A CEO Finds Government Not Eager to Be Reinvented : Reform: Southland executive arrived at U.S. agency full of ideas. A political rude awakening was in store.

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 backbiting, 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 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. “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.

“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 has 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 coterie 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 news conference in Newport Beach’s Pacific Club, a bastion of Republicanism where Bush and Ronald Reagan were often feted.

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.

Washington society embraced him and his wife. 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 one of the Orange 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 the agency does employ nearly 20,000 workers and oversees $60 billion a year 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 halfway 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 that its ineffective procurement policies were costing the government millions in cost overruns. GSA folklore was rife with stories like the one about 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.

As a CEO, Johnson 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 is cheaper to build? Why tear down a veterans’ hospital in one end of town only to build a military hospital in another?

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 instructions. 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 had 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 thought things 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 to tell how this will end, but so far, I think, Roger Johnson is the best administrator we’ve seen in 12 years.”

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.

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.

Johnson was accused by members of the House Judiciary Committee 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.

He seemed to be taking all of it personally. His asthma worsened, aggravated by stress. He had trouble sleeping. His sense of humor faded.

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.

Some of the problem, Johnson acknowledges now as he searches for what went wrong, was simple 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.”

Outside the GSA headquarters at 18th and F streets, Johnson slips into his chauffeur-driven Chrysler New Yorker. 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 Clinton. 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 his wife 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 has moved 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,” he says. “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. 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.”