When a Fed Was a Friend

By Hugh Sidey

There is no precise time recorded when a majority of Americans looked up and decided that their Government had ceased to be a friend and helper and had become a hindrance. The best guess is that it occurred long before the November election, when it was finally and firmly established by the political process.

Ronald Reagan's Inaugural Address was the loudest statement yet by the aggrieved. The No. 1 victim stood before the nation proclaiming avuncular outrage over the federal family he had just inherited. Government is the problem.

It is not that simple, and Reagan knows it. The Sixth Fleet still steadies the Middle East, 35 million Social Security checks still go out the third of every month --and most of them are made out correctly--and we still need regulation for airways and hospitals.

Yet there is no denying the modern tragedy of deep alienation between vast segments of our society and large parts of the federal establishment. We stand separate, hostile and at times dedicated to punishing and humiliating each other. It could turn out that Reagan's most important domestic contribution will be to reconcile these attitudes, to change the feeling and understanding between the Government and the governed. That could be more significant than all the new laws passed and all the old regulations rescinded.

A while back, a young Labor Department aide studied the much hated Occupational Safety and Health Administration and then stepped back to think about it. OSHA, he concluded, was ill-directed, badly staffed and angry over its job. Each morning unthinking and miserable people at the agency marched forth to punish the society that had put them there. Hence the dreadful reputation of OSHA. Eula Bingham, who became director in 1977, worked a near miracle in her time, changing most of all OSHA'S low state of mind. But that was only one small corner of this monstrous federal machine, which in days gone by was welcome in hamlets and cities everywhere.

The late Hubert Humphrey used to love to tell the story of the men from the Department of Agriculture in Washington who came to rescue his baked, broke and forgotten prairie town of Doland, S. Dak., in the midst of drought and Depression. Those fellows were white knights to Humphrey, they were missionaries, they were the reason Humphrey put so much faith in Big Government. Yet even H.H.H. before his death sometimes despaired at the way insensitive bureaucrats had forgotten that they existed to serve, not to threaten.

The world has changed since the New Deal, of course. Government must now more than ever arbitrate internal conflict and administer scarcity, hardly pleasant tasks. But need Government be so obtuse and at times acrimonious?

Before Nelson Rockefeller left the vice presidency in 1977, he talked one night in troubled fashion of how the Government's attitude had changed since he put in his first tour of federal service in 1940 as F.D.R.'s Latin American aide. Back then, Government people considered themselves partners, friends, helpers of the private sector, Rockefeller related. They were often hesitant about intruding, deferential to the citizenry. But in our time, Rockefeller said, many departments, agencies and bureaucracies seemed to view the private sector as an enemy, a foe to be suspected, shadowed and finally subdued. It was all out of whack, said Rocky, and America faced no more important task than to straighten it out.

Nelson Rockefeller and Hubert Humphrey, were they here today, might be nonplused at seeing their old nemesis Reagan carrying this banner, though the chances are they would enlist. It was not really a political affair about which Reagan talked on his Inaugural Day. It was, rather, about the circulatory system of liberty, with Government as the heart that nourishes and protects the body by both its actions and its self-restraints. Regenerating sympathetic and helpful Government and spreading public understanding of the partnership may be the essence of the American renewal that is the task Reagan has set for himself.

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