B. U. G. S.

Here is some inside-the-Beltway information you may find interesting.

I was a Reagan appointee. I was Special Assistant to the Director of the Office of Personnel Management. My job description included speaking for, in the place of, the Director of Personnel Management, as if he were there. He had two Special Assistants in charge f different areas.

As always, though I was in the same office suite, I almost NEVER talked to my boss. As I said in my piece on “Delegation” I almost NEVER spoke to my boss on Capitol Hill when I was a senior staffer. The congressman would routinely turn interviews with the press in his name over to me without any directions at all. They came out as HIS quotes.

I once had my picture on the front page of the New York Times as Special Assistant to the head of OPM. The Director knew nothing abut it until he read the paper. In the big leagues, you HIRE STAFF. If you don’t do THAT well, NOTHING will substitute for it.

President Reagan did his job in a forty-hour week, which the media criticized. One of them asked me what I thought of Reagan forty-hour-week after Carter’s workaholism. My reply was, “When a hand picks up the Red Phone I DO NOT want that hand shaking with fatigue.”.

Reagan liked that, though we never had any contact abut it. The Executive Office of the President alone has about five THOUSAND employees. If you can’t USE them to get the President’s job done, no hundred hour week will substitute for it.

Reagan, a former union president and eight years governor of California, knew how to delegate.

I had a LOT of responsibility, but how could I describe it to someone who is not familiar with how the government works? Even most of my fellow workers inside the beltway equated power with how many hours you spent talking with the Boss. If THEY couldn’t understand me, how can I explain this to YOU?

So to describe my Reagan job, I said I was in charge of ALL civilian security clearances. NOBODY is in charge of all security clearances – or in sole charge of anything else -anywhere in the Federal Government in the sense the average person in the private sector would understand “in charge.” Officially my boss was in charge of all civilian clearances for 2.2 million Federal civilian employees, including the most secret. But big agencies just came to us for delegated authority over their own clearances.

We could and did interfere sometimes, and they were livid.

I did a lot, most of which my employer did not know about and that I cannot talk about. My boss, unlike Ashbrook just complained about how much I was out of the office. It was his first and only job in an inside the beltway job.

From here it just gets MORE complicated. But the easiest way for me to talk about what I CAN talk about was to simply use my job description, one part of which was to act for the Director who was in charge of all security clearances. It’s not accurate, because any staffer at that level makes his own job. But in charge of all civilian clearances describes my LEVEL very well. Clearances were, in fact, only a small part of my job.

So Fox described me as a cabinet member. That was DEAD wrong, but that is how it looks if you are not in an inside-the-beltway career.

Kelso sent a message to someone doing a story on Stormfront that I was in charge of Reagan White House clearances. White House clearances were a wholly different job, dealing with POLITICAL appointments. A personal friend of mine was given charge of MY clearance with the White House, and he had to tear a page out of one of my books to get me through, one where my assessment of Reagan was not flattering on one point.

The part of another of my books which described with pride how we helped defeat then Vice President in his run for reelection to congress was left in. I had a LOT of power, but if you work INSIDE the system it is impossible to describe quickly. That was the knowledge I had that gave me power.

Maybe, “in direct line of authority over all civilian clearances for 2.2 million competitive Federal employees” would be the most technically correct, but what would it mean to the average person who has as much interest in the exact details of Federal employment as he does in qualifications for the Brick Layers’ Union?

And it STILL wouldn’t describe what I REALLY did.

So the description I gave is as close as any newspaper reader would want to get. It describes my LEVEL, and is technically exact.