The Right Man for the Job

Everyone knows the famous Peter Principle – in any hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence, which is a subset of the general truth that anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications, until it fails, at which point everyone stands around flabbergasted, stunned that what had always worked suddenly doesn’t work. How did that happen?

 

In terms of every employee, you do your job well and others, seeing that, promote you to a position of more authority and more importance to the organization, where, if you do well, you are promoted again, to an even more critical position, and so on. This can go one for years. It ends when you reach a position where you are rather hopeless and screw up regularly – and then no one is talking to you and your office has a nice view, but there’s less and less to do, but the pay and benefits are great, so you do a lot of pretending and try not to do too much damage. You retire on the job, as they say. Or you make big, bone-headed decisions that ruin everything, now that you’re in charge.

 

There’s more about this here, with the mention of the obvious corollary, that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties” and that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.”

 

This is great, cynical fun – the Peter Principle explains modern life. In any organization, eventually, every important job is held by someone who just cannot do the job, and the only thing that keeps the whole enterprise from collapsing is fresh blood – new low-level hires, and the janitorial and support services people. We’ve all seen it. This might explain what has happened with General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, or the banks that have failed or have been eaten up by others, or the phone company or your cable provider – actually, any organization will do. You smile ruefully – it had to happen.

 

Organizations try to deal with this, and sometimes it’s not pretty. Maybe you had to be there, in the early eighties here in Los Angeles, working in Human Resources for a giant aerospace corporation, specifically in Training and Organizational Development. Things were booming – everyone was buying the hyper-expensive communications satellites, one right after the other, there were the even more critical secret government programs, and payloads to build for other folks’ birds, and all the stuff for the ground stations to get out the door. Managing the growth was challenging – the people in Employment were always trying to find someone who knew all about hardening microchips to shield them from cosmic rays and electromagnetic bursts, or about celestial mechanics and orbital decay, or some other odd area of expertise. That was hard enough, but for those of us in Training, the problem was all the new departments that were being formed, groups of eager young engineers and scientists, in need of supervision. And what always happened was that upper management selected the brightest and most talented of the lot, promoted them to supervisor, and sent them off to us, for Management Training.

 

That was a bit of a farce – eight or ten pleasant, young and extraordinarily intelligent fellows (there were few women) would arrive for the workshops fairly eager to learn what they could about what they’d now have to do, even if they did call the whole thing “charm school.”

 

Maybe it was. These guys knew amazing things, and now none of that mattered very much. They had to learn how to motivate and discipline employees, without being an asshole or doing anything illegal, and about all the ins-and-outs of performance appraisals and compensation, and about things like sexual harassment and constructive dismissal and labor law, and how to listen patiently and settle disputes, petty or not, and all the crap that comes with managing people. For people brilliant in fields that generally require no social skills whatsoever, this was a stretch. It seldom worked out well. Now and then one of them turned into a brilliant manager, but that had little to do with the workshops. Now and then you find a real Mensch in the most unlikely places. Most of them just resented that all they knew – their vast technical expertise – was now only useful to tell when one of the people doing the work they once did was feeding them bullshit. So this was the Peter Principle in action, and the generally futile attempt to counter it.

 

Fast forward to Monday, January 5, and Barrack Obama’s big surprise – there had been a rumor the month before that Obama might keep Michael Hayden on at the CIA, running the place, but after a false start with John Brennan, Obama surprised everyone and said Leon Panetta is getting the job:

 

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday.

 

Mr. Panetta has a reputation in Washington as a competent manager with strong background in budget issues, but has little hands-on intelligence experience. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior Al Qaeda leaders around the globe, but one that has been buffeted since the Sept. 11 attacks by leadership changes and morale problems.

 

Given his background, Mr. Panetta is a somewhat unusual choice to lead the C.I.A., an agency that has been unwelcoming to previous directors perceived as outsiders, such as Stansfield M. Turner and John M. Deutch. But his selection points up the difficulty Mr. Obama had in finding a C.I.A. director with no connection to controversial counterterrorism programs of the Bush era.

 

Yep, he has little hands-on intelligence experience, so this is not a promotion from within. That’s one way to counter the Peter Principle, the only danger being that thing about one of the people doing the work feeding him bullshit. Managers coming in from other fields always face that problem.

 

But note the last point, about Obama having a hard time promoting from within, as Obama doesn’t agree with the “controversial counterterrorism programs of the Bush era.”

 

Steve Benen comments:

 

Pretty much every official from within the CIA in recent years has been tainted in some way by Bush administration policies. Obama needed someone capable who had nothing to do with the last eight years, and Panetta fit the bill. At a minimum, he had the highest of security clearances during his tenure as White House chief of staff, and no doubt spent a lot of time in intelligence briefings and in the situation room and he was a member of the Iraq Study Group, so it’s not as if Panetta is going to the CIA with no background.

 

Maybe he has just enough background – an operating bullshit detector. That can overcome any initial disrespect and resentment. And it seems that former CIA Director John Deutch told the New York Times that “two of the agency’s most successful directors, John McCone and George H. W. Bush, had little or no intelligence experience when they took over at CIA.”

 

And we also learn that Congresswoman Jane Harman, the Democrat from out here – her district is the South Bay, where all the aerospace companies are – TRW, Raytheon, Boeing (formerly Hughes Space and Communications) – was considered. She is the former senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee – but she was ruled out because of her early support for Bush’s warrantless-search program. Well, she’s big on electronics – her husband founded Harman Kardon. But you want someone with fresh eyes.

 

And we will get those. You see, Panetta and his wife founded the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy in 1998 – they’re the Institute’s directors – and that’s up at California State University, Monterey Bay, which Panetta helped get started, as he was born in Monterey, and someone had to do something with the Fort Ord property. Anyway, in March he wrote an op-ed piece for the Monterey Herald containing this line – “Torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive. And yet, the president is using fear to trump the law.”

 

Earlier he had said the same in the Washington Monthly:

 

According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified in some circumstances. How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear.

 

Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what’s wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock?

 

The simple answer is the rule of law. Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. It was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that. This new nation would recognize that every individual has an inherent right to personal dignity, to justice, to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

 

So his position is fairly clear:

 

We have preached these values to the world. We have made clear that there are certain lines Americans will not cross because we respect the dignity of every human being. That pledge was written into the oath of office given to every president, “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” It’s what is supposed to make our leaders different from every tyrant, dictator, or despot. We are sworn to govern by the rule of law, not by brute force.

 

We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.

 

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

 

No, that’s not fairly clear – that’s definitive. And that seems to be Obama’s position too – Obama said it over and over again in the campaign. It seems he wasn’t kidding. Panetta will run the CIA.

 

And see Moira Whelan here, on expertise of a different sort that Panetta would bring to the CIA:

 

He knows how brains work inside the West Wing because he was there as White House Chief of Staff, and therefore will know how to provide information that gets attention in the way it should. Personally, I think this will give the intelligence community a big advantage in terms of getting their point of view across in the Oval Office. Panetta will know how to be subtle, but also how to sound alarm bells as needed.

 

Even some conservatives are okay with this. At the National Review Online, of all places, see Michael Ledeen:

 

I always liked Panetta. He served in the Army and is openly proud of it. He seems to be a good lawyer (oxymoronic though it may seem). He’s a good manager. And he’s going to watch Obama’s back at a place that’s full of stilettos and a track record for attempted presidential assassination second to none. But Italians know all about political assassination; you may remember Julius Caesar. Or Aldo Moro. The self-proclaimed cognoscenti will deride his lack of “spycraft,” and he’s never worked in the intel bureaucracy or, for that matter, in foreign policy or national security. But he’s been chief of staff, which involved all that stuff. I think it’s a smart move.

 

On the other hand, Joe Klein comments here, saying this smells of desperation:

 

Leon Panetta is a terrific guy, a fine public servant – one of those people who reek of sanity and good judgment – but he doesn’t have much, if any, experience in spook world. …

 

Given the insidious nature of the terrorist threat, accurate intelligence is more important than ever – and the precise use of CIA’s kinetic capabilities is one of the few tools, short of war, that the government has to deal with the people who mean to do us harm. There is a fine line between excess and success in the intelligence business, and Panetta will have to locate and walk it. It may be the most difficult bureaucratic job in the government.

 

That is the standard line – promote from within and disregard the Peter Principle – but Andrew Sullivan isn’t buying it:

 

Others, like Goldberg and York, peddle the line that no one who has operated in the “real world” of intelligence could agree with Obama’s attempt to move the US past the torture era.

 

No: a huge majority of intelligence professionals agree with Obama on effective interrogation. But after eight years of a CIA tainted with torture and presidentially-sanctioned lawlessness, drawing a bright line under the recent past is critical.

 

That’s why the Panetta pick is inspired. The more I think about it, the more that seems true. This is change we can believe in. And in this necessarily secret area, public trust is vital. For the first time in a long dark patch, we will regain it.

 

Well, you could find some super-spook and send him to “charm school” – but this seems better.

 

One of the senators from out here, Dianne Feinstein, disagrees and is upset – because she wasn’t consulted about Panetta and had instructed the president-elect that he had to choose an “intelligence professional.” She’s a big gun Democrat, and she’s miffed. He didn’t follow instructions.

 

But see Digby here:

 

Well, excuse me. When did DiFi get a veto on cabinet appointments?

 

The fact is that DiFi is actually implicated in the torture regime and should just shut up on this. Panetta is a royal pain in the ass in many ways, but he’s not a torture apologist, he’s not implicated in it and he’s reputed to be a good manager. I see no reason why the position has to be chosen from among the CIA ranks just because Porter Goss was a miserable failure or the CIA rank and file is having a hissy.

 

Welcome to Washington, Barack. First your good friend Bill Richardson forgets to be forthcoming about his little problems and now DiFi goes public in a fit of pique. Wrangling the egomaniacal Democrats and the defensive bureaucracy is always one of the biggest challenges for any poor Dem who actually wins the presidency. Good luck.

 

Well, JUST ABOVE SUNSET has no use for Dianne Feinstein either.

 

As for our other senator, see Mother Jones here:

 

And there’s this: in 1990, then-Representative Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced legislation that would have required the president to seek approval from the congressional intelligence committees before mounting most covert operations. (Under this legislation, the president could still stage secret ops to save American lives or rescue American hostages without asking permission from the committees.) The measure failed miserably. Only 70 members voted for it, but one was Panetta. Will that vote come up during his confirmation hearings? One wonders if Panetta still supports the idea of greater congressional oversight of CIA clandestine activities.

 

A CIA director who has denounced torture, advocated intelligence cuts, and backed greater congressional control of covert operations – that would be… different.

 

This appointment certainly has the potential to spark opposition from inside and outside the agency. But if Panetta manages to make it to Langley without much fuss, that would indeed signal real change in Washington.

 

Yep, someone would have finally done something about the Peter Principle.