Controversies Swirl : Patronage: Tradition Has Limits

Justifying the number of political plums that President-elect George Bush is handing out to the faithful, Chase Untermeyer, his director of personnel, recently cited the case of 19th-Century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne as a distinguished precedent.

“Nathaniel Hawthorne was kept from starving to death,” Untermeyer told a news conference, “because his college roommate, President Franklin Pierce, gave him a job as the director of the customs house in Salem.”

Untermeyer’s anecdote from the lore of American literary and political history compressed events slightly: Pierce was only a senator when he arranged the Salem job for his Bowdoin College classmate in 1846; as President seven years later, he named Hawthorne the U.S. consul in Liverpool, England.

Uniquely American

The anecdote, nevertheless, was apt and to the point, for it underscored a crucial truth about the frenzy of job-seeking and talent-hunting going on in Washington these days. The massive changeover of government jobs in Washington, which does not take place in any other industrial democracy, is deeply rooted in American history.

In the United States, a new President, like presidents and prime ministers elsewhere in the world, chooses his Cabinet. But, unlike the system in other democracies, the Administration of the new American President then appoints several thousand partisan officials as well to make sure that his policies are carried out by the huge federal bureaucracy. No prominent American challenges the principle of this tradition anymore.

Controversies swirl instead over more limited and detailed issues: How do you fill these jobs without demoralizing the civil service? Can the White House put anyone anywhere whether a member of the Cabinet likes it or not? What counts more, ideology or competence? How do you get rid of Reaganites pressing to stay? What about blacks, Latinos, women?

‘Most Sought After Man’

At the center of these controversies in these weeks is the 42-year-old Untermeyer, a former naval officer, journalist and government official little known in Washington until his appointment after Election Day as director of personnel for the transition and the future White House. Now, according to Carl Brauer, a Harvard professor who has written extensively about presidential transitions, Untermeyer is “the most sought after man in the world.”

His role comes directly out of early American philosophy. The first leaders of the republic believed that filling the government with political followers was egalitarian and wise. President Andrew Jackson, insisting that his followers should take power from bureaucrats, told Congress that “the duties of all public offices are . . . so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” Alexander Hamilton argued that the combination of presidential appointment and Senate confirmation would “promote a judicious choice of men for filling the offices of the Union.”

But political patronage mushroomed beyond reason. Electoral victory once meant great “spoils” for the victor in the United States. Even the job of village postmaster was a political plum as recently as a half-century ago. Congress did not pass civil service legislation until a frustrated office seeker, angry over the refusal to name him U.S. consul in France, shot and killed President James A. Garfield in 1881.

A century of reforms since then has fashioned a career civil service. Yet the legacy of that early faith in political appointment remains.

Untermeyer, a thoughtful, erudite young man with obvious confidence, an air of efficiency and a deadpan sense of humor, has played only a limited role in the appointments announced so far. Bush has been conferring regularly with what the transition team calls CASAG (the Cabinet and Senior Advisory Group) before choosing the members of his Cabinet and the heads of important agencies.

Untermeyer sits with CASAG but is obviously not as influential as such powerful members as Secretary of State-designate James A. Baker III, Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F. Brady and Chief of Staff-designate John H. Sununu.

But, once Bush selects the top rung of his Administration, the special American practice of choosing thousands of underlings gets under way, and Untermeyer will preside over much of that turmoil and tension.

Although Untermeyer has had little to announce so far, both he and his personnel team have drawn praise from those outsiders who monitor and yearn for competence in government.

“I think they’re doing OK. Their instincts are right,” said Mark A. Abramson, the executive director of the Center for Excellence in Government. “And I like the fact that they are taking their time.”

Untermeyer estimates that the Bush Administration will make more than 4,000 political appointments to full-time government jobs in 1989. Of these, a little more than 800--mostly Cabinet members, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, ambassadors and federal judges--will be subject to Senate confirmation. The others can be appointed by Bush or his Cabinet members or his agency heads without Senate approval.

This total of 4,000, according to Untermeyer, makes up only one-seventh of 1% of the 3 million civilian employees in the federal civil service.

“This, I think, would surprise a lot of people who imagine that when any new Administration comes in line that there are armies and legions of political hacks who are ready to take over all of the federal agencies around the nation and the world,” Untermeyer said.

Yet while the percentage of political appointments has decreased in the last 30 years, the total numbers have increased. Decrying this trend, Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve who now heads the National Commission on the Public Service, points out that a new government in Britain makes only 100 political appointments, a new government in France only half that.

Both Britain and France have powerful, anonymous civil servants who run the ministries for politicians of any party with equal loyalty, insight, competence and elan. In fact, the British civil servant, his nose in the air, his face impassive, who listens to the minister and then acts as he sees fit and best is a proverbial figure of popular British literature.

Lean Toward Career People

Volcker and his commission do not advocate adoption of the British or French systems, but they do call for reducing the number of political appointees somewhat in favor of career civil servants. They insist that the many layers of political appointees prevent the President from communicating his ideas directly to the federal bureaucracy and limit the promotions that could serve as a reward for civil servants who perform well.

To complicate matters, political appointees do not stay on the job very long. During the last two decades, the average presidential appointee served only 26 months. One-third worked 18 months or less. Some were lured from government by higher salaries, some driven from government by the pressures of Washington.

The number of political appointments has increased in recent years mainly because of the distrust of the civil service by both the Jimmy Carter and the Reagan administrations. This notion has troubled many civil servants. “The outsider’s glib assumption that career civil servants will be disloyal to a new Administration is an unwarranted calumny based on ignorance,” wrote former State Department official Lincoln P. Bloomfield midway into the Reagan Administration.

So far, Bush and his staff have not made it clear where they stand on this issue. But Bush’s appointment of career diplomat Thomas R. Pickering as the new ambassador to the United Nations--a post usually reserved in the past for political figures like Adlai E. Stevenson, Andrew Young and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick--has astounded and heartened the Foreign Service.

State Department officials, who fought many losing battles with the Reagan White House over the appointment of political ambassadors, had prepared a list for the Bush transition staff recommending a career diplomat for almost every top State Department and ambassadorial post. Pickering was recommended for undersecretary of state but not ambassador to the United Nations. No career diplomat had been proposed for that; it seemed too wild an idea.

“It comes as a very special, surprising, bonus recognition for the Foreign Service,” George Vest, the State Department’s director general of the Foreign Service, said of the Pickering nomination.

Yet there is no indication that the Bush Administration, as a general rule, intends to promote career civil servants to lesser posts than U.N. ambassador. Untermeyer, in fact, has been somewhat deprecating of them or, at least, of the idea of policy by bureaucrats. He described civil servants in his recent news conference as “good folks who . . . are not reflective of the mandate that was given to President Bush on the 8th of November.”

The Reagan White House has been criticized sharply by scholars and analysts for two personnel practices during the last eight years. The White House would force its appointees on reluctant department and agency heads and would also impose an ideological, extreme rightist “litmus test” on candidates for these jobs. It is not clear whether and how this will change in the Bush White House, but the mood does seem different.

Sees ‘Healthy Process’

Untermeyer insists that his personnel office will be “a service agency rather than a set of dictators.” In a recent meeting with the Center for Excellence in Government, Untermeyer said that he envisions “a very healthy, cooperative process” in which the White House sends names to the Cabinet members and agency heads who, in turn, might propose names of their own.

“And if it turns out that a Cabinet secretary’s choice turns out to be the nominee and appointee rather than Untermeyer’s,” he said, “I’m not so worried about that.”

The Reagan Administration was trying to ensure loyalty to its ideology. But Untermeyer said that a Bush White House need not fret about loyalty if an appointee had “ways of being reminded that George Bush is the head of the Administration and his principles and policies are what we all follow.”

There were simple ways of doing so. “I don’t mean to sound critical of even the Reagan White House or previous White Houses,” Untermeyer said, “but never have appointees of the President been invited to the White House Christmas party . . . . Well, George and Barbara Bush, by personality alone, are going to want to do that.”

Untermeyer also promised no more Reagan-type litmus tests, though he added: “I would say certainly that people should share the philosophy of the President.” Along this line, the President-elect’s son, George W. Bush, is heading a separate “loyalty team” that is taking part in the search for appointees.

“It certainly doesn’t mean any sort of loyalty test or urine analysis or blood test or any other form of testing of somebody’s credentials,” Untermeyer told the news conference. “It’s mostly an effort to make sure that the true troopers, those who helped elect George Bush, who were there, especially in the early days, are not forgotten, as frequently is the case in a new Administration.”

Since he is succeeding an Administration of his own party--the transition people call it “a friendly turnover”--President-elect Bush faces the quandary of what to do about Reagan appointees who want to stay on the job in Washington. Untermeyer has described them as “our folks . . . who share the same ideological agenda that . . . Bush was elected to fulfill” and promised that the best of them may keep their jobs or win promotions in a Bush Administration.

But Untermeyer also noted that Bush “has stated publicly and so many times privately that the message has indeed reached me that he wants to make sure that there is a fresh Administration.” To make it easy to replace them, Reagan Administration appointees have been asked to hand in their resignations before Bush is inaugurated Jan. 20.

In the drive for freshness, Bush, according to Untermeyer, is pushing for more blacks, Latinos and women. There also is a publicized attempt to attract applicants from what is known as “beyond the beltway”--the rest of the country outside the Washington area. Bush has asked Republican politicians from all over the country to appoint someone in each state to recruit new candidates for Untermeyer. This will surely balloon an application list that already numbers more than 6,000.

Untermeyer and his staff will not choose the first of their candidates for several weeks. Until then, analysts will have a difficult time assessing how sincere or successful the Bush Administration will be in attracting blacks, Latinos, women and fresh faces.