________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
I had a West Point classmate, Dave Palmer (who has just retired as superintendent of West
Point), who was in the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army, working in an office called
the Office of the Deputy Director of the Army Staff for Coordination, Analysis and Reports.
Another classmate, Mike Conrad, was also working there. They had some changes coming
up in that office, and so Mike and Dave asked me to come over and interview with some
people.
So, I did, and was then selected to join that office. They were changing leadership; the fellow
coming in was supposed to be Colonel Bob Sennewald, who did not come in but was picked
for brigadier that same week. Later, of course, he ended up as a four-star commander of
Forces Command.
This office had been part of the old Secretary of the General Staff's office, but under the
Army reorganization it was now the Director of the Army Staff. The director had two or three
subelements under him, one of which was the Staff Action Control Office, in which they had
the so-called "Seven Dwarfs." These were the people who were actually running the actions.
When papers come in to the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army from throughout the
Army Staff, they would come to that office. Those action officers would make a quick
review. If it was all right, everybody had signed off on it, they sent it on to the Director of the
Army Staff and on to the Vice Chief or the Chief of Staff for action. They processed and
controlled staff actions.
Then there was our office--CAR (Coordination, Analysis, and Reports). There were four
elements to it. One was the Chief of Staff's speech writer, one person sometimes augmented
to two. Second were the Chief of Staff's legislative assistants. They would put together all
the issue papers and sit behind him when he'd go over to testify on the Hill. When he wanted
to talk about a subject he was questioned on, they'd pull out the right paper and set it before
him. They were the keepers of the testimony books in that respect.Third were the people who
put out the Weekly Summary from the Office of the Chief of Staff to all Army general
officers every two weeks. Finally, there was the special action team. I was part of the team.
I can't remember how many of us there were; I guess there were five plus Colonel Doug
Smith, who was the chief of the special action team. Colonel Vic Hugo was the Deputy
Director of the Army Staff for Coordination, Analysis, and Reports.
Our job was to assist the command group--the Chief of Staff, the Vice Chief of Staff, and
the Director of the Army Staff--in any way in which we were needed. I really mean that in
the full sense of it. You could say we were almost "gofers" in this respect because our jobs
weren't specifically diagramed. If there was a need, we were there to go and try to answer
that need.
We had areas that we were assigned to monitor. The Army Staff was divided up into
functional areas, and we were each given several offices and areas to monitor. My
recollection is that I had the Office of the Chief of Engineers, rather naturally, and the
DCSLOG, the Inspector General, and some others--six or eight.
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