What we've won and what we've lost: a 'Monthly' scorecard.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Self-evaluation of 'Washington Monthly'

When we started The Washington Monthly in 1969, our purpose was to look at our political system in a way that would enable us to understand how and why it worked or didn't work. We thought we knew ways of doing this that had seemed unknown to reporters we had seen covering the Peace Corps, the organization from which all the founding staff of the Monthly came. The errors they most often made were relying on the agency's top officials and public relations people for stories, seldom leaving Washington or the capital cities of the host countries where comfort was readily available, and not understanding bureaucratic culture or even being aware of its existence.

By concentrating on officials who were actually on the agencies' firing lines and had firsthand knowledge of their organization's problems and were more likely than agency heads and PR types to be candid about them, we were soon able to identify some of the more significant factors in bureaucratic failure.

The most important secret we discovered was how government officials use make-believe to ensure their survival. The number-one goal of the typical bureaucrat is to protect his job, and, since the only way he is likely to be fired is if his agency's budget is cut, he devotes his highest efforts to defending that budget and if at all possible to increasing it to cover the promotions he yearns for. Deep in the bureaucrat's DNA is the awareness that if his agency attains its goal of, say, eliminating the energy crisis or solving the farm problem, the elimination of the agency and his job would follow. So the civil servant quickly learns to master the tools of make-believe--memoranda and meetings--so that he can appear to be busy while actually accomplishing little if anything.

Make-believe is most common in the middle levels of the bureaucracy. The fat that concentrates there tends to clog the arteries of communication between the top and the bottom of the typical agency. Another factor in this failure of communication is that the people at the bottom are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their job or their promotion. Still another is that the people at the top don't want to know about potential disaster so that they won't be blamed for it--instead of trying to solve problems, many senior officials simply pray that the lid can be kept on during their tenure. This is the Not On My Watch principle of executive behavior.

At all levels of government there was also an almost total lack of entrepreneurial risk-taking that was becoming, along with the other bureaucratic deficiencies we had identified, characteristic of the private sector as well. This similiarity between government and business helped explain why, in the seventies, General Motors was producing lemons while the post office was losing packages.

Among the first agencies we looked at was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had been widely recognized as one of the most vital and creative offspring of the New Deal. But by 1969, our writer found, it had lost its mission and had become an enthusiastic co-conspirator in the worst sins of the electric utility industry for which it was supposed to serve as a model and a yardstick. This finding was made in the course of an article that uncovered decay in two other institutions: the United Mine Workers, which had once been a great union dedicated to helping workers, and a leading Washington bank, with a pre-BCCI Clark Clifford on its board, that had become a tool of corruption. We now realized the problem of institutional decline was wider than we had thought and broadened our concern to the private as well as the public sphere. Additional evidence of the breadth of the problem came when we began the "Memo of the Month" in 1969 and realized readers were sending examples of bureaucratic absurdity not just from government but also from corporations, unions, universities, and charities. The funniest memo that year came from Western Electric.

But the Monthly's main focus remained on government because we felt our experience working in it gave us a head start on understanding the culture of the natives who lived along the banks of the Potomac. We realized, for example, that one reason for the lack of courage in speaking up was that the life tenure promised by the civil service attracted not risk-takers but people who wanted security. We saw that the kind of term limits we had at the Peace Corps (five years of service, then you were out) had attracted a more courageous person, one who had the self-confidence to contemplate having to get another job in a...