Jim Kittleman, who was a consultant from Chicago and the Federal Executive Institute, Frank Sherwood and R. T. Williams, they were under contract for [a study of] organization development. Jim Kittleman was the contractor for management [issues]. I kept those two organizations as long as I was director, because that gave me an outside viewpoint [along with] every one of my senior executives [whom] I sent to the Federal Executive Institute, so that I had a community of people who spoke the same language. I had them constantly in contact there. They’d call the regional director, they’d call the assistant director, they’d call the director of Harpers Ferry. Bill Everhart and Frank Sherwood became great personal friends. I mean it was that kind of relationship, always getting the outside viewpoint, because I felt that that was important for us to understand the world in which we were trying to operate.
I would like to hear your thoughts on what you view as the appropriate relationship between political appointees and careerists. It’s generally regarded that after your departure from the Park Service, the director position seemed to change with the political administration. There were, as you mentioned in an earlier interview, instances of political appointees making operational decisions that might be best left to the careerist. Would you talk about that for a few minutes?
That problem was beginning before I got fired. But that just never existed when I was director. If I had an assistant secretary, and I had several of them, who wanted something done, I always made it clear to them that when they went out in the field and they saw something they didn’t like, something they thought ought to be changed, if they would call me and tell me about it, we would talk it over. If I agreed with them, we’d change it and we’d do what they wanted done in the way that they wanted it done, because they’re from the outside. They’re sensitive to the community and the political environment that exists.
Remember that I went through a change of administrations, so I worked for Democratic assistant secretaries and Republican assistant secretaries. But the one thing that we had an agreement on was that they never ever ordered a change in my management directly to a superintendent. I had one assistant secretary who had a tendency to let his staff do that. I finally made a telephone call to all of my regional directors, a conference call, in which I said, “I’m advised that the assistant secretary’s office calls the superintendents in your region saying he wants this and that done. You get on this phone today, before you go home, and talk with each superintendent you’ve got. You tell him that I said if the assistant secretary calls him and tells him to do something, and he has the money and he wants to do it, do it. But I want to know how much it costs, because next year I will reduce his budget by the same amount that he spent on this project.”
Then when I finished that conference call to the regional directors, I got up and went to the other end of the hall and walked into the assistant secretary’s office and I told him exactly what I had told the regional directors. I said, “I’ve been trying to work with you to get you to understand that if you want something done in the parks, tell me and I will tell them, because we can’t have two directors of the Park Service. Those superintendents know they report to me. When I call them and tell them to do something, they do it, and when I get somebody off in left field here calling them and telling them to do something, that confuses them.” I told him, “If you continue to let that happen, they can do it if they want to, but the cost of that project will be deducted from their budget next year.” He knew I could do it, because he knew my relationship with my Appropriations Committee was such that 99.9 percent of the time they would do what I asked them. If I told them I wanted Yellowstone’s budget cut $100,000, they’d cut it $100,000. That [the assistant secretary’s interference] stopped.
It seemed to me that you can’t run an organization if everybody is intervening and countermanding what the director has told them to do. That is unacceptable operation, and besides, in many instances, like male alligators they eat their own. The career service works for the political establishment. The interface between the political bureaucrat and the career bureaucrat is of paramount importance to effective and efficient government. The political bureaucrat has resources beyond his comprehension that he can direct to any project he wants done, if he involves that career bureaucrat in transmitting that energy through that system. The career bureaucrats are much smarter than the political bureaucrats give them credit for. See, this comes out of the philosophy that everyone [specifically every political bureaucrat] is capable of doing a government job. That is simply not so. They’re simply not. A political bureaucrat may be a great guy and a lousy manager at the same time.
The Army Corps of Engineers is one of the agencies I greatly admire. I say to people, they [the Corps] can do any damn thing in the world that the Congress tells them to do and puts up the money for, but they’re not efficient. I’ve adopted a lot of their tactics, because I was never really all that innovative. I stole ideas everywhere I could find them from whomever I could find them. And I was very much in the tradition of Mo [Rep. Morris K.] Udall in telling jokes. The first time I used it, I said, “The Army Corps does this and this and this, and this is what we think. And this is what I think we ought to do.” And after that it was my idea. You [the other person or organization] get credit for it the first time. After that it’s my story. Mo Udall said he always stole his stories from everybody. The first time he told it he said, “Joe Blow told me the other day.” The next time he told it, “This is what I heard.” It’s my story now.
W.E.– To back him up, we had a slogan, “shop the competition.” Our interpretation is fine, but there are obviously other people who are doing better at whatever it is you’re doing. So look out. Just because we’re the Park Service that doesn’t mean we’re the best in all elements of it. Go out and look and shop the competition, which we did.
G.H.– You know I used to send maintenance people to Coney Island. Now, why would I pay government transportation and per diem to send people to Coney Island? They knew more about picking up trash than anybody on the face of the Earth, because they had more of it. I don’t know what the situation is now. I went there and I saw, and it was the cleanest beach in America. You rode along our parkways and there was trash all over the side of them. I paid to send them [Park Service staff] up there to let them experience how you pick up trash. As Bill said, my motto was “shop the competition.” Somebody has done what you’re now doing or you’re going to try to do. Go see how they’re doing it. And if they’re doing it better, steal it. They don’t have a copyright or a patent on it. So it’s in the public domain. Take it.
