Water Resources
and Issues
one of the senators that he thought had some influence to ask for support. So
I got a call from a staff man urging me to hire him. Actually, I think someone
on my staff had already made an offer and he'd accepted it when I got this call.
If I had gotten the call before we had made the offer, I'm not sure I would
have offered him the job because that's the way we operated at the Library of
Congress. We would never hire somebody with a political recommendation. I
suppose we might have if the recommendation came from the chairman of the
Library Committee. Then we might have hired him and put him in a place like
kicking him upstairs before he started.
Then I also got a call from Scoop Jackson about a young man who wanted a
summer job. We interviewed him and he looked good, so we hired him as a
research assistant. I guess we trained him well, because he's turned out to be
a leader in the water resources field. I'm glad we were able to help him along
in his career. It was a summer job for him.
What was his name?
A: I can't remember for sure, but his first name was David. Yes, David Friedman.
You said you got three calls?
A: Yes. It's funny that I remember all this, but I never could understand why
officials of the executive branch of the government allow themselves to be
pushed around by members of Congress.
Anyway, this other call was from a staff member for a senator that I knew
quite well. The caller said that the senator was interested in so-and-so and
wanted me to hire him. This was a staff person for whom I didn't have much
respect, so I said, "There are no vacancies, but if the senator is really
interested, have him call me and I'll talk to him about it." I never got a call
back. So it was pretty obvious it was all being handled at the staff level.
I was very careful in hiring the staff. There were probably a couple of mistakes
made, but that was inevitable considering the time pressure we were under.
Actually, I was primarily responsible only for hiring the top staff people. I
hired Howard Cook as my deputy and I hired Ralph Fuhrman as an assistant
director, and, of course, Bob Baker to handle the administrative work. After
I hired the three division chiefs, I let them pick up their own staffs. But I
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