Richardson stressed that the need for "better coordination and communications, and a higher degree of consistency in federal law enforcement policy" also applies to the U.S. attorneys' offices.

Beyond the Justice Department, Richardson's ability to deal with crime and related problems will be enhanced by the projected establishment of Cabinetlevel committees shaping Administration policy under the direction of Presidential counselor Melvin R. Laird. Richardson will chair the committees on crime prevention, drug abuse and civil rights. Current plans call for the head staff assistant of each of these committees to report directly to Richardson.

STRUCTURE

Of the 49,000 employees of the Justice Department, approximately 20,000 serve in an investigative capacity: another 3,200 are attorneys. But, said Cramton, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, there is so little attention given to long-range solutions that "the Department of Justice might be more properly called 'the department of government litigation.''

Cramton, now dean of the Corneell Law School, said, "Many of the divisions of the department act as though they were separate independent agencies.' 'As examples, he cited the FBI, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), of the department act as though they were separate independent agencies." As the new Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA-formerly Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA).

Organization: The department's existing organizational structure (see chart, p. 1012) lists the 22 divisions of the department, each theoretically reporting to the Attorney General and deputy attorney general.

Law office Of these divisions, seven litigating divisions (tax, civil, lands, antitrust, criminal, civil rights, narcotics), the solicitor general (who coordinates the department's appearances in the federal courts of appeal and the Supreme Court) and the Office of Legal Counsel (which gives "legal advice" to the Attorney General) account for about 3,000 employees.

A traditional view of the Attorney General's role with regard to these offices, as stated by Richard K. Burke, who retires July 20 as deputy assistant attorney general (Criminal Division), is that "the Attorney General is the senior partner of this tremendous law firm whose client is the government of the United States."

Richardson disagreed: "The Justice Department is a law office and is concerned with the administration of justice so it can't help to have some relationship with the law," he said. "But, in any event, I do not believe the department can be effectively managed by someone who does not immerse himself into the substantive administrative problems of the department."

U.S. attorneys-Most of the cases actually argued for the government are argued by the U.S. attorneys and their assistants.

Each nominee for U.S. attorney is reviewed by the Attorney General and is expected, by statute (28 USC 547), to "prosecute or defend, for the government, all civil action, suits or proceedings in which the United States is concerned."

However, James R. Thompson Jr., U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois, said: "We make our decisions entirely on our own. The Department of Justice should not be a monolith; it should respond to the needs of the local communities, as determined by the U.S. attorney."

Thompson, who has made his Chicago office into one of the most active U.S. attorney offices in the nation, said that in his three years in office he has annually determined the key issues-civil rights and pollution in the first year, political corruption in the second year and narcotics in the third year.

He said that the department's principal role in the priority-setting process has been to permit him to expand his staff from 23 to 72. "Having built up our resources in each area, we then go out on our own," he said.

Former Solicitor General Griswold agreed with the importance of giving "local people considerable input into management of the department's affairs, even though this may not be desirable from a management point of view. A considerable measure of independence makes the U.S. attorney's job attractive." Ralph E. Erickson, former deputy attorney general (1972-73), said that some of the U.S. attorneys operate their offices as a "imni-Department of Justice." He said this is "undesirable when it leads to inconsistency of policies, as has happened in a few cases."

Erickson, one of several top Justice Department officials whose resignations were accepted by President Nixon after the November election, added that "because the U.S. attorneys are the guts of the department, had planned to have more meetings with them." (For a report on criticism of the method of selecting the U.S. attorneys, see Vol. 5, No. 16, p. 584.)

Management-Besides those parts of the department that are principally involved in litigation, there are several agencies and bureaus whose principal function is basically foreign to lawyers. An example is the Bureau of Prisons, which manages the federal correctional system with its 28 major facilities and 23,000 inmates.

Normal A. Carlson, director of the Bureau of Prisons since 1970, said: "We are an autonomous bureau in a sense. Day-to-day decisionmaking is done at the bureau. We turn to the department for over-all policy and direction, but there is no significant difference from one Attorney General to another."

Carlson said that the bureau maintains its own contacts with members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. As an example, he said "Jim Meeker (James G. Meeker, staff director of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on National Penitentiaries), spends considerable time working with us."

A more heralded example of bureau independence from the department is the FBI. (For background, see Vol. 5, No. 27, p. 988.) The bureau's investigators and agents account for approximately 42 per cent of the department's funds, exclusive of LEAA, yet, said acting Assistant Attorney General (Administrative Division) Glen E. Pommerening:

"J. Edgar Hoover built an organization in which he asked for and was given considerable independence of action, and he maintained this independent status of the department for 40 years. As a result, the Administrative Division doesn't have much input to the FBI.”

Besides the problem of sparse communication between the Attorney General's office and the bureaus, there often is less-than-complete coordination among the constituent elements of the department.

As an example, one former high department official, who did not want to be identified, said he once called a meeting with the heads of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Board of Immigration Appeals, unaware of the fact that the two had not spoken to each other for several years

Attorney General's role-Donald E. Santarelli, who until his March appointment as LEAA administrator served as one of the department's chief planners, said that "in the past, the department has been, to a large extent, unmanaged.” He gave two reasons:

"There is no 'executive' function to the department. It is like a law office responding to the caseload and statutory requirements; for the most part, it is only reacting to external stimuli.

"Attorneys General have for the most part been lawyers from non-management background. They are not trained in executing or skilled in a structured, orderly routine and delegation of powers, known as management."

Santarelli said that he thinks Richardson will change this cycle "because he is more concerned with the pursuit of justice than being just a lawyer."

Richardson agreed that "there has been no management existing in the A.G.'s office. The obvious explanation is that previous Attorneys General came to the department from their previous experience as lawyers and they superimposed on their legal abilities some contribution to a President's campaign. The combination of those factors, in varying proportion, has not included experience in the administration of a large agency. The result is that they have tended to deal with the department as if it were a big law office and, of course, this function is only a fraction of its total responsibility."

However, former Attorney General Kleindienst vigorously disagreed with those who argue that the Attorney General ought to have a management background:

"The Attorney General should be a political appointment," Kleindienst said. "The President sets policies of broad nature that he campaigns on. There are some naive people who think that the Attorney General can be removed from the political processes. The administration of justice must reflect the broad political forces."

Kleindienst added that the role of the department is "limited to enforcing the law." He specifically cited former Attorney General Ramsey Clark as "a

compassionate young man, but not a prosecutor; he should have been a caseworker at HEW."

(Clark, who was not available for comment, wrote in the June 4, 1973, issue of The Nation: "Political people have brought political judgments to the Department of Justice under President Nixon. In crime control, civil rights enforcement and 1st Amendment areas, among others, the department took political actions.")

Deputy attorney general-Another aspect of department administration lies in the position of the deputy attorney general. While the department head in the past had no professional policy assistants on his staff, his deputy usually had a staff of more than 40, including the executive officers for the U.S. attorneys and U.S. marshals.

Prior to the Richardson takeover, the deputy's office also included the Office of Criminal Justice (formerly headed by Santarelli), which was designed to provide long-range criminal justice planning, as well as an associate deputy attorney general for legislation who coordinated the department's congressional lobbying. (This position was held by John Dean from early 1969 until June 1970, when he was appointed counsel to the President).

Former Deputy Attorney General Erickson said his concern was that "planning needed much more attention. I wasn't satisfied with the machinery." He added that while the Office of Criminal Justice did some planning, "it tended to evolve around specific immediate projects, and thus the over-all administration of criminal justice had to take a back seat."

Richardson sharply criticized the office's performance. "I hope to convert it into a criminal justice planning agency for the entire department," he said. "If that's been its theoretical purpose for the past decade, the stress should be on 'theoretical.' "

Erickson said the deputy's office "could very well be changed so that there would be one deputy for enforcement and one for litigation." Other individuals interviewed voiced similar sentiments, some indicating there should be as many as five deputy attorneys general to provide more top management control.

But while some of those interviewed echoed Erickson's view that the deputy attorney general should have the principal administrative responsibilities in the department "because the A.G. has so many other functions relating to other departments and the President as the government's chief legal officer," others said there was no valid reason to continue the distinction between the Attorney General and the deputy.

Cramton, the department's former legal counsel, said consideration ought to be given to merging the offices of the Attorney General, the deputy, the Solicitor General and the legal counsel to form a planning office, so that the department could take "a broad view of the administration of the court system."

He added: "We're woefully ignorant of the operations of the court system, and need a social service capability to find out what's going on." However, Cramton said, "Rooney (John J. Rooney, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Justice, Commerce, and the Judiciary) has not been prepared to come up with the money which is needed."

Data control-Symptomatic of the department's lack of planning capability is its inability to maintain even relatively primitive data on the cases its attorneys are prosecuting.

In 1953, the department established an automated docket and reporting system to keep track of its workload. This was later upgraded to the so-called "JIMS" (justice information management system) to receive data from the U.S. attorneys.

However, a recent report of the Office of Management Programs in the Administrative Division said that, with one exception, "no person interviewed felt that the system produced information worthy of reliance." Estimates of error varied from 30 per cent to 45 per cent. The report said data received from U.S. attorneys is from one to three months out of date.

Leo M. Pellerzi, former assistant attorney general (Administrative Division, 1968-73), said the department had "no accounting of the amount of manpower each case took.

"The department headquarters doesn't even have the concept of managing the U.S. attorneys as a field establishment.

"This is not a question of controlling the ideas or suggesting a course of action for a U.S. attorney; what we are talking about is giving him the administrative support, information, and policy guidance he needs to do his job effectively, and insulate him from local pressures."

Earlier reform efforts: During the past decade, there have been some relatively feeble efforts to attempt to come to grips with the department's lack of over-all management. The problem was highlighted as far back as 1952 when a private consultant (Griffenhagen and Associates) concluded in a study of the department that there was:

No top-level management attention;

Inadequate staff assistance to top management;

No supervision and coordination of the litigating offices.

Andretta-Ernest C. Friesen Jr., former assistant attorney general (Administrative Division, 1966-68), said that a principal reason for the lack of management was "the close and effective relationship" that his predecessor of 20 years, Salvador A. Andretta, had with Rooney's appropriations subcommittee.

Other former and present department employees said the Andretta-Rooney relationship resulted in a particularly disorderly situation in the department when Hoover and other bureau heads rebelled against Andretta's budgetmaking policy, with the result that many divisions and bureaus went their separate ways and worked out their budget informally with Rooney.

Clark-When Ramsey Clark succeeded Nicholas deB. Katzenbach as Attorney General in 1967, he told associates one of his prime objectives was to make the department operate better. At the same time, the Bureau of the Budget was attempting to implement its "PPB" (planning, programming, budget) concept across the government. (For a report on PPB and its successor, see Vol. 5, No. 22, p. 788.)

Hugh Nugent, who was Clark's principal assistant for planning, said this program "created an awful shock at the department. While two or three division heads used it as an opportunity to reform, many, such as the FBI, went through superficial compliance but were constantly subverting us on the Hill." Nugent said Rooney's subcommittee never appropriated any money for the PPB system.

"As a result, the Attorney General had no management capacity even if he wanted it," Nugent said.

With the replacement of Andretta with Friesen in 1966, Clark attempted to reorganize the budget along 11 program lines (civil rights, internal security, crime, corrections, law enforcement assistance, drug abuse, immigration and naturalization, government representation, judiciary support, antitrust and general support).

The objective Nugent said, was to include under each program the agencies involved in that area. The result would be that the Attorney General could look at a problem by subject area, rather than along organizational lines. "Although it did help us to better identify the issues, and to allocate resources and manpower within the divisions, the effect was minimal," Nugent said.

Mitchell, Kleindienst-While Mitchell was Attorney General, Kleindienst was deputy attorney general and the operational chief of the department.

In an interview, Kleindienst said that as deputy he kept in close personal contact with the principal bureau and division heads, holding hour-long policy discussions on a daily rotating basis with each individual, as well as weekly luncheon sessions with a group including the assistant attorneys general and his own key staff members. He emphasized that these meetings primarily were policy discussions and that he made no attempt to interfere with operations. When he succeeded Mitchell, he said, his pattern of operation remained virtually intact.

Kleindienst's top aides, including Santarelli, Dean and Wallace H. Johnson (later a Senate liaison for the White House, and now assistant attorney general for the Land and Natural Resources Division) provided assistance in department management, criminal justice planning and legislation. Kleindienst said the budget process in cooperation with the division and bureau heads was "key to our policy planning."

Asked about the need for more staff in the Attorney General's and deputy's offices, Kleindienst said he preferred to run the department through the assistant attorneys general, and to leave himself sufficient time to make

speeches across the country. "Opening himself to the public in order to talk about the department is an important role of the Attorney General," he said. White House involvement-Three men who served in top capacities under Kleindienst, each of whom recently left the department, said that during the last four years the White House persistently involved itself in Justice Department decisionmaking.

Former Solicitor General Griswold said, "There has been a considerable effort to make Justice Department decisions in the White House in this Administration which I and others attempted to resist."«

Another former high Justice official, who did not want to be named, said: "While I was at the department, it was difficult to determine how our policy was made because of the continual White House concern over the department and their effort to cover up Watergate. It wasn't even clear who was running our actions from the White House (former Presidential aides H.R.) Haldeman, (John D.) Ehrlichman, Dean, (Egil) Krogh (Jr.), the Domestic Council and so on."

David L. Norman, a career servant who became assistant attorney general (Civil Rights Division, 1971-73) and is now a judge of the D.C. Superior Court, said:

"There was high-level dissatisfaction by people at Justice with the White House. The problem was that White House staffers were more involved in our activities than in the past, and when there was disagreement, the White House staffer usually won."

OUTLOOK

In Elliot Richardson, the department has at the top a lawyer who relishes the art of management.

The upcoming months are likely to include operational changes unprecedented in the department's history. Richardson and his staff emphasize that the changes will be gradual, and that there is no sense of crisis.

But the Watergate scandal has shaken both the self-confidence and the public confidence in the Justice Department. The challenge of being Attorney General, which Richardson at first undertook reluctantly, is an impressive one-to turn the department away from the events of the past year, then redefine its goals and make it operate in an efficient manner in pursuit of the new goals.

Darman, Richardson's planning assistant, said, "The Justice Department may not be so big to administer as HEW or Defense, but it is perhaps a greater intellectual and policy planning challenge."

[Reprinted by permission, National Journal, vol. 5, No. 28, Dec. 1, 1973]

JUSTICE REPORT/U.S. ATTORNEYS PUSH WIDE-RANGING STUDY TO GAIN LARGER ROLE IN LAW ENFORCEMENT POLICY

(By Richard E. Cohen)

For individuals and businesses alike, the United States Attorneys represent the front line in federal law enforcement. In investigating and prosecuting political corruption, criminal conspiracy, environmental offenses and a host of other federal statutes, the U.S. Attorneys emerge, in the public eye, as the local enforcers of the federal law.

But many U.S. Attorneys have become increasingly restive about their role and, in particular, their relationship with the Justice Department. They believe that Justice does not consider adequately their views in determining federal law enforcement policy and case priorities.

Each of the 94 U.S. Attorneys is appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. Traditionally, the President seeks out and receives the recommendations of the key party officials of the state in which the U.S. Attorney is to be nominated. For many U.S. Attorneys, the position has been a short-term, often honorary appointment he holds prior to being appointed a federal judge, seeking other political office or pursuing a prosperous legal practice. As a result, many have been content to act as the government's barrister in routine cases, and to let Justice and the client agencies handle the more complex, important cases.