When I became Director of Oversight for the House Education and Labor Committee, I appointed

a woman with full credentials as my Associate Director. I was genuinely surprised when the

male staff largely resented having a woman over them.

Everybody in DC wants to work on Capitol Hill. If you meet a receptionists thre, you can be

sure she could be a high-level secretary anywhere else — the demand for and pay of

secretaries in DC is espeically high.

Capitol Hill is even BETTER than the White House, because once you have Capitol Hill

experience, you are there to watch administrations come and go. White House people have

hell of a time getting a job on the Hill, because there is no substitute for THAT experience

in THAT place. So when I made her my Associate Director, it was a VER high place for her to

be.

Knowing me you can be reasonably certain this was not affirmative action.

This was in the early eighties when everybody declared loudly that there was no real

difference in the mentality of men and women. I never believed that, just as I never

believed anything else fashionable. Fashions come and go. Women, men, whites and

nonwhites were here long before and are here long after that fad died.

I needed a FEMALE Associate Director becuase of a term everybody thinks is nicer when they

spell it out: when are setting up a group from scratch using money on Capitol Hill that is

always in short supply, you need to cover your ass. They have been literally that for

infant males at least a hundred millennia, and no matter how great you are, you need some

version of that for the rest of your life.

This is a hell of an admission for an adult male to make, especially one who has been as

high up as I have. But the higher you go the MORE you need it. It is fact of life that the

big difference between a big man and a small man is that a big man makes BIG MISTAKES.

A woman can be a great advisor on high level mattes, but she will also make damned sure all

the bases get covered. A male associate director would respect me enough to ASSUME I had

taken care of things. My female Associate Director didn’t take a week to realize I was

balloon-brain, thought she deeply respeced me.

I had a very high level secretary. To give you an idea of how she had figured me out, when

I wrote a speech for one of our bosses, she would not let me TOUCH the final she had tyed

(no word processors then) until she had made a COPY of it. No matter how I chafed, because

by then I had thought about it and wondered if it needed changing, she kept the original and

gave me a copy.

My German legal secretary wife treated me the same way.

I remember when a Secretary of the Treasury was on an interview show and one reporter asked

him who dealt with his family money matters. He said he gave the checks to his wife. This

was considered funny, but nobody took it seriously. In fact there is an old, standard joke

abut it.

Somebody asks a regular guy about how he and his wife divided. He replied, “She handles the

little things and I make decisions on the major matters. She decides how my money should

be spent and I worry about the national debt.”

My Associate Director worked with me on policy matters, and never hesitated to tell me when

I had dropped the ball.

But she worried about “minor matters” too.

You see, when you drop the ball and make a major mistake by overlooking a “minor” matter, it

abruptly ceases to be minor, especially on Capitol Hill. After all, the reason you are

senior staff is precisely because it is YOUR job to do things so the congressman doesn’t

have to worry about those “minor” things.

If you have to cover someone’s ass, you had damned well better hire somebody who can cover

YOURS.