Having serviced the journalistically overprivileged, Mark Gearan is now freed to help those in actual need.
Gearan, the White House director of communications and strategic planning, is splitting, having been nominated last week by his boss, the president, to be the director of the Peace Corps.
It would seem, at least on the surface, a perfect match of one man’s temperament and the 34-year-old agency’s high-minded mission. One might watch, though, to see if he may be too good a soul to succeed in deceptively tough environs.
“It’s a thrilling chance and the timing seems good,” he said.
Gearan, 38 and a lawyer, resembles a small-town Midwest Rotarian and bank president. Honest, capable, straightforward. He has brought those qualities to an array of government positions, including serving as press secretary for Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, and campaign manager for Vice President Al Gore in the 1992 campaign.
He was in the Clinton camp long before many other well-known aides, such as George Stephanopoulos, James Carville and pollster Stan Greenberg, and is probably the most personally popular official in the Clinton White House. Even if one goes “off the record” with the many two-legged snakes here, you won’t hear anything bad about him.
Nice man. Smart man. Decent to a fault.
But was this former aide to Rev. Robert Drinan, the Massachusetts priest-congressman ordered out of politics by the pope, too good a man to ultimately survive in a political hothouse?
To say he was no longer truly in the mix at the White House would probably be true, even if, given the oddities and inconsistencies of the boss, the same can be said of most in the upper echelon there these days. The president’s aide du jour is some Republican consultant from Connecticut named Dick Morris, known to seven (maybe eight) people outside the capital political and journalism Establishment.
Founded by President John Kennedy, the Peace Corps has a rather modest $234 million annual budget, with 1,200 full-time employees and 6,700 volunteers operating in 93 countries and in 13 field offices across the United States. It’s a young, well-educated workforce, with the average age at 30 and lots of graduate degrees.
They are, as Gearan knows, a people-to-people, not government-to-government program. They’re not an arm of the State Department, though the two organizations have regular contact (in a foreign land, the U.S. ambassador oversees the Peace Corps security), and there are frictions.
There have been suggestions by the new Republican congressional majority of melding the Peace Corps into the State Department. That infuriates the Peace Corps. It sees itself as essentially non-political and disinterested in the sort of intelligence gathering, to name one facet, that is part of State Department activity overseas.
As one Peace Corps official put it to me last week, “If we’re in Africa and a country goes Marxist, we stay,” implying that the State Department likely will not. “We’re there, people to people.”
But the official is part of an organization somewhat adrift, faced with assured budget cuts from the new Republican majority in Congress, in need of new blood at the top, new vision and tough decisions on how to distribute diminished resources.
Gearan had only good things to say Thursday about his predecessor, former New York politician and Peace Corps volunteer Carol Bellamy, who split after a brief tenure to head UNICEF. But her 15-month stint was mixed.
Some saw her as not being farsighted enough in spying the likelihood of budget cuts and thus making strategic plans. Further, morale at headquarters sank. Some saw her as disrespectful of many members of the senior staff and traditional lines of authority.
Gearan knew it was time to decide about whether he would be on the Clinton re-election team. When Bellamy split the Peace Corps, he went to White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and asked to be considered.
“My career has been in public service, on Capitol Hill and state and local government. I came to the White House and got a pay raise. Others of my colleagues had to take pay cuts.”
His not being a Peace Corps alumnus will rankle some of his new minions, assuming he’s confirmed. There was an internal constituency for former Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Pa.), a Peace Corps founder. But Gearan’s White House ties may well offer a clout that would help, especially in dealings and dueling with the State Department.
But, for sure, there will be satisfactions. A Peace Corps official noted last week how “people actually love you when you show up” in their countries. No Ugly American syndrome at work here.
No more Sunshine?
In a period in which the Republicans have forced re-examination of all sorts of assumptions, one now has a liberal Democrat wondering if there just may be too much open government.
It has not been reported but Steven Wallman, a commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is circulating a memo suggesting that a bastion of post-Watergate reform, the Government in the Sunshine Act, has backfired.
Under the act, there are strict rules as to when heads of multimember agencies (run by a panel, as is the SEC, not a single executive like, say, the Agriculture or Commerce Departments) can discuss agency matters outside of a formally announced public hearing.
The aim was to avoid secret decisionmaking. It means a quorum of commissioners can’t mosey into the lunchroom and even informally broach agency business.
The result is that commissioners don’t talk much to one another and inefficiently use staff members as conduits. Meanwhile, they tend to be wary of speaking as bluntly in the open meetings as they might in private, says Wallman and others (the five-member Federal Communications Commission, among others, is supporting him).
“I come from a liberal Democratic family,” Wallman said in an interview. “I support the goals of the Sunshine Act. The public should have access to what we are talking about. But as a practical matter, it has detracted from good government.”
An example: SEC commissioners are anxious about real discussion at public meetings: “Nobody can say something stupid that The Wall Street Journal may pick up and that may inadvertently move the markets.”
Another example: The SEC will shortly, albeit temporarily, be down to just two of its allotted five commissioners, Wallman and the chairman, Arthur Levitt Jr. As a result, under the Sunshine Act two men whose offices are perhaps 50 yards apart won’t be able to say a single word to each other about SEC business outside a formal, public meeting.
Wallman has spoken to a few journalists about this and not received much sympathy. If Congress, city councils and even other government bodies can have full and frank discussion, why not agencies like his?
And though he is suggesting changes to the Administrative Conference of the United States, which oversees administration of such agencies, “I would not be supportive of changes that did not ensure better public access to information.”
He does have allies, including Alan Morrison, a top attorney with Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen and a member of the administrative conference. “I applaud him for taking the bull by the horns. It’s something I’ve heard about for many years. The public is not getting much benefit” from the act.
Shouting, secrets and spies
Sarah McClendon, the octogenarian White House reporter known for shouting questions during presidential press conferences, produces her own newsletter. Recently, she claimed Hillary Rodham Clinton had been secretly indicted by the Whitewater grand jury.
Well, while you’re waiting for confirmation of that, be apprised that a coup d’etat beckons led by “George Bush people stashed away carefully in government,” according to her latest issue. “The date set for Clinton to leave the presidency under a Nixon-type exit is Aug. 1.”
