Long before she came to Washington, Barbara Everitt Bryant had established herself as an information-age alchemist, using survey research to transform the public`s needs and habits into the numbers necessary to manage hospitals, television stations and schools.
Just five months after President Bush appointed her director of the federal Census Bureau, Bryant`s skills were being put to a daunting test: to rally an apathetic public and transform the problem-plagued census.
In April, Bryant appeared before the House Census and Population Subcommittee of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee to try to explain an unexpectedly poor return rate of census forms-at that time, only 62 percent had been mailed back-and to say what she plans to do.
Bryant, 64, the executive of a Michigan survey-research firm, sought at least $130 million to complete the lagging census. She also faced hard questions on what is going wrong, and why.
”I knew I`d be jumping immediately into the tidal wave,” she said. Although she worried ahead of time about taking control of a machine she had not designed, she says nothing publicly about the stress in recent weeks, since her people in the field first let her know how far the mail-response rate was lagging behind the 70 percent rate originally projected.
Her response to these and other problems is dogged optimism. ”I think we at the Census Bureau always shoot for extremely high goals,” she said.
”We`ll count everybody, even if we do it door to door.”
Since the revelation of the low mail-return rate, Bryant has held daily afternoon staff meetings to pinpoint the cause.
Much of the rest of her time has been spent trying to generate publicity for the census and traveling the Suitland Parkway as she shuttles from her own office meetings in Maryland to almost daily meetings at the Commerce Department, 10 miles away.
”There`s no way you`re going to have that job right now and not have a lot of criticism,” said Robert Teeter, a former campaign poll taker for President Bush.
He is a former colleague of Bryant`s at Market Opinion Research and the man who, as head of the president`s transition team, suggested her for the job she considers ”the mountaintop of the field.”
Bryant was appointed by President Bush during Congress` Christmas break. The timing of the recess appointment, which filled a job that had been vacant for nearly a year, meant that she not only had to take over responsibility for a census on the eve of the massive operation, but that she would do so without Senate confirmation.
Also, during the interim, a lot of detailed management of the bureau had been picked up by Commerce`s Division of Economic Affairs.
She wasn`t the White House`s first choice. She won the appointment after White House officials, bruised by the rejection of John Tower`s nomination as defense secretary, realized they would be courting another bitter fight with congressional Democrats if they persisted in their intention to nominate Alan Heslop, a Republican redistricting specialist from California who provoked strong opposition from that state`s Democratic Congressional delegation-which considered him far too partisan.
Bryant`s stength, at a time when partisan nerves were raw, was her reputation for technical competence and fairness. Her background in communications, Commerce Department officials said, was also a plus, since the 1990 head count would need a public relations effort.
”She`s a very public person,” said Mark Plant, a deputy undersecretary at the Commerce Department. ”She is a very intelligent, bright woman walking into the biggest government operation outside of a war.”
As for the census, Plant said: ”If anything was certain, it was that unforseen circumstances would come up. That`s where the director of the census comes in. She calls herself a cheerleader. Cheerleader is too modest. She`s the quarterback.”
But in contrast to some earlier census directors, he said, ”She`s a much gentler person.” Her approach, Plant said, ”plays well at the bureau.” He added, ”It plays well upstairs.”
To the public Bryant`s cheery manner and neatly coiffed white hair may seem oddly dissonant with her mission. ”The nature of the dissonance is that this is a high school math teacher, this is my grandmother, running a huge statistical agency,” Plant said. ”It doesn`t compute.”
For Census Bureau officials, she does compute. Preferring professional anonymity, several of her colleagues refused to say even complimentary things about her on the record.
Privately, they respect her as someone who talks their language and shares their values about how data should be produced, analyzed and distributed.
At a time when many census bureau veterans are doubling or tripling their government salaries with jobs in the booming information industry, and when the political and legal pressures on the bureau are intense, Bryant wanted to move in the opposite direction.
”After a career in survey and market research, this is the biggest place of them all for doing the total census and the largest surveys,” she said in an interview.
A generation ahead of the demographic curve, she started on her new career in 1961, after the youngest of her three children entered 1st grade.
Oakland, a small local university in Michigan, offered her a part-time job doing public relations and teaching science in the continuing education program. Her neighbors disapproved, saying her decision to work would deprive her children.
She persisted. In 1965, she began graduate studies in communications, first at Oakland and later at the University of Michigan.
She had taken her undergraduate degree from Cornell University in physics, though her father had accused her of spending more time on the student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, than in the lab.
But numbers fascinated her. At the age of 10, she was using a slide rule. ”Dad thought that anyone with his genes had to be good at math,” she said.
Her father, who taught engineering at Ohio University, became dean of the school of engineering at the University of Illinois.
When she was 8, her father asked her and her younger brother to solve a puzzle. The needles had fallen off the Christmas tree. He gave them a thimble, a cup, and a bucket and asked them to calculate how many needles the tree had shed.
”We figured out how many needles fit in a thimble, how many thimbles in a cup, how many cups in a bucket, and so on,” she said. ”We figured out the number. I`ve forgotten it now.”
She met her husband, John H. Bryant, an engineer, at a party her father threw for students. Before their children were born, she worked as a science writer.
When his work took him to the Detroit area, she continued her graduate studies in communications at the University of Michigan. Her work on her doctorate caught the eye of Teeter, who asked her to join his public opinion- research firm in 1970. There, while doing polling and survey research for health care agencies and transportation planners, she paid closer and closer attention to census data.
By the mid-1980s, she had become head of a census advisory committee of the American Marketing Association, and had gotten to know Vincent Barabba.
A former census director now General Motors` executive director for market research and planning, he became legendary at Census Bureau
headquarters in Suitland, Md., for his ability to rescue the troubled 1980 census and to maneuver within the Commerce Department and on Capitol Hill.
Barabba was one of the people she consulted before deciding to take the job, as was Teeter. Both encouraged her, but both pointed out the way the job had changed since 1980.
For one thing, since Barabba declined to make statistical adjustments in the 1980 count to compensate for the acknowledged undercount of minorities, more than 50 lawsuits had been filed seeking to force adjustment.
In 1987, the Commerce Department took control of the adjustment issue-the biggest statistical policy question facing the bureau-as Undersecretary Robert Ortner announced the Commerce Department`s opposition to statistical adjustment.
Last summer, in settling a lawsuit brought by New York City, the department agreed to consider adjusting the 1990 count.
In the decade between Barabba`s departure and Bryant`s arrival, the adjustment issue had been the cause of external lawsuits and bitter internal disputes, culminating with the 1988 departure of Barbara Bailor, the head of the bureau`s Statistical Methods Division, after she switched to the pro-adjustment camp.
Her job, which had symbolized statistical creativity and independence for the bureau, had been vacant since 1988, amid rumors, never confirmed, that all candidates had to convince the Commerce Department that they were anti-adjustment.
One of Bryant`s first moves, since arriving last January, has been to appoint Robert M. Groves, a respected sociology professor from the University of Michigan, to fill the statistical methods job.
The problems of the census have left Bryant scrambling to divide her time between managing the census and the bureau`s budget planning for fiscal 1992. She is also trying to work on the two tasks closest to her heart:
figuring out how to improve data flow to the bureau`s clients in government and business and industry, and finding a way to make the census a smoother operation in the year 2000.
”I saw that by coming in late I couldn`t drastically change plans for this year,” she said. ”But I could exercise some real leadership for the future.”
