________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
whether he testified as the ACE or for General Wray on the execution side. It works on the
basis that you need to build up any kind of relationship with congressmen and their staffs--
and there were an awful lot of meetings, you know, where General Read would go over one-
on-one with staffers and talk with them about things or call on a congressman to work things
out in addition to testifying. General Read had working relationships with the staffers and the
committee chairmen, so he was the right person to carry over the cards.
Q:
What about--this is a little different issue--within the secretariat? What about relations, for
example, with the Assistant Secretary for Installations and Logistics at that point? You know,
in the interim it has been an issue, and so what was it like at the time you were there?
A:
I guess Paul Johnson must have been there.
Q:
Okay.
A:
Same crew. They were there and we interacted with them; I don't sense with quite the same
degree of specificity that goes on now. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps I just wasn't involved
with that, and perhaps General Read, in carrying something to the Hill, touched all those
bases. Later, when I was in Europe as DCSENGR, I knew many things that the ACE was
telling me that he had to get secretariat approval on this. I had the feeling that we went to the
secretary a lot more than we used to--maybe we always did.
Certainly the environment wasn't a big issue thing then, and Dee Walker's position didn't
exist, so when that came about there was a whole new arena for contact between the two
offices.
Q:
Okay. One of the things that, in talking with General Hatch--I've been interviewing him
over the last year--we talked about the level of participation, direct participation by the Chief
on the Select Committee. You referred earlier to, I think, the ACE at times attending that
meeting. General Hatch was making a point, which was something that General Heiberg also
observed when he was Chief about the importance of the Chief actually attending those
meetings.
Do you have any comments on that from your period of time? Did it seem like it was fairly
routine for the Chief not to attend, or what? I had a sense that General Heiberg had identified
this as something that he wished he had done more of. He thought it was a more important
thing to have happened and it didn't.
A:
Yes. I think General Hatch has done extremely well in carving out the time to make sure he's
present there when the Army's senior leadership gets together, either the General Policy
Group or Select Committee. When the Army wants to get its collective leadership together to
advise the Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Army, it's an important time. I think that it is
an important time for the Chief of Engineers to be present so that he's seen as a contributing
member of the Army and not just "that civil works guy." Hank Hatch has done it very well.
Others may have too, but I had more visibility of how Hank Hatch did it.
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