Golden Handcuffs - law student reconsiders career in public service - includes response

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1995 by Gibson Cromwell, Charles Peters

In Japan, for example, the best students from the best department of the best university--the Tokyo University Law Department--stream into the Finance and Foreign Ministries, where they stay until the end of their working lives. An acquaintance of mine at the Ministry of Finance, Kazuo, represents the quintessence of the Japanese civil service. When Kazuo graduated from Tokyo Law, he could have had any job in business or banking that he desired (all of which would have paid much better than the Ministry). He, like many of his classmates, decided instead to join the government--for life.

Western European countries are similar to Japan. In France, the very best students pass through one of the grandes ecoles (especially the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, or "ENA") and then maybe into one of the five grands corps d'etat--elite divisions of the French civil service. The newly elected French president, Jacques Chirac, is an ENA alumnus--as is his Socialist rival, Lionel Jospin. In Britain, the dominance of Oxbridge-graduated senior civil servants earns them the title of "mandarins," in a conscious echo of pre-revolutionary China.

In our system, you have to wonder about the background of those who ultimately accept a high public office. They may be bright and hard-working, but does a law firm provide the right training to help run the federal government? For 20 years, while they were becoming experts in the nuances of tax law and securities filings, their counterparts in France and Britain were moving steadily upwards in their ministries, learning along the way how broad policies are actually implemented. In 25 years, my friend will likely be heading up the Japanese Finance Ministry's international finance section. His American counterpart may have spent 20 years at Goldman, Sachs issuing bonds for General Electric. Who is more fit to govern?

The fact of the matter is that to get the very best people for a particular career, you have to do more than appeal to their sense of duty and excitement. You have to appeal, in some way, to their ambition. I'm not saying hand them the key to the city at age 25. But you have to hold out the promise that, with hard work and diligence, they can do important things, and yes, be important themselves.

I'm not prepared to demonize ambition. Of course, it has its dark side. But ambition often drives us to do good things, to achieve, and to excel.

Consider the case of a civil servant I know named Sam. He's as bright a lawyer as you'll find in Washington. Hard-working, too--you'll find him in at 8:00 a.m. and staying until 7:00 p.m. or later on most nights, hours after some colleagues have gone home. But, though he's not yet 45, he has topped out--unless appointed, Sam can no longer be promoted. If he stays in government, he'll be there at the same government-issue desk in 2020. The country is lucky to have him. But when you encounter too many stories like Sam's, you realize why many people don't rush to follow in his footsteps.