B. U. G. S.

Mark’s comment made me think about my staff days, when I used to be one of those guys who walks up and whispers something in the congressman’s ear in the middle of a hearing. Then I tried to remember how I used to know it was rime to go up behind him. It’s hard to remember. After al, the last thing a busy man normally wants in the midst of an important exchange is somebody wandering up and talking in his ear.

But the process reminded me of something. You know those big, big auctions where millions are spent on some object, and you can’t tell who bid? The auctioneer is rolling along and he recognizes a bid, but he seems to be the only one who can see it, though I am sure other expert bidders do.

If you think it’s safe NOT to go up and whisper in your boss’s ear, you should have gone through one of the dressing-down staffers got when they failed to do so. You are sitting behind him because you have a job to do, and you had better do it, because job security in a political job is nil.

Junior staffers are there to fetch and carry. But a senior staffer is, among other things, The King’s Remembrancer. As one member put it, “Even if I knew everything, I wouldn’t be able to remember it all at the right time.”

For some reason, committees with 168 hours in the week love to set their meetings at the same time as your boss’s OTHER committees are meeting. Each congressman selects two committees he is on, but the Select Committee on Intelligence was a Special Committee which was tacked on to Ashbrook’s.

So it was routine for Education and Labor, the Judiciary Committee, and the Select Committee on Intelligence not only to meet at the same time, but to meet on critical issues at the same time. On two different occasions, I forgot which committee I was sitting in on. Ashbrook never did.

But in my defense, Ashbrook had us, and I didn’t. It was our job to be damned sure that, when he came off the Floor or from another committee he was primed as quickly as possible. I don’t know how he managed to switch so quickly from being in the details of national security to paperwork in education to the precedents in Article III relative to limiting court jurisdiction, but we HAD to help.

I lost track because I found it confusing enough going from Ed and Labor to Intelligence. It is VERY embarrassing to come up with something ingenious about the last remark someone made about domestic spying and be informed BY YOUR BOSS that you are in Judiciary.

But both times this happened, John enjoyed the hell out of it.

When he came in a senior staffer would come in range and he would indicate, with a slight motion of his head or his ears or his Adam’s Apple or something, that he was already primed for that committee, even though he had just come out of another one. If he did not make that motion, I would tell him where the committee was at the time and what he had wanted to be reminded of.

I was supposed to know. That’s why he paid me the big bucks…

if I did it right ….

Or kicked my butt if I didn’t.

But let me be fair to John. He did scare the hell out of most staffers. In fact, as I said before, he was named by John Anderson as one of the two hardest men on the Hill to work for. But not for me. One of the finest compliments I ever received was second hand from his office manager, a lady who was a good friend of mine. She told me that he said in passing, “Hell, Bob would take a bullet for me.”

John gave me a lot more forgiveness than I gave myself. Once he came into the office on Saturday morning at 2 am. He was ALWAYS in his district any time he could be, so this was unique. But he saw me sitting there working my butt off and he said, “Bob, you’ll work better if you’re ALIVE. GO HOME!”

I must be one of very, very few people who got kicked out of an office on Capitol Hill for working too hard. So when I say, “kicked my butt” I am projecting, trying to give you a picture.

John knew that if I did something wrong, I would kick myself without mercy. John sympathized with my admirable conscience. But he also knew that the time and pain I took kicking myself was time and effort that HE was not getting from me.

Sometimes, simple decency is also excellent sense.