For me, predicting a dramatic mail volume decline seemed to be a no brainer.  But there were many smart people who had seen predictions of mail volume decline before and they remembered that the earlier forecasts had all been proven to be wrong. I had a good deal of analytic support.  Focusing on the coming loss of First Class Business Mail (businesses sending one another bills and making payments) alone explained a good deal of of the pending loss of volume.

But the opposition view was strenuously held.  There were a significant number of individuals and businesses who had a lot at stake .  Private companies in the mailing industry who had to defend their businesses to Wall Street every 90 days clearly did not want to hear about the predictions of decline.

Postmaster General Bill Henderson wanted me to find a more persuasive basis for anchoring the Strategic Plan.  He directed me to go up to Harvard to meet with one of our advisors, Professor Anthony Oettinger, the well known Harvard Professor of Computer Science.

I laid out my case.  ”OK,” Professor Oettinger responded, “But how do you know that this is going to happen? It’s the future.”

I recognized that he had a point and we put three alternative scenarios into the Strategic Plan.  The graphic to the left was presented to a conference of Mailers in 2009 by the former Chief Financial Officer and me.  The Red line represents our baseline.  The Green line was the worst case.  We left the optimistic case off of this chart when we presented it in 2009 because it seemed to be a distraction that increasing mail volume could have ever seemed to be a reasonable forecast.  The actual mail volume (Blue and Purple) showed that we had been pretty close in 2000.  We were correctly forecasting the decline.  (I still don’t believe that this was rocket science given what was happening in the world in 2000.)  The purple line shows that following the financial crisis, mail volume collapsed.

One of the problems with putting scenarios into the forecast was that everyone could find their favorite theory and it didn’t force anyone to act differently.  Acceptance of the baseline prediction of mail volume decline would have allowed the USPS to construct a far softer landing than it is struggling with today and to see transformation of the institution as much more of an imperative.

But i don’t think that those who continued to have faith in growth were Neanderthals.  What the curve that represents “actual” volume (Blue) shows is that after 9/11 there was a decline that was associated with the recession.   The recovery restored volume but it left open the question of whether to interpret the growth curve as a short term reprieve or sustaining a long term growth trend.  The pattern is clear today.  But to have understood the strategic framework sooner  would have been valuable and important to the future of the institution.

What’s important about understanding that these stages interact with one another is to recognize that they each need to be considered at the same time and adjusted accordingly.  For example, the scope of the innovation that you will need will depend on how much time there is.

Likewise, you cannot wait until you are sure that there will be a decline in the traditional business.  You have to anticipate the decline and begin to invest in the innovation program while there is time.

In the interactive marketplace there is a need to see the entire panorama and the whole journey – the ascent, the second path and the turning point.

What’s more, the increasing activism of the constituencies of the traditional organization will ensure that the traditional sequential way of looking at a process like transformation will no longer be representative of the way in which organizations interact and consider the elements of transformation.

One of the things that we found at the USPS during years of intense change in the business environment, was that it’s exceptionally difficult to know whether you have alignment.  People won’t tell you.  It’s not that there is intentional deception.  Often leaders of businesses and functional leaders want to be loyal and they will say that they are aligned with the boss’s policy direction.

But there is value in probing to know what they understand.  If you don’t know whether you are aligned, you will inevitably communicate this to the enterprise whether by intention or not.  The trajectory of your strategic journey will be skewed.

Alignment 

Getting on the Same Page 

One way to explore the degree of alignment is one that we used with the senior leadership team.  Our analysis turned on the “radar chart” above.  What we did to start off involved choosing the salient features of the workplace environment.  (Here we show five key features.)

We developed a brief presentation that explored each of the variables – the regulatory environment, technology, the workplace and degree of change in human capital matters, changes in the marketplace, and changes involving the competition.

By interviewing each of the members of the team (see the red and blue lines in the graphic used as illustratioins) we were able to compare the ways in which different members of the team had a different profile from one another or an average of their estimates might agree with outside “experts”.  Creating a graphic like this one provides a way to communicate the areas of alignment back to the team.

What comes next may be the most difficult question of all.   Even when its clear that there are differences among parts of the leadership team and even when its clear that the differences involve specific questions such as estimating the speed with which technology change is forecast to impact the future of the enterprise, the second question is why?  Did the leaders learn the right lessons about the market?  Do they understand the implications of new technology?  Highlighting alignment is only a first step on the transformational path but its an important one.

In part, this is because organizations in both the public and private sectors are being confronted by imperatives to change that have been driven by technology, financial crises, resource constraints and new conditions that are forcing them to address issues such as,

• How do we change the services we deliver to our customers?
• How should we change the business model of our organization? and
• How do we change while retaining our essential character?

My work with leaders who are facing these questions reveals that there are seven basic elements that are present in every successful transformation – elements that are illustrated by fundamental questions that must be answered:

• Why change?
• Who is going to be involved in planning, executing and sustaining the transformation?
• When to launch?
• Where is the change going to lead?
• How should the journey be structured to achieve creative balance?
• …To be imlementated dynamically? and
• …To sustain the gain?

Addressing these seven questions will be aided by building your own playbook and using it to create a gameplan that fits your context . Your playbook needs to address:

The two preliminaries:

• Why change?
• Who leads?  and

The five elements of transformation:

• Timing
• Innovation
• Strategy
• Implementation, and
• Sustainability

This is the framework.  Effective transformation strategy will address each of these classic themes.

What makes this interesting today is that we have reached one of the great inflection points in history when new voices and new players have been empowered by technology change and are making the dynamics of transformation come alive.  Looking at the framework, some old hands will be tempted to say that they have seen it before.  After all, the essential elements of transformation have a timeless quality.  But historically, future directions were defined top down.  Since Ancient Greece, strategy has been the work of generals.  This this is in the process of changing.

If the moral of this story were “adapt to technology” there would be little news here.  This has been a common theme for nearly 20 years since the Internet became a mainstream communications channel.  But today, interactive technology and transparent enterprise are writing new rules for future leaders forcing traditional leadership to adjust to the force of the new players.  The dynamics of organizations in every sector of the economy are being changed.

Some will need to react and democratize their enterprise as quickly as possible; others have more time to choose their future path.  But everyone needs to understand the implications of the forces that are democratizing transformation.

* Preparing to teach seven classes on Transformational Leadership at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, it became valuable to create a brief summary of the framework for the discussion.  Some of the discussion here has appeared in different forms in this blog and in the Working Papers on this Transformation Strategy site. Much of it is new.

In discussions of implementation, one of the most common themes in the networked age is the recognition of the growing need for collaboration and the importance of building skills and capabilities to support it. In part this stems from the recognition that initiatives and change programs cross boundaries far more easily in an Internet age than might ever have been the case before. What’s more, providing service to customers and addressing today’s customer needs are functions more likely to demand access to data that is housed in what might have traditionally been completely different silos (e.g. Finance and Customer Service). The need for collaborative methods to address and improve customer experience is also a common conversation and the need to become more skillful in building  effective teams is a phrase that is often repeated.

A second theme that is equally common in discussions with leading edge management thinkers is the quest for ever higher performance one of the most popular business books of the past decade has focused on execution and on the techniques that famous leaders of high-performing companies and agencies have evolved in order to manage performance effectively.

Finally, the third theme that is also common is the discussion of the need for agility in implementing strategy.  The Monitor group talks about the need for dynamic implementation of strategies in changing markets. Here where the focus is on transformation and where changing markets and conditions are a gift, this concept of dynamic implementation is likely to be particularly important.

These three concepts of collaboration, performance improvement and agility are all important to effective implementation and they are also so common that they can be a cliché.  So what is important about noting often discussed best practices like these?

What’s interesting is that the virtues of those who are best at collaboration and performance improvement are often not the same as the virtues that interfuse an agile organization.

In a recent white paper  the Monitor group discussed his views for tactical solutions that address the issues that organizations encounter when they need to sustain their effectiveness in implementing strategy even as conditions change.

Collaboration, effective team building and performance improvement each require consistency. Establishing a framework and sustaining it overtime is a critical aspect of aligning the organization’s focus on clear goals and measuring progress toward achieving them.  Building trust that goals will be established fairly and that performance will be assessed in a consistent manner and measured consistently and results will be used in a responsible manner all take time and trust building.

But in a time of changing conditions, where adaptation needs to take place to allow for the formulation of new strategies and where new measures may need to be used, consistency is often the first thing that is sacrificed. Dynamic implementation is, by its nature, a process of change. Skilled practitioners are likely to emphasize the importance of effective communications because they have experience with the problems of coordination and apparent inconsistencies that arise in trying to adapt to changing circumstances in a pressured high-performance environment.

What’s important to recognize is that collaboration, performance management, and agility are often working against one another. To be able to adapt to changing market conditions and modified plans will require a vigorous program of updating the expectations and the accounting for performance. To modify the tools without disrupting their effectiveness is likely to be deceptively challenging. Often the statistics that are used to measure performance depend upon longitudinal analysis of historical trends. Or, to take a different example, the ability to conduct effective analysis depends upon the capacity of the organization to select measures that can be cascaded into the organization. But today performance is going to be measured across organizational boundaries and sometimes across national boundaries.   When the numbers are changed, they must be adjusted at each level. The risk is that this process of updating the accounting and modifying the statistics in a responsible manner is one that is easily subject to misunderstanding.  What its likely to mean in the end is that there will be a need for a new concept in strategy for high performing organizations – agile data integrity.  In a very practical sense there will be a need for data infrastructures that can balance many things that often create tensions -  security, consistency, integrity and market agility.

The tension that underlies this observation – that the collaborative, high performing enterprise and the agile enterprise may be pulling in different directions – becomes highly meaningful in the presence of increasing stakeholder activism.  Ultimately its a process that will force attention to be given to the issues of the rights of constituencies to define the future.

One of the sins of the modern 24/7 news culture is hypocracy.  These Google checks are going to be important because they will impact the effectiveness of the leader.  In an age in which everyone can have a blog, every employee is Woodward or Bernstein.  For the CEO to present a false or at least hypocritical statement  is likely to ignite the appetite of the blogosphere and lead to more trouble down the road.

The implication of this modern phenomenon is unlikely to be comfortable for leaders.  But there is tangible value in candor.

One of the most famous examples of leaders who demonstrated his candor and his authenticity was seen in the well known Commencement Speech that Steve Jobs delivered at Stamford University in 2005.  He started by explaining that he was going to tell 3 stories and keep it simple.

His first story would have been embarrassing in any celebration of graduation.  He started by explaining how he came to be a college drop out.  For an extended period after he dropped out of Reed College, he floated, staying there at Reed and auditing courses.  “And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on”

His advice was to follow your gut, to do what you love and have faith that this process will bring you to something valuable. You may not know at first why something is valuable to you .

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

Having begun by explaining that he had been an orphan and a college drop out, he went on to describe how he created Apple and then was fired.  Having to leave Apple, he said, was like love lost.

“I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

His third story about himself had to do with hearing that he had been diagnosed with cancer.  Recognizing that we are all on a path to the end of our lives, he said, offers the blessing of confirming how little time we have.  “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Indeed, for Steve Jobs, recognizing his mortality confirmed his intense personal focus.

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

What worked for Steve may not work for everyone.  But there is no question that his case is notable for its candor.

As a professor at Harvard Business School, Christiansen was interested in the question why do successful managers, those who do all the right things and listen to their customers, run into trouble and often move from success to failure in changing markets?

What his research showed was that listening to your customers may be a virtue in normal times but in competitive technology driven industries it often leads to the fallacy of continuing to improve a traditional product by investing in sustaining technologies while competitors may be investing in nurturing disruptive alternatives. His insights lead the iconic technology pioneer and head of Intel, Andrew Grove to radically alter his direction. The head of GE wrote about disrupting himself.

Christiansen had a message for the leaders of big, complex organizations like Intel and GE at a time when technology was forcing them to rethink their fundamental directions. His strategies offered a pathway to those who saw the need for innovation and investing in disruptive futures but who faced all of the normal resistance from traditionalists.

But interestingly, his second message a decade later that everyone needed to think about how they were going to measure their lives came at an equally powerful time. Just as technology revolution stress tested the best management teams in the late 90s, a decade later, the world had begun to recognize that organizations had ceased to maintain their patterns of lifetime employment and individuals were far less loyal to careers in one enterprise – even the seeming lifetime employment of places like the Postal Service began to seem far less secure.

If success would not be defined by ascending the corporate, or law firm ladder, Individuals needed to revisit the traditional ways in which success would be measured. Christensen was speaking to many who were beginning to explore the existential uncertainties of such a marketplace.

Christianson teaches a course on innovation at the Harvard business school. In his last class, after studying models of successful entrepreneurs, he turns the focus around and asks the class to consider how they will measure themselves. In his articles, he tells several poignant personal stories about how his values and his professional and personal life have interacted at key points in his life.

He tells the story of having to miss the last basketball game of the tournament well he was a Rhodes Scholar and playing basketball at Oxford. He had made a personal commitment to his faith and the game had been scheduled for a Sunday. By refusing to play on Sunday he was clearly letting his team down and yet to this day he believes that his decision not to play (his conscience was eased when the team won without him) was one of the most important of his life. He had committed to the importance of standing by principle.

Later, as a Professor and increasingly famous business writer, he was invited by Andrew Grove to come and present his thinking at Intel. Grove said:

Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

Christiansen writes

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

This experience that grew from standing by his principles was a defining moment for him in which he came to recognize that his personal capacity to have an impact in the world would be through teaching and influencing others to through his insights bringing them to act on their own.

What has become interesting to me in studying change settings has been the importance of clarity in the leadership message. The new media has created a 360 degree perspective on leaders. Apart from the way that Christensen’s question touches on the core insecurities of changing times, it also serves as a challenge to future leaders to define their personal leadership statement and to sustain it in the face of challenge.

And then Willie Geist interviewed the “911 Surfer” and his wife.  This man has such an incredible story to tell but his survivor’s guilt has apparently kept him from telling it for 11 years.  He was in the second building to fall, going down the stairs as fast as he could and he had reached the 22^nd floor when the building fell.  Somehow, miraculously, his slab of concrete was supported as the building collapsed around him and while he may have fallen 14 stories or more he opened his eyes and had survived.

I was back in 2001.  That day, like 2012, was beautiful and clear.  I was watching the Pentagon from across the river when it exploded in a fireball.  I remember my knees went weak and adrenaline shot through me.  The federal government was shut down and mid morning, while driving home I was caught in traffic.  On an incongruously beautiful Pennsylvania Avenue at 12^th street I was stopped dead with my roof open listening to NPR.  A traffic cop and I struck up a conversation as I sat there next to him.  “You could try going up there to the White House or maybe down there to the FBI”, he said.  There were rumors on the radio of car bombs and speculation about whether there was a fourth plane.  Neither path seemed to be particularly appealing.

The 2012 conference call ended and MSNBC was running NBC’s coverage from the morning of 911.  Listening to Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw and Matt Lauer try and figure out what was going on was remarkable.  First, they learned the story one piece at a time while they were live on the air.  But they made remarkably few comments that they should regret today.

Even more dramatic was the way in which their conversation reflected the innocence of an isolated America.  “This is the first time since the war of 1812 or what we did to ourselves in the Civil War, that Americans have ever seen any damage from an attack like this on our soil”, Tom Brokaw said as the television showed the smoke from the collapsing tower literally white out all of lower Manhattan.  “This is so unreal that it’s like scenes from a movie” Katie Couric said.

What struck me in watching it play out again was how much time there was if you had known what was going to happen.  The 911 surfer had stayed in the building for 80 minutes after the first attack.  There was no reason to think that the building would not be safe, he said, and he and a few colleagues were told to stay.

Reading the 911 Report several years later I was struck in particular with how many clues there had been to the planning and the practice runs of the terrorists and how many Americans had to believe that we were safe from the clearly articulated threats.  There were dozens of people who could have stopped the events that played out that morning of 911.  But there was no concern with what everyone would have agreed was possible, but unthinkable.

There are these moments when it becomes clear that after this, everything changes.  In the US we have been so fortunate since 2001 that the plots have been foiled and there have been no new everts.  Human nature will push these matters to the back.  But there is no question that 9/11 was a strategic inflection point on many dimensions.

The problem is not that democracy has flaws and is limited in it’s ability to curb factional excess.  This has been well known and debated since the Federalist Papers.  My concern has not been with the limitations of democracy as much as with the things that executives do to correct for them.  Our democracy has been built on the notion that leadership in time of crisis can make up for democracy’s inefficiencies.  There are many examples of great men and women who have stepped forward to lead in spite of the challenges that were put in their way by democratic process and even the Constitution.  Few would debate that Lincoln and FDR should be ranked in among our greatest leaders.  Yet in each case there have been major questions about whether they had violated Constitutional principle.

In our time, the energy crises of the seventies offered examples of massive economic disruptions that had to be answered.  In the energy crisis I saw both the best and the worst sides of executive action.   I had seen Frank Zarb and Bill Simon and the White Houses of Nixon, Ford and Carter acting to save important economic interests by moving far outside of the box.

Before I ever reached the challenges of the energy crisis, I had seen the difficulties that democratic process, our administrative laws and our modern political culture impose on leaders as they try to step up to address national priorities.  I also had been able to take some measure of individuals who I thought were great leaders and therefore I had a sense for the ability of individuals to prevail in spite of the constraints.  I had seen the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and I knew that the capacity of leaders was severely limited by our customary political process. I believed in Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus and in the integrity of their personal leadership. I had seen Watergate.  But it was in the energy crisis that I began to appreciate leadership and its limitations.

In 1973 I had been working at the Office of Management and Budget on energy and environmental policy when the price of oil jumped overnight from $4.75 ($22.89 inflation adjusted) a barrel to $9.35 a barrel ($40.84 today).  Even more shocking to Americans was the way that the energy crisis began.  When the Yom Kippur War broke out in October 1973, the oil producing nations who had formed OPEC only a few years earlier acted to use an oil embargo to seek to influence the outcome of the war.  The fact that a cartel of oil producing nations could successfully withhold supplies and virtually cripple parts of the U.S., Japanese and European economies, was a surprise of epic proportions.

The ferocity of the impact of the first oil embargo is still surprising years later.  The government was thrown into wild activity trying to respond to its many effects.  I was there when it happened.  In January of 1994, on a few hours warning, I flew to New York City with my boss, Frank Zarb, to go to yet another crisis meeting.  In the car I asked where we were going and I learned that we were headed for City Hall to meet the new Mayor, Abraham Beam.  The diminutive Mayor had been in office for 11 days when Frank and I reached New York to find a City Hall in transition. The drapes on the high windows in the Mayor’s office had left with the previous Administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay.

We were puzzled at first by the Mayor’s urgent request for a meeting.  The conversation took a rambling course through the landscape of energy policy – converting power plants to coal, changing daylight savings to make it permanent.  And then, the Mayor blurted out that he had no gasoline and did we think we could help?

My clearest memory of that moment is of looking up at the high bare windows of the Mayor’s office. To my horror, I saw the first flakes of snow beginning to fall.  I understood why we had been asked to come to New York.

Frank Zarb jumped up and went to a phone on the side of the Mayor’s office and set about making calls, redirecting supplies on their way to New York Harbor.  Our intervention no doubt caused disruptive ripples in the oil supply chain that were litigated for years.  But New York got the gasoline to plow their streets.  I had stood there in the Mayor’s office and watched a classic case of executive leadership in crisis.  I’m not sure it could be done today.

Today, more than 3 decades later, there are again signs of a major energy storm.  The U.S. continues to depend on oil supplies that come from Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria and many other places where our relationships are troubled.   But today there is vastly more demand for supplies as China and other developing economies enter world energy markets.  And there may be less supply.  Indeed, there are many respected analysts of energy policy who argue today that we have reached the point of peak oil supply.

Frank Zarb’s decisive action remains imprinted on my mind as the image of executive action of the old school.  Today the image of the decisive CEO pulling levers is a rare exception to a more common pattern of activist constituencies and negotiated compromises.  Political partisanship and division are far more typical than leaders who believe in the principle of the common – in self interest rightly understood - are rare.

The central problem for me, is not only to be able to create a democratic process that can resolve the tensions between the proclivities of the marketplace with a concern for equity but also to create mechanisms that will guide leaders even when they feel they must lead rather than react.

Faith in markets only took me so far because it often conflicted with values that I had grown up with. If my Quaker education during the Civil Rights movement and my experience at Yale reading Bobby Kennedy’s hearings on the problems of the cities were not enough to have created a healthy skepticism, certainly my experience in Washington during the ‘70s had left me feeling that however effective markets might be that there needed to be a balancing concern with equity. Unfortunately, this was more commonly missing in the dozens of policy debates over energy and the environment that had consumed my life for the decade plus since I had left Harvard Business School.

Just as Steve jobs later wrote that you often can’t see the way in which the dots connect at the time, I realized in those Reagan years that it was an experience that I had in Russia that had shaped my belief that the tension between efficacy and equity needed to be moderated so that the hard choices that are ultimately made will be guided by a palpable sense that they were legitimate.

In the fall of 1974 I had traveled to Russia on a Ford foundation trip studying education and for someone who was still trying to make sense of American democracy and the white heat of the political debacle that had erupted during Watergate, Russia was a sobering contrast.

We stood in the lobby of the Rossoya Hotel waiting for our transportation to take us from Red Square to an office in the Education Ministry and I absentmindedly glanced at the display of pictures next to the door. Suddenly I realized I was looking at tanks in Portugal proclaiming a celebration of communist victory. Nearby a similar exhibit celebrated events in Chile. You would not have seen such a display at the Hilton Hotel in Washington. In fact, I don’t think that until that moment I had quite appreciated that these people were serious.

That afternoon at the USA Institute we sat among fluent English speaking Russian hosts who looked as though they were Canadians who had been dressed by Brooks Brothers. At the end of our discussion of education one of the hosts said,

“Do you mind if we ask you about Watergate?”

My colleagues could not have been happier. One of the members of the delegation, a distinguished civil rights lawyer from Washington, gave a speech about the victory of constitutional law and explained that this was how Americans looked at the political scandal.

The Russian hosts could not contain themselves. They disagreed and they offered an alternative explanation. They pointed to the composition of the Nixon Cabinet in the first administration and then the changes that took place after 1972. These were matters that I knew well. Working on the White House staff in 1973 I had helped do the work to create post-election team. I was struck by the fact that the Russians practiced their own form of Kremlinology in reverse in studying the US. They pointed out that in the first administration the cabinet had consisted of individuals with political constituencies – Volpe, Romney, Hickle, Richardson, Rumsfeld and so forth but in the second administration they had been replaced by technocrats Lynn, Breniger, etc. the faceless bureaucrats who could presumably be better controlled by the White House. This was a fatal mistake, the Russians believed, and they felt that above all this showed why Nixon had no political support to draw upon when it was most needed.

I did not think that the Russians got it right. In the Nixon White House, the concern with the Pentagon papers, the plumbers unit that was created to make sure that the leaks didn’t continue and the anxiety over what the Russians would do with the secrets in the Pentagon papers drove a great deal of what happened next.

There was indeed frustration with the way that Democracy introduced barriers to action – whether they were high minded (Cooper-Church debates over war powers) or routine fights over appropriations – but there were frustrations with Executive Branch inefficiencies too. The great challenge of the times was to rationalize the explosive expansion of government that had followed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society vision. Making improvements in performance of federal programs was  a centerpiece of the Nixon Administration’s goals.  The debate shifted from policy to practice.

So I didn’t think the shift was a political coup.  Watergate was a big, unwieldy, complex side show. I had been far closer to the center of the fire than anyone would have wanted to be. Testifying before the Ervin Committee, the press was bemused with the fact that I was such a non-story. My contribution was to add some details that were essential for the Committee and later the Special Prosecutor in building a larger picture. In the Justice Department and its uneasy after-action report on what the FBI had known and when, there was a natural wish that the scandal could have resolved by itself and there might never have been a need for a special prosecutor (or an evaluation of performance.)  Some wanted to blame the witnesses for being missed. But Watergate was bigger than all of us.

To me, the famous quote from the David Frost debates “it’s okay if the president says it is” was behind a great deal of the foolish political behavior in the 72 campaign and in the White House. Sadly, there were quite a number of people who believed that even though what they were doing was wrong in the real world, that they were not working in the real world. They were working for the White House where there were special rules like Ian Flemming novels. They were operating by some other code that had no basis in criminal law and many lives were ruined as a consequence.

But most of all, the contrast between the simplistic formulations that Watergate was an intentional assault on the Constitution or the Russian belief that factionalism explained behavior spoke volumes. What the Russians were missing I thought was a reading of the Federalist papers. They didn’t understand how important the structure of the American system was not only in the view of Madison but in 200 years of experience in providing checks on excess.