A Journey through Governance: A Public Servant's Experience Under Six Presidents

By William A. Morrill

A Journey through Governance: A Public Servant’s Experience under Six Presidents Among the projects central to Morrill’s time in federal government were helping to spearhead healthcare reform in the early 1970s, transforming the telecommunications industries, improving emissions standards under the Clean Air Act, and helping to figure out how many nuclear bombs were needed in the United States. On the local level, Morrill put his problem-solving talents to work in Fairfax County, Virginia, during a stint as deputy county executive.
Morrill writes: “I want to share an insider’s look at events and challenges that are more exciting and historically significant than readers may have guessed. But more important, I want to convey the necessity, even the nobility, of the work of those who serve in government.” Morrill hopes his book will inspire others to follow his footsteps into lives of public service.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cosimo Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781616409104

William A. Morrill

William A. Morrill has had a long distinguished career of public service in federal and local government. He served in the administrations of six presidents, from Eisenhower to Carter: at the Pentagon on the Air Force Headquarters staff; in the Executive Office of the President under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter; and as an assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Presidents Ford and Carter. Morrill has remained engaged in public-service and public-policy matters in the private sector, including with the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration. After leaving government, he was president of Mathematica Policy Research, chief executive and chairman of Mathtech, and a senior fellow at ICF International.

Book preview

2013

[1]

WILLIAM WHO?

MY NAME IS William A. Morrill. That probably doesn’t ring a bell—you’ve probably never heard of me. I was a government bureaucrat for nearly a quarter of a century.

You might not think that sounds very interesting.

You might be wrong.

I worked out of the Executive Office of the President in five administrations and two major departments.

I was the guy who helped figure out how many nuclear bombs we needed to build and assisted the president’s review and approval of their manufacture.

In 1974, millions of the nation’s poor faced suffering in the public and congressional backlash to the profligate spending of state officials who had found a loophole in the Social Security Act. A loophole that let them spend money intended to help the needy on such irrelevant fluff as new prison uniforms. I, with no statutory authority, assembled stakeholders representing the governors, labor force, social-service agencies, and welfare organizations, and got them to keep meeting in a room at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport until they agreed on a solution they could all support. I wrote it up as Title XX of the Social Security Act in an open process with stakeholders. Then I supervised the writing of a new bill and shepherded it through Congress to become the law of the land, when it was signed by President Ford in January 1975.

If House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills hadn’t been caught in the Tidal Basin with an Argentine stripper, and Watergate hadn’t sapped presidential authority, the healthcare reform legislation that the team I led had drafted at the behest of President Nixon might well have been in effect for the past forty years.

When the chairman of President Lyndon Johnson’s Task Force on Telecommunications Policy figuratively tossed its report over the White House fence in frustration when LBJ wouldn’t accept it near the close of his administration, I was the career staff person to whom the report was given—to bury in my safe. It wouldn’t stay buried. After LBJ left office, Nixon’s people retrieved the report from me and quietly implemented its recommendations—which included introducing competition into the telephone system and encouraging innovation in the cable and television industry.

I am the guy who once stood between West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd and an utterly unnecessary dam he was determined to have built on a home-state creek called Buzzard Branch. (That turned out to be the wrong place to be standing. I had the better case, but Byrd got his dam.)

I once—along with William Ruckelshaus, the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency—helped persuade Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman and my boss and director of the Office of Management and Budget, George Shultz, to bless Ruckelshaus’s implementation of a new EPA emissions regulation under the Clean Air Act that saved the lives of countless children threatened by lead poisoning. This we did despite personal intervention against the measure and dire warnings from the chairman of Chrysler Corporation in a face-to-face meeting with Nixon two days earlier.

I was among those who, under the courageous leadership of Shultz, said no to actions with which Nixon sought to punish those whom he viewed as his enemies. I saw from the inside how Nixon’s failings erased many of the parts of his agenda that would have truly helped the nation, such as healthcare reform and even more-vigorous environmental protection than he had in fact accomplished.

Largely because of Nixon’s failings, most notably Watergate, the era during which I served in Washington was the last in recent history where government and those who served in it enjoyed both the widespread respect of the public and the ability to work as aggressively and unrestrictedly as we did to get things done.

In these recollections, I want to share an insider’s look at events and challenges that are more exciting and historically significant than readers may have guessed. But more important, I want to convey the necessity, even the nobility, of the work of those who serve in government.

It is the bureaucrats who make the machinery of government function, who turn ideals into reality and goals into results.

In the present era, in which government and its leaders are distrusted, government is scorned by citizens in public gatherings and by candidates for the very offices they decry, and even by the elected once they take office, contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that serves the country poorly. A candid but more evenhanded look at the people of government and the work they do will, I believe, lead to a better understanding of governance and can be a refreshing and renewing enterprise.

[2]

WHERE I’M COMING FROM

THIS MEMOIR ARISES out of sixty years of direct and indirect public service, with a continuing involvement in public and private governance. That experience has spanned virtually all levels of governance, from community and business organizations to formal governments, concentrating in the latter on the federal level and missing paid employment only at the state level. It also spans the functional gamut, from national security, through most dimensions of domestic policy, to direct participation in some of the largest political issues from 1953 into the twenty-first century.

This story has developed from a necessary and deliberate perspective—that of an insider looking out rather than an outsider looking in. Further, though my responsibilities increased over time, and my role was periodically crucial, these recollections are not those of a major political figure or a public personality. Some might characterize it as a bureaucrat’s view. While that is neither inaccurate nor pejorative, it is a view, as I see it, anchored in a central concern for governance rather than partisan politics, however important the latter is to public action. And career and appointed personnel can and do play important roles in conducting the public’s business. I was a career civil servant from 1953 to 1971, and an appointed official from 1972 to 1977.

Books on getting the public’s business done are too frequently left to dry texts for public-policy and management students or scholars. This memoir tries to reach beyond that objective, because getting our governance structure and processes right is no longer a game for insiders and experts, but a critical matter for the public at large to understand so that we may restore the trust in and enhance the performance of our public institutions.

For me, the twenty-four odd years inside the government were interesting and rewarding. It is the case, however, that by the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, things began to change. The Vietnam War and the Watergate debacle accentuated a growing distrust of all large institutions, the federal government in particular. The disappointment and disillusionment of the 1970s, based on the gap between the government’s expectations and the results observed by the public, raised questions about the capacity of the federal government to perform in the way it should.

These feelings of distrust and doubt about capacity have grown, fed by an eroding consensus of the post-World War II period about international and domestic objectives, around which it was possible to harness institutions, processes, and initiatives with substantial public support. That consensus was further unraveled by the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a clear and present military danger. While I waited with anticipation for a new consensus to emerge around a number of appealing concepts and objectives, none so far has.

Surely rigid and unresponsive bureaucracies, where we have them, are strong candidates for reform, but equally surely, not the only explanation for our problems.

It has been noted that bureaucracy is a mirror—often an unpleasant one—of the society as a whole, with all of society’s inconsistencies and irrationalities, as well as its principles and goals. Public irritation with disagreeable outcomes can conveniently place blame on bureaucratic implementation of desired policies without exploring value conflicts within the policies that are actually causing the problems.

This memoir uses these perspectives as a framework for one person’s journey through governance, in search of meaning in the past six decades and some sense of desirable direction for the years ahead.

[3]

WHERE I CAME FROM

YOUNG ADULTS SEEKING a first job bring to the marketplace a personality and a set of experiences that affect their chances of being hired and mold the future. Perhaps more clearly recognizable in retrospect, I arrived at my first job with a rich set of family, cultural, and educational experiences. They strongly affected my perspective and my opportunities, mostly for the good, though in a few dimensions, serving to limit my outlook or choices.

MY HERITAGE

I benefited and, it sometimes seemed to me, suffered from a strong and engaged family. On the paternal side, my father was another in a long string of New England physicians and an occasional clergyman. My father, Ashley, and his father, Shadrack, and his father, Alpheus, were family doctors in or from Concord, New Hampshire. Doctor Shad, as my grandfather was affectionately called, married Osma Baker, daughter of Osmond C. Baker, a bishop of the Methodist Church. Baker was important in the founding of what became Boston University, and in 1831 matriculated in the first class at Wesleyan University, which I attended.

Married in 1928, my father was 45 when I was born in 1930; only his mother and an Aunt Sophie were still alive from his parents’ generation, and both died soon thereafter. My father’s sister, Gladys, lived into my early adulthood, and is the only clear memory I have of the extended Morrill kindred, though I heard about the others at some length from my mother, who did not want to be seen as slighting her husband’s lineage in comparison to her own large and omnipresent family. Among those included in the recitation would be the very distantly related Justin Morrill, a congressman and the author of the hugely important Morrill Act, which created land-grant colleges in the Civil War period.

My mother, Katharine Anderson Morrill, was sixth of the seven children of William Franklin and Lulah Ketcham Anderson, one of whom died as a baby. Grandfather Anderson, also a Methodist minister, became a prominent clergyman and was elected a bishop in 1908, serving in Chattanooga and Cincinnati before ending his career as the bishop in Boston. He was an active participant and leader in the social-gospel contingent among the Methodists, a strong internationalist, and a cosigner of an important tract in the campaign for child-labor laws. A reasonably well-known preacher, he was asked to join Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, and Warren Harding on their 1921 summer encampment to provide religious counsel and inspiration. The bishop, known to his grandchildren as Pappy, was, with his wife, a truly family-centered person. That conviction took its most memorable form in the purchase of a summer property where the full family and more could assemble. After several briefly used locations, he purchased Amblewood in Buzzards Bay at the border of Cape Cod in the 1920s, a place large enough to accommodate a family then numbering twenty-seven, with room for additional guests.

If my accounts about my father seem sparse as I describe life at Amblewood, I want to note that he was a very private man who spoke rarely about his youth and his premarriage life, and not at all about his experiences in World War I.

Amblewood encompassed eight acres on a small lake (we bordered about 40 percent of it) with four dwellings and a bunkhouse where the older boys—all cousins—slept. The main house—a three-story home of typical Cape construction with ten bedrooms and twelve fireplaces—could seat eighteen to twenty in the main dining room with a separate room where the smaller children ate. We all assembled each night after dinner for hymns, prayers, and then more music or Methodist-approved games (no cards allowed). My generation of thirteen cousins at that time and the mothers came for the entire summer, while the men of my father’s generation came for two weeks to two months, depending on their occupations. As a result, I have known my cousins with the same level of intimacy that most people know their friends in school, though with a ten-year age spread, and my younger brother and I were an unquestionable pain to our older cousins when we sought to join their activities as small children. My uncles included another minister, a doctor (who left the family circle after divorcing my aunt), a professor, and two businessmen. Although the women volunteered extensively, none of my aunts were then in the paid labor force. The family handled most of the day-to-day maintenance of Amblewood, but a professional cook from Boston made most of the meals for this large group. Amanda, who came back year after year, was very much a member of the family.

In my earliest memories of him, my grandfather was a vigorous man in his seventies who took an early morning dip each day in the lake with his male grandchildren, au natural, and joined in throwing the younger boys about in the water. In this and other ways, he worked at establishing close bonds with his grandchildren in a much more intimate manner than my more formal grandmother, who reached out somewhat differently. She, for example, wrote and had published a daily book of Bible verses, prayers, poems, and hymns. All of the grandchildren were brought actively into the evening worship activities through selecting a hymn, leading a responsive reading, or giving a prayer. Methodism and the Anderson family were known for their hymn-singing, and my cousins and I to this day still know the numbers of favorite hymns from the 1938 Methodist hymnal. Oddly, I have met several people in my life who recalled a large family singing The Spacious Firmament on the beach at Cahoons Hollow on the Cape in the early 1930s during a solar eclipse. (It was the Andersons, though I was far too young to remember the occasion.)

While Amblewood activities had a substantial religious cast to them, they were neither solemn nor without other dimensions. There was an endless parade of visitors who were members of the extended Anderson family and close family friends. Among the many who came were well-known people who were friends of my grandparents, including Methodist bishop Herbert Welch, the hymn writer and teacher Earl Marlatt, and educator and public administrator Arthur Flemming, with whom I later came to work at the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. For other family entertainment, there were the approved games—dominoes (Methodist bridge) and the inevitable and frequent games of charades. In the annals of Anderson charades, my reserved and non-thespian father was famous for standing in the middle of the floor shaking and hoping someone would guess shiver my timbers (no one did).

My father’s recreation during his annual month at Amblewood was fishing, particularly for striped bass in the Cape Cod Canal or surfcasting off the outer Cape beaches. My uncles much preferred golf, so his only company was my mother or my brother and me. He was a good and patient fisherman, from whom we all learned both to fish and to enjoy it. Not all at Amblewood, however, was idyllic. The fact that my brother and I were four to six years younger than our next cousin meant we were excluded from many of the older boys’ activities. My uncle Huntley Dupre—the history professor and later dean at Macalester College—took pity on the two of us and formed an exclusive club, complete with rituals, to which only the three of us belonged (The Independent Order of the Wild Jackasses). He had enough P.T. Barnum in him to make the older cousins jealous of their exclusion.

FAMILY VALUES

The outlook at Amblewood was inclusive and outwardly directed. Few of the biases and little of the bigotry of the time were in evidence. None of the common discriminatory attitudes toward Jews or African Americans appeared in conversations, though the strong Protestant convictions periodically produced anti-Catholic sentiments. My own experiences with Roman Catholic friends were helpful in offsetting these occasionally expressed views, but notwithstanding my largely white-Caucasian-community upbringing, the attitudes around me were open and discrimination-free.

The outlook among my family and their close friends was similar to the Amblewood community’s, yet the broader community of Bronxville, New York, where