Ernest Graves
Personally, I never felt comfortable with the proposition that I would deal on behalf of
some company with governments that I had been dealing with as an official of the U.S.
government. But that isn't, in my opinion, something that is entirely a matter of ethics.
It's just my personal equation.
There have been a great many people leave the foreign sales program, take jobs with
industry, and do marketing work among foreign clients, a great many. It's a common
practice. I haven't read a lot of criticism of this in the Washington Post or anywhere
else. It seems to be viewed differently. Jim Ahmann is just one of hundreds who have
been involved with the contractors who sell overseas, whether they be Northrup or
McDonnellDouglas or General Dynamics or LTV or you-name-it.
There are hundreds of retired Army, Navy, and Air Force officers who work for these
firms, often on foreign sales. Some of them have been in foreign sales before in the
government, and some have not. So it is a different ball game from going to industry
to sell back to the U.S. government.
Q:
Ethical concepts are difficult things to get at, and they are difficult things to make
judgments on. In fact, it's often presumptive to make judgments on the ethics, to
question the motives of people.
But in the case of the Israeli air bases, where we had an area engineer who'd been a
contracting officer for Atkinson for two straight jobs and then went to work for the
company almost immediately upon retirement, you just wonder whether the system
ought to--I guess you can't stop that. I guess that's the point. I don't know. Maybe
you shouldn't.
A:
It all depends what he was doing for Atkinson. But also, that's a somewhat different
question of ethics. This is akin to the concern that has been written about recently in the
Post that government inspectors at some of the plants--they're not called inspectors,
they're called representatives--but people that oversee the inspection operations in
some of the aerospace plants have gone to work for that firm after they retire.
That's a different set of ethical issues about whether one can infer any impropriety in
the relationship between the government employee and the private firm because later
on he made a business relationship with them and, therefore, he might not have been
tough enough on them when he was working for the government. Otherwise, they
wouldn't have loved him or something.
There have been a bunch of guys from the Corps that have gone to work for private
contractors. Until recently, the view has been, as long as they weren't engaged in trying
to sell to the Corps, they could do this. There has not been the inference of impropriety
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