________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
serving the folks in the Ohio Valley. Anyway, I got my hand smacked, but I accepted the
bottle of Scotch he had bet me. [Laughter]
Q:
Were there other areas of that relationship of the headquarters with division headquarters?
A:
I think part of that we talked about before. You have to recognize the headquarters at that
time was deeply involved, especially toward the last, in changing policy developments with
the secretary's office. There were lots of times where they were trying to sort out things, not
knowing how they would sort. So, there were time delays because of that.
Frankly, I think, in some cases, some of the things we had to send over to the secretary's
office, he would sit on because if he would sit on them, then the Corps wasn't spending
money, and that was a goal of the administration--to hold down federal expenditures. If he
could keep it in suspension, then action wasn't being taken and so one can't necessarily fault
the Director of Civil Works for not prosecuting these things. He had the problem of trying to
work out the issues and the process.
Now, where that befell us was, again, my comments that I thought the secretary did not
respect the Congress and their staffs who really knew how the process worked and knew they
had to keep the pressure on the office of the secretary for answers. They always knew where
projects were because they'd call and say, "Where is this?" The answer would be, "Well, we
sent it to USACE on such and such a date." Then they'd call headquarters, and they'd say,
"Yes, that's correct, and we sent it on to the secretary's office on such and such a date."
So, then they'd call over to the secretary and put the pressure on getting it out. Then it might
come back down, back up and back down, as we all sorted out the policy kinds of things.
I think my comment that it took too long is really answered in those two kinds of things--the
fact that it just seemed too often that we had to call up and get answers that should have
already been developed and sent back.
On the military side of the house we were just getting into that, and on the resources side I
know that we felt that we had convinced Drake Wilson and his folks, and they'd tell us they
agreed on those numbers. But then it would go over to the resource manager, Colonel Gilkey,
who would want to work it, but he didn't have time to work it.
So, it would take a while to get him to verify, validate, or disagree with what we already
thought we had through the Director of Military Programs. If he validated it, that was fine
and we got it, eventually. If he disagreed, then we'd have to go through the whole process
again, back to Drake Wilson, get those two together to come to grips with each other as to
the right answer.
I think those were the sense of my comments.
Q:
How would we relate another comment that you made about, "We need a higher headquarters
that acts like a higher headquarters?" I mean, does that pull in some different kinds of things
as well?
321
Previous Page
