to describe what could be called democratic accountability as the “spoils system...
...When we criticized your plan, it was the weakness of the plan, not the faults of politicians, on which we rested our case...
...What me Washington Monthly wants is to guard against the weaknesses of both the civil service system and the political “spoils system” by having an equal number of both instead of the 99-percent civil service we now have in the federal government...
...Your description of the position of your three friends at Brookings disturbs us because of the context [“Tilting at Windmills,” June...
...Ciyd servants, because they are almost impossible to fire, are often neither civil to the public nor servants of it...
...We have few illusions about politicians, but on the whole, we respect them, and we feel obliged to set the record straight...
...The congressman wasn’t about to put up with sloppy performance that could anger his constituents and lose him votes...
...His “control of the machinery of government” was certainly not weakened thereby...
...Of course such a system can be perverted, but so can the civil service...
...This is the label the civil service lobby pinned on a system under which an official elected by the people chooses the subordinates he thinks are bestequipped to carry out the programs the people elected him to implement...
...It seems to us that admirable politicians far outnumber the disgraceful ones, and that the average quality and moral standards of the profession are not self-evidently different from the averages for the population as a whole, which is not surprising in a representative system...
...As one chief executive put it, every time he made an appointment, he produced one ingrate and nine enemies...
...ANTHONY LEWIS Boston, Massachusetts Anthony Lewis is a columnist for The New York Times...
...In fact, as we have pointed out, the present civil service is a patronage ring based not upon politics, nor upon merit, but upon friendship...
...Moreover, political work is hard and not altogether pleasant...
...Nothing could be farther from the truth...
...But in the Bobby Kennedy item you omitted the point-which he used to tell on himself...
...When we disputed your proposed method of increasing presidential control over the bureaucracy by making half the employees of the federal government political appointees of the President, we were objecting to the inefficacy of the method, not the alleged deficiencies of politicians...
...The spoils system will not contribute to what you claim you want it to achieve-executive mastery of the administrative machinery of government...
...A reader might reasonably-but erroneouslyinfer from the sequence of statements in the article that your luncheon companions are in the group that condemns politicians...
...More political appointees were hired by Franklin Roosevelt than by any other President...
...The post office worked much better when postmasters were named by the congressman in whose districts they served...
...In the paragraph for which the Brookings lunch is the topic sentence, you observe that many people, including politicians themselves, look down on politicians...
Vol. 9 • September 1977 • No. 7
