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player ready...It has been so very long that even Mike Causey, who coined the term, cannot quite remember what he originally meant by “inside the Beltway.”
It was the mid-1960s and the 66-mile, circular stretch of road around the nation’s capital was opening. Causey, a young assistant to a Washington Post columnist, came with a photographer and was one of the first civilians to drive the entire route.
Causey was helping out on “The Federal Diary,” a very curious patch of space in the bowels of the paper’s metro news section. It was, and remains, devoted to the doings of the growing federal workforce and, thus, was of great interest to many outside the paper but, if truth be told, a low-prestige matter for many inside the paper.
“An editor had told me to keep my columns local and I coined the term `inside the Beltway,'” he said. “It’s sort of like `aloha.’ It means whatever you want it to.” For journalists, inside the Beltway stories are ones of scant interest outside.
Any definitional ambiguity aside, Causey does at times wish he had copyrighted the term.
Of course, if he had, he might have made a load of cash and been inclined to split what has, for nearly four decades, been a rare vantage point on how American taxpayers’ money is spent. Only now is he departing, after more than 11,000 bylines and having proven a marathon man of daily journalism, writing seven or eight columns a week by himself for 31 years and thus verging on Ann Landers-like indomitability.
The timing of Causey, 60, perhaps could not be better, and not just because he is, as if he were among the legions of 20-somethings, heading to a dot.com. It’s also because the visceral animus toward government workers again seems to be rising, with the latest nastiness involving a Texas congressman’s reference to the “jackbooted thugs” of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno who seized Elian Gonzalez from his temporary Miami home.
“I had lunch the other day with a `jackbooted thug,’ a.k.a. a retired federal law-enforcement officer,” he wrote last week. “He now works as a volunteer with disabled children. He could have made more in corporate security but said he decided to spend his retirement `giving something back.'”
“He’s a disgrace to thugs everywhere,” Causey wrote with succinct, Royko-esque sarcasm. He ended a dandy effort by regurgitating the words of the same congressman (“God bless our fallen heroes”) at a ceremony to commemorate the bravery of the two federal police officers murdered in 1998 when a gunman burst into the Capitol.
Even if most people at the paper didn’t see the column–“most of our metro reporters probably don’t even know who Causey is,” says a Post editor–it underscored a penchant to defend a much-maligned group of 2.6 million workers nationwide.
Indeed, any Causey reader has seen thousands of items underscoring workers’ achievements, not to mention loads of bread-and-butter information about benefit changes, seminars of potential interest and notable happenings, ranging from dismissals to dubious contracts, leaked by loyal readers.
And, no surprise, he has met scores of working stiffs and found that even his stereotypes have been smashed at times. For example, at the Office of Personnel Management, “which sounds like the dullest thing going,” Causey discovered a “brilliant manager was president of the Lone Ranger Club of America and an authority on old-time radio.”
Michael Barone, editor of the Almanac of American Politics and a pundit of conservative bent, recalled Friday his own 1982 arrival at The Post as an editorial writer. A colleague informed him, “You can write about all that national and international stuff, but Mike Causey is the guy who sells papers.”
Causey’s path to the paper was different than the middle-class, suburban, college-educated track that is typical these days for a generation of overeducated kids who tend to be Internet savvy and woefully lacking in street smarts. He was raised in Indiana, Kentucky and Mississippi as his divorced mom, a secretary, followed the job market and wound up with Causey here in 1945, as a Pentagon stenographer “to help win the war.”
They moved back to Kentucky, then Causey returned to attend George Washington and Americian Universities but never graduated. After a stint in the National Guard, he took a job as a messenger at the Post for “about a buck an hour.”
After serving in the Army Reserves, he was again at the Post, this time as a clerk, then a copy boy and, finally, an aide to Jerry Kluttz, author of the federal column and a star. After several different assignments, he was back with Kluttz and, after he retired, Causey was paired with a senior reporter, Willard Clopton, to do the column.
Nine months later, Clopton left to become a clinical psychologist (changing his name in what Causey is convinced was part of a midlife crisis). So, after seven years of involvement of some sort with the well-read feature, Causey had it all to himself.
The column has been in other sections, including a short time on the comics page (“Heck, I’d rather be there than on Page 1”) but mostly in the metro section. And, if there is anything that has been clear to Causey, it’s that federal workers are, well, just like the rest of us.
“People, no matter who they are, have to pay the rent. They have to get the kids’ teeth fixed. A husband or mother worries about health insurance. CIA agents, in the Sinai or Northern Ireland, doing life-threatening things, have called about their insurance.”
His self-image is of a journalist “telling the grunts what’s being done to them. Not just their pay, but everything.” The column has also let bosses know what’s going on in their own agencies; perhaps “an underling firing everybody while the boss thought they were just all leaving to write novels.”
When I asked about the increased belittling of federal workers, he proferred the sobering (if true) theory that our four best-known “government workers” are Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, dysfunctional mailman Cliff Clavin of “Cheers” and disliked Newman, the mailman on “Seinfeld.”
As he puts it, “Lewinsky was hardly a government worker, Tripp is, well, Tripp, and the other two don’t exist. Once upon a time, the best-known government worker was a GS-14 [civil service rank] who went to the moon, Neil Armstrong.”
As for general trends he has discerned, they include: the declining value placed on longevity and loyalty; changes in retirement plans’ portability, making moves to the private sector easier; and a penchant to contract out work to the private sector and not necessarily save money, even as several million contract workers have been added.
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People in Vice President Al Gore’s hometown of Carthage, Tenn., may cheer his citing the 370,000 workers eliminated during the Clinton years, but the number of contractors is booming while the public has been infused with a belief that government is inefficient and resistant to change.
“That may be the unkindest cut of all. It is either not true or, at best, half-true,” said Causey, chiding a destroy-the-village-to-save-it mentality.
What’s true for him is having written his final column on Friday, to appear Monday, and then a farewell party Tuesday at The Post (Yikes, are they too cheap to do something nice at a classy restaurant after all these years?).
He will then join PlanetGov, a “Web portal, or vortal, created specifically for current and former government employees,” according to the release they sent me. One group they will target is procurement officers. Causey, who unabashedly says he is exiting “for the money,” will do a similar column, five or six times a week and keep the same view about a much-derided slice of the workforce.
“I come away thinking that, by and large, these people are superb,” he said. “Most took a test to get their jobs, which is not standard anymore in the private sector. And there is a feeling with many of them that they are `serving,’ not just `working.'”
“If you want excitement, go into government,” said one of their most ardent chroniclers. “If they conquer AIDS or cancer, it will probably be somebody 7 miles from where I sit, at the National Institutes of Health.”
“And, don’t forget, those astronauts are government workers too.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.