Molasses Pace on Appointments

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Not all the President's men--and fewer women--are in place

The logjam on appointments to key State Department positions began to break last week. By votes of 16 to 0, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved President Reagan's nomination of Myer Rashish as Under Secretary for Economic Affairs and Chester Crocker and Robert Hormats as Assistant Secretaries for African Affairs and for Economic and Business Affairs. Hearings on three more assistant secretaries will be held this week, and they too are now certain of approval.

Hearings on the nominations had been held up for weeks because the White House and its Senate allies had been fear ful of confronting North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, the self-appointed en forcer of purist Reaganism to the Administration. Most of the nominees are too liberal for Helms' taste. He considers Crocker too cool toward South Africa, Rashish too inclined to aid Third World leftist governments, and Lawrence Eagleburger, nominated for Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, suspect sim ply because he worked for Helms' bete noir, Henry Kissinger. The day before last week's vote, Helms submitted 109 questions to Crocker and 127 to Rashish, demanding written answers before he would vote on their appointments. As it happened, the committee went ahead with out Helms, who was busy chairing a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on the farm bill. Helms promised the President that he would not try to prevent the Senate from voting on the nominees, citing a personal assurance from Reagan that they would follow White House policy.

Helms was also mollified by the appointment of his candidate, Lieut. General Edward L. Rowny, a bitter opponent of the SALT II treaty he helped draft in 1979, as the Administration's chief arms-control negotiator. Rowny did not get the other job Helms pushed him for, head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, but it went to another hardliner, Eugene V. Rostow -- a Johnson-era Viet Nam hawk.

The battle over the State Department posts was a visible reminder that not all the President's men are assembled.

By the end of last week the Senate had not confirmed even one Reagan-nominated ambassador, and the White House had announced only seven of 133. That pace was only half as fast as the Carter Administration's four years ago -- in part, said White House Personnel Director E. Pendleton James, because "our priority was to fill the slots to get the economic pro gram moving. Foreign policy is not being hindered because we don't have an Ambassador to Denmark."

Even in economic areas, things are not much better. Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan has named fewer than half his assistant secretaries. Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige has chosen 19 of 20, but only two have been confirmed. Energy Secretary James Edwards is having trouble attracting aides to a department that Reagan has pledged to abolish.

Overall, of the top 400 or so officials in the Cabinet departments and at inde pendent and regulatory agencies, only 55% have been announced, 36% formally nominated and a mere 21% actually confirmed. The reasons are numerous:

pressure from Helms and other conservatives, policy confusion within some sectors of the Administration, complex conflict-of-interest and financial disclosure rules, which often require divestiture be fore service and ban related employment afterward. Then there is the molasses pace set by James, whose operation is the most widely criticized of any in the White House.

James, who has the air of an absent-minded professor, runs a system bogged down by delays that perhaps only he understands, says a senior White House aide.

Despite his talk of priorities, he has man aged to process nominations for the Public Printer and for the assistant administrator of the Agency for International Development for the Near East faster than for some assistant secretaries. He has also enraged conservatives by recruiting moderate "retreads" from the Ford and Nixon Administrations, and has embarrassed the White House by filling only 7% of the jobs so far with women, 3% with Hispanics, 2% with blacks.

James blames his slow pace on an elaborate cross-checking procedure -- involving the FBI, Presidential Aide Lyn Nofziger, the Republican National Committee, home-state Congressmen and Senators, and the troika of top Reagan aides, Edwin Meese, James Baker and Michael Deaver. Yet the White House says that these elaborate procedures failed to alert senior officials that Warren Richardson, eventually withdrawn as a nominee for Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, had been chief lobbyist for the right-wing anti-Zionist Liberty Lobby.

James also claims that he has been subjecting every nominee to a time-consuming political loyalty test. But in an Administration that dislikes bureaucracy and favors business, thus far 43% of the nominees to top jobs come from Washington and the suburbs, and 70% from the technocratic fields of law, education, finance, consulting, or from the Federal Government, while only 7% come from manufacturing. The political test has excluded so many blacks that one top aide says the White House may have to set an informal quota for the remaining jobs.

The few successes in speedy recruitment are mostly attributable to Cabinet secretaries. Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis worked the political ropes to get his team approved early, and Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr. chose his top aides quickly, although Helms' opposition delayed Senate action on most of them.

James says that selection of the elite 400 is nearly complete, and that almost a dozen more ambassadors will be nominated in the next week or so. Then comes the even bigger task of filling about 6,000 lesser jobs. "I don't know ii we're going too fast or too slow," says James. "We're doing it our way." An even higher White House aide offers a somewhat differ ent view: "It's becoming a terrible burden."

William A. Henry III.

Reported by Douglas Brew

With reporting by Douglas Brew

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