The Administration: Things Could Be Done Better

From a top Democrat last week came a considered criticism of U.S. handling of world affairs under both the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. Said Washington’s Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson, in summing up the two-year work of his Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, which was created find out if the U.S. Government is geared to manage the cold war: “There is still much to be done in defining our vital interests and developing a basic national policy which supports them.”

Jackson’s sharpest words were aimed at the State Department: “No task is more urgent than improving the effectiveness of the Department of State. State is not doing enough in asserting its leadership across the whole front of foreign policy. It attaches too little importance to looking ahead. State needs more officials who are good executive managers, who have an ability to manage large-scale enterprises—to make decisions promptly and decisively, to delegate and to monitor. Round pegs in square holes are a luxury we cannot afford.”

The Federal Government, in Jackson’s view, is overstaffed. There are, he said, “people engaged in work that does not really need doing. The payroll costs, although formidable, are less important than the price paid in sluggishness of decision and action.” The really effective top civil service and sub-Cabinet officials should be kept in Government service by paying them more, and better people should be attracted to temporary high-level jobs by easing conflict-of-interest laws, which Jackson termed “pointless impediments to public service.”

Jackson also cautioned against the National Security Council’s becoming either so institutionalized as to engage in “the overproduction of routine papers,” or so informal as to disintegrate into “official bull sessions.” But after his committee had held some 50 hearings to take testimony from authorities including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, General Maxwell Taylor and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Jackson was convinced that no basic reorganization of the nation’s policy machinery is really necessary. “More often than not,” he emphasized, “poor decisions are traceable not to machinery but to people—to their inexperience, their failure to comprehend the full significance of information crossing their desks, to their indecisiveness or lack of wisdom. Our best hope lies in making our traditional policy machinery work better—not in trading it in for some new model.”