Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Often CAR was the group that actually wrote the sentence or two of the policy, put in the
words, put in the direction, and then send it in to him and he would fine-tune it, change it,
throw it out, start over, or refine it where appropriate.
Q:
Well, it would give you a sense of inner workings and the paper flow at that critical juncture.
A:
I was happy to work there rather than in with the Seven Dwarfs, who were in the paper flow
tracking actions--get it in, wait for a signature, get it back, send it on back with the right
kind of decision, and get it all filed and recorded appropriately. So, they were really in the
flow; we were just off the flow--
Q:
Watching it.
A:
Available to provide some capability to address substance.
Chief of Public Affairs, Office of the Chief of Engineers
Q:
Do you know the month when you went to your new assignment in Public Affairs in 1975?
Your next assignment was Chief of Public Affairs in the headquarters of the U.S. Corps of
Engineers.
Can you say a little bit about how that particular assignment became your next one?
A:
Yes. First of all, in November 1974, after I'd been in CAR, I came out on the colonels list. I
was in a lieutenant colonel position, so there was a push to have me move to another
colonel's position. It was a matter of finding another position. While working with the
engineer colonels assignment officer, a position as Chief of Public Affairs for the Corps of
Engineers came up.
I don't know if the name was recommended to him or he came up with my name, but
General Gribble, through the system, asked for me to be his Chief of Public Affairs. Of
course I'd known him earlier when I was at the North Central Division and in work when I
was in the Colonels Division and he had been Chief.
He knew I was on the colonels list. The Corps had a real public image problem at that time
and was coming to a head with environmentalists thinking we weren't in the forefront of the
environmental movement as we'd been trying to tell people we really were. Fred Clarke had
put out his policy to implement the National Environmental Policy Act of, I think, 1969.
We in the Corps were doing pretty well in changing our paradigm internally, but this was a
time when the environmentalists were really teeing off on the Corps, and a lot of high-
visibility things were happening. Articles in the papers and the magazines were harpooning
the Corps. The Chief's Environmental Advisory Group had been established.
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