County’s No. 2 Man Gets Job Done Without Fanfare

It’s tough to picture David Janssen as an adviser to Jerry Brown and Rose Bird.

Janssen--an Eagle Scout, conservatively dressed with his mustache cropped thinly and his hair clipped above the ears--seeks publicity the way most people seek the measles.

Now the top assistant to San Diego County’s chief administrator, Janssen, 40, was reared a Richard Nixon Republican in Oakdale, a tiny town east of Modesto. While Berkeley was erupting with political protests in the 1960s, Janssen was completing nine years of study at UC Davis, a quiet school with few demonstrations outside the exhibits in the farm program laboratory.

So what was Janssen doing in the administration of then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., a place known as a bastion of novel ideas and headline makers, a symbol of left-wing politics that much of the state, and the nation, loved to hate?

“The governor was looking for someone who was straight, versus other people in the administration who were out of the counterculture, who were offbeat,” Janssen said. “He wanted somebody who would keep an eye out and keep things straight. Somebody who would be tough and somebody who would stay out of the press.”

He found him.

“David did a marvelous job,” said state Assemblyman Gray Davis (D-Los Angeles), Brown’s chief of staff when Janssen was plucked from the Agriculture and Services Agency--then headed by California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird--and named director of general services. “He was one of the few directors in the Brown Administration who did not become a lightning rod for criticism.”

Janssen hasn’t changed much.

Since 1983, he has been the No. 2 man in San Diego County government. Amid an upheaval that has transformed the county’s administration and the people who run it, Janssen has lain low, surviving with his reputation--and his wit--intact.

Janssen was passed over in November when the Board of Supervisors chose Norman Hickey to replace former Chief Administrator Clifford Graves, who was pressured to resign because of problems in the personnel, health services and general services departments. But from the time Graves left his job Nov. 19 until Hickey arrived Friday, Janssen filled the county’s top post, earning high marks from board members, colleagues and observers. As Hickey evaluates the county in his first months here, Janssen will be in a key position to help him shape the county’s future.

In his two months as chief administrator, Janssen had neither the time nor the mandate to make any dramatic changes. But he was able to set a tone in contrast to the increasing tension and bitterness that marked Graves’ final weeks with the county.

When Janssen took over, he quickly sent a memorandum trying to reopen lines of communication between department directors and the Board of Supervisors. Graves, seeking to implement a change in the county charter centralizing power in the office of the chief administrator, had curtailed that communication. While Graves rarely dealt with supervisors’ aides and was often abrupt with reporters, Janssen has been known to drop in on both groups for casual chats or interviews.

And Janssen, despite his subdued style, isn’t always bound by traditional rules of behavior that government officials tend to follow.

For instance, when a reporter called him recently to check on a rumor that a newly hired mental health official had quit her job, Janssen, shocked at the thought, let out a piercing scream. During interviews, he often stares off into space, resting his chin on his hand, while mulling an answer to even uncomplicated questions. The silence, which can last a half-minute or more, is unnerving.

Janssen admits he’s compulsive about being punctual--he’s often early for lunch dates, a rarity among government officials. He hates to waste time.

“When I make the coffee in the morning, I can’t just pour the water in the pot and then put the coffee in the filter,” he said. “I have to do them both at the same time. My left hand can’t be idle while my right hand is pouring the water, and that’s sick.” From all accounts, including his own, Janssen takes the same approach to his job.

On the difference between him and Graves: “I am more of a person who gets directly involved rather than holding other people accountable for solving problems,” Janssen said. “Cliff relied on other people to solve the problems. When they didn’t get solved, he often didn’t know about it, and that was one of the things that snared him.

“I’m a doer, not a planner,” Janssen said. “I much prefer to do something, and if it doesn’t work, do something else.”

The flip side, from Graves’ point of view: Janssen “has a sharper style, an eye for detail which I do not have. My primary interest and concern was in the basic functioning of the county--financing, the rituals and processes of the county. He’s more program-oriented, so he was able to move very quickly into something like the health department controversies. He was able to plunge into that where I wasn’t able to because I was more preoccupied and felt more comfortable in other things.”

Janssen sees himself as not only an administrator, but also as something of a humorist and philosopher.

“I look at the political scene more through the perspective of my education than my experience,” he said. “Government is not facing anything particularly new now that wasn’t faced by government when Aristotle and Plato wrote. We have the same basic issues. Only the accommodations are different. The strength of our system is that those people who make the accommodations change regularly, so you don’t get locked into a particular style, a particular individual or a particular philosophy.”

In his time as acting chief administrator, Janssen said, he has tried to convince county officials that the Board of Supervisors, despite its quirks, has a legitimate role to play.

“They’re not just someone to get around, to avoid, or to deny their existence,” he said. “They are part of our system. They are the only ones who represent the citizens. We don’t. The professional bureaucrats don’t represent anybody.

“We need to appreciate their role, respect it, provide them the information they need to make their decisions, and understand why they may not want a road paved the way all the experts say it should be paved, or a program operated the way the experts say it should be operated. I don’t think this country is designed to be run by experts. It’s designed to be run by the people, who are not experts. That’s the message I’ve been giving.”

As assistant and acting chief administrative officer, Janssen has been involved in a reorganization of health services, changes in the personnel department, and sensitive negotiations involving the hospital trauma-care network, a controversial trash-burning power plant, and a new county telephone system. In each case, Janssen has been served by the direct approach for which he’s become known throughout his years in government.

“He’s a straightforward, no-nonsense, give-you-the-facts-as-they-really-are person,” Supervisor Susan Golding said. “He makes an effort to keep you informed and to make sure you have the facts you need to operate.”

Said Joe Harper, general manager of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, who worked with Janssen when he was director of the state Department of General Services: “Don’t go to David looking to get stroked or waiting there for him to tell you what a great idea you’ve got. If it’s a good idea, he’ll act on it, and if it’s not, you’re going to know that real soon.”

“He is direct and to the point,” offered Tom Houston, a former Brown aide.

Janssen credits his mother with instilling in him the style he demonstrates on the job.

After his father, a veterinarian in Oakdale, died when Janssen was 13, his mother, Cathleen, returned to college and earned a master’s degree. While raising four sons, all Eagle Scouts, she worked her way up from typing instructor to vice principal at the local high school. Her progress ended there, Janssen insists, only because the district would not hire a woman as principal.

“My older brother is an attorney, I have a Ph.D., my next brother has a master’s in communication and owns a travel agency, and the youngest is a neurosurgeon working at the Centers for Disease Control,” Janssen said. “My only conclusion is it’s my mother’s fault.”

Janssen graduated from high school in 1962 the month he turned 17--he had skipped the fourth grade. After a year overseas, he returned to California and studied nine years at the University of California at Davis, eventually earning a doctorate in political science. His specialty was in international relations and the Soviet political system, an expertise that later led colleagues in the Brown Administration to joke that Janssen was their “Kremlinologist.” Janssen graduated from Davis in 1972, during what he calls “the height of the Ph.D. glut.”

“I went to a conference in the spring of 1973 in Portland, Ore., and there was not a job to be had in the western United States for anyone with my training,” Janssen said. “That was rather depressing.”

So instead of continuing his career in academia, Janssen took a job as an analyst with the state Department of Finance. There, he said, he worked on several “very esoteric reports that never did anything.” Janssen’s break came when he was put on a Finance Department team to brief the newly appointed cabinet officials in the Brown Administration. One of them was Rose Bird, hired to head the Agriculture and Services Agency.

“I’d met her twice, and she called me out of the blue,” Janssen said. Bird hired Janssen to be assistant secretary, one of her four top advisers. The others were Houston, now a deputy to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley; Stephen Buehl, executive assistant to Bird at the Supreme Court, and John Davies, the top staff member for the state Judicial Council.

Janssen still looks fondly on those days with Bird, who now finds herself in a political dogfight to save her job as chief justice.

“She’s a very efficient and effective individual,” Janssen said, demonstrating the loyalty others say he’s known for. “A more honorable person and somebody with more integrity than anyone I’ve ever met in my life--bar none.”

Through Bird, Janssen came to know the governor better than he would have had he worked in another agency.

“She, unlike most other agency secretaries, was very egalitarian. She would always involve the four of us with the governor in whatever project she was working on. Any issues that involved the agency, if it involved the governor, she would haul us along.”

Brown picked Janssen, then 31, to be director of the Department of General Services in 1977. The state government’s housekeeper, the department had 4,000 employees and a $300-million budget. Janssen, who despite his friendly demeanor likes to be known as a tough administrator, tells a story about how U.S. Atty. Gen. Ed Meese, who was then outgoing Gov. Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, advised Brown’s top aide to hire “the meanest (person) in the valley” to run general services.

“I don’t think we followed Ed Meese’s advice,” Davis, Brown’s chief of staff, said in an interview. Still, Janssen was tough enough, Davis said.

“He was fair and accessible, but once a decision was made, that was it,” Davis recalled, adding that such a trait is crucial for the director of General Services, who constantly evaluates, and sometimes rejects, requests from Sacramento’s most powerful officials. “If people sense you have second thoughts or can be persuaded to rethink your position, they’ll hound you mercilessly.”

As director of general services for six years, Janssen was involved in the background of many of the major issues of the day. But he rarely made the news. When he did, it was usually because of some effort to trim government waste and costs--attempts that pleased the frugal Brown but irritated others in the administration.

It was Janssen’s idea to sign a contract with a single rental car firm so that traveling state employees could rent cars at lower cost. The idea, dubbed “Thrifty wait-a-car” by detractors within government, is still in use, although Janssen admits that even he had to back down from his insistence that top agency officials also be required to rent their cars from Thrifty.

Another Janssen brainchild was less successful. Hoping to slow the flow of paper from the state’s 3,000 office copiers, Janssen in 1980 ordered the machines altered so that each copied document would be affixed with a faint but indelible declaration that said: “This Copy Made at State Expense.” The idea was dropped after state agencies complained that the declaration caused problems when official copies were sold or given to others who then recopied them privately, only to find that the documents still appeared to have been copied “at state expense.”

“It was such a simple idea,” Janssen lamented recently. “It made so much sense. But everyone fought it like crazy.”

When Brown left office at the end of 1982, and Gov. George Deukmejian made it clear that no former Brown Administration official would find a place on his staff, Janssen left Sacramento. Since 1983, he has spread his philosophy of government--and life--in San Diego County. He lives in a Poway tract home with his wife, Jeannie, and their 11-year-old daughter, Addie.

Janssen seems to have a knack for keeping the events of the day from overwhelming him.

“Nothing can be as serious as some people like it to be around here,” said an aide to one county supervisor. “Everyone thinks their issues are the most pressing and the world will fall apart if they don’t get heard. David puts things in perspective.”

Said Janssen: “I told the board when I sat down with them the first time that I had every intention of having a good time. In the big picture of life, only certain things are important. Family is one, and I’ve been married 20 years this year. And doing your job well is another. If you can’t do it with enjoyment, you’re going to end up in a very bad place in life. It’s much easier to get along with people and to get people to work with you if you enjoy what you’re doing.”