On Giving Oneself a Hotfoot: Government by Commission

by Elizabeth B. Drew

IN 1794, President Washington had a problem. Rebellious groups in Pennsylvania were threatening the nation with civil disorder. So he appointed a commission. “The report of the Commissioners,” Mr. Washington informed the Congress in his sixth annual address later that year, “marks their firmness and abilities, and must unite all virtuous men.”

Whether it did or not, or whether the President thought it would or even intended in to. is now lost to history. But the technique of appointing a special presidential commission, of which this was the country‘s first, to investigate, obfuscate, resolve, defuse, defer, detail, or derail a problem has become as much an instrument of the presidency as the State of the Union Message, the toss of the ball on opening day, or the review of troops in wartime. The line art of commissionmanship enjoys an unusually flourishing state today. There is no official tally of how many presidential commissions are extant, but a casual inquiry shows that in the past year and a half there have been special presidential commissions on Health Manpower, Health facilities, Rural Poverty, Food and Fiber, Civil Disorders, Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas, Urban Housing, Urban Problems, Income Maintenance, Crime (nationwide), Crime (in the District of Columbia), Criminal Laws, Libraries, the Post Office, the Selective Service, Budget Concepts, Federal Salaries, and the CIA.

There are several types of government commissions: permanent floating ones, such as the American Battle Monuments Commission, or the Canadian-American Boundary Commission, which has been preventing an outbreak of war between the two nations; or so-called regulatory commissions, such as the Federal Communications or Interstate Commerce Commissions; commissions which Congress tells the President to establish, such as the Pornography Commission, also espoused by former Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, who was so upset about the pornography that came through the mail that he kept a whole room full of it just off his office. There are also the not-so-secret task forces of inside and outside experts which President Johnson has been appointing each year to review federal activities.

But special presidential commissions are an institution unto themselves, so much so that not long ago a group of highly qualified Washington observers (of the stripe that the press frequently turns to for profound insights) formed a Commission on Commission-Watching. Because of internal problems, the report of the CCW has run into unforeseen delays. A comprehensive summary of its findings has been obtained from friendly sources, however, and it goes as follows.

THE USES OF COMMISSIONS

There are eight reasons, which are not mutually exclusive, for appointing a commission.

1. To obtain the blessing of distinguished men for something you want to do anyway. Thus, if you want to make the Post Office more “businesslike,” appoint a commission consisting largely of important businessmen whose concurrence might help persuade Congress to relax its grip on postal operations. A useful by-product might be that the commission would work out some of the difficult problems of making the Post Office more businesslike — which the Post Office itself never could do — but this could also be done through a consulting firm, which the Commission on Postal Operations has hired anyway.

2. To postpone action, yet be justified in insisting that you are at work on the problem. This is one of the most popular uses of commissions. The CCW believes that it largely explains the existence of the Commissions on Civil Disorders, Income Maintenance, the CIA, Health Facilities, among others. A guaranteed annual income has now been proposed or studied by one advisory council, one presidential commission, two government agencies, and three secret White House task forces. There are, however, two other possible reasons for the Income Maintenance Commission (see Reasons 3 and 8).

In 1965, Health, Education, and Welfare Department officials were saying that there was an urgent need to build or remodel urban hospitals and estimated that the cost would be $6 billion to $10 billion. In 1966, the Administration asked Congress for a $5 billion program of guaranteed loans for urban hospitals. Mayors and hospital administrators condemned the plan as inadequate, it wasn’t pushed very hard, and it got nowhere. Early in 1967 the President promised to appoint a commission to study the problem, described as “pressing” the year before, and seven months later he did. At this writing, the commission has met three times.

3. To act as a lightning rod, drawing political heat away from the White House. When the Selective Service Act was to expire in 1967, despite the fact that there had been a (secret) Pentagon study on the draft, it was useful to set up a presidential commission to deal with this politically sensitive subject. This set the terms of the debate at how the draft should be extended, not whether it should, or why we were in Vietnam; moreover, it permitted the President to pass along recommendations to Congress which were a commission’s, not simply his own. The fact that Congress rejected almost all of the commission’s recommendations, and brought off the singular achievement of making the draft system worse than it was before, does not negate the effectiveness of the lightning-rod device.

4. To conduct an extensive study of something you do need to know more about before you act, in case you do. Commission-watchers report that it is often difficult to distinguish between this and Reason 2 (deferral), but they are generally agreed that the latest crime commissions fall in this category. The National Commission on Urban Problems— Codes, Zoning, Taxation, and Development Standards fits here, too, because of the highly technical nature of its assignment. Administration officials report, however, that the Urban Problems Commission is showing disturbing tendencies toward wanting to solve the urban crisis. (The 1931 Wickersham Commission report on crime grew out of national concern with a breakdown of law and order, which had become a political issue, and it was a landmark report. It analyzed court processes, the relationship between poverty and crime, police brutality, and other problems. A new Administration and other political issues came along, however, and it was largely unimplemented. There has been little implementation of the recent national crime commission report either, but commission sources say that they were writing for posterity, which was foresighted of them.)

5. To investigate, lay to rest rumors, and convince the public of the validity of one particular set of facts. The Warren Commission is the most outstanding example of this type of commission.

6. To educate the commissioners, or get them aboard on something you want to do. Many, perhaps most, commissions are indeed useful in this respect. They help overcome the insularity of businessmen. The Urban Housing Commission contains representatives of business and labor whose cooperation is needed for any breakthrough in building low-cost housing. The report of the Health Manpower Commission, one of the best and potentially most effective in the view of the CCW, carried the signature of Dr. Dwight Wilbur, the president-elect of the American Medical Association.

7. Because you cannot think of anything else to do. This is not to be confused with Reason 2. The origin of this type of commission is often a speech or a message to Congress in which it is necessary to lengthen the list of actions you say you are taking on a problem. File CCW understands that this was the origin of the Rural Poverty Commission.

8. To change the hearts and minds of men. This is one of the most frequently cited yet elusive uses of a commission. It is said to be a reason for, among others, the Disorders and Income Maintenance Commissions. It has also been the basis for the numerous blue-ribbon commissions on foreign aid. The theory is that a commission generates press copy and speeches, and that a certain number of people will decide that if, say, John McCone or I. W. Abel says it is so, it must be so, thus spreading the acceptance of an idea. There are two problems with this theory, however. One is that it can backfire. To stem rising congressional opposition to foreign aid, for example, President Kennedy created the Committee to Strengthen the Security of the Free World, by one count the thirteenth blue-ribbon commission on foreign aid since the program was started in 1945. It was headed by retired General Lucius D. Clay and stocked with a number of respectables. The Clay committee, however, looked over the aid program and wasn’t all that enthusiastic about what it saw. Its report, issued in 1963, said the program was trying to do “too much for too many.” In desperation, the President pared his own request, but nonetheless the program met with the greatest disaster in its existence at the hands of Congress that year.

The second problem with the “hearts and minds” theory is that there is scant historical evidence that it works. When reports on controversial subjects are issued, the usual result is that those who agree say that they knew it all along, and those who do not say that the report is unwise, that it wasn’t thought through. There have now been at least five reports on the causes of riots, all of which came to similar conclusions about the need to improve conditions for Negroes.

The history of commissions indicates that they are most effective when they deal with a discrete problem, such as a special governmental organization question, or when they call for change within a delimited discipline, such as the medical profession. They are least effective when their scope is broad, when the problem they are dealing with lies within the political system itself (as the disorders problem does), or when the political leadership is disinclined to act. The greater and more complex the problem, the less effective the commission, in itself, can be. In fairly short order most reports become footnote material. Thus there were forces within the Disorders Commission staff who argued for continual televised hearings, to spread the impact of what the commission was, once again, finding out. But the commission itself rejected the idea, on the grounds it might start trouble. They said it might cause riots.

HOW TO CHOOSE A COMMISSION

Over the years, there has developed an informal set of guidelines for selecting commission members, and they are important for both commissionappointers and commission-watchers to understand.

1.Neither commissioners nor staff should be controversial. In many situations, it is also important to rule out commissioners or staff who are “committed” to a particular solution of a problem. This procedure was largely followed in the selection of the Income Maintenance and Disorders Commissions. Since a great many people will be controversial in the eyes of someone, the search for a noncontroversial commission can be difficult, but with effort some commissioners can be found about whom no one has any point of view at all.

2. Commissioners should be bipartisan and otherwise representative of constituent groups, as long as they are respectable. This assures both a variety of points of view (within limits) and built-in checks and balances. An ideal commission will be composed of at least one business mogul, labor union president, Negro, woman (Negro women are excellent commission choices), publisher, university president, Italian, Mexican-American (the latest addition to the ideal-commission list), and White House “plant.” The latter is a former employee or a friend of the President’s, and his role is to watch the commission closely, and occasionally to say things like: “This would cause the President a great deal of political trouble, and we wouldn’t want to do that, would we?” Among the friends and former associates of the President who have served on commissions are George Reedy (Income Maintenance, Selective Service), Warren Woodward, a vice president of American Airlines (Selective Service), and Leon Jaworski, a Texas lawyer (Crime). Not all former employees are useful commission members, however. Thus, while former press secretary Reedy has been called upon to serve, former press secretary Bill D. Moyers, long suspected of Kennedy tendencies, has not.

Negroes are a particular problem, because of the noncontroversialness principle. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young can serve only so often. Attempts to bring the more militant aboard have not been notably successful. Floyd McKissick. for example, served on the Council of the White House Conference on Civil Rights and then charged that the conference itself was rigged, a serious breach of the rules of commissionmanship. Negro businessmen will do, and hopefully not too many Negroes on welfare will wonder why Asa T. Spaulding, an insurance millionaire, is on the Income Maintenance Commission, and George Wiley, head of the welfare rights movement, is not.

3. The chairman should be able, and safe, but better safe than able. Though some wondered about the independence of a Crime Commission headed by the Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach met both qualifications quite well. So has Ben Heineman, a Chicago businessman, who has been chairman of the Council of the Civil Rights Conference and of a White House task force, and now heads the Income Maintenance Commission. Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, chairman of the Disorders Commission, was safe. Mr. Kerner had the further benefit of helping to maintain harmony with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Kerner’s patron. (It should go without saying that appointments to commissions are useful devices for strengthening political ties or paying political debts.)

Commissioners tend to take very seriously the fact that the President has sought their wise counsel, and they assume that their recommendations are eagerly awaited; but if chosen carefully, the commission will not create difficulties for the appointer, whatever action he takes on its proposals. This singular detachment from the fate of their efforts is a phenomenon which the CCW had some difficulty understanding. It was explained to them, however, that people who serve on commissions enjoy the sense of “in-ness” that commission service brings, and, furthermore, that businessmen and university presidents have too many dealings with the government to want to risk the wrath of the White House, no matter who is its occupant. While the latter explanation struck the CCW as touching on paranoia, several commissioners insisted that this stemmed from a real, not an imagined, threat.

A study of the rosters of recently appointed commissions tends to confirm the widely held theory that there are only forty-seven people in the whole world. The CCW is, in fact, considering the presentation of special awards for recent commission service. If so, based on its research thus far, the most-frequent-service awards would go to George Meany and businessman J. Irwin Miller, each of whom has served on three commissions in the last year and a half. Based on attendance and hard work, the best-commissioner award would be divided among Miller, Whitney Young, Hermit Gordon, president of the Brookings Institution, and Henry Rowen, president of RAND. It is understood that the leading candidate for worst-commissioner award, similarly based on attendance and attention to the work of the commission, is Meany. The CCW is considering a special commendation for Senator Edward Brooke, a member of the Disorders Commission, who missed some crucial meetings because he took a trip to Africa, in his capacity, his office announced, as a member of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee.

THE PROCESS OF COMMISSIONMANSHIP

Once a commission has been appointed and begins its work, certain procedures are followed.

1. The staff does most of the work. When Edward Jay Epstein, author of Inquest, wrote of this horrible discovery about the Warren Commission, experienced commission-watchers yawned. Commissioners are, after all, busy people. This makes securing a good staff crucial, but it is difficult to find able people who are ready to drop everything to devote full time to a temporary commission job. Those who do usually have been persuaded that the contribution the commission will make to the national good makes it all worthwhile; most do not do it more than once.

2. The relationship between the commission and thestaff is usually one of mutual contempt. The staff is often composed of young, less experienced people who still think that the world can and should be changed; the commissioners know better. Moreover, commissioners are disinclined to indict politically important figures, or programs or agencies identified with the President who selected them. “Obviously,” remarked someone with the Disorders Commission as its work was getting under way, “we’re not going to pick on HUD” (the Department of Housing and Urban Development). A second point of friction stems from the fact that the commissioners, being important people, are not very interested in chewing things over with a lot of young staff members. They prefer memoranda. “Commissioners, by their very credentials,” reports a former staff member of the Warren Commission, “are not prepared to admit the need to learn.” So the policy alternatives go up from the staff, and the policy directives come down from the commission, and seldom do the twain meet, except in the person of the exhausted, whipsawed executive director.

3. A high percentage of the work of the director or his deputy has nothing to do with the subject before the commission. It is spent begging for money from government agencies, which have their own problems, and otherwise stretching the rules of government funding so that Congress need not be asked to appropriate money for commissions; cutting through civil service regulations so that the staff can be hired before the commission expires; arguing with the General Services Administration over office space and typewriters and with the Government Printing Office over how long it will take to print the report.

4. In the writing of the report, each commission is likely to evidence certain syndromes:

a. The this-is-not-going-to-be-another-bookthat-gathers-dust-on-the-shelf syndrome. This usually shows up early in the commission process, when the commission and the staff agree that this one will be different.

b. The everybody-is-going-to-read-our-report syndrome. This comes just after the commission has sat down and done some hard thinking about the questions Whom are we writing for? Whom are we trying to reach? The politicians? The media? The people? Then it decides on the strategy of reaching all of them. This leads in turn to a desperate search for a great writer and in the end to a report hastily put together by committee.

c. The unanimous-report syndrome. Commissions frequently decide that it would be best not to confuse the nation with divided counsel. Since the commissioners usually are divided on important issues, this guarantees that a large number of these issues will be fudged.

Once the report of the Disorders Commission, for example, got beyond the conclusion that the causes of riots lay with white attitudes and actions, it listed some proposals and then neatly avoided the central questions When were these proposals to be carried out? Who had the responsibility for seeing that they were? Could the crisis, so forcefully stated, be met without discomfort to the haves? Should taxes be raised now, beyond the surtax sought by the President (“the major need is to generate new will — the will to tax ourselves to the extent necessary to meet the vital needs of the nation”)? If, as the commission concluded, the problem is racism, what specific actions should be taken by specific institutions — the President, the Congress, the governors, the mayors, the unions, and others —to eliminate racist policies? In the true spirit of commissiomanship, the representatives of these institutions on the commission saw to it that the report eschewed finger-pointing.

5. The theory that the commission is independent must be nurtured. The press is helpful in this respect, since it usually focuses on whether the President read the report while it was being drafted. Naturally, this is as unlikely as it is irrelevant. It is a simple matter for the chairman or the executive director to keep a presidential assistant fully briefed, and to receive the assistant’s reactions and “suggestions.” It is preferable, however, that such exchanges not take place in the Sans Souci restaurant.

HOW TO HANDLE THE REPORT

One of the most serious problems with presidential commissions is that they do issue reports. This is of course the greatest drawback of commissions appointed in order to postpone action. Moreover, despite all the precautions taken in selecting the commission and following its deliberations closely, some commissions will nevertheless recommend something other than what the appointer wants to do. The CCW has ascertained several methods of dealing with this sort of problem.

1. Hide for as long as possible, leaving the commission the choice of tossing the report over the White House fence or waiting until you are good and ready to receive it. A number of commissions have found that the White House was not quite as anxious to receive their report as they had expected. One former commissioner reports: “There was a great ceremony with plaudits in the Rose Garden when our appointment was announced, and then at the end we couldn’t find anybody to hand the damn report to.”

It is always helpful, of course, to have the commissions report, as the Disorders and Urban Housing Commissions did, after one has made one’s own proposals to Congress. In this way, the appointer is less in the posture of seeming to react, or not react, as the case may be. With luck, the appointer is then in a position to give one of the handiest responses in case, despite all precautions, the commission’s proposals do exceed his own, as some of the Disorders Commission’s proposals did: the “Not me, Al” response (Don’t look at me — I have proposed many of these things — your problem is with Congress).

2. After receiving the report, postpone and play down its release. The report of the Commission on Rural Poverty, a runaway commission, had been printed by September, 1967, but was not released until December. The White House explained that this was because (1) the chairman, Kentucky Governor Edward T. Breathitt, did not want the report released before last November’s Kentucky elections, and then (2) because the poverty bill was in trouble in Congress. The report was released after a reporter stumbled on the fact that back in September an employee of the Government Printing Office had routinely sent several hundred copies to libraries, and they had been available all along.

Daniel Bell, a member of the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, which reported in 1966, wrote in The Public Interest that the handling of his commission’s report “was curious indeed.” “At the end of Bill D. Moyers’ regular press conference, the report was in fact released to the press, in desultory fashion, with no member of the Commission on hand to answer questions, and no prior advance notice to the press that the report would be forthcoming — an advance notice which is usually given when the White House wants its press corps to reserve space with its city editors about important stories.” The report on Federal Salaries, submitted last year and recommending substantial pay raises for high government officials, never was released.

3. Dissociate or denounce the report. Three Administration officials interviewed by the CCW shrugged their shoulders and said, with striking similarity, of the Rural Poverty report that it was a “terrible” report, “it just calls for more and more.”

4. Hope that the public’s interest in the problem has waned during the delays. Thus, when the stories of CIA’s financing the National Student Association and dummy foundations were causing a national furor early in 1967, the President appointed an interdepartmental committee which studied the problem and in turn recommended the appointment of a commission. One year later, the commission, headed by a busy Secretary of State, had had few meetings, and it appeared that the public as well as the commissioners themselves had largely lost interest in the whole matter.

5. If all else fails, there is one other method of handling a commission report that has proved quite workable over the years:

Ignore it.