Case Event Group Discussion

Ashworth, K. (2001). Caught between the dog and the fireplug, or How to survive public service. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN: 0-87840-847-9

OCTOBER

re: Working with politicians

Dear Kim

Well, I suppose you know by now how thoroughly you have disappointed your mother and father. They cannot imagine what got into you to turn down those admissions offers you had in hand from the Harvard School of Business and the Wharton School of Finance to attend what they consider some podunk university to study public administration, of all things! They have complained to me that they didn’t even know such a degree existed.

They hope, I believe, that as your uncle I might talk you out of your decision. After all, they had come to cherish fond visions of you becoming the microchip baron or maybe cornering the market on soap. They’ve been reading about MBAs fresh out of college starting with salaries over $100,000. And now instead, you have chosen a highly questionable and unpredictable future in the public service. They have left it to me to inform you that they have not yet been able to bring themselves to tell the neighbors, who they know never expected you to amount to much anyway. If your parents continue to give you grief over your choice, you should bite your tongue, but you might take consolation in something Arthur Miller said about why he became a playwright and did not follow his father and uncles into business. He said, “Oh, I didn’t have the discipline. To be a businessman you have to have the discipline to put everything interesting out of your mind to make money.”

Knowing the lack of support you are receiving in this decision, I feel I may need to find moments now and then to drop you a note to explain some of the finer points of the career you are now embarked upon. If I can maintain the discipline, I do—at least for the moment—intend to send you some of my passing thoughts from my experience of almost four decades in this field. I’ll try not to preach, just observe, generalize, talk big and tell a few stories. A lot of what I will tell you will come from my work experience at various levels of government: local, state, and federal. Although a lot of what I draw on will come from my experience in working with a governing board and with governors and legislators, whatever you end up doing, you should find what I share with you to be transferable to your work. Whatever you do in the public service, there will always be somebody to whom you are accountable and who is giving you directions and applying advice and criticism, even if you are in a so-called independent agency.

So over the months ahead in your studies, I will try to make the point that there is at least one in the family who supports your totally unexpected decision about your future career in the service of the people.

Perhaps there is nowhere better to start for your first lesson from this old government functionary than with some advice on dealing with politicians. A large portion of your time as a public servant will be spent with elected politicians, trying to convince them of policy initiatives or changes you have found to be needed. And part of your experience will include being kicked around or being on the receiving end

of abuse from elected officials, most of it mild but some probably quite severe. Consequently, this topic can probably bear a little elaboration to prepare you for your future dealings with politicians.

About a year ago I had to go to the capitol on some business, and after I parked my car and I was crossing the mall I noticed my stomach was tying itself into knots and I had this unexplained depression and sense of dread. I knew suddenly that Pavlov was right. The legislature was not even in session and there I was with a conditioned reflex to the treatment I so often receive before committee hearings and in dealing with individual legislators. It was complete, even to Pavlov’s ringing of bells, in this case the bells calling the legislature into session.

This reaction is just part of my usual biennial manic-depressive mood swings that go with having the legislature in town. I can be manic at noon when a “bad ol’ bill” looks like it’s dead in a committee and then depressive by mid-afternoon when I learn that the committee has met on an emergency posting and voted the bill out and sent it to the Calendars Committee to schedule a floor vote. Or I might feel great when I hear that an important bill looks like it will probably pass this session because a conference committee between the two houses has been appointed and will work out the minor differences in the two versions of the bill. And then I learn that the senator chairing the committee is refusing to convene the conferees for a vote until a dog of a bill of his is voted out of the House. And when you have several bills you are concerned about, you can find yourself manic and depressed at the same time.

Sometimes a bad ol’ bill will be passed by one house as a favor to one of its members or to help a group of legislators who need to go back home and be able to brag about what they got accomplished. The members of one house will do this in full expectation that the bill will die in the other house. Such was the case one year with a bill to create by statute nearly 250 new degree programs in universities in south Texas, including doctoral degrees and new colleges of engineering and law and pharmacy and veterinary medicine and other professional fields. This bill would have created these programs without the review and analysis of my agency, the higher education coordinating board, which had been established by the legislature decades earlier to oversee and prevent just such unnecessary and costly duplication of degree programs. The bill was passed in the House to help the legislator sponsoring the bill and House colleagues to “bring home the bacon.” The House passed it with the clear belief that such a bill would never pass the Senate or get by the governor. But after it passed the House, the House sponsors, and others in the Senate who wanted credit for this bacon as well, suddenly realized that the governor could never afford to veto such a bill if it reached her desk. She desperately needed votes from their region in the next election. Consequently, there was a “full-court” press put on to pass the bill out of the Senate as well, and it remained a cliffhanger for the entire session.

With so many bad ol’ bills being introduced every session in legislatures nationwide and in the U.S. Congress, you come to appreciate the foresight of the founding fathers in knowing this would occur. They wisely made it exceptionally difficult to pass any bill. They protected us all by requiring that for anybody’s idea to become imposed upon the people as a new law it must garner enough support to pass both houses and then be signed into law by the governor or the president. And if the governor or president refuses to sign it and vetoes the proposal, the two houses will then have to gather exceptional support and re-pass the proposal in both houses by a two-thirds majority. Thankfully this provides many places to kill or modify a bill or to tie it up until it dies.

You will quickly learn there are far more bills introduced in every legislative session that need to die than need to pass. I suppose every state has the same saying, “No person’s life, liberty, or property is safe so long as the legislature is in session.” Yet some critics of government claim that these kinds of requirements lead to gridlock and they feel it should be much easier to pass bills quickly that seem popular with the voters. But after you have watched a legislature very long, you will agree with the founding fathers: It is better to have a little gridlock than for a bunch of bad ol’ bills to pass every session, laws that the voters would then have to live with until they could get them repealed. There’s an old saying, “There are three things you should never watch being made: sausage, cottage cheese, and legislation.”

There are many ways a bill can be killed. And you will need to learn these points to apply choke holds. A committee chair in either house may decide to lock it up in a subcommittee. Or if two even slightly different versions of a bill pass the two houses, it might get waylaid in the conference committee, or it might get modified so that it is not so bad a bill as it started out being. Or the Speaker of the House or the lieutenant governor may arrange for the bill to never reach the floor for a vote. Or the governor can help a bill to die by saying in advance she will veto it. Even if it’s a bill the governor may have to sign for political reasons, she may work quietly with legislators in one or both houses to be certain it never arrives at her desk to embarrass her into having to sign it. Or if she’s vetoed it, she can work to be certain that at least one of the two houses can’t get the two-thirds votes necessary to override her refusal to sign it into law.

But those who are promoting an idea or proposal never count on just the most visible and direct way to have their way, that is, to pass the substantive bill itself. They are always looking for a fallback option to salvage at least part of what they seek to achieve by attaching it to some other bill, ideally a related bill they know has to pass that session. Their challenge is to find a bill to which their attachment will be germane. If it is not germane to the purpose of the bill they are loading onto, their attachment faces the risk of being removed on a point of order. But what others with lessdeserving proposals attempt to do can provide you a lesson on how to have your way on more worthy issues you will pursue in the future.

Because bills can be killed so easily, politicians have to be willing to amend their proposals to attract enough votes even to get it through their own chamber. That means thoroughly bad bills with no redeeming social values can rarely get passed. The only exception is where a bad ol’ bill intended to benefit one area or one city or one military base or one university begins to get broadened to include benefits to additional legislators’ districts in order to garner more votes for passage. A bad ol’ bill loaded up with enough “bad ol’ amendments” to gather enough votes to pass is called a donkey barbecue. Everybody gets a free piece of ass. This is where the governor or the president can spoil the party, however, if he has the courage to veto it.

Playing with “free votes” in one house while counting on the other house to kill a bill can be risky, however. In Washington for years the House of Representatives used to pass a bill to impose constraints and regulations on the use of animals for research purposes in medical schools across the country. The American Medical Association (AMA), working on behalf of the medical schools, could be relied upon to always oppose the bill and to ensure its demise every session in a Senate committee. With assured death in the other chamber the bill for animal rights each session became a popular “free vote” for every member of the House. They could vote for the bill in the House and then go home and tell their

constituents they were looking after the protection of everybody’s pets, and if they felt like it they could even cozy up a bit to the anti-vivisectionists.

One year the bill once again passed the House and came before the same Senate committee where it was expected to be summarily dealt with in the usual manner. The chair, Senator Warren Magnuson, a lifelong bachelor who had just recently married, commented musingly, “I know we kill this bill every session, but my young bride told me at breakfast this morning she sure wished we could pass it. She’s worried about our two little dogs getting out of the house someday and getting picked up by those people who collect stray dogs and sell them for medical research.”

The Republican minority leader from Colorado on the committee was notorious for opposing any kind of federal control and regulations and was predictably anti-government intervention on everything. The senator from Colorado said, “Mr. Chairman, let me tell you a little story. Our dog disappeared in Denver last year and my wife and I walked the streets, we knocked on doors, we posted signs about him, we talked to neighbors, and we simply couldn’t find him. We were devastated at losing him. Then my wife suggested we go to the medical school as a last resort just to see if he might be there. That’s where we found him, waiting to be cut on by those doctors.” Everyone sitting there picked his chin up off the floor when he then added, “Senator Magnuson, I will join you in reporting this bill out to the floor with a recommendation that it do pass.” With two such powerful Senate leaders supporting the bill it passed despite all that the AMA and the lobbyists for the medical schools could do to defeat it.

So, back to where I was: What do politicians do to you in committee hearings? One thing you learn early is that legislators are very current-issue oriented. What’s been in the papers and on television and might have gotten the attention of the voters? Those are the issues that often get dragged into a hearing on totally unrelated topics and get aired at length. This permits members to make their positions clear on what’s in the morning news, what’s on the minds of their voters. You can see your silk purse of a hearing quickly become a pig’s ear if there is press coverage at your hearing and the questions and statements on your testimony devolve into a diatribe on something from the “City and State” page of a local newspaper.

Some legislators become notorious for their grandstanding and posturing for the voters. Once I was berated and abused for over two hours by two committee members about how I had for years denied their constituents their constitutional, legal, and rightfully deserved benefits from the state. When the committee broke for lunch the television crews heard what had been going on and showed up in force. When the committee reconvened with cameras all over the room, the morning performance was repeated, almost word for word. I was hardly permitted to respond or defend myself in either the original performance or in the replay. I was to stand there and take it, a necessary prop or “straight man.” I was not to play an active role other than to serve as a convenient foil and target of abuse. It is a humiliating thing to have to put up with, but often there is very little you can do.

That is one thing you learn early. As a paid public servant you are never equal to legislative committee members, and you should never expect to be. Moreover, committee members will rarely discipline each other when one of them is boring in on a civil servant. Why should they make an enemy or alienate a vote they need on something else just to help you out? After all, this is part of what you get paid for, and you are merely incidental to what each of them is trying to get done that day anyway. They are

courting each other for votes, they have cut deals, and they have committed their votes. You are expected to tolerate the abuse you receive and you must put up with it. Occasionally a member may intervene to throw you a soft-pitch question or to elicit a response he knows you have been wanting to make. Be thankful for such small help. It is very infrequent.

Once I did get some serious help and it came in such a subtle form that the senator in the chair never caught on. The committee vice chair was presiding and he could not resist his rare opportunity to perform for a large group of hometown constituents present at the hearing. He proceeded to abuse me as he had so often before. His accusations became so outrageous that I refused to remain silent or acquiescent any longer. As he continued making outrageous and unsupportable charges, I warmed to my task and began to make strong and pointed responses, denials, and corrections of facts. The vice chair was increasingly losing control, and since he was in the chair it did not appear anyone else on the committee could correct the drift of the altercation. Finally another senator called out, “Mr. Chairman, point of order.” The intensity was partly broken simply by his interrupting our exchange. The vice chair asked what the point of order was. The committee member winked at me as he said, “The witness should be instructed to confine his remarks to the topic of this hearing.” The vice chair was so absorbed in his performance for his claque of supporters that he missed the scattered laughter around the room, but he banged his gavel and said severely to me, “Yes, the witness is admonished to restrict himself to the topic under consideration.” Nothing could have pleased me more and we all went back to the business before the committee.

It is very risky to respond in kind to legislators in most cases. In this case I was in dangerous waters. You may quickly find that rather than only one or two committee members being on the attack, you have all of them down on your neck. The ranks close quickly if you do not stay in your allotted subordinate role with legislators.

Specifically, they get after witnesses in a number of ways. They may start by keeping you waiting to testify by running in ahead of you other unscheduled witnesses or those scheduled to appear later. Sometimes this is unavoidable for a committee, but a chair who wants to send a message of displeasure to a witness can keep him waiting all day or several days by this technique. And the costs of keeping state executives and their staffs idly waiting are not a consideration even to the most efficiency minded of legislators. It is more important to make clear who is in charge and who is subservient.

You sometimes will find yourself fielding questions that can become increasingly accusatory and abusive, often presented as in cross-examination, pointed and rapid fire, in an effort to confuse you, make you appear stupid, or lead you to a predetermined end. And it is the nature of the proceedings that you never know where a question is coming from next or what kind of off-the-wall grilling you may get. I will not advise you to relax and bear with it, because it is impossible to relax. It is some of the most intense intellectual effort you will ever encounter.

If members are determined to intimidate you or to try to embarrass you, they may show little regard for facts or circumstances. For four years we were criticized for having more space per employee in our agency quarters than the new state standard recommended. The fact that our ten-year lease had been executed several years before the legislature set the new space standard was irrelevant. We clearly were not following state guidelines and were accused of being wasteful and uncooperative.

They may ask why the staff travels so much or why your people are not out in the field more to see conditions first hand. Or why you printed a report in-house rather than contracting it out. Or why you contracted out a printing job you could have done more cheaply in-house. Or why did you extend a contract for services or why did you not extend an existing contract rather than incur the costs of getting new bids?

You also learn soon that there is abundant wisdom in the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” In our administration of the federally insured student loan program, we had managed to accumulate surplus funds beyond what were needed to cover debt service, above what was needed to keep the costs of student loans low, and more than sufficient to cover losses of unpaid loans. The state was leasing a privately owned building for our agency at considerable expense to the taxpayers. We did some calculations about how much we could save the state on our next ten-year lease if we were permitted to use the surplus funds we had accumulated in the loan program to build a new facility to be owned thereafter by the state. So we presented our proposal to the legislature.

It was at that hearing that I learned not to expect beatification but to take solace in martyrdom. The only thing the committee members heard was that we had somehow accumulated $9 million that they could get their hands on to spend on something else—which they promptly proceeded to do, continuing to appropriate funds for us to lease space. That was over ten years and untold millions of tax dollars ago.

Another case arose with our recognition of the desperate need to place more African American and Hispanic faculty members in our university classrooms. We devised a program to lend money to minority graduate students to complete their doctorates. The program would permit these students to have a fifth of their total indebtedness paid off by the state for each year they worked at a university in our state after completing their doctorates. The legislature thought it was a wonderful program and passed authorizing legislation. But since it required new funds they directed us to seek support for it from private sources and foundations.

We spent two years trying to raise such funds, only to be told repeatedly by possible donors, “This is a fine program, but it needs to be funded by the state, not by us because it will be an ongoing program spread over many years.” When we returned to the legislature two years later and explained our situation, the House Appropriations Committee looked around for a source of funds for this fine program and found it. They took it from our agency’s operating budget. The gratitude for our proposing this program was summed up in one legislator’s angry question to me when I objected that this would injure our agency and was not an appropriate way to fund the new program. He said, “You mean to say, doctor, that your operating budget is more important to you than helping minorities get doctoral degrees? It appears you have lost sight of the purpose of your agency.” And, indeed, our budget was cut to pay for the program. Fortunately we got part of that funding restored in the Senate.

As you sit there before a committee giving your testimony, a multitude of thoughts go through your mind. Stay calm and in control of yourself, show respect, never appear arrogant, avoid any sense of self- importance, try to be responsive and helpful, and keep your answers as short and cogent as possible. And never blow up or show your impatience.

With experience over the years you would think that testifying before legislative committees would become easier. But it doesn’t. You learn to be more aware of what is going on behind what is superficially obvious. As the questions come at you from all sides you must consider what is the best and

most appropriate response. For example, a legislator may throw you a soft pitch, but you need to consider that if you hit the pitch as hard as he wants you to and as you are tempted to do, it is likely to draw a reaction from other legislators who hold a different view. In fact, is the easy question a kindness to you from a sympathetic member or is he trying to use you and the answer he thinks you will give him in order to irritate or embarrass another member of the committee? Is this a leading question? Where are this line of questioning and my answers taking me? Will it be better to respond succinctly and risk being misunderstood or to explain this complex issue more fully and perhaps lose the attention of the committee members? Do I answer this as best I can from the data I have at my command here or do I give a short reply and promise to provide more information later? And as you are processing these thoughts and making your responses, you notice that half the committee is in conversations with each other or not paying attention.

One day as I was being cross-examined and tossed from pillar to post among the committee members an aberrant thought crossed my mind. I recalled a scene from the movie Dr. Strangelove. There was a character named Jack D. Ripper who was lamenting his war experience to another officer named Mandrake. Ripper was reproaching himself for how he had broken under torture by the Japanese during World War II and had given his interrogators more than his name, rank, and serial number. Then he asked Mandrake how he had behaved under similar torture. Mandrake replied, “Oh, I don’t know that they cared all that much about what I said. I rather think they were having a bit of fun.”

Then there is the question: “We know, of course, where your board and your agency stand on this problem, but tell us how you feel about this personally.” Beware. You have no privilege to represent an agency position and hold a different personal opinion in public. To state a differing personal position is to immediately undercut your agency, your board, and your job in that agency. It seems so self-evident after you have once fallen for that simple invitation to separate yourself from the agency position you must justify and defend. In fact, with this question, there will be occasions when you do, indeed, have a strong personal view different from the one you must defend in public. You just don’t have the prerogative to state it publicly. It can even be a risk to state it privately.

A senator devised on his own on his computer a new formula for how the legislature should fund higher education. And as chair of the Senate Finance Committee he was in a position to push to substitute his version for the formula that the universities and our agency had developed and been fine-tuning and updating every two years for several decades. The senator invited me for a private discussion to ask me to endorse his innovation, his new formulas. I explained that to accede to this request I would first have to abandon a financing method I had agreed to with the universities, one I had pledged to the presidents I would defend before the legislature. Second, I would have to disassociate myself from my own board’s formal adoption of recommendations to the legislature to use that method of financing. I explained the situation I was in and why I could not now choose to endorse his plan personally when the one I was officially wedded to was on the table before the legislature.

I did offer the services of our agency to assist him with his new model for financing and to do trial runs of data and his formulas for him. He pointed out that the universities were abandoning the old method and were going to endorse his approach since he was promising them more money if they would accept his new formula. I told him they had that prerogative, but I did not. They were pledged only to each other; I was pledged to all of them as a group. In the end, he saw me as less than cooperative and felt I

was being inflexible and hardheaded. I did not feel I had a choice in the matter. I had to do what my job and my pledges required of me.

We all may wonder what motivates legislators in their own particular ways of dealing with public servants. Most of all they want their way in what they pursue. The political process is distinctly different from the practices followed in most of our working hours as civil servants. We focus principally upon developing solutions to problems and implementing and carrying out programs. In contrast, the politicians’ problem is to reach agreement with other politicians and policymakers so that some version of what they want to achieve and what others are pursuing can move forward. That means they become masters of trade-offs, at swapping, at making deals, and at compromise.

Those of us in administrative posts carrying out public programs don’t have the politician’s latitude to wheel and deal and be unpredictable or to always be flexible and willing to modify a position we have taken earlier. We don’t have favors to trade or chits to call in. Consequently, we sometimes become part of the problem in legislators’ eyes because we can’t capitulate easily, put deals on the table quickly, or compromise away standards or procedures. The politician’s position was best encapsulated by Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, when he said, “I am a man of fixed and unbending principles—the first of which is to be flexible at all times.”

We administrators tend to be more concerned than legislators about what is required to give greater predictability and stability to our activities and our rulings that affect people every day. Our jobs require us to pursue consistency. Politicians are more often looking for change and new accommodations. We prefer to tinker with programs or procedures on the margin and fine-tune what exists. They often prefer to sweep out the old and introduce something entirely new. No wonder our two camps often look upon each other with considerable distrust and skepticism.

Moreover, politicians have needs we bureaucrats don’t have. They need to impress their voters and the pleaders for special treatment and satisfy supplicants for exceptions and favors. We bureaucrats can be obstacles to those needs because favors, exceptions, and special pleaders are the bane of our existence. To us these kinds of people are asking us to be unfair and to treat themselves and other citizens unequally. To the politician such requests represent a chance to do a favor, to make someone indebted to them, to create the potential for some future trade they may need in order to move something on their agenda.

In addition, legislators are performing for other politicians, particularly the leadership in both houses. They all want better committee assignments and aspire to hold committee chairs—or to chair a more important committee. So they are grandstanding to look good in the legislature as well as with their voters. And some are courting supporters and voters they may need in order to pursue the next higher office they aspire to.

And finally, of course, most of them serve because they want to make a difference. They see conditions they want to correct or improve, circumstances they want to get placed on the public agenda, solutions they want to try out, changes they want to make in how governments do things. And it may sound cynical, but when one of them does something for you, a mere bureaucrat, it may very well be to get you indebted to him so he can ask you for something in exchange later. Even when they are your personal friends, politicians don’t see a request to balance the ledger as unusual or out of line. Why would it be inconsistent to ask a friend for a favor, especially if he has already done one for you? What

are friends for? All of this is in the nature of being a politician. It’s just that elected politicians move the public agenda differently than we career public servants do. And for the good of the nation, we can be thankful for that. Both approaches contribute to the way our system of government works. Efficiency and consistency are worthy goals, but so are change and accommodation.

In terms of individual personal relations with legislators, you will find most of them are pleasant or certainly tolerable. Many politicians are downright charming. After all, they have not gotten to where they are by always being nasty or threatening to other people. And in being charming they feel this entitles them to press to the very edge of what is socially acceptable to obtain what is politically desirable.

Yet one underrated pleasure of life is to watch obnoxious politicians get their comeuppance. Those who are overbearing and generally abusive of their positions are often taken care of by their own colleagues. There was one east Texas legislator who was renowned for his outrageous and arrogant demands upon state agencies and his colleagues. Fred was one of those politicians who truly felt, “If it turns out reincarnation is the way the universe works, I want to come back as me.” Many of his fellow House members had a chance to observe him in all his glory on one occasion as they walked from a parking lot to a university reception for the legislature. He was leaning out of his car window and screaming at three policemen to move a goddamned barricade to permit him to park in front of the building where the reception was being held. The other legislators might walk from the parking lot a block away but not Fred. When the police officers did not move fast enough for his satisfaction, he blew his horn at them and began pushing them and the barricade with his car.

Fred’s brother-in-law was serving as a dormitory proctor at one of the universities, a special privilege Fred insisted on by virtue of his august position in the legislature. The young brother-in-law was generating substantial personal income by requiring that all laundry in the dormitory be handled through a laundry service that provided him with a commission. He had also moved a pool table from the lobby into one of the rooms of his suite and was charging students to use it. He had also moved his girlfriend into his apartment. Then the university discovered he was not even enrolled at the university. Fred wanted to know what the university’s problem was with his relative; after all, he was going to marry the girl. I tell you these tidbits to help you see Fred in all his resplendent dignity.

During one slow day in the House there was a large delegation of school teachers from across the state in the gallery watching the House debate bills on education and do its business. Fred received a note purported to be from one of the teachers upstairs, saying how she was from his district and how much she admired his work and how she had been ecstatically watching him for hours. This epistle was followed a little later with another note from the young lady, saying that it would make her so proud to see him at work and would he please go to one of the microphones and say something on one of the bills for her. He did this, of course, and the word soon spread among his colleagues in the chamber what was going on. Legislators caucused in a corner to compete in creativity about the next note to send to him. This continued for some time as the notes became more and more personal. Finally a note arrived in which the teacher said she had called back to her school superintendent and had arranged to take the next day off and she would be able to stay overnight. If he could possibly be able to meet her after the day’s work, he should give her a signal. Perhaps he could stand up and comb his hair. She pointed out, incidentally, that she was the teacher in the lavender dress (chosen from among those in the gallery by

Fred’s colleagues for her pulchritude). Good old Fred nearly stripped himself bald, looking up toward the young lady as he stood and vigorously preened away.

There was another politician whose practice was to vote against programs and appropriations and then return home to take credit for projects funded under them. On one occasion he told the people holding a dedication ceremony that he could only be present briefly before he would have to dash out to catch a plane. He demanded to be put first on the program. His peremptory request so angered the dignitaries gathering for the ceremony that they directed everyone to turn the clocks in the courthouse and their watches back fifteen minutes. When the senator arrived he saw the clocks and proceeded to use this windfall in time to move around the room and greet the voters. Finally his staff caught on to what had been done just in time to get him out the door and to the airport to catch his plane. Unfortunately he had not had time to stay for the dedication ceremony.

Dislike among colleagues can be intense. When one member of the Texas legislature had a heart attack, two colleagues got into an argument over which of them was entitled to take credit for causing it.

You learn in this business as you go. When I was first in this line of work I was crossing the Senate floor during a hearing and a senator jumped up from a table and came across the chamber yelling at me. When he reached me he accused me of “messing around” with one of his bills. If I didn’t back off he’d take care of me in my agency’s financing bill. He was right about what I had been doing, and as chair of the Senate Finance Committee he could deliver on his threat. I was going about it all the wrong way. I had some unrealistic idea that I could work quietly and unknown behind the scenes.

There are few if any secrets in the legislative process. In fact, a political secret is an oxymoron. There really is no alternative to confronting the sponsor of legislation you disagree with. If you voice your first opposition at a hearing on the bill you will get roasted in public. You might as well get barbecued in private by seeing the bill sponsor and explaining your position. Besides, to oppose a bill when it is being heard before a committee is nearly always too late to do any good anyway. The deals have been made, the favors swapped, the votes pledged and counted, and you’ll be going public as an opponent for no practical purpose. Also you might remember this: If you do have ideas on how a bill can be improved, telling the committee and sponsor for the first time at the hearing is far too late. You have an amendment? Talk to the bill sponsor. He doesn’t like it? Find a sponsor for your amendment on the committee.

One senator I met with to talk about a bad ol’ bill he was carrying listened from behind his desk with a scowl on his face as he glared at me over his half-moon glasses. When I finished, he said, “I’m gonna get you fired this session. I’m tired of you messin’ with my schools.” He had not heard a word I had said. But he could not accuse me of working behind his back.

Often you go to see a governor or legislator or other elected official to ask for help, not to discuss matters you disagree on. Since appointments with busy politicians are so difficult to get, many people make the mistake of bringing their whole load of hay of every idea they have saved up for months and then proceed to unload all of it. That is a mistake. Identify the two or three things you need help on most and ask only for those and make your case on them. Even better, keep the requests to not more than two if possible. If you raise too many topics they will all seem of equal value to a politician still thinking about her last appointment and what she still has to follow up on and about the meeting

coming up when she can finally get you out of her office. And when you are gone she is likely to forget all of your multiple requests.

Another word of advice on lobbying legislators. Don’t feel that you have to talk to the legislator himself or herself on all the issues you need help and support on. It is often more effective to talk with the legislator’s aide or the committee clerk handling most of his business. These people generally are not as pressed for time and can give you more attention and listen at greater length. If you can get them to buy into your cause and you provide them with the information and arguments they will need to sell your position, they can become an in-house lobbyist for you. When their boss asks about it, they are ready and informed. In briefing them, you help them to look good with their bosses. They can also pick the right moment to present your position, when the legislator is receptive or dealing with an ancillary matter.

A legislator who was particularly obstreperous was threatening a lobbyist one day and I overheard the lobbyist say, “You know, Carl, you really do try to scare people, don’t you? You bluff, you bully, you push against them with your belly, you yell in their faces. If I didn’t know you were a lawyer and that you know better than to hit anybody, I would swear at times you were about to slug somebody. Why do you do it?”

Carl laughed as though he had been caught out and replied, “Because it works on so many people.”

Once a legislator asked me to do something for the son of his major political donor, to make a particular exception for the boy, and I had to tell him I had no legal authority to do it. I explained that I had turned down dozens of similar requests and I couldn’t legally or in good conscience do what he asked of me. The word would quickly get out that I wasn’t holding fast to the position I had to enforce under the law. He listened to what I said and then he said quietly in his most pleasant manner, “You don’t understand. I’m asking you to do this for me as a personal favor.” As they say in West Virginia, “Everything here is politics, except politics. That’s personal.”

When I again said I could not do what he asked, he said in a less pleasant voice that he would remember this at the next budget hearing. Sure enough, he remembered the following year. He had arranged with the chair that in the final markup of the appropriations bill he be given the personal privilege of making the motion to cut our request.

In another case I had to say “no” to the overweening aspirations of a legislator to convert his local branch campus into a separate university and I testified on behalf of my governing board against his bill. On the floor of the House in debate on the appropriations bill, he reduced the line item for my salary. He worked with the Senate conferees to see that it was not restored. In the many years I knew him after he left the legislature he sent several messages through mutual acquaintances about how much he regretted later having done such a small-minded thing. But at the time it had not seemed small to him. I still remember watching from the gallery as he looked up at me from the House floor and smiled as his amendment passed to cut my salary.

I had another legislator ask me to overlook and write off an unpaid student loan of one of her constituents. I refused to do it and as a result she would call me to her office on other business and leave me waiting each time for an hour before she could manage to work me in. But her later political problems dwarfed this into insignificance.

When I first took my job many legislators wanted to send me a message about their unhappiness with me and our board. The message came as they would introduce a bill to abolish our agency. The requests for such a bill were so frequent that the Office of Legislative Counsel kept a folder at hand with multiple copies of a standard bill to abolish us. The form provided two blank spaces, a place for the sponsor to enter his or her name and a space for the bill number. Over the years that practice has declined as we spend more time “on the hill” talking to legislators and making ourselves available for more direct reprimands and complaints.

However, a few years ago one senator took great umbrage at our board denying his university’s request to purchase an empty “white elephant” of a building some fifteen miles from the campus. One of our board members referring to the facility as “an old sausage factory” did not soften his feelings about our board members and their action to support the staff recommendation for disapproval of the proposed purchase. So later the senator introduced a bill to abolish our board and transfer any functions that might indeed be found necessary to other agencies. Since he was chair of the Senate Finance Committee by that time, he had substantial leverage on his colleagues and he treated the bill as important to him.

The night of the hearing on his bill I was called to testify. I started off listing the essential functions assigned to us by the legislature and which we had been carrying out for several decades. But I said I knew change is inevitable and certainly we all knew where the final authority rested as to any changes that might be made concerning our agency. I said I was reminded of Lord Tennyson’s Death of King Arthur. I said, “As you will recall at the end King Arthur is dying and is on his funeral bier on the river. The King calls his grieving knights to him. And Tennyson describes the King’s response to their lament:

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfills Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

I then went on to say that we thought in following their statutes our work had been good, but if in their eyes we had corrupted the world, then they certainly held the power to cause us to yield our place to something new. I said perhaps no university or college would defend our continuation. If not, that possibly could be to our credit. If we had failed the legislature or had offended them individually in some way we would, of course, accept their decision.

The committee turned to other matters and nothing further was said about the bill. The members were either so confounded by my quoting poetry to them they did not know what to do or they felt the message of dissatisfaction by their chair had been received and understood.

However, I was criticized later by one of my own staff members. He said I had been disingenuous when I said to this group of legislators, “As you will recall … ,” and then referred to Tennyson. Perhaps I was temporarily insane. I know I did not feel as cocky as that testimony sounds to me as I reread it today. I do know by hindsight I would handle the situation differently today, even though the bill did get dropped.

The worst abuse of legislative power I ever witnessed was by a House member who wanted a new university in his district. His “window of opportunity” opened when he became chairman of the House Calendars Committee, the body that schedules bills to go to the floor for final voting. He informed all House members that if they had any bills they wanted to reach the floor for passage that session they would have to support his bill for a new university. Coincidentally, this was the session when my higher

education agency was up for sunset review. This meant that if the bill reauthorizing our agency’s existence did not pass out of the session, our agency would be forced to go out of business during the following three months. The legislator wanting the new university informed us that any opposition to his bill by us would doom our reauthorizing bill to die in his Calendars Committee.

Not surprisingly, the Calendars Committee chair’s bill passed the House, and it was quickly defeated in the Senate. At that point, he became what some legislators referred to as “the thirty-second senator” of the thirty-one-member Senate. He crossed the rotunda and explained to six senators who had voted against his bill that their bills now in the House would all die in his committee unless they reconsidered their votes.

His bill then passed the Senate, but only after he had to agree to a provision added by the Senate and insisted on by Governor William Clements. The amendment required prior approval for establishing the new university by our agency after the legislative session was ended.

Our own “sunset” or reauthorization bill reached the floor of the House and passed just before midnight during the very last hour of the legislative session. After the session ended, our agency, as a result of his bill as amended, was then placed in the unusual position of being able to veto an act passed by both houses and signed into law by the governor. This provision arose because neither house of the legislature nor the governor was willing or able to kill the new university and they passed that nasty job on to our agency.

To this date no new university has been approved by our board or authorized by the legislature for that district. Unpopular as our agency may be with politicians, we have proved useful to them on occasion.

For all the associated unpleasantness, though, you must always be willing to meet with your opposition and your enemies. There are lots of advantages. First, you might bring them around to your point of view. Or, remote as the possibility might seem at the time, they might bring you around to their point of view. Or, more likely, you might work out an accommodation between you, even if it’s just temporary. Your opponents will have to respect your openness and might even admire your courage in entering the lion’s den to meet with them. And if nothing else, you will get a better idea of their arguments and the forces you will have to overcome to prevail in your position. There is no downside that I have ever found in meeting with my opposition—except, perhaps, the occasional concern about assassination.

Incidentally, don’t ever fall for the commonly heard criticism that compromise is dishonorable or reprehensible. That’s bull. It is not selling out or capitulation. Look it up. The dictionary says compromise is consent reached through mutual concessions. It is the alternative to gridlock and inaction. It is the lubricant to governing.

Back to meeting with your opponents. There is a byproduct I came to recognize. You tend to come to know your enemies better than even your friends because you have to spend more time with them and talk more persuasively with them. They might become useful allies on other issues in the future, which will tell you that they are never really enemies as much as they are merely temporary opponents. You are at the moment political adversaries, but that may be the case only on this particular issue. If you show you aren’t self-righteous and “holier than thou” they might be willing to help you with a favor. Like all politicians, they sometimes like being asked for help. You can show them you are not above

obligating yourself to them just a bit. Your asking for help gives them face and respect and shows that you see them and yourself as equals, even as you disagree over some substantive issue in another area. As more than one politician has said, “I never had a friend who couldn’t become an enemy or an enemy who couldn’t become a friend.”

In the end you need to understand that it is inevitable in dealing with politicians that you are going to have at least some of them mad at you from time to time. One or two may be mad at you all the time. You will find that if you are going to carry out the responsibilities of your job this is absolutely unavoidable. And unpleasant as it is to have people of power and prestige angry at you and to have to live with their emotional explosions and attacks, you will discover that there is usually a much larger number of other politicians who are looking on and who recognize that you are doing what you are expected to do. It is the nature of political relationships, however, that these other politicians don’t often speak up to defend or explain what you are doing. Why should they? As a result you can feel alone and unappreciated. One of my board chairmen, Harry Provence, summed it up best. Once when I was whining and complaining about my unpopularity and being caught so often between two opposing groups, he said, “You don’t understand. Your job description is to stand between the dog and the fireplug.”

Harry’s characterization of my job resulted in the enclosed cartoon, drawn by one of our college presidents, Carl “Cheesie” Nelson. You will see he actually made me into the fireplug. But he clearly captured the idea; I had a wet leg much of the time—and so will you when you get in this line of work.

It is more than merely rationalizing to say that you need to have some politicians mad at you some of the time. A public agency is given certain duties and responsibilities by the legislature and perhaps by the governor, and if you do the job given to you, it is inevitable that you will create hostility from a few of those legislators and their constituencies. It is inescapable that you are going to offend some of them and some of their constituents. If you do not accrue such hostility, it may very well mean you are not carrying out well the job the legislators as a body have assigned to you. In striving to be popular or inoffensive you may be letting somebody down. If you fail to do your job, then it puts that job back on those who delegated it to you in the first place. And they probably gave you that job to do because they, as a group, do not want to deal with it or find that they cannot deal with it effectively. Some of them have come to know that in the political process legislative votes alone should not control every decision. Sometimes the political leaders need someone else to provide the obstacles they do not want to set up or to state the rationale for denying some colleague’s unreasonable demands. You help them to hold the line without their having to say “no” directly.

Even if the only thing ever erected in your name is a pissing post, consider it an honor if it’s done for the right reasons.

When a legislator is looking a colleague in the eye who is pressing him for his vote on a bill and he doesn’t know enough about the bill to give the reasons why he can’t vote for it, that legislator may find it very helpful to use you as a foil. He will be off the hook in committing himself too quickly if he can say, “I know you probably have a really good bill here, but you know we gave Agency X or Commissioner Whatzit responsibility to report to us on these kinds of things before we take action. It’s all very

complicated. I hate to put you off, but I’d like to find out what they think about the bill before I commit myself on it.”

In other words, it is important for you to have the right people mad at you. Lyndon Johnson used to say, “Ever’body needs a sumbitch sometime.” Consequently, if you work too assiduously to avoid controversy and try to keep everybody happy, you may just be inviting a much more significant group of politicians to see you as ineffectual. Some people need you to be their sumbitch sometimes. If you never make an enemy you will probably soon be considered to be inconsequential. Good politicians know very well that the quality of a person is often known best by the enemies he makes. If you let them down by avoiding the unpleasant accoutrements of your job, in time a growing group of them will come to be unhappy with you. So get on with doing your job and at least have the right politicians angry with you.

But expect no reward or recognition for your unpopularity. To expect this in an active political arena is about as realistic as to think that a bull in his field will not charge you because you are a vegetarian.

Like it or not, this is all part of the workings of our democratic system of government, or as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes might have labeled it, “sparks in an active workshop.” If you want to play a meaningful role you have to get into the fray. James Q. Wilson said making policy in the United States is like a barroom brawl. “Anybody can join in, the combatants fight all comers and sometimes change sides, no referee is in charge, and the fight lasts … indefinitely.”

You have to remember, it is not you and it’s not them. It’s what you and the elected politicians together constitute: a way of finding a public course of action in your area of responsibility that is in keeping with the sentiments of the people, those you serve, those who speak for those you serve, those who pay for what you do, and sometimes those who have no one but you to speak for them. If you come to understand what is going on and what to expect as you live in the midst of the political process you can be a more effective player. You will come to accept the attendant discomforts as a condition to continuing progress.

I can’t resist one more word of advice. Don’t pander to politicians, or for that matter, those above you in the organization. Ask yourself, “Am I doing this or taking this position on this issue because I know it will make so-and-so happy?” If you are, odds are you are probably cutting corners on your analysis and neglecting the duties of your office and your obligations to others. It is so tempting to want to do something to be liked, to want to placate a powerful adversary, to anticipate what you think are the desires or preferences of a governing body, all to make your job a little less unpleasant. Like so many temptations, this is a dangerous one.

If you are reluctant to face confrontation and stress you might wonder after this dose of cynicism and war stories why I have stayed with it. If it is so bad why didn’t I get out? How can I continue to work with an agency or an administration or with politicians when I disagree with their positions strongly and where disagreement brings mistreatment? Harry Truman used to say, “If you can’t stand the heat don’t come in the kitchen.” I would extend his metaphor to say that working in the kitchen is sometimes the best way to change the menu. Or as George C. Marshall, one of the men President Truman most admired, said, “You don’t take a post of this sort and then resign when the man who has the constitutional responsibility to make decisions makes one you don’t like.” Part of your staying or going depends on the issue. You can’t fall on your sword every time you disagree with your board or the courts or the governor or the attorney general or, in Marshall’s case, with the president.

Harry McPherson, longtime aide to Lyndon Johnson, asked himself this as well: “Why am I here? Why did I choose this ‘experience’ instead of beginning a law practice and finding a responsible place in a small community?” His answer is probably what lies in part behind your own decision to become a public servant, “Partly because I want to find out what goes on in the councils of power. … Partly because I want to ‘do good,’ and a decade after Roosevelt it still seems as if Washington is the grand arena for doing good. Partly—perhaps chiefly—because I want to cast a shadow, to feel, however vicariously, that I have affected significant events and therefore exist.”

My public information director is getting restless. She wants to brief me on what not to say at our next meeting. I am hosting lunch for the press to provide them with background information on issues of interest to us this session. One skeptic says that’s my first mistake, to think I can educate the press.

Your admiring Uncle Ken

P.S.: Incidentally, from my collection of quotes, I found a few that fit the topic of this letter. Here they are.

Watching a legislature in session is like attending an Italian opera. One person gets up to sing and four others stab him in the back.

—A legislative witticism

I don’t want to start any kind of precedent here, but I would like to read your bill a couple of minutes before I take a position on it.

— Texas Senator Kent Caperton

All my constituents like trees. The problem is 50 percent like them vertically and the other 50 percent like them horizontally.

— California Representative Douglas H. Bosco

Yes, you may speak briefly on this topic, but I doubt you can.

— Texas Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby