Exclusive Book Excerpt: “Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor”

THE STORY ANN COULTER SAID SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING FOR EVERY BUREAUCRAT IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Many of the people mentioned still work at the Department of Defense. They are civil service employees who are almost impossible to fire, demote, or shift to other jobs. In my book, SPEECH-LESS: Tales of a White House Survivor, I show how nameless big government bureaucracies can treat America’s heroes.

The Pentagon’s press operation was run by a very large staff of civil servants and military personnel.  Maybe twenty or thirty public affairs specialists sat among a maze of carrels while the director of the room sat in a glass cage and watched over them.  It was reminiscent of a secretarial pool from the 1950s or ‘60s, without the Smith-Corona typewriters. I sometimes expected to see Lucille Ball walk in with a steno pad looking for Mr. Mooney. 

Most of the press officers were probably Democrats, but the problem was not that they were partisans. The problem was that those who wanted to help were given no direction and the rest were mostly inert. Many would come in around 8:30 or 9 and breeze out by 4:59 pm.  Nothing would prevent their on-time departure – not some major crisis abroad, not even a war.  At night, that giant room was so deserted that tumbleweeds blew by desks. A sizable number of them lacked any sense of urgency or interest in what the administration was doing.  One Pentagon reporter compared prying information from them to going on an Easter egg hunt..  Sometimes you’d want to put a mirror under their noses to see if they were breathing.

Forget about their being proactive.  They rarely, if ever, came up with an interesting new story to pitch to a reporter.  Their job was to wait for the phone to ring and hold morale-building events.  There was almost always a party going on with cakes and cookies and people telling jokes and giving each other awards.  There was an annual chili cook-off. If ever you needed a sugar fix, you could find something almost any day in the press room….

One of the worst things anyone in the Public Affairs office of the Pentagon could do was have an original idea that required work or innovation.  Like I fool, I had one.  During my first weeks at the Pentagon, the woman who tipped me to the Rumsfeld job opening, reporter Kate O’Beirne, called the public affairs office to write a story about some of the troops who’d received medals in battle in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Her aim was to help support the war effort by putting a human face on the thousands of Americans who were proudly fighting overseas. Whether one supported the war effort or not, our men and women who performed acts of heroism deserved as broad recognition as possible.

Kate called several people in the public affairs office for help.  And the press room did what they always did – sent her from one person to another without ever answering her request.  Their lack of assistance was all the more notable since Kate’s husband was the head of personnel at the Pentagon.  The press room people didn’t care.  Getting the list of soldiers who won medals took work, and they didn’t want to do it. And since they were civil service, no one could do anything about it as long as they looked like they were trying to help.  

Members of Congress experienced the same frustrations that Kate did.  Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania actually introduced legislation to require the Pentagon to inform members of Congress when troops from their districts received medals. The Pentagon, through its do-nothing bureaucracy and general ineptitude, was frustrating its own efforts to try to put out positive information about the troops! 

So to me it seemed like a good idea for our office to start putting together a one-pager on medal recipients under the title of “Heroes.”  Our plan was to pick three people per week who’d received awards for heroism and send their names and a brief summary of their heroics to anyone who might be interested – members of the media, other offices in the Pentagon, the White House, Capitol Hill, et cetera.  I also proposed that our staff create a product called “Fifty Heroes from Fifty States” to highlight a service member from every state in the Union.  This would be followed up on a DoD website that showed a map of the U.S.  Anyone who clicked on a state would find profiles of medal recipients with their photos. 

The idea was simple.  The objections within Public Affairs, and the broader Pentagon, were angry and immediate.  First, people in our press room told us we were violating privacy rights of military personnel by highlighting them without permission.  We responded that all of our material came from press releases that these soldiers had already approved (the problem with the press releases was that no one outside the military ever saw them).  Next, the naysayers said that others in Public Affairs should be responsible for highlighting these people, not the speechwriters.  But no one ever volunteered.  Then our critics said we were exposing troops to danger and terrorist attacks by listing their names and where they were located.  We responded that we wouldn’t be listing specific locations. At one point, representatives from the Air Force flatly refused to cooperate. We informed the Air Force that this would mean we’d be focusing solely on medal recipients with the Army, Navy and Marines. 

Nothing motivates the services more than their rivalry with the other branches.  The Air Force decided that they wanted to be involved after all.  Still, this was becoming a total pain in the neck for our office. I decided to show an example of what we wanted to do to Secretary Rumsfeld.  If he liked it, maybe it would help. 

He liked it.  So did General Peter Pace, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And so, apparently, did President Bush. This changed things considerably, at least for a while.  Suddenly the military services were calling us to provide their assistance.  

This was terrible news for our friends in Public Affairs world, though.  Now that the Secretary wanted this project to go forward, the press room staffers were being assigned to help us.  In fact, the guy who sat in the glass cage and ran the room was told to be a key part of the project.  He was supposed to corral all of the people under his command – radio and TV bookers, the woman in charge of “our blog guys,” … to make this effort a success. 

If a great artist ever wanted to construct a sculpture of bureaucracy in its essence, he ought to first meet the man that was sent over to my office to help make the Heroes program work.  His every movement and facial expression gave the appearance of complete exhaustion.  He wore one of those too-short ties that lay on top of his noticeable paunch.  Words seemed to come with great effort.  He was as quick as a tub of molasses. As flexible as a rusted fork.  And keep in mind: this man had ascended to the top rungs of power in the Pentagon’s press room.  He was their best.  I called him Mr. You Can’t Do That.  I’d say, “We want to pitch our heroes to the Today show.”  He’d respond, “You can’t do that.”  I’d say, “We might want to highlight them for a CNN segment.”  Again, he’d reply, “You can’t do that.”

As you might expect, the press room’s idea of promoting DoD heroes was to do as little as possible.  The person who ran the radio outreach effort at the Pentagon had a staff of two other people.  Their entire workload for the week appeared to be booking one or two low-level Pentagon officials on a few local stations.  That was it for the week.  And that was all they wanted to do for the Pentagon’s heroes.

I don’t think the press room folks wanted to undermine us. They were just unmotivated and had grown comfortable with doing nothing.  A larger than expected number of them had advanced to a civil service level that allowed them to earn more than $100,000 a year for work that in most offices would be done by interns. They would outlast the Bush Administration. They couldn’t be fired.  They were philosopher kings without the regal bearing or any hint of a philosophy.  These also were the people who were managing our communications during a time of war on behalf of the American taxpayer.  Most, of course, are still there.  If you want to find them, make sure you get to the Pentagon before five o’clock.