Ex-Powell aide urges appointees to trust employees

A former government insider turned critic of the Bush administration said Monday that distrust in career employees is a major source of dysfunction in today's government.

Retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, a longtime Republican who served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell for three years, made a splash last fall when he made a speech at the New America Foundation that was highly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Wilkerson, who is now teaching at the College of William and Mary, told a crowd of federal executives at the Excellence in Government conference, a two-day event co-sponsored by Government Executive, that political appointees must trust the bureaucracy to succeed.

"The temporary is almost always the enemy of the sustained and vice versa," Wilkerson said. But there are two models for political leadership of agencies, he said. These are the Baker model, which he named after George H.W. Bush's secretary of state, James Baker, and the Powell model, named for Wilkerson's former boss.

In the Baker model, Wilkerson said, "The principal comes in and basically ignores" career employees. "He brings in a few political appointees with him, selects a few civil service personnel to complete his team and then charges out and ignores the building."

Powell's model, on the other hand, "brings a management team essentially organized to empower the department."

He cited Powell's tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- Wilkerson worked for Powell in that capacity as well -- during which he removed an elite group of about 20 special staff officers to transfer responsibility to the full staff, as an example of success stemming from faith in the bureaucracy.

"They had never been trusted to that extent," Wilkerson said. "Lieutenant colonels came in to brief the chairman. Within six months, the Joint staff was running on all four cylinders."

Wilkerson lauded Powell's management style despite their current rift, which formed after both left government and Wilkerson began airing his anti-Bush views. He told the civil servants in the audience that they can have an impact in spite of what he called poor political leadership.

"You have to do your mission," Wilkerson said. "You are keeping the country running while the politicos do their thing."

Wilkerson also encouraged the audience members to speak up if they encounter legal or national security wrongdoings, and said he kept a resignation letter in his desk at the State Department for months, in part because of wrongdoings he perceived in the treatment of detainees.

"Face the fact that you might be rationalizing … in order to protect yourself," Wilkerson said. "I still wake up at night trying to figure out why I didn't submit that resignation letter."