Assistant secretary of what? The secret jobs that can really make a difference

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1988 by Matthew Cooper, Jason DeParle, Charles Peters

The secret jobs that can really make a difference.

It's November 9. You're exhausted. You've just spent two months pledging allegiance and two years traveling from Des Moines to Pennsylvania Avenue. Now comes appointment time. But far from being a pleasure, it's taking all your energy. Just thinking about who should be Secretary of Agriculture gives you a headache. (The farm state governors are calling you; the National Cattlemen's Association has some ideas; your staff is bickering again.) The last thing you want to think about is your appointment to the Merit Systems Protection Board or the Consumer Products Safety Commission. You can leave this swff to your cabinet secretaries or your pollsters or the people in the party. You just concentrate on the big jobs, like Treasury and Defense.

But sometimes the president should focus on the trees as well as the forest. We're not saying that he should pore over every job in Carter fashion. But there are little-known posts in the government that demand the president's interest-jobs with long, boring titles that, if performed well, can become truly important, Call them Power Pockets. Do you remember Julius B. Richmond? He was Jimmy Carter's Surgeon General. Today C. Everett Koop has made that office important by banging the drums-sending everyone in the country a pamphlet on AIDS, going mano a mano with the New Right on sex education, wrestling with the tobacco lobby. You can't forget his Amish-style beard, and you can't deny he's made a difference. Same with William Bennett. The education secretary isn't exactly the most pivotal member of the cabinet; after all, town councils and state legislatures run our schools. But Bennett, of course, came in and gave a boost to the reform movement-fueling important debates on awarding teachers merit pay, teaching great books, and controlling the costs of higher education. (He steered the AIDS debate in a lousy direction, but that's another story.) He filled the Power Pocket.

If an appointee is going to bring provocative ideas to his office-ideas guaranteed to earn him the wrath of interest groups, Congress, and the civil service-then he needs the president's support. Ideally, the president will stand up for him, loudly at press conferences and quietly on the phone to lawmakers. Barring that, the good appointee needs a healthy dose of presidential indulgence, the freedom to speak from the heart even if the president won't embrace his ideas. Reagan doesn't buy the whole Koop agenda, but he hasn't shut him up either.

We don't stay awake nights thinking Michael Dukakis will take our counsel. (And we're even more doubtful that George Bush has the vision to pick those we're proposing.) These are not the staid names from permanent Washington-fixtures like Robert Strauss, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Schlesinger, Anne Wexler (see "The Powersthat Shouldn't Be: Five Washington Insiders the Next Democratic President Shouldn't Hire," Paul Glastris, October 1987). But haven't we had enough? For instance, when it comes to campaign spending, we do not need someone who's going to be squeamish about wringing the big PACs and special interests out of Congress.

While we're wary of the inside respectables, we're just as suspicious of the face that's too fresh. Both Carter and Reagan fed us the line that to make Washington work we darn well needed someone from outside the Beltway to kick some horse sense into those bureaucrats. From Hamilton Jordan to Ed Meese we've seen what happens when novices are handed the tiller. So while the people we've picked aren't the biggest names, they know Washington. They know the complex latticework of agencies, interest groups, the executive branch, and the courts.

This supple understanding of government has been the signal quality in the best of our leaders. FDR owes much of his greatness to his experience as, of all things, a bureaucrat. During World War 1, as an assistant secretary of the Navy (a job comparable in rank to the ones described here), he learned how not to trust the chain of command. In the White House he played rivals Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins against one another, asking each what he thought of the other's latest proposal. At times his understanding of the system could be eerily sharp. Leon Keyserling, then an aide to Senator Robert Wagner, recalled an occasion when the president buttonholed him"I just want to ask you one question about the housing bill. Have you got anything in there to keep the sand and gravel men out of it?" Keyserling, caught off guard, said he didn't understand"You know," the president to keep out the people who sell the government materials for mixing sand with cement." Having been in charge of the Navy's procurement, FDR was wise to the shenanigans of contractors.

The six jobs we've chosen illustrate a larger point. Throughout the government there are lesser-known posts with rich potential-positions that, if administered with that rare combination of vision and street-smarts, can make all the difference.