O.C. Exec’s Baptism of Fire in D.C. : Government: GSA chief Roger Johnson reflects on frustrating first year that made him yearn for home.

It all seemed to come crashing down one night last March when Roger Johnson walked into his Georgetown living room and just stood there. He couldn’t remember feeling more alone--bewildered really. The cold outside was bitter, the worst in anyone’s memory. Three thousand miles away stood his seaside dream house, where the warm shores of Laguna Beach were his back yard.

What was he doing here, anyway, closed up in this four-story silo of a house in Washington, a city so insanely ambitious that people compete to leave the office last and it’s a badge of honor never to see your kids?

Johnson had come to the nation’s capital as the highest-ranking Republican on the Clinton team, tapped by the President himself. His assignment was to run the General Services Administration, seen by some as the Keystone Cop of federal agencies, a place so bound in red tape that it concocted nine pages of rules for the simple task of buying an ashtray.

What he found was a Washington more daunting than he could have imagined, where back-biting, put-downs, suspicion and half-truths seemed a way of life. Not in 35 years as a businessman had he been treated this way. That March night he came this close to quitting. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

“Janice, I’ve never felt so alone,” he told his wife of 37 years--his college sweetheart--standing in the living room. “I’m to the point where I don’t think I can trust anyone in this town.”

Johnson, a savvy CEO who had turned a foundering Irvine computer firm into a Fortune 500 company, had come to Washington in 1993 with visions of “reinventing government.” He would lend his expertise to the American people, whip a wasteful agency into shape and give something back to his country in the process.

Now he was beginning to wonder. Someone in his office seemed to be leaking false information about him. He fired two people as a result. The press began scrutinizing his expense vouchers, forcing him to explain trips back to Orange County. Some members of Congress branded him the worst combination of uppity and stupid--Mr. Johnson Goes to Washington--another pain-in-the-neck newcomer bent on fixing the bureaucracy and screwing things up.

The corporate world was rough-and-tumble, but at least the players were civilized. Here people were just mean. One lawmaker suggested that they “send Roger Johnson back to Orange County on a bicycle with no seat.” Some congressional staffers dismissed him as “arrogant, naive, sophomoric.”

“He wanted to shake up the federal government,” one critic later gloated. “He got his (rear end) kicked. Badly.”

What happened to Johnson was less a question of administrative talent than a clash of cultures. East Coast political meets West Coast corporate. In the comforting arms of Irvine’s Western Digital Corp., CEO Johnson gave an order, the order was followed, the problem was fixed, and everybody was happy. But in Congress, CEOs looking for slaps on the back sometimes get kicks in the pants.

“I was getting personally attacked, and I couldn’t figure out why. I’ve spent 35 years mostly getting patted on the head. I thought of leaving. I had some good people around who got me through this,” Johnson said in a recent interview, looking comfortable at long last in his cavernous navy blue office, the mystery of Washington clearer to him now.

Lately, he’s even able to joke about it. “There’s more than a three-hour time difference here. I think I found Atlantis.”

*

As the story goes, Roger Johnson was so disillusioned with the state of the economy under President George Bush that he once told a newspaper reporter something to this effect: If a Democrat would give him a reason, Johnson would vote for him.

Bill Clinton, then little more than an asterisk in the polls, called him up and gave him one.

Johnson was a member of the powerful Lincoln Club, a group of moneyed Orange County Republicans who fuel GOP candidates and causes. For one of such an exclusive cult to support a Democrat was unprecedented. But Johnson and seven other powerful Orange County Republicans shocked the nation by withdrawing their support from Bush and throwing it to Bill Clinton. The Orange Eight, as they would be remembered, decided to announce their allegiance to Clinton on Aug. 21, 1992, at a press conference in Newport Beach’s Pacific Club, a bastion of Republicanism where Bush and Ronald Reagan were often feted.

They figured the local papers might show up. They walked in to find 11 television cameras, the major news magazines and virtually all of the national print media. Word leaked out that “traitors” were about to defect on sacred ground. Lincoln Club members scrambled to stop the press conference. It never dawned on Johnson that what he was about to do would ruffle so many feathers. Certainly, he never dreamed it would lead him to the White House.

“Life was no longer the same after that,” he said at the White House dining room one recent afternoon. “I latched onto a wild train.”

Clinton made a steady rise in the polls and Johnson came to genuinely admire him, not as Bush’s lesser evil but as a visionary in his own right, he said. Election night was heady stuff. Headier still was the day the new President named Johnson to head the GSA, an appointment “beyond my wildest dreams,” he said then.

The pink Mediterranean-style Laguna dream house was rented out. Johnson and his wife bought a brick place in Georgetown where homes bump up against each other and people hire valets to find their dinner guests a parking spot. Their cherrywood headboard wouldn’t fit up the old narrow staircase, so they bought a new one. Janice Johnson had the blue walls painted blush and they moved in.

Washington society embraced them. There was dinner at the White House with Isaac Stern; Johnson sat next to the President. Columnist Art Buchwald had them over in December. Never had life been more exciting.

But through it all there persisted a hostile undercurrent that said living in the public eye would not be simple. Back in Orange County, the Republican establishment was plenty mad. Janice Johnson was shunned at some lunches. At one reception, a local Republican notable referred to Janice Johnson and another Orange County Eight--Irvine developer Kathryn G. Thompson--as “turncoats.” When a local Boy Scout group decided to honor Roger Johnson at its annual fund-raiser, bitter Republicans staged a boycott.

And this was just the start.

*

No one had to tell Roger Johnson that the GSA administrator post was not the flashiest job on the Hill, even if it does employ nearly 20,000 workers and oversees $60 billion in government spending.

Known as the government’s Wal-Mart, the GSA is its phone company, car buyer, supply warehouse and purchaser of almost everything the bureaucracy requires, from personal computers to pencils. Linked together, a year’s supply of GSA paper clips would extend half way around the world.

What someone did neglect to tell Johnson, however, was that he was taking over an agency dogged by one of the worst reputations in the federal government. It had gone through 17 administrators in 23 years; the average staying just 18 months. It employed one supervisor for every four employees. Congress had repeatedly criticized it for failing to prevent or detect waste, fraud and abuse. Auditors concluded its ineffective procurement policies were costing the government millions in cost overruns. GSA folklore was rife with stories like the Navy commander who planned to buy a $79 vacuum cleaner until the GSA insisted he get the $348 model. Johnson walked into a department that, just a year before, had somehow lost track of 236 federal aircraft it was supposed to manage.

“The only criticism I have of the Administration is, no one sat me down and said, ‘This is the mess you are walking into,’ ” Johnson said.

As a CEO, he could cut at least 10% out of any annual budget. As GSA chief, opportunities to trim and streamline seemed to be leaping out at him. Why lease a federal building for decades when it’s cheaper to build it instead? Why tear down a veterans’ hospital in one end of town only to build a military hospital in another?

“I walk in here and I see billions of dollars lying in the streets. My mouth waters,” Johnson said. “But every time in this town that I reach out to pick up a gold nugget, I get hit by lightening.”

He had come onto the scene raring to reinvent. He cut $1.2 billion in waste out of nearly 200 planned federal construction and leasing projects. He worked with Vice President Al Gore on the National Performance Review, a study that spotlighted the now-infamous nine-page ashtray. He ordered all federal law enforcement agencies to destroy surplus and outmoded firearms rather than sell them to gun dealers, reversing a policy that in the past 10 years put more than 60,000 weapons on the streets. He forged a unique partnership with the GSA’s two largest labor unions. He held round-table discussions asking the demoralized GSA staff how they think it could be done better. He kept his promise to downsize the department without a single layoff. He helped lead the way in reforming how the government buys things and coined a new motto for efficiency: “better, cheaper, faster, easier, smarter or not at all.”

“I’ve gotta give the guy an A for effort,” Harry Dawson, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 236--one of two labor unions that represent GSA workers--said with cautious praise, noting that grievances have fallen as much as 80% since Johnson came on board. “It’s too early tell how this will end, but so far, I think, Roger Johnson is the best administrator we’ve seen in 12 years.”

U.S. Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) praised Johnson’s efforts to upgrade an antiquated federal computer system that occasionally causes the government’s right hand not to know what the left is doing. “I am just sorry somebody didn’t do this a long time ago,” Glenn said. “He’s doing it, to his everlasting credit.”

But the voices of praise seemed lost in a thunder of criticism. Some Republicans didn’t trust Johnson because he supported a Democrat, and some Democrats didn’t like him because he remained a registered Republican. Hateful newsletters, anonymously written, were landing on his desk. If one union leader lauded him, another demanded he resign.

The Washington press pored over his travel vouchers and overnight mail receipts, then raised questions about whether he spent federal funds for personal use. Although an internal investigation concluded that he had broken no rules, Johnson decided to repay $1,062.55 to clear the air. The reimbursement was viewed by some an admission of guilt.

Worst of all, Johnson’s grand plans for change--which had the enthusiastic backing of the President and vice president--had overlooked one detail: Congress.

On Capitol Hill, he was the bull in the federal china closet--cocky, rushing to change an agency he had not taken the time to figure out, and neglecting to inform Congress, where six major committees are authorized to oversee what the GSA does.

“If what is wrong with the GSA could have been fixed that easily, it would have been fixed a long time ago,” one congressional source grumbled. “He got off to a terrible start.”

Perhaps his most vocal critic--Rep. Jack Brooks, a Texas Democrat and powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee--said Johnson’s reorganization plans were gutting the GSA’s central purpose: to monitor what other agencies procure.

At congressional hearings in March, Johnson was blistered. Said Brooks: “They’ve turned the meat house over to the lion and I want to get that lion.”

Johnson was accused by committee members of keeping secrets from Congress, of attempting to unravel the agency he was supposed to run. Members hollered at him. Government Computer News, a Washington-area trade publication, ran an editorial cartoon of an astonished-looking Johnson emerging from the hearing with his severed head in his hands. “Mr. Johnson Goes To Washington,” read the caption.

This wasn’t the way he wanted to be seen, the man who sings in the car on his way to work, who loves opera and hates conflict--even if he has been known to jab a few chests to get something done--this father of three and grandfather of two who brings his staff souvenir boxes of White House M & M candy.

“Absolutely everything I had been trained for (in the corporate world), all I had learned, my instincts, value system were not applicable here,” Johnson said. “One and one kept coming up three, one, 27.”

He seemed to be taking all of it personally. His asthma worsened, aggravated by stress. He had trouble sleeping. His sense of humor--so pervasive that he once found the wit to crack a joke after getting hit in the head by a flying golf ball--was flickering. His friends and family noticed.

“My Lord,” Janice Johnson said, looking at her disillusioned husband that March night in the living room. “This isn’t Roger.”

“A couple of times he sounded so down. . . . I was concerned whether his health could take that stress and strain,” Thompson, the Orange County developer, said.

His wife flew home to Orange County in March to visit friends. As the plane landed in Southern California, she wondered if going to Washington had been the mistake of their lives. She told a newspaper reporter that the critics on Capitol Hill could all “jump in the Potomac.”

It was the sort of statement that can get you in trouble around here. Instead, it prompted a personal letter of encouragement from the President and two from the First Lady. Vice President Al Gore learned of Johnson’s rocky start and gave him a hearty “Go get ‘em.”

Winter passed. Cherry blossoms burst into bloom everywhere. Janice Johnson found a Georgetown home built in 1811, with a master bedroom addition, circa 1840. Her husband apologized to Congress, assuring members that he had no secret plan to reorganize the agency and promising to keep them informed. In recent weeks, even his harshest enemies seemed to be turning around, crediting him with an attitude adjustment and acknowledging that some of his ideas might even be good.

“I will take some share of the blame,” Johnson said when asked to consider again the question that dogged him for months: What went wrong? “I was used to not worrying my board of directors until I came to some sort of conclusion. Here you have to keep them briefed, otherwise they invent their own implications and impugn motives to you.”

Some of it, he said, was just miscommunication.

“I’m the only Fortune 500 guy around here,” he said. “I was saying things and using words that have completely different meaning in government. I would say this agency needs to be competitive. That was read that I intended to dismantle it and privatize it. I was talking about finding out what we are doing that’s good and what we are doing that’s not good.”

Johnson calls upon the electorate to send to Washington more lawmakers who understand a profit and loss sheet. The trouble, he said, is not the nine pages of specifications required to buy an ashtray, but the culture that produced the nine pages in the first place. “There is no room left in this town for reasonable judgment. The town is paranoid about making mistakes and the process has taken over for common sense.”

*

It’s hot outside. Johnson steps out the back of the GSA headquarters at 18th and F streets, where his chauffeur, James, stands beside the black Chrysler New Yorker. Johnson pauses. Should he and a reporter walk the couple of short blocks to the White House or ride? He decides to ride and gives the nod to James.

“I was trying to determine whether this would be considered a business meeting or a personal meeting,” he explains, evidently still skittish about the expense account scrutiny. “If it was personal, we shouldn’t use a government car. But this is business.”

He settles back in the cushy gray leather seats. If there is one thing he wants to make clear, it’s that he has more admiration for the President and the First Lady than he did the day he endorsed him. Clearly, this government job pays him a fraction of the money he was earning in private life. He just turned 60 and could be sailing in the Pacific with Janice at one side and a margarita at the other. He stayed on to serve the President.

“I think more today than I did 2 1/2 years ago that he is a person of great vision, of extremely good intentions, he and Hillary both.”

With his sights reset, Johnson moves forward, calling most recently for a review of government building contracts. The investigation will likely make some waves, but he has grown accustomed to boats rocking. “I think I walked through hell and came out the other side--a little burned, but not fatally. I came here thinking that on a scale of 1 to 10 I could achieve a 7. I now think if I achieve a 1, I probably should be sainted.”

After a lunch at the White House, he grabs a couple of boxes of M & M’s and offers an informal tour. He comes to the famous pillared north entrance, the one that leads to the residential quarters, the President’s front door, so to speak. The guard smiles and waves him through. He strolls to the Oval Office, through the Rose Garden where Socks is usually basking in the sun, but not today. The staff is vacuuming and primming.

There is something stimulating about just being here, off the path of the public tours. The baptism was hell, but watching him stroll the quiet corridors that Lincoln walked, one wonders if he wouldn’t do it all again.

“You can’t put down your right hand or left foot around here without touching history,” Johnson says, smiling contentedly.

“Yes,” he decides. “It’s been worth it.”

Profile: Roger Johnson

Age: 60

Hometown: Hartford, Conn.

Residences: Laguna Beach and Washington

Education: Master’s degree in business administration and industrial management, University of Massachusetts, 1963

Former job: CEO of Western Digital Corp., Irvine

Current assignment: Heads the General Services Administration

Responsibilities: In charge of 20,000 employees and an overall budget of $60 billion

Nominated: March 29, 1993

Confirmed: July 1, 1993

Political profile: Highest-ranking Republican in Clinton Administration

Quote: “I came here (to Washington) thinking that on a scale of 1 to 10 I could achieve a 7. I now think if I achieve a 1, I probably should be sainted.”

Researched by FAYE FIORE / Los Angeles Times