The Mitchell department has not yet shown that it can work with Congress, however. Its crime package, late in delivery after early announcements of general outlines, is only now emerging from the Senate. (See p. 214.) The House, where committee leaders are more hostile to some of the proposals, has hardly begun to consider it. (See p. 109.)

Observers in both Congress and the Justice Department say legislative liaison is not one of this Administration's strengths, and attribute the department's poor record with Congress during the first session to this shortcoming. Much of the legislative program has support in Congress, however—particularly the crime bills-and the record is expected to improve.

But the department's most pressing problem is neither the President nor Congress. It is the segment of its constituency that believes with the Ripon Society that Attorney General Mitchell "has allowed political strategy to shape law enforcement strategy."

Justly or not, critics of the Mitchell department say it has lost its commitment to "the cause" of civil rights enforcement, and has set aside the proper concern for the rights of the individual in conflict with the criminal justice system.

Much criticism of the department is itself political, but Justice must protect its image as well as perform properly. Former Attorney General Clark underscored the importance of confidence in the administration of justice in his introduction to the department's annual report for 1968:

"The Department of Justice with steady purpose must move effectively toward equal justice for all, unperturbed by the emotions surrounding it. To those who suffer most, it must manifest the purpose of our laws as equal justice. To those who fear most, it must give confidence in its strength, its fairness and its effectiveness."

[Reprinted by permission, National Journal, vol. 5, No. 16, Apr. 21, 1973] JUSTICE REPORT/SENATE UNIT DRAFTS PROPOSAL TO REDUCE PATRONAGE IN STAFFING OF U.S. ATTORNEYS' OFFICES

(By Richard E. Cohen)

Legislation has been drafted in the Senate that would transfer much of the staffing of U.S. attorneys' offices to a professional prosecuting service, akin to the State Department's foreign service.

Under current law, the President appoints the 95 U.S. attorneys, each of whom then appoints a number of assistant U.S. attorneys to prosecute the cases in the federal court for which he has jurisdiction. As a result, there is considerable staff turnover in the offices, particularly when there is a change in the party controlling the Presidency.

Impetus for the bill was provided by a survey of U.S. district court judges conducted last year by the staff of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. The survey reported a sizable majority of the judges unhappy with the "(political) insecurity and the lack of experience” among incumbent U.S. attorneys and their assistants.

While details of the bill and the decision on whether and when to introduce it are not yet final, Senate and Justice Department aides said that Sen. John L. McClellan, D-Ark., the subcommittee chairman, requested the drafting of the legislation and that he is reviewing a prepared draft.

Proposed pool

Under one version of the proposed bill, within five years at least 50 per cent of all assistant U.S. attorneys would be drawn from a pool of prosecutors who would have passed an examination and been appointed to the prosecutors' service by a national review board. Within 10 years, at least 50 per cent of all U.S. attorneys would be selected from the same pool. However, all the U.S. attorneys would continue to be appointed by the President who, presumably, would make the decision on which ones, if any, of the U.S. attorneys would not have to meet the national standards.

It is contemplated that the lawyers in the prosecutors' service, like the members of the foreign service, occasionally would be reassigned to other U.S. attorneys' offices or to the Justice Department in Washington.

Divided allegiance

Under current practice, U.S. attorneys feel varying degrees of allegiance to the department because of their appointment by the President. A Justice Department aide, who did not want to be identified, said: "Many U.S. attorneys are independent of the department; some are attuned to us. But closer cooperation would be a healthy thing."

A congressional aide familiar with the situation said:

"The U.S. attorney often interprets his Presidential appointment as giving him independence from the Justice Department. The result is that there is considerable resentment going both ways.

Decline in convictions

Since there has been no recent comprehensive study of the staffing and operations of U.S. attorneys' offices, the survey by the Senate criminal laws subcommittee staff amounts to the best available discussion of the matter. Although no decision has been made on whether to hold hearings, the judges' comments could serve as the starting point for the type of broad changes now being considered. (See accompanying box.)

The staff survey was precipitated, in part, by a report of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts that Sen. McClellan requested to help determine the impact of the proposed laws and recommended sentences being considered as a part of the new criminal code. (For background, see Vol. 5, No. 15, p. 535.)

In a letter, McClellan wrote:

"The report suggests a constantly diminishing ability on the part of the United States to secure convictions for the 17 most frequently prosecuted federal crimes. From 1967 to 1971, prosecutions for those offenses increased 65 per cent, while the percentage of convictions dropped from 85 per cent to 68 per cent."

Some of the judges suggested other possible explanations:

There is "increased incentive to litigate" as a result of the 1964 Criminal Justice Act (78 Stat 552), which established procedures to provide indigents with adequate legal counsel.

Recent Supreme Court decisions suppressing the use of improperly obtained evidence have "impeded (the search for truth) to a degree which may be unwarranted."

Proposed solution

To help reverse the decline in convictions, several judges recommended the establishment of a professional prosecutors' service.

[Reprinted by permission, National Journal, vol. 5, No. 28, July 14, 1973]

JUSTICE REPORT/RICHARDSON MOVES TO ASSERT HIS CONTROL OF WATERGATESHAKEN JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

(By Richard E. Cohen)

Elliot L. Richardson, taking charge as Attorney General, is attempting to impart a sense of management and organization to a Justice Department he says has been oblivious to the need for more efficient operation.

Richardson, who spent the past four years attempting to tidy up three other departments-State, HEW and Defense-faces a task that many persons associated with Justice feel is long overdue.

Summoned by President Richard M .Nixon following the April 30 resignation of former Attorney General (1972X73) Richard G. Kleindienst, Richardson took over a department wracked by charges of misfeasance and nonfeasance in connection with the Watergate scandal and other political controversies of the past year.

His mission is to restore public confidence in the nation's law enforcement processes, as well as to bolster the confidence and morale of the staff in its own work.

Initial steps: While Richardson speaks cautiously of his plans, he leaves little doubt that many department staffers will see jarring changes in their operational procedures and lines of communications in the weeks to come.

In fewer than two months on the job, Richardson has developed some farreaching ideas for improving Justice Department performance, especially in the over-all planning and coordination of the war against crime.

During an interview in which he sketched the broad outlines of his proposed reorganization, Richardson said, "I do not believe that the department can be effectively managed by someone who does not immerse himself into the substantive problems of the department."

In a press conference the day before he took office, Richardson pledged that he would deal with "a kind of sleaziness (that) has infected the ways in which things have been done, and (which) has touched agencies that have been concerned with law and law enforcement. . . ."

In a subsequent National Journal interview, Richardson said, "I don't propose to chop off heads in order to create an impression that I'm doing something about sleaziness. The hard, practical question is what to do to get rid of it."

Senate confirmation: Richardson was sworn in as Attorney General May 25, following a nearly month-long confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which focused primarily on the selection and degree of independence of the special prosecutor for the Watergate investigation. The Senate confirmed Richardson, 82-3, after he designated Archibald Cox, former U.S. solicitor general (1961-65) as the Watergate prosecutor and assured the Judiciary Committee that Cox would have full operational independence. (Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., Mike Gravel, D-Alaska, and Harold E. Hughes, D-Iowa, voted against confirming Richardson.)

Reform: Richardson moved quickly to assert the renowned management skills he previously exercised as undersecretary of State (1969-70), Secretary of HEW (1970-73) and Secretary of Defense (January-May 1973). (For a report on Richardson's plan to overhaul the HEW Department, see Vol. 5, No. 1, p. 1.)

His first step was to perform radical surgery on the department's organizational chart. Where previously each of the 22 separate divisions and bureaus reported separately and with little coordination to the single deputy attorney general, Richardson is redrawing the lines of authority to connect them directly with the Attorney General's office. (See charts p. 1012-13 of this issue.)

And he took along his top staff aides from HEW and Defense to assist him in devising and placing his mark on the Justice Department. Other Attorneys General, both Democratic and Republican, in recent years have had no in-office professional support of this kind. They have depended on staff scattered through the department.

With the early completion of this task, Richardson will focus on the over-all management of the department's functions, to provide planning, evaluating and goal-setting capabilities that he said the department lacks.

"Two components need to be added to the department, as a whole, as well as throughout the divisions," he said. "First, we need the ability to plan in order to avoid the tendency to reaction rather than 'proaction,' and an indispensable tool of planning is the capacity to evaluate the effectiveness of what you are doing now."

Morale: Richardson is directing a department that, in the words of recently retired Solicitor General (1967-73) Erwin N. Griswold, is "suffering from an impairment of morale and a general slowdown resulting from the new surprises revealed almost each day this spring." Among these events, whose total impact probably is unprecedented in the department's history, are:

The federal indictment of former Attorney General (1969X72) John N. Mitchell in connection with the campaign contribution case involving Robert L. Vesco;

A series of four directors in 15 months for the FBI, the department's largst and best-known agency (one of whom, L. Patrick Gray III, resigned because of alleged indiscretions in the Watergate case);

The appointment, as the result of congressional pressure, of Special Prosecutor Cox and his staff and the later resignation of the three principal prosecutors, who had worked on the case for a year;

Charges in the press and by witnesses before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities that Assistant Attorney General (Criminal

Division) Henry E. Petersen did not vigorously and fairly supervise the initial Watergate investigation;

The Senate testimony of ex-Presidential Counsel John W. Dean III listing, among other things, White House efforts to place in the White House traditional Justice Depatrment operations and decisionmaking functions, and the resulting "low morale," in Dean's words;

Criticism of the department by the General Accounting Office for not prosecuting alleged violations of the 1972 Federal Election Campaign Act (86 Stat 3);

The Supreme Court's 8X0 rejection last year of the department's strongly argued claim that it could wiretap "domestic subversives" without seeking prior court approval. (Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, who helped formulate the argument while at the department, abstained.)

One result of this series of events, according to recently resigned Assistant Attorney General (Office of Legal Counsel) Roger C. Cramton, has been the creation of a public climate suspicious of the department with the result that "some major suits have been lost by the government that might have been won pre-Watergate."

Former Solicitor General Griswold said: "The effect of these events will give Richardson an opportunity to do whatever is necessary to make everything sound, and he will be able to operate independently of the White House."

Richardson's experience gives him a strong background in the federal legal system-law clerk (1948-49) to Justice Felix Frankfurter, U.S. attorney in Massachusetts (1951-61) and Massachusetts Attorney General (1967–69).

The circumstances surrounding his arrival at Justice indicate how illprepared the department was for Richardson.

First, when he entered his office with his own carry-over staff (four policy assistants, his personal secretary and two other clerks) he had to expropriate office space from Griswold (his former law professor at Harvard) and install new telephone lines so that all the staff could talk with each other and the boss.

Second, a staff plan to establish a committee to study reorganization of the department, which had been studied by key department officials for several months, was deemed to be so obvious in need as to be "trite" by Richard G. Darman, a Richardson special assistant who is working on management problems.

The plan called for the establishment of a high-level committee to recommend how to:

Elevate the management function to a place of power and influence in the department;

Create a top structure with capability for planning, coherence and continuity throughout the department;

Reduce the span of control of the deputy attorney general, who, the report said, has been the "chief executive officer" of the department but unable to give it any direction.

Restructuring: Richardson's first significant organizational step was to reduce considerably the role of the deputy attorney general, now Joseph T. Sneed, former dean of the Duke Law School. In the past, the deputy has been the central management figure in the department.

Sneed's sole official responsibility will be to supervise the seven legal divisions and the U.S. attorneys. The other bureaus and agencies will report directly to the Attorney General (see chart, p. 1013).

Richardson said he and Sneed "have a good understanding of our own; I feel we should go along with this development of an evolving relationship as I did with Jack Veneman (John G. Veneman, undersecretary of HEW, 1969-73) and Clements (William P. Clements Jr., deputy secretary of Defense)."

Sneed's reaction to the change was: "My function is to serve the Department of Justice in whatever way is thought to be most effective in the mind of the Attorney General." He had no comment on press reports that he would be leaving the department.

Sneed is the highest ranking of several new officials President Nixon appointed to the Justice Department during the Administration's general reorganization following Mr. Nixon's reelection last fall. He met the President at a White House reception for Mr. Nixon's Duke Law School classmates, which Sneed was attending as the school's dean.

33-875-74- -32

To help him manage the department, Richardson plans to name Jonathan Moore to a proposed position of associate attorney general. Moore served in a similar "chief of staff" position with Richardson at other departments.

Richardson's other principal aides at HEW and Defense have been named to the following staff positions at Justice: J. T. Smith II, executive assistant; Richard Darman, special assistant; Richard E. Mastrangelo, associate deputy attorney general. Also, Sol Lindenbaum, who has served in an administrative capacity for each Attorney General since Ramsey Clark (1967-69), will head the executive secretariat that will be responsible for directing communications between Richardson and the rest of the department.

Planning: However, Richardson said he regards these organization-chart changes as less significant than the imposition of new operational techniques on the department. In an interview, he said: "More important than how responsibilities will be split up is the development of capabilities necessary to manage the department."

The planning and evaluation components will be implemented not only in the Attorney General's office, but throughout the department, Richardson said. "I have always believed that the planning capability at the top of the agency needs to be matched by corresponding capabilities within the operating units." Richardson said that the department, both as a whole and in its parts, now lacks a mechanism with broad planning and evaluation capabilities, as well as a means to provide suitable "backdrop assistance for management problems across agency lines."

New unit: While the final decisions as to details have not yet been made, Richardson is setting up a planning unit to serve the entire department. Richardson's staff is developing the planning unit in cooperation with Edward W. Scott Jr., director of the office of management programs in the Administrative Division.

When it is in operation, the Richardson scheme would envision more systematic coordination of the following units or functions:

An office of policy and planning development, which would be a vehicle for implementing the Administration's "management by objective" policy within the department. (For background on MBO, see Vol. 5, No. 22, p. 783.)

A bureau of criminal statistics, which would serve a function in crime analogous to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in economics; (The bureau would collect not only the traditional "uniform crime reports" of the FBI but also would provide nationwide data on topics such as rate of convictions, victim outcome, recidivism, rehabilitation and narcotics addiction.)

An institute of criminal justice, the foundation for which could be a similar institute in LEAA (see Vol. 5, No. 13, p. 452), which would determine trends in crime and attempt to discover means to reduce crime;

An office of management programs, which would provide "trouble shooting" on a project-by-project basis;

A policy review staff to coordinate these functions.

Richardson described the justification for the proposed plan this way: "You look at the field of criminal justice, and you see us (the federal government) pumping millions of dollars into the states (through LEAA) for more criminal justice planning, and they in turn are passing out all this money to municipal and regional entities, and yet it doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone that if comprehensive criminal justice planning is worth doing on the state level, then it's worth doing on the federal level."

He added that once the federal government has some idea on how to collect data and provide planning and evaluation for the criminal justice system, “the states will be glad to get any ideas we can give them."

Richardson said, half seriously, that his aide Darman is now the entire counterpart of the Office of Planning and Evaluation at HEW, which has several hundred staffers.

Coordination: Implicit in his plan, he said, is an attempt, which has not been made in the past, "to assure the maximum complementarity between what is done in the investigative processes to what is done in pretrial procedures, probation, sentencing and parole.

"The department embraces all of the components of the federal criminal justice system except the courts . . . so if it's possible to use all our agencies to plan effective administration of criminal justice and thereby improve the system in terms of effectiveness and results, then we should be able to make the federal system into a model for the states."