Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
public affairs. He had some public relations background, and he was always saying, "Let's
turn over Corps Public Affairs to the Army Chief of Information."
Part of that, I think, was that he was right down the hall from the Army Chief of Information
and he felt that he'd have his man doing it. Other assistant secretaries have had similar
thoughts, like, "Maybe I really ought to run everything. If I had it over here, then I could run
it. If I have it over there, with the Chief, then I've got to work through the Chief and his
staff."
When I first came over, General Gribble gave me several items of guidance. One was, he
said, "Sam, we don't have a very good reputation, Corpswide, for our environmental actions,
so I want you to work on that, but I'm not so sure we can really change everybody's
perceptions. We ought to work on trying to do better and we ought to do it right and then
maybe it'll eventually come out right."
Second, he said, "All we seem to talk about out of this office is the civil works part. I'd really
like to see more awareness on the part of the Army of those things we engineers bring to the
table. So, although you're seeing everything defined about our bad image being civil works, I
came out of the Army Staff research and development to this job. You have just been through
the district engineer selection process in MILPERCEN. We know that not everybody in the
Army understands us or appreciates us, so I want you to work on that line--that's one reason
I selected you." He continued, "Pretty soon we're going to have to address what's going on, I
mean the flaps that come up. You're going to have to figure out your time between solving
flaps and getting us better."
So, I approached my new position from that standpoint. I dialogued with people in the field
and developed a public affairs action plan that had a lot of parts. Part of that plan was to get
our capabilities better aligned and focused on the right kind of things. That meant more
capability in our office in the Forrestal Building.
We had some folks who were wedded to their old ways. We didn't have anybody who could
write anything concerning contributions to the Army, that aspect. In fact, we did speech
writing for the Chief of Engineers, and I did the Army part of the speeches thereafter. We
were at a place where the Civil Works Director, General Morris, had become so unhappy
with the Public Affairs Office that he had set up his own communications presentations
branch office. There was almost a nonspeaking relationship between that office and the
Public Affairs Office that I inherited.
At the same time, out in the field, we had offices that had some really capable people, but
they could never get in to see their district or division engineer with their ideas. They weren't
part of the team when the division engineer got his team together. In many respects these
people had good ideas and couldn't get the ear of the commander. Many others were
comfortable doing just what they had been doing and didn't want to have any more
responsibility or visibility because that meant more work to be done.
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