Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
emphasis on the newsletter and those kinds of things, and a more aggressive approach to
dealing with external media sources. Is this something that also reflects back to your
experience at this time?
A:
Absolutely. I really have already commented on it. It's not necessarily a reflection that they in
the Public Affairs Office should not emphasize the command information component; what I
was suggesting was that they overemphasized their newsletters. My feeling was that in an
organization that's still austerely staffed, where there were only two or three people in the
Public Affairs Office, with one of them spending almost full time keeping the newsletter up
to date--that, I said, was not putting our effort where it should be. A newsletter is easy to do,
it's fun to do, and as long as you fill the time with something easy and fun you might not ever
get around to doing the more important things.
That comment in Louisville was a reflection of my feeling that way, having been a division
engineer since my Public Affairs days, having watched it and having tried to convert my
folks. Newsletters were all right as long as they did everything else that was needed.
Now, I wasn't against command information; what I was saying was, "If your newsletter
informs the command about policies and functions and things that are happening and things
they need to know, okay; spend your effort on that, but not on new babies, retirements, and
the list of things that you find in most of them."
In fact, my whole emphasis was that they, the public affairs professionals, ought to be
focusing on programs for making their external audiences understand what the Corps was all
about. That takes a lot more work because you've got to get out of the office and you've got
to go visit editorial offices and papers in various places.
Back then it seemed like we were dividing up things 50 percent external and 50 percent
internal, and the Corps' focus ought to be 25 percent internal and 75 percent external.
Further, our division and district commanders know how to communicate motivation to their
subordinates; you don't need a person in Public Affairs cranking stuff out, especially when
it's easy. Therefore, I felt we ought to extend ourselves in getting higher caliber people who
could do more than just crank out a newsletter--that would use their full talents better.
So, that was it. What I did was tell my views to a lot of people in the audience that day who
were persons who really took pride in their newsletters and who spent their efforts on it--and
they knew just exactly what I was talking about. It wasn't that we had bad newsletters, but in
a zero sum game can you afford to have people that are so proud of the newsletter, they
spend every moment of their day getting it even better when the rest of the mission goes
awry? So, there was very considerable debate that spilled over into the halls.
Q:
That was probably part of the intent, right?
It got people's attention.
A:
Sure did.
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