Believes He’s Trusted : Block: Farmers’ No. 1 Scapegoat Plows Ahead

The sign says “Closed,” but through the window you can see the faint outlines of people around a table. Even before 6 o’clock, when the waitress flips the sign to “Open” and the lights go on, the George’s Cafe regulars are getting a jump on breakfast.

Hunched over cups of steaming coffee, they welcome a late-comer. In these parts he is Jack Block; to the rest of the country, he is Secretary of Agriculture John R. Block.

There is little to distinguish the 50-year-old Cabinet officer from the others in their faded jeans and visored caps, passing around the homemade peach jam.

Block’s father, Julius (Judd) Block, 72, is here. Nowadays he does the bookkeeping for the 3,500-acre spread east of town known as Block Farms, leaving the day-to-day task of running it to Jack Block’s 26-year-old son, Hans. The Blocks call it a “family farm,” although that may be stretching it some, since Hans has six hired hands who help him with the work.

Like the Blocks, members of this breakfast fraternity raise pigs, corn and soybeans. They are kindred spirits who consider a pig beautiful when it grows quickly, looks happy and betrays a certain curiosity about human visitors.

Joking With the Pigs

Later, checking the farrowing barns at Block Farms, Block jokes that his pigs are “wondering, ‘What the hell’s the boss doing in here with us today?’ ”

Knoxville (population 2,000) is one of the few places where the boss can avoid criticism from those he is dealing with.

The day before, he had flown to Wisconsin to meet with 2,000 dairy farmers who were angry over forthcoming reductions in price supports for milk--and in general, over the Administration’s methods of coping with the three-year-old Farm Belt economic crisis. Block calls it the worst since the Great Depression.

For almost an hour, farm men and women hurled accusations at Block, the farmers’ favorite whipping boy in the Reagan Administration.

Finally, voicing a common concern, one desperate farmer called out, “Why don’t you tell people that the bulk of your farm program is to put family farmers out of business?” It is no wonder that Block has nursed an ulcer on and off for several years.

This was not the first time John Block had traveled far to face an unfriendly audience. As a good soldier in the Reagan Administration’s war on big government, he willingly goes wherever he is needed.

The second week of September he was in the Soviet Union, the 32nd country he has visited on fact-finding missions. In the service of the cause, in fact, he has traveled more than any of his predecessors.

Block may lack passion for the high drama going on around him (“Less government is the best approach to saving the family farm,” he replied to that Wisconsin farmer), but he does not lack conviction about the need to reduce the government’s role in agriculture.

In this year’s battle over a farm budget, Block was all over Capitol Hill meeting with farm-state legislators, pushing the Administration’s line of frugality. But as was the case on other crucial farm issues in the past, he and the Administration bowed to congressional pressures to put more money into farm programs. In return, President Reagan was able to win Senate support for his budget compromise.

Many believe that the agriculture secretary is in a losing position. “The things most important to him are decisions made by others,” says Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), “and he has to take the blame for all of it.”

Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (R-Kan.), who recommended Block to Reagan in 1980 because Block had “hands-on” experience as a farmer, says it’s impossible to gauge Block’s political future.

“It’s hard for secretaries to control events, with Congress looking for more money for more spending for agriculture. It’s a rocky road for any secretary. Farmers view Block as being on the wrong side, because they want more, and he can’t get more.”

Block, though, believes that farmers identify with him regardless of how “negative everything turned in winter. . . . If I had not been a farmer, had not known farming, was not one of the crowd, I’d have been burned at the stake by now.”

Things haven’t been easy for the nation’s No. 1 farmer. Once he was a golden boy of American farming, known for his smart farm management. Today, his high-rolling farm investments have soured--he is reported to be at least $5 million in debt--and his business practices with hometown partners have provoked sharp scrutiny and criticism on Capitol Hill.

In some partisan circles, the belief that he has failed to provide a voice for farmers has earned him the sobriquets of “Auction Block” and “Stumbling Block.”

Block says he knows that his support has eroded in “pockets of the country where problems are the worst,” but he believes that most of today’s farm problems are “out of the reach” of the secretary of Agriculture. “I can’t control the interest rates that have victimized us, the worldwide recession, the strong dollar.”

At least one member of Congress has called publicly for his resignation. Others have speculated that Block’s usefulness as a lightning rod is near an end and he will soon be replaced by Deputy Secretary John R. Norton, a wealthy Arizona farmer close to Reagan’s inner circle.

Back in their northwest Washington town house, the Blocks are spending a rare evening relaxing in the rec room. At the front door is an iron pig, the family-industry trademark of which there are several other versions scattered about.

The furniture has the same comfortable look that the Blocks lived with in Illinois. What weren’t in Illinois were a portrait of Sue Block, slender and fair in her 1981 inaugural ball gown, a black dog named Shadow, a white cat named January and two red telephones, one direct to the White House.

On this night Jack Block feels like talking about agriculture. Some nights he doesn’t. Some nights his feeling is, “I’ve fought the wars for the day. Sue’ll ask me, and I don’t give her a whole lot of answers.”

Sue Block never tires of hearing about agriculture--”No! Why, for heaven’s sake?” she asks, slightly shocked that anyone might think she does.

From early on John Block, whom then-Sen. Charles Percy of Illinois called “a Midwestern farmer with a world view,” saw his special metier as dealing with foreign leaders. He says he feels obligated to attend some social functions, but that he particularly enjoys those involving other countries.

Block Farms, in fact, became the Administration’s showcase farm for foreign visitors. French President Francois Mitterrand visited last year, drove Block’s tractor, waded through ankle-deep mud and hugged two 10-day-old pigs.

“You’d be surprised how heads of state, like India’s Gandhi, come here and I don’t ask to meet them, they ask to meet with me,” Block says.