Revitalizing The Service

<< Previous | Table of Contents | Next >>

Your administration marked a transition in so many ways. The National Historic Preservation Act, as you mentioned, extended the Park Service’s preservation responsibilities outside park boundaries. We talked only briefly about the explosion of new legislation during your tenure, such as the National Trails System Act. Mr. Everhart, you wrote that Mr. Hartzog “might be termed the last director of the old Park Service.” I’d love to hear both of you comment on the idea that this was a transition period. Would you like to go first, Mr. Everhart?

W.E.– I think that with the coming together of President Johnson, Stewart Udall, and Hartzog for the Great Society, there was really sort of a revolution. I’m a historian. I know the people who live through a revolution never realize it. It’s the next generation who has to realize it. So that was the time, and the great tragedy for the country was that LBJ got caught up in the Vietnam War. And that is where all of the money went.

But during that time, all things were possible and the Park Service started looking where it had never looked before for parks and for activities. Like Wolf Trap, Stewart Udall and George, engaged in a little conversation, mainly, “Is culture a part of history?” And when they decided that it was, then many others expanded it [the number of cultural sites]. At the same time with the victory [for historic preservation, the Service started] getting involved in so many things that the organization itself got to be—I think in our time 7,000 employees; now it’s up to 15,000 employees—now it’s probably a bureaucracy. We always tried. At the same time we [the Service] are doing things that George and I would be astonished to even find out we’re doing. But once it started up it hasn’t stopped. The Park System has expanded, but I think it was during those days that it took off for the big revolution.

Do you see your tenure as a transitional period, Mr. Hartzog?

I suppose in looking back you would have thought it was a transition. I never really looked on it as a transition. I thought of it as a revitalization, and I still look on it as that. You look back at Steve Mather and Horace Albright, and I put them together, because of the great difficulty Mr. Mather had with two or more years of his administration.23 It was really Horace Albright’s administration. They were interchangeable in the years from when Mather was director through Albright’s term; it was really one.… That was a period in which the Service set its bounds, branched out into new areas. It had no historic areas. Horace Albright brought them in, in that one fortuitous trip that he made as a passenger with the secretary and President Roosevelt to Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge Parkway. That’s where Horace Albright got the historical areas in that few minutes that he talked with the president about it.24

So I looked on it as a revitalization of that era in which there were no limits. There was a great rapport between the Service and the Department [of the Interior]. The secretary was involved and gave me free rein to go and do. I always kept him fully informed. He knew everything I was doing.

This was Secretary Udall?

Udall. I had the same kind of relationship with Secretaries [Rogers] Morton and [Walter] Hickel. They didn’t circumscribe me. That’s one of the reasons that they give for President [Richard] Nixon’s quote in [H. R.] Haldeman’s book: “Rogers Morton won’t get rid of the son-of-a-bitch. But he’s got to go.” Nixon meant “Morton wouldn’t contain him, so I’m going to contain him. I’m going to get rid of him,” you know. But they [administration officials] were a part of it, because I always kept the secretary advised of my activities and pending legislation. The White House wanted to stop the expansion of the National Park System.

Be that as it may, if people want to look on it as a transition, then it was a transition, because I’m sure we came out of it a different organization than we went in. The Park Service had become a bureaucratic organization hidebound by its books and its rules and regulations. I think Bill Everhart and Ted Swem and Howard Baker and Ed [Edward A.] Hummel, and those of us who had a new vision about what created the Park Service, could bring it [the organization] back to the [original mandate for the] Park Service. And we restored it by abolishing handbooks, making superintendents responsible for management, saying to the employees what a satisfactory level of performance is, what the policies are and they decide how to run the park on a day-to-day basis without having somebody in Washington write a book answering all of their unasked questions.

In that 1981 interview, you indicated that you had: “A freedom of movement which none of my successors have ever had, and which I doubt if any of them will ever have again.” It sounds like that’s what you were talking about with the support from the department.

Absolutely. Yes. I don’t know if any of them have had that liberty since, do you?

W.E.– Well, it’s gotten so big, but one thing is that George initially went in and got the approval from Udall that he [Hartzog] would appoint every superintendent in the park system. Well, that was a clever way to do it, because every park superintendent in the system was looking forward to moving upward, and he knew that he would have to impress George. So by doing that George was able to get the support he wanted. I guess, as I recall George’s conversation with me one time, he was pointing out that he gave the superintendents his authority, because they had to do things and make decisions and so forth. But he could not delegate his responsibility. In the end it was all going to come, the things that get out of hand, come back to him.

So that is the way to operate the system, and the difficulty was it got too big. Now it would be literally impossible. The Park Service has become a bureaucracy. I guess what’s happened is, it [the responsibility] has moved down. The superintendent now runs his park, and it’s a bureaucracy. And a lot of the goodwill came out of it [the Service when it became more bureaucratic]. [But] it’s still a great organization, and we still have a great park system.

G.H.– I met with every superintendent in the National Park System once every year, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We convened on Friday night, had our meeting on Saturday, and tried to adjourn by noon on Sunday, so they could be home to go back to work on Monday morning. They were invited to bring their spouses, and I met with the wives separately during that session to hear what they thought about the Park Service.

I don’t know. That took an awful lot of time from my family, but my wife approved of it before I started it. I left this area on Friday morning, and I didn’t come back usually until Monday, because if a superintendent wanted to stay individually and talk with me on Sunday after the meetings were over, I stayed overnight for that purpose. No minutes. No agenda. Just your problems, whatever you want to bring up we’re going to talk about it. The only record ever made was, if you brought up a problem and we agreed on an answer that had Service-wide implication, then that answer went out the next week on a pink memorandum to all regional directors so that that communication went throughout the Service. But otherwise no record was ever made of it.

I felt that was one of the most important things that I did in meeting with those guys, because we could sit across the table from each other and talk about their problems. I had no agenda. I spent the first fifteen minutes telling them what was going on in the department and in Congress, where the legislation was, where the appropriations were, what, if anything, the secretary was all churned up about and wanted to do something about. That was it.

I also insisted that the regional directors give me a list of five of the most talented people in their region every year. And I kept that list in my desk drawer. At the end of the year, I took it out and compared it with where those thirty-five people were at the end of the year. And generally every one of them had been moved to a new position during the course of that year.

You also sent them to the Federal Executive Institute.

Absolutely. We contracted with the Federal Executive Institute at Charlottesville, Virginia, to devise and implement a team-building program to foster cohesiveness in our changing organization. The institute was established by the Civil Service Commission (now the Office of Personnel Management) to train senior managers in the federal government. The University of Southern California loaned the director of its School for Public Administration, Dr. Frank Sherwood, to the federal government to head the institute. The sixty-day residential program that Sherwood designed for federal managers was the most creative, innovative effort made by the federal government during my career to improve the quality of government management. I attended the first session and sent some of my principal assistants to each session thereafter until each deputy, associate and assistant director, and each regional director had completed the program. I thought it was one of the most innovative, substantive things ever done to improve the quality of government management.

In addition to providing advanced training for Service managers, Hartzog retained the management consulting firm of James M. Kittleman and Associates to conduct an organizational study of the National Park Service. Later, Hartzog retained Kittleman personally as a part-time consultant to monitor and advise him on the implementation of the study and evolving management issues.25

Jim Kittleman, who was a consultant from Chicago and the Federal Executive Institute, Frank Sherwood and R. T. Williams, they were under contract for [a study of] organization development. Jim Kittleman was the contractor for management [issues]. I kept those two organizations as long as I was director, because that gave me an outside viewpoint [along with] every one of my senior executives [whom] I sent to the Federal Executive Institute, so that I had a community of people who spoke the same language. I had them constantly in contact there. They’d call the regional director, they’d call the assistant director, they’d call the director of Harpers Ferry. Bill Everhart and Frank Sherwood became great personal friends. I mean it was that kind of relationship, always getting the outside viewpoint, because I felt that that was important for us to understand the world in which we were trying to operate.

I would like to hear your thoughts on what you view as the appropriate relationship between political appointees and careerists. It’s generally regarded that after your departure from the Park Service, the director position seemed to change with the political administration. There were, as you mentioned in an earlier interview, instances of political appointees making operational decisions that might be best left to the careerist. Would you talk about that for a few minutes?

That problem was beginning before I got fired.26 But that just never existed when I was director. If I had an assistant secretary, and I had several of them, who wanted something done, I always made it clear to them that when they went out in the field and they saw something they didn’t like, something they thought ought to be changed, if they would call me and tell me about it, we would talk it over. If I agreed with them, we’d change it and we’d do what they wanted done in the way that they wanted it done, because they’re from the outside. They’re sensitive to the community and the political environment that exists.

Remember that I went through a change of administrations, so I worked for Democratic assistant secretaries and Republican assistant secretaries. But the one thing that we had an agreement on was that they never ever ordered a change in my management directly to a superintendent. I had one assistant secretary who had a tendency to let his staff do that. I finally made a telephone call to all of my regional directors, a conference call, in which I said, “I’m advised that the assistant secretary’s office calls the superintendents in your region saying he wants this and that done. You get on this phone today, before you go home, and talk with each superintendent you’ve got. You tell him that I said if the assistant secretary calls him and tells him to do something, and he has the money and he wants to do it, do it. But I want to know how much it costs, because next year I will reduce his budget by the same amount that he spent on this project.”

Then when I finished that conference call to the regional directors, I got up and went to the other end of the hall and walked into the assistant secretary’s office and I told him exactly what I had told the regional directors. I said, “I’ve been trying to work with you to get you to understand that if you want something done in the parks, tell me and I will tell them, because we can’t have two directors of the Park Service. Those superintendents know they report to me. When I call them and tell them to do something, they do it, and when I get somebody off in left field here calling them and telling them to do something, that confuses them.” I told him, “If you continue to let that happen, they can do it if they want to, but the cost of that project will be deducted from their budget next year.” He knew I could do it, because he knew my relationship with my Appropriations Committee was such that 99.9 percent of the time they would do what I asked them. If I told them I wanted Yellowstone’s budget cut $100,000, they’d cut it $100,000. That [the assistant secretary’s interference] stopped.

It seemed to me that you can’t run an organization if everybody is intervening and countermanding what the director has told them to do. That is unacceptable operation, and besides, in many instances, like male alligators they eat their own. The career service works for the political establishment. The interface between the political bureaucrat and the career bureaucrat is of paramount importance to effective and efficient government. The political bureaucrat has resources beyond his comprehension that he can direct to any project he wants done, if he involves that career bureaucrat in transmitting that energy through that system. The career bureaucrats are much smarter than the political bureaucrats give them credit for. See, this comes out of the philosophy that everyone [specifically every political bureaucrat] is capable of doing a government job. That is simply not so. They’re simply not. A political bureaucrat may be a great guy and a lousy manager at the same time.

The Army Corps of Engineers is one of the agencies I greatly admire. I say to people, they [the Corps] can do any damn thing in the world that the Congress tells them to do and puts up the money for, but they’re not efficient. I’ve adopted a lot of their tactics, because I was never really all that innovative. I stole ideas everywhere I could find them from whomever I could find them. And I was very much in the tradition of Mo [Rep. Morris K.] Udall in telling jokes. The first time I used it, I said, “The Army Corps does this and this and this, and this is what we think. And this is what I think we ought to do.” And after that it was my idea. You [the other person or organization] get credit for it the first time. After that it’s my story. Mo Udall said he always stole his stories from everybody. The first time he told it he said, “Joe Blow told me the other day.” The next time he told it, “This is what I heard.” It’s my story now.

W.E.– To back him up, we had a slogan, “shop the competition.” Our interpretation is fine, but there are obviously other people who are doing better at whatever it is you’re doing. So look out. Just because we’re the Park Service that doesn’t mean we’re the best in all elements of it. Go out and look and shop the competition, which we did.

G.H.– You know I used to send maintenance people to Coney Island. Now, why would I pay government transportation and per diem to send people to Coney Island? They knew more about picking up trash than anybody on the face of the Earth, because they had more of it. I don’t know what the situation is now. I went there and I saw, and it was the cleanest beach in America. You rode along our parkways and there was trash all over the side of them. I paid to send them [Park Service staff] up there to let them experience how you pick up trash. As Bill said, my motto was “shop the competition.” Somebody has done what you’re now doing or you’re going to try to do. Go see how they’re doing it. And if they’re doing it better, steal it. They don’t have a copyright or a patent on it. So it’s in the public domain. Take it.

<< Previous | Table of Contents | Next >>