RICHARD THE WICKED, succeeded by Gerald the Banal, was followed by a man who would have us believe he was Jimmy the Good. Former Georgia Governor Carter captured the Democratic Party nomination while advancing some unorthodox ideas about the nation's future course. Speaking to the Democratic platform committee on June 16, 1976, he said:
Without endangering the defense of our nation or commitments to allies, we can reduce present defense expenditures by about five to seven billion annually (emphasis added). We must be hard-headed in the development of new weapons systems to ensure that they will comport with our foreign policy objectives. Exotic weapons which serve no real function do not contribute to the defense of this country. The B-1 bomber is an example of a proposed system which should not be funded and would be wasteful of taxpayers' dollars. We have an admiral for every seventeen ships. The Chief of Naval Operations has more captains and commanders on his own personal staff than serve in all the ships at sea.
The Pentagon bureaucracy is wasteful and bloated. We have more generals and admirals today than we had during World War II, commanding a much smaller fighting force. We can thin our troops in Asia and close some unnecessary bases abroad.
My cynicism about the eternal hypocrisy of politicians began to soften; here was a candidate giving ironclad, specific promises and saying, "I will never lie to you." At that time we were only fourteen days away from the end of fiscal year 1976, during which the Pentagon had spent just under $88 billion. And DoD was asking for a huge increase for FY -77. I thought there could be an interesting confrontation between the five-sided brass and a president who had spoken those bold words to his platform committee. I began to hope Jimmy Carter would win.
My friends believed that Carter would listen to the sound of the blowing whistles and would come down hard on waste and corruption. Then Jimmy Carter told us so directly and personally. On October 23, he came to Alexandria, Virginia -- very near my home -- and gave a speech, saying in part:
As I've traveled across the country, I have heard thousands and thousands of Americans say they don't believe the federal government can be made to work again. This pessimism about government is so widespread that many people have lost faith in the very idea of public service. The word "bureaucrat" has become a pejorative word, almost an insult.
It wasn't always like this and it doesn't have to be anymore. The federal government can be well managed. It can be efficient. It can be responsive. It can once again be a source of pride to the public and the public servant.
I want to talk today about what government reorganization will mean to the thousands of federal public servants. I share the public's disillusion with its government -- and I know that you do, too. But the backlash should not be directed against government employees who want to do a good job, but against the barriers that hold them back.
If I become president, I intend to work with career civil servants, with Congress, with leaders of business and labor, with academics, and with many other groups to devise a reorganization that will eliminate waste and inefficiency and overlapping and confusion in the federal government and make our government truly efficient once again.
Going on in this vein, Carter arrived at a promised four-point program, with the final point directed at my case:
Fourth, I intend to seek strong legislation to protect our federal employees from harassment and dismissal if they find out and report waste and dishonesty by their superiors or others. The Fitzgerald case, where a dedicated civil servant was fired from the Defense Department for reporting cost overruns, must never be repeated.
How often does a candidate solicit somebody's vote by singling him out by name and promising to right the wrongs he suffered? I couldn't help being optimistic. These were words I'd been hoping to hear for years.
That fall I was invited to become a board member of the Fund for Constitutional Government, an organization founded and financially supported by Stewart Mott. I'd become friendly with Mott when I was working with the Businessmen's Educational Fund and had found him sympathetic to my cause. The FCG was willing to expose governmental waste, and it was not a political lobbying organization, so the Air Force general counsel permitted me to join its board.
While I was at a board meeting at the Mott family home in Bermuda, I received a telephone call from two Carter recruiters who had tracked me down. For about an hour they spoke enthusiastically about my joining the new administration as a political appointee to help clean up the mess in the Pentagon. The FCG's president, Charles "Chuck" Morgan, Jr., an ardent Carter supporter, also recommended me to the recruiters. When I returned home, I found waiting for me some forms from the Carter-Mondale Policy Planning Group. I filled them out and sent them in.
Time passed. The transition team, an uninspiring collection of functionaries, began nosing around the Pentagon. Then I began to hear disquieting rumors that Jimmy Carter was meeting with the old Johnson-era national security apparatchiks: Harold Brown, Cyrus Vance, and others. I got a little worried and began to make phone calls. But I was reassured when Mitzi Wertheim, of the transition team, said the new administration still wanted my services. She asked me to write a paper describing my approach to reforming the Pentagon.
In response I wrote a piece titled "Motivating the Pentagon Bureaucracy to Reduce the Unit Cost of Defense," in which I argued that defense debates usually had the fallacy of either/or built into them: we must either allocate more and more money to the military or suffer an unacceptable loss of defense capability. The obvious third alternative was to vastly improve our management of defense. I pointed out that whenever we had a promising effort to follow the third alternative, somebody like James Schlesinger would announce that cutting fat without cutting muscle was "an enchanting illusion."
Only after I'd forwarded the paper to Mitzi Wertheim did I discover that Schlesinger and Harold Brown were leading candidates for the office of secretary of defense. Bad news for the taxpayer, bad news for me. I went to see Chuck Morgan. He'd heard the same stories, but he was more sanguine. His close friend Hamilton Jordan had let it be known that he'd refuse to serve in the new administration if the Johnson-era political hacks were going to be restored to high posts.
As I watched the Pentagon clipping service day by day, I began to see reports on an irresponsible, alarmist organization called the Committee on the Present Danger. The ringleaders of the group were James Schlesinger, David Packard, and Lane Kirkland, who was then secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO and a member of the transition team. Their pitch was: "Our country is in a period of danger, and the danger is increasing. Unless decisive attempts are taken to alert the nation and to change the course of its policy (translation: to speed up Pentagon spending even faster), our economic and military capacity will become inadequate to assure peace with security." It was the old bugle call with a new title.
Carter was listening; the sound of the whistle had faded away and he was listening to the brassy notes of the big bucks. Schlesinger "deeply impressed Mr. Carter during the briefing he gave the President-Elect after his return from a visit to China," reported the Christian Science Monitor on November 29, 1976. Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a CBS "Face the Nation" audience that carrying out Carter's pledge to cut $5 billion to $7 billion of fat "would inject a fundamental instability in the world."
By mid-December I had heard nothing from the Carter camp. Some of my friends sent them copies of an interview with me Rolling Stone had published, in which I'd cited some significant figures about one-year unit-cost increases of 20 percent to 109 percent. There were no replies other than the usual form letters.
A few days before Christmas, Jimmy Carter announced that he would appoint Harold Brown secretary of defense. It was a great setback. Joseph Kraft, in the December 23 Washington Post, bade Rumsfeld goodbye with these words: "(He has acted as) a transmission belt, passing on the requests of the Services to the Congress and the White House without interference. Under this loose rein, each Service has reverted to type, ignoring strategic and foreign-policy requirements in favor of doing its own thing."
Significantly, the Washington Star's headline on Brown's first announcements was: "For Openers, Brown Sounds Like Rumsfeld." Brown said in an interview, "I am concerned about ... the upward trend of Soviet defense expenditures in constant rubles and the downward trend of American defense expenditures in constant dollars." Jimmy Carter's campaign promises began to evaporate like dew under the August sun in Plains.
On December 30, when a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer asked Carter if he would keep his economy pledge, he replied with seventeen words when one would have sufficed: "If I don't, I will be very disappointed in the performance of the secretary of defense." Then, according to the Inquirer, Brown said, "I don't see a reduction in military spending from present levels." The newspaper took the question to Carter's press spokesman, Jody Powell, who said he had "no memory" of Carter's ever promising a $5 to $7 billion dollar cut.
In view of such contradictions, some of the press were sharpening their tone. The Washington Star on December 30 carried an editorial headlined "The $5 Billion Misunderstanding." About Carter it said: "He seemed aware that a dangerously high level of cynicism is abroad in the land about the capacity of government to keep its promises ... (and he) was the first presidential candidate of recent memory who found it useful to pledge that he would not lie to the voters. Did he?"
And Charles Mohr in the New York Times the same day found that Carter had changed from the indicative to the conditional in talking about budgets: "There would be a net reduction in any ... given year's defense budget of five to seven billion, which is brought about because of the changes I've described (better management and reduction of waste). And if we can achieve a reduction of threats to our national security, we might achieve substantial reductions in defense expenditures in years to come." Later in the story Mohr reported that Carter and Mondale would soon meet to find means to stimulate a "still sluggish economy."
In a baton-passing operation, the outgoing Ford administration leaked (read: planted) some helpful Red Menace stories. "New C.I.A. Estimate Finds Soviet Seeks Superiority in Arms" was the headline on a New York Times story on December 26. One of the chief sources was the retiring chief of Air Force intelligence, General George Keegan, who was quoted as saying he'd become "convinced that the Soviet Union was preparing for an offensive war against the United States." But according to the Nation (January 8, 1977) the ghost behind the report was George Bush, outgoing director of central intelligence.
Defense industry executives rushed in to add their weight. Robert Anderson, president of Rockwell International (principal contractor for the controversial B-1 bomber) said in the pages of Business Week, "I have a strong feeling that the Russians are pulling ahead." Raytheon's D. Brainerd Holmes called the Soviets "the U.S. defense industry's greatest ally."
There were a few grumbles. Senator Proxmire called upon Jimmy Carter to restore me to my full duties and to honor his economy pledge, and Senator Howard Metzenbaum joined in. But in the end they both voted to confirm Harold Brown.
Early in 1977 the Pentagon money machine was getting up to full speed. The FY 78 budget submitted by President Carter requested cash outlays of approximately $112 billion, which was about $29 billion above the reduced level promised by candidate Carter on June 16, 1976. To answer your question, Washington Star, yes, Jimmy Carter had been lying.
Under Brown the pressure mounted to obligate and spend. The notes of the DoD financial managers' meeting of February 22, 1977, reports Assistant Secretary (Comptroller) Fred Wacker's words: "Mr. Wacker stated that recent reports indicate that FY 1977 execution is lagging behind plan to date, both in terms of obligations and outlays, and urged the FM's to investigate the significance of this information." Translation from the bureaucratese: you guys aren't spending the money fast enough. Quit stalling!
White House instructions for this speed-up came in the form of a directive titled "The Economic Stimulas (sic) Program." My sarcastic friends said that the spelling showed the educational level of Carter's South Georgia brigade, but I knew that its spirit came straight from Wall Street.
By May 2, 1978, Fred Wacker was almost hysterically telling the financial managers to get out there and spend. He told the meeting of that date: "There is no cap on expenditures and ... the DoD is certainly not restricted from exceeding the established target. Any unexpended balance should be analyzed to determine cause."
Apologist historians of the Carter era have said that the administration discovered the need to step up spending only after the Soviet Union's brutal invasion of Afghanistan, but as I have shown, that is nonsense. The apologist school's theory is that Jimmy the Good tried to live up to his campaign promises but was sneakily undermined by Harold Brown. This derived from the mistaken notion that Brown resented Carter's June 30 announcement that he was canceling the B-1 bomber program. It is much more likely that Brown, though disappointed, accepted that Carter had to make this ritual sacrifice because of his campaign promise. The B-1 had become an important symbol.
The fight to kill funding for the B-1 bomber was, in mid-1977, a conspicuous but misleading success. It was led by a loose grouping of organizations (including my old outfit, the NTU) called the Coalition to Stop the B-1. Pentagon propaganda held that almost every state in the union stood to get contract dollars from the B-1. The coalition countered by pointing out that the cost to the taxpayers of most of those states was far greater than the income. This rarely used device was one that our similar coalition had used earlier to kill the supersonic transport plane subsidy.
My own skepticism about the B-1 was based on its chilling similarity, especially from a technical point of view, to the F-111 fighter-bomber fiasco. All of us who distrusted the campaign to sell the B-1 to the public were relieved at the president's decision. What we did not realize but might have suspected was that the defense budget quietly included $442 million for research and development money that was intended for a B-1 research model. An alliance of Air Force military and Carter office holders thereafter managed to inject other funds -- suitably disguised by misleading labels -- into Rockwell International's ongoing effort to advance the B-1. (An illuminating account of this appears in Nick Katz's Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics and the B-1 Bomber.)
In the meantime backing by the "new priorities" supporters for Carter's promised military budget cutting had begun to melt away. They were heavily influenced by the leaders of the big labor unions, who were worried about employment. The principal new priorities lobby, the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, even advocated "slow growth in the military budget" in its winter/spring 1977 legislative program.
Prosperity, fear of Soviet strength, jobs -- add to that the Israeli factor. Congressman Les Aspin noted them all in a speech to a meeting of Pentagon suppliers reported in the December 6 issue of the Philadelphia Bulletin. He said that the 1973 Yom Kippur war had convinced Israel that America must be ready with quick and massive resupply in any future emergency. "The Israeli lobby in Congress is no longer in favor of cutting the defense budget," Aspin observed.
Carter's own frugality urge had shrunk, then vanished. By December 17, 1977, in a speech in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he was actually bragging about a military spending increase: "Under President Ford and under me, the contribution for defense efforts has gone up in real dollars ... in other words, we have compensated for the inflation rate and then added on top of that an additional amount to increase our defense standing -- quite a reversal of what had been done in the past." Then in January 1978, Jimmy Carter proposed to Congress a military budget increase of $56 billion over the next five years, putting the 1983 figure at $172.7 billion.
Partisans of Carter have latterly tried to attribute the new splurge to insubordinate and clandestine activities by Brown. Former Carter insiders told this fairy tale to Nick Katz, who recounted in Wild Blue Yonder (p. 196):
Carter spoke angrily about Secretary Brown, who now increasingly sided with the military in favor of larger defense forces. "Harold's been a horse's ass on defense budgets," Carter told his aides. "He's caused me more work and took a hard line and never yielded."
This conflict of views was never apparent at my level of the Pentagon. Everything pointed to a pact between a free-spending president and a free-spending secretary.
As every recent administration has discovered, extravagance with money can be embarrassing when there is a free flow of information in government. Every candidate for the presidency over the past sixteen years has followed the pattern of campaign speeches denouncing wasteful spending. Often, as in the above-cited Carter examples, they condemn the concealment of such waste and promised a new era of economy and candor.
Then, almost without knowing how it happened, they fall victim to one of the most powerful forces in American society -- what Eisenhower long ago called "the military- industrial complex" and what we have come to know, in our own time, as a machine that eats presidents and well-meaning defense secretaries alive. To keep the giant-scale boondoggling hidden as much as possible, the politicians must resort to suppression.
On January 24, 1977, Senator James Abourezk, chairman of the Senate Small Business Subcommittee, invited me to testify on our options for airlifting military cargo. More specifically, which method was the most cost-effective -- the Military Airlift Command's own operation, large supplemental air carriers, or smaller supplemental carriers? I was a logical person to ask about such matters because as management systems deputy in the Air Force secretary's office, I had done extensive work on the subject. But the request immediately set off a warning buzzer in the Pentagon.
Brigadier General Robert Tanguy was instructed to tell Senator Abourezk that the Air Force preferred to send another spokesman, someone who, needless to say, knew nothing about airlift productivity trends. I could, the general conceded, testify as a private citizen, but nothing I said was to be taken as "the Air Force position" if it didn't jibe with the official spokesman's words.
This daft ruling set off a memorandum skirmish between me and my bosses, who finally agreed to let me testify "unimpeded." However, anything I said could later be declared unofficial if it was deemed contrary to the Air Force position. (That same rule, when placed on me earlier by the Ford administration, was described by Representative Parrin Mitchell as "the height or depth of asininity.")
Abourezk wrote Carter an angry letter, reminding him that he'd campaigned on the promise of open government and a tolerance of criticism but "in this case . . . the Air Force seems to be violating your principles blatantly." Much later he received a reply from the White House saying, in essence, "Thank you for your interest in aviation."
On March 2, 1977, the American Federation of Government Employees gave me their "whistle blowers' award" and the title "Mr. Integrity." I took advantage of their hospitality by making a speech in which I combined candidate Jimmy Carter's proposals for budget balancing and remotivating government employees with my own suggestions from the paper I had sent Mitzi Wertheim the previous fall. All in all, it was a tough talk to address to the leaders of a government union. I told them that integrity started with the understanding that there is no such thing as government money. It is all taxpayers' money. I asked them (along with the rest of us) to shape up and cut out waste. I said that meant they would have to live with lower budgets and help achieve lower costs. I gave some examples of the trials and tribulations good stewards have to suffer, but I reminded them that we were employed by the taxpayers to do an honest job. It was up to us to believe candidate Carter's commitments and to take things into our own hands to follow through.
The average American, brainwashed to believe that all merit-system federal employees are mediocre hacks with very little interest in their work, would assume that such an audience was hostile to my message. But let the Federal Times, a federal employees' newspaper, describe the reaction:
Suddenly, Fitzgerald was part of the audience. He needed to explain no more. The frustration he apotheosized (sic) was written on almost every face in the audience.
Hands were shooting up. Stories about waste, mismanagement, corruption, and cover-ups began pouring out from all sides. Complaints went uninvestigated, complainants were punished, documents destroyed ....
It seemed an endless orgy of accusations in southern lilts, midwestern drawls, and Bronx accents.... There were many Fitzgeralds now, countless numbers, and all of them felt that the big shots who commit crimes go scot free, while the little guys, honoring their Code of Ethics, get slammed for revealing wrongdoing.
Carried away by all this, I went too far. I promised my audience that, as a supergrade (one of the three highest civil service categories) in the office of the secretary of the Air Force, I'd try to follow up on any horror stories they had documentation for or credible witnesses to prove.
In a vulgar but apt phrase from my native Alabama, I was letting "my mouth overload my ass." I began to get more horror stories than Alfred Hitchcock ever dreamed of. Embarrassed yet encouraged by this reaction, I bundled up my speech and some of the favorable press notices and sent them through channels to the president, explaining to the secretary of the Air Force -- an inert figure named Stetson -- that "I would like for President Carter to know how well his program can be received by the rank and file of DoD employees when it is put to them the right way." About a month later I got the package back with a note saying that it was "inappropriate" to send to the president.
I persevered in trying to get a hearing. I got an appointment with Greg Schneiders, a Carter adviser who was now a White House assistant. I gave him my package from the highly successful AFGE pitch and the material I had submitted to the Carter-Mondale recruiters the previous fall outlining my ideas for squeezing the fat out of the military budget. Schneiders was sympathetic but firm in telling me that Harold Brown was in charge of the Pentagon.
I redoubled my efforts to get an appointment with Brown to try to make common cause with him in fulfilling Jimmy Carter's campaign commitments. Senator Proxmire tried to help me get appointments both with Brown and with higher-ups in the Carter White House, but all of our attempts met with stony silence. My friends wrote letters to the president on my behalf and got back form replies from the Office of Civilian Personnel Operations at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. Chuck Morgan, interceding for me, had conversations with Hamilton Jordan, Attorney General Griffin Bell, and other insiders. He never told me specifically what they said, but much later he did remark cryptically, "You never had a chance."
Discouraging though this was, I thought I might get somewhere with Ralph Nader's support. During the Nixon and Ford administrations, Nader had spoken out clearly to defend truth telling in government. And he had helped me personally. At an October 28, 1970, conference of government administrators in Washington he had deplored "the concept of heroism in civil service that called for employees to sacrifice their careers if they dared point out threats to the public purse or safety.... Blowing the whistle is a cardinal safeguard of public interest, and we're not going to let you be heroes." He went on to say that whistle blowers weren't the problem, it was the government employees who lied or covered up facts who were. He wanted punishment for those officials who practiced "bureaucratic unaccountability." His talk drew a standing ovation that lasted several minutes.
Nader and his organization did a lot of useful work in outlining what was wrong with the federal government's civil service system. He and his associate Peter Petkus published a good book on the subject called Blowing the Whistle, and another Nader associate, Robert Vaughn, wrote a superb paper called "The Spoiled System" denouncing the regression of the supposed merit system for government employees to a de facto political spoils system.
Nader's group had acted effectively when Nixon tried to put the top three levels of the federal merit system under his political control, a power grab meant to smother dissent and communication with Congress and the press. When Carter came into office and Peter Petkus was given a White House staff appointment, my friends and I took it as a very good sign.
We had another organizational ally in Chuck Morgan's Fund for Constitutional Government. The FCG had helped subsidize an important Nixon-era expose by public- interest lawyers William Dobrovir and Joe Gebhart. Their "Blueprint for Civil Service Reform" was both an attack on Nixon's violations of the federal merit system and a proposal for greater public accountability. Stewart Mott, the FCG's founder; Chuck Morgan, its president; and other board members had strong ties to the Carter administration. Board chairman Ted Jacobs, who had been Nader's second in command, knew many of the ex-Nader people now in government. New Republic editor Ken Bodie, labor lawyer Joe Rauh, and Georgetown University Professor John Kramer had close relationships with Carter officialdom. This was the liberal Establishment. These people, I was sure, would use their muscle to support a superb civil service reform.
Thus I simply refused to believe Inderjit "Indy" Badhwar when he telephoned me in December 1977. Indy, a native of the Punjab, was one of the best reporters I ever knew. Writing for the Federal Times, a funny little weekly (which was, nevertheless, a very good paper) he uncovered scandals of national proportions. Indy and his colleague Sheila Hershow kept a very good scrutiny on the federal bureaucracy. Badhwar said that unimpeachable sources in the government had told him that Carter's and Nader's people were cooking up a new civil service "reform" even worse than the swindle Richard Nixon had tried to sell, which had been hooted down by Congress. Indy said that the new plan would strip government employees of any real protection against arbitrary action by political appointees.
Nonsense, I said. This was exactly the opposite of Carter's campaign promises. Furthermore, there was no way Ralph Nader would ever involve himself in such blatant dishonesty. I told Indy we'd go to see Nader and get his personal denial.
I had an unexpectedly hard time getting in touch with Nader, but finally, through intermediaries, I got an appointment in early January 1978. When Indy and I arrived, Nader was somewhere else. We were taken in to see Alan Morrison, Nader's lawyer; Andrew Feinstein, the organization's civil service lobbyist; and Robert Vaughn. Morrison coldly said that Nader was unavailable -- what did we want?
Indy recounted the stories he had heard about the proposed reform. To my total shock and confusion, Morrison essentially confirmed Indy's story. He said it was true they were going to "trade off" some government employee rights for certain advantages he wouldn't name. It was "too hard" to fire government employees; the system needed an easier way to get rid of people.
Indy and I said that the government had never had much difficulty getting rid of whistle blowers or dissidents, and we cited cases. And if that was so, it shouldn't be too difficult to get rid of those who were bad or incompetent. Indy cited the statistics; a lot of people had been fired in recent years. No argument made a dent. And whenever I tried to see Nader, it was clear that he didn't want to meet with me on this issue. Obviously the deal had been cut.
Indy and I went next to that true-blue public interest organization, the Fund for Constitutional Government. For them I prepared a little test memorandum, which was in essence the FCG-sponsored "Blueprint for Civil Service Reform" with the title removed. It showed the parallels between the Carter and Nixon proposals, and it contained a very slightly modified statement of the Blueprint's proposals. We gave this paper to Chuck Morgan and Anne Zill, Stewart Mott's Washington representative.
The reaction was even worse than we'd had from the Nader people. They rejected the paper out of hand. Morgan said that when a government employee was accused of wrongdoing or inefficiency, he should have to prove his innocence. All other workers except some union members had to, didn't they? He relented a little and allowed a couple of exceptions: when an employee was being accused on the basis of some allegation prohibited by civil service rules or when the employee could claim a whistle blower defense. Otherwise, Morgan insisted, a person was guilty until proven innocent.
Now I was not talking to a Nixon Watergate shyster or a French avocat. I was arguing with one of the finest civil rights lawyers in the country. He had successfully defended Cassius Clay (later Mohammed Ali) when the boxer refused to be drafted into the Army with the reasonable explanation, "I ain't got nothing against them Viet Cong." As an ACLU lawyer, Chuck had fought for the one man/one vote rule that helped give Southern blacks their electoral rights. His record in defense of the downtrodden and unjustly accused did him great honor. What was the reason for his turnaround in this matter?
I think it was simply that the Carter people felt that government employees no longer needed elaborate protection of their rights. The FCG's Ted Jacobs argued that the Carter election had made the FCG charter "to expose government corruption" obsolete.
When the FCG board wanted to talk about the new utopia in a series of quo vadis meetings, I insisted that we include a discussion of civil service reform. The White House considered the FCG important enough to send Simon Lazarus, its chief civil service reform lobbyist and former Nader lieutenant, to explain the proposal. Lazarus made no bones about the fact that Carter was adopting the discredited Nixon plan to politicize the top three civil service grades (GS 16, 17, and 18), but with an added nasty twist. Nixon would have offered three-year contracts to the supergrades; Carter offered no contracts. These employees could be dismissed for "incompatibility"; in fact, they would be political appointees. At first, Lazarus said that the number of such employees would not exceed 10 percent, but after questioning, this percentage became a bit slippery. As former merit system jobs were filled by political appointees, those appointees could "burrow in" and become career employees, thereby freeing up slots for new politicals. Lazarus finally admitted that Carter intended to replace the whole merit system, in time, with politically appointed henchmen.
According to the minutes of that FCG meeting, Lazarus said that the Carter plan, as Chuck Morgan had suggested, was to place "the burden of proof in disciplinary proceedings ultimately upon the employee in question." For all practical purposes, Carter could then get rid of anybody in the civil service.
Lazarus explained that some people were already earmarked for dismissal under the new plan, and he named one of them. Assuming that the person named was a notorious incompetent, I offered to explain the present system's mechanisms for firing incompetents.
No, said Lazarus, the employee wasn't incompetent.
What was the reason for removal, then?
Well, the administration wanted to get rid of him because "he talked to the press and said the wrong things to Congress."
That was the story of my life, and I was outraged. So were Badhwar and Frank Silby, assistant to Representative John Moss. But this roomful of noble and eminent liberals couldn't see anything wrong with dismissing a person for exercising his rights under the First Amendment and for carrying out his responsibilities under the government Code of Ethics.
I wanted to offer evidence against the Carter plan, but Chairman Ted Jacobs repeatedly ruled me out of order. I was reduced to writing letters to my own board of directors, posing questions that were never answered. How would an employee defend himself against a charge of "disaffection"? This charge, which even had a code number in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, was not an act but a state of mind. How did someone on trial prove that he was full of affection and not disaffection? In the end the board approved Chuck Morgan's formula of putting the burden of proof on the accused.
If Sy Lazarus had been frank and consistent with us, Jimmy Carter was just the opposite. First, he argued that it was almost impossible to get rid of unwanted government employees. Then he argued that he wanted new legislation to protect whistle blowers from being fired. But he never seemed to consider that the people who were firing whistle blowers were his own appointees, and all he had to do was tell them to stop.
He lied specifically as well as in general. When he presented his Civil Service Reform Program on March 2, 1978, he said, "Last year, out of about two million (federal) employees, only 226 people lost their jobs for incompetence or inefficiency."
When I heard that, I dug out and circulated a very recent brief from the Air Force inspector general. One section titled "It's Impossible to Fire a Civilian!" read:
How often have you heard that? Do YOU believe it? Well, don't -- it's a myth. The facts are that in fiscal year 1977, 1,230 Air Force civilians were separated for cause. This included directed separations for suitability reasons, resignations in lieu of adverse actions, separations for inefficiency, termination during trial or probation period, and removals for misconduct. The figures for calendar year 1974, 1975, and 1976 and 1,823, 1,495, and 1,433 respectively.
Ken Blaylock, the only leader of a major employee union to support the Carter plan, tried to bail the president out of his embarrassing lie by saying the 226 was a typographical error, that it should have been 22,600. But the White House continued to use 226, then switched to a new figure of 1,157 employees fired in the previous year.
I then went to the source -- John Scholzen, chief information specialist in the Civil Service Commission. He explained that his statistics were for fiscal years but that he'd been asked for figures for calendar year 1976. Another source of confusion was that many people who quit government service did so to avoid being fired. But it was impossible to single those out of the 212,000 people who had resigned.
The CSC figures showed something quite the opposite of a static, entrenched work force whose members could not be fired. I knew that literally thousands of government employees -- usually the most talented -- had quit because of dissatisfaction or disgust with political machinations. Surly secretaries and slow workers are problems in any organization, but these weren't the people committing the expensive atrocities. Most government workers will take career risks to achieve cost reduction or improvement in service if they are convinced that is what their bosses really want. It is when these efforts begin to threaten certain special interests that politicians begin to get scared. In this case, I began to wonder what had scared Jimmy Carter and his retinue so badly.
Civil service statistics showed a rate of turnover that would alarm most private businessmen: 26 percent in one year excluding deaths, 30 percent including deaths. But the problem with the system was that it protected political hacks and drones while it punished or ejected people who had a sincere wish to contribute to the public interest.
Raymond Jacobson, Carter's Civil Service Commission executive director, was quoted in the July/August 1977 edition of the Washington Monthly as saying, "Any unproductive employee can be fired if his supervisor has balls." But the paradox was that the productive ones seemed to get fired and the politically submissive stayed on, no matter how unproductive.
The Carter people simply could not understand that what they were doing was a reversion to the political spoils system of the nineteenth century. Beyond that, they didn't see that they were preparing the way for a Republican stranglehold on the bureaucracy in future years when the Republicans would make the appointments.
I was a lonely protester against Carter's plan. Most congressmen seemed ardently in favor, and a big majority of the public-interest organizations had fallen into line. Ralph Nader, that brilliant but unpredictable man, testifying before the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee on behalf of the reform, attacked "political intrusion into the career service" that led to civil servants "performing political dirty work of whatever administration was in power ... as the fast track to advancement. This eagerness to please has led to violation of criminal laws." What was Nader's solution to this corrupting process? He proposed to make employees he'd described as all too responsive to political influences even more responsive to them. He said:
What is a democratic election for the President of the United States all about in the first place? What good is an election of a president replacing another administration if the president cannot bring in an adequate number of people who share his views and his programs and the issues that were debated during the election and won as a result of the November election?
Ulysses S. Grant or Boss Tweed couldn't have said it better.
Nader and his associates conceded that federal employees would lose certain rights of protection against political strong-arm tactics, but they'd be rewarded with a special office to which whistle blowers could, supposedly, bring complaints. There would be a kind of chaplain called the Special Counsel. In effect, our citizens' employees could no longer protect their rights under the Constitution and laws such as Title 5, Section 7211, of the U.S. Code. These rights were passed on to a third party.
The Carter Reform Act -- or, as many people I knew called it, the Carter Deform Act -- was a reckless reversal of governmental progress since 1883, and promised some dire developments. The Nader followers, my friends at the FCG, and many other well-meaning liberals seemed to think that political corruption had been abolished by the election of Jimmy the Good. How many other times have liberals woven the ropes for their own hanging?
The Carter Act moved relentlessly through Congress, undergoing quite a few changes on the way. The features that supposedly promised greater efficiency in the civil service were amended until they became meaningless. I testified several times, noting that instead of making it easier to get rid of the deadwood, the act would make it easier for the deadwood to get rid of everybody else. No one was listening.
The climax of the president's attempt to sell his reform came on the evening of August 3, 1978, when he spoke in Fairfax, Virginia, in a high school auditorium:
The essence of what we proposed also includes the protection of the rights of those who are part of the civil service system, and we are also very interested in seeing the so-called whistleblowers, those who see defects in our government, violations of law, gross waste, protected when they point out these deficiencies leading to correction of errors in our government.
After laying out his proposal for the special counsel's office, he reached the heights of hypocrisy:
Let me give you a notable example from past history, perhaps the most famous person who has suffered. And that's Ernest Fitzgerald, who, through his own insistence, pointed out an example of great waste in the federal government. Under the present merit system, he has, through his own analysis, been punished because of that whistleblowing experience. That would not be possible under the proposed legislation. He would be protected and could not be punished, could not be silenced, in fact may very well have been rewarded.
The president seemed to be looking right at me as he uttered this astonishing deception. Fred Small, the president of a government worker's union local in Air Force headquarters, shouted back at Carter, "Here's Fitzgerald, Jimmy. Reward him!"
In truth, Carter needed no new laws to protect me. All he had to do was to pick up the telephone, call the Pentagon, and say, "Harold, stop putting Fitzgerald down. Let him go back to work."
***
Not long after the Fairfax speech, TV producers Judith and Harry Moses, a husband-and- wife team, came to me with a fascinating proposal they were preparing, which documented Carter's close ties with Lockheed. As governor of Georgia, the state where the C-5A was built, he had tried to protect the company during the height of the 1960s scandals. The Marietta Daily Journal of April 9, 1972, reported his defense:
"A company like Lockheed which has the ability and courage to plan and design a new concept in aircraft like the C-5A must be expected to run into certain cost overruns as they must make constant modifications in the aircraft while it is being produced," Carter said.
"The Defense Department understands this and allows for it. It has come into the public light so often only because certain politicians, including Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) want to create a political issue with it.
"The cost overruns are predictable and easy to understand in a program like that of the C-5A," the Governor said.
The Moseses had evidence to show that Jimmy Carter, while governor of Georgia, was Lockheed's best-known traveling salesman. One evidence of that was a note the Moseses obtained from Carter's gubernatorial records. On April 8, 1972, Lockheed took Carter on a fifteen-day selling tour of South America. On his return Carter wrote to Lockheed-Georgia's vice president, R. D. Roche:
Dear Bob,
One of the finest experiences of my life was being with you on the trip to Central and South America. In addition to the remarkable performance, luxury, and convenience of the Jet Star, the opportunity to learn more about Lockheed was extremely important to me. ... I have carried this message of admiration to our national leaders in the State Department, Defense Department, and the Congress and will continue to do so.... I want to help in an active way.... The first step now in addition to my public and private promotional efforts should be for me to visit Lockheed and know at first hand the problems and opportunities of your company.
Your friend,
Jimmy Carter
This unpaid lobbyist for Lockheed clearly resented the Proxmire hearings and must have heard a good deal of bad language about me from his Lockheed friends. To gain votes in civil-servant-populated northern Virginia, he'd said, "The Fitzgerald case, where a dedicated civil servant was fired from the Defense Department for reporting cost overruns, must never be repeated." And then he produced "civil service reform" bill that would make my GS-17 job (and the jobs of all upper-echelon government employees) political rather than professional. He was, in fact, trying to make it easy to get rid of whistle blowers and closet patriots. This was the man who said to all of us, "I will never lie to you."
Jimmy Carter's Civil Service Deform Act passed the Senate by a vote of 87 to 1 and by an almost equally large margin in the House of Representatives.
Carter's faithless repudiation of his own promises were a grievous blow to me personally. Moreover, the weakness of character that produced the debacle of the Carter presidency set in motion some of our later national calamities and set the stage for others. Clark Mollenhoff's summing up in his book The President Who Failed was prescient:
The greatest tragedy of all was that President Carter's performance created an unreasoned national craving for a strong and forceful leader -- any strong leader. Carter's weakness set the political stage for a bold, strong leader who might be too bold, too strong, too ruthless and too authoritarian to tolerate opposition and more skillful in the exercise of the authoritarian tools of secrecy and political retribution that Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon used quite clumsily.
Jimmy Carter may have been too bumbling and weak to become our man on horseback, but he was plenty strong enough to saddle the horse, to help hoist the new, elected ruler into the saddle, then give the steed of state a slap on the rump to send our new leader on his way.