An ever-shrinking group of aging leaders regularly invokes the spirit of the Kennedy Administration. For most people, born after President Kennedy was assassinated, much of this must sound like the nostalgic reminiscences of people tied to the distant past. We are coming up on half a century since JFK was elected. It is all ancient history.
Americans under the age of 45 have lived their entire adult lives in an age of anti-government politics and worship of "the market" and the private sector. Dominant themes, especially since the so-called Reagan Revolution, have been government as the problem, government as socialism, the private sector can do it (whatever "it" is) better, and government officials as faceless bureaucrats. The results of this brilliantly executed public-information campaign are everywhere: collapsing infrastructure, the results of Katrina, our disintegrating health-care system, declining confidence in the safety of our food supply and medicines, huge deficits, widespread corruption and growing cynicism.
It is worth revisiting the Kennedy years to understand that it was not always thus. President Kennedy's message was one of public service as an honorable calling. The Peace Corps was probably the most glowing symbol of that call to service, but it extended to virtually all of the functions of government. While the "best and the brightest" today strive to be hedge fund managers and compete to see who can become the richest, in the Kennedy years and beyond, this group was attracted to public service. They believed that government and their service would help make America a better and more just country.
President Kennedy's inspiration coincided with the beginning of the management revolution and its extension to government. By the mid-1960s, most notably in New York City, public service and "management" were linked. It was initially an awkward marriage. Social service and other "human" services leaders and advocates saw management as the enemy of their efforts to help the poor and dispossessed. Quantifying things and holding people accountable for outcomes were considered to be fascistic tools designed to kill the spirits of helping professionals whose primary quality was that they cared. The bean counters were also interested in knowing what government was getting for its money, something that was always difficult to explain, especially if the answer was "not much."
Just as these services-management issues were getting sorted out, the country was entering the long cycle of anti-government reaction which is just coming to an end today. Public service was baloney. Idealists no longer needed apply, unless their idealism reflected the new religion of unfettered capitalism and they brought a good dose of hostility toward government to their public-sector roles. What made this doubly unfortunate was that automated information systems had become useful tools for managing the complex businesses and services of government. In reactionary hands, they would now be put to more perverse uses. For example, rather than assisting poor people in accessing the earned-income tax credit, these systems would be employed to make sure that any poor person cheating would be caught. Not a bad thing, but probably not worth expending 90 percent of all IRS investigative resources on.
So the concept of public service shriveled in conservative hands. President Reagan praised businessmen coming into his administration not for their service, but because they deigned to get their hands dirty in the public sector. Government service became a magnet for "ticket punchers," individuals who needed to get experience before moving to lucrative private-sector jobs in businesses that fed off the government. The absolute nadir was reached in the current Bush Administration, when extraordinary numbers of incompetents, parasites and crooks were joined by a cadre of young religious zealots. One of these, Monica Goodling — who rose to a position of great power based on sheer effort and right-wing Christian credentials — believed that she had taken an oath to George Bush rather than to the constitution of the United States. She was unaware of he parallels to the Third Reich.
The late Arthur Schlesinger pointed out the tendency for American politics to swing through 30 year cycles of liberalism and conservatism. As the 2006 elections and President Bush's disastrous approval ratings demonstrate, the current age of reaction has hit a wall. It is over. Much damage has been done, and it will take a long time to dig out of the multiple messes that the country finds itself in. One starting point will be to reinstate the honorable role of public service and to replace the image of the faceless bureaucrat with that of the dedicated public servant doing work that is far more important and rewarding than hedge fund manipulations or lobbying for the health-insurance industry.
Because its public sector is so large, the reinstatement of public service as a noble calling can have a huge positive impact in the Virgin Islands. Before the current administration, one has to go all the way back to Cyril King to find a leader who systematically encouraged the values of public and community service. There is a huge opportunity here to once again link idealism, managerial skill and information management and related tools that are available to us today. The clouds are lifting.
Editor's note: Frank Schneiger is the president of Human Services Management Institute, a management consulting firm that focuses on organizational change. Much of his current work is in the area of problems of execution and implementing rapid changes as responses to operational problems.
