My life as a Fed

I got my first “professional” job in 1972 when I went to work as an investigator for the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. There were so many whacky things about the gestalt of me being any kind of Federal employee it would be a struggle to tell the story completely, but it’s important to me because it was there that I first became interested in writing well, so that’s the part of the story I will tell.

There were twelve of us doing research and field interviews for the lawyers who ran the investigations. We were enforcing regulations that were mission-critical to keeping the American economy humming along; for example, The Wool Products Labeling Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As interesting as those statutes are, I’ll be focusing on one of our tangential activities: answering the mail.

The office received about 20 non-specific letters per day. By non-specific, I mean they weren’t addressed to any particular person, nor were they related to a particular open investigation. So every twelfth day each of us would get that day’s mail and the assignment to respond to it.

About half the letters could have been answered with a simple form letter that explained to the consumer that the FTC is only permitted by law to investigate a fairly narrow range of transgressions, and that said transgression had to involve interstate commerce in order for us to have jurisdiction. But, this being the new, friendly FTC we weren’t allowed to use form letters. Instead, we struggled each day to find new and friendly ways to say the same things, over and over again, in our responses.

For example, if the consumer wrote to her Congressman complaining that there were only 11 donuts in the bag of a dozen that she bought at Kroger’s that morning, the letter would work its way to us, and we could not just pass the buck with the old “no interstate commerce” line. We’d also throw in a little sympathy and suggest that she contact her local Better Business Bureau, helpfully enclosing the address and copying her Congressman, of course.

The directive that each letter should appear to be unique and personal produced a wide range of interpretations, and here’s where it got interesting. This being the Federal government they weren’t going to let a bunch of GS-9’s send letters to voters without scrutiny. This was well before the word processor found its way into office life, let alone email. This is how the process worked.

When my turn came up I took the day’s mail to my office and wrote out responses to each in longhand. This took 2-3 days. I then took them to the typing pool. A day later they emerged in a batch (Each day’s mail had to stay together until they were all ready to be mailed – like a litter of puppies all weaned together.) Inevitably a typist would have misinterpreted something I wrote and I’d have to make a few corrections, which would have to go back to the pool for retyping. With luck, I was done with this first draft by day four.

At this point the batch went to my boss, Irv. There are two things you need to know about Irv. The first is that he was not a lawyer – he came up through the civil service ranks, and it took him about twenty years to get to where he was managing our group. As a non-lawyer he had absolutely no status with the lawyers, who were the Princes of the agency and who ran the cases. Therefore, they never clued Irv in on anything going on with the cases and treated us like their direct reports, leaving Irv bureaucratically emasculated and isolated.

The second thing to know about Irv is that he looked exactly like Sammy Davis Junior, both in face and in stature. This would be a significant personal burden anytime, but had a special weight to it in 1972, the year Sammy gave Richard Nixon “the hug.” Irv needed a way to allow the master-of-the-universe portion of his personality to see the light of day, and torturing the mail-answerers was the only option open to him.

Irv also had plenty of time on his hands, so those letters came back to us very quickly, and when they arrived each looked like a New York subway map; a maze of multicolored lines, arrows and notations. On a good first pass I might get 1-2 of the simplest letters through unscathed. I was solidly in the middle of a very narrow range of similar results with my peers. Irv simply lived to correct us.

I would then make the corrections and send the letters back to the typing pool, because Irv wouldn’t read them unless they were neatly typed. A day later Irv dictated that perhaps ten of the letters undergo a second round of changes. Then back to the typing pool. Then back to Irv for more changes. Sometimes he’d change “white to black” on the first round and then “black to white” on the third round. Only we noticed as Irv had a dozen of these correspondence circle-jerks going at once with me and my colleagues.

This volley of revisions went on for the next several days. By the end of the second week after their arrival at the FTC, a 20-letter batch would have gone through 40-50 revisions, and been professionally typed the same number of times just to get past Irv. Then the lawyers got them.

The Assistant Regional Director, who was a lawyer making a pretty good buck, got first crack at them. His first order of business was to remove whatever friendly, colloquial language remained after Irv had worked his magic. The friendly stuff was the language we had been urged to use to show the consumer how much their government loved them, and it was replaced with some impenetrable legalese intended to either impress or confuse the recipient (or her Congressman). About a quarter of each batch received revision orders at this level, which prompted another trip to the pool. (Most of the women in the typing pool – and they were all women -- could have answered these letters in their sleep after a few months given how many times they’d read the same drivel.)

Then came the final stop the Regional Director’s desk, another lawyer and the top dog in our world, but we think he only read the letters that had cc’s to someone really important because he made very few changes. Once they came back from the pool the final time, out they went – just as the next batch came in. None of us was ever without of a batch of letters in some state of processing.

Maybe the reason the boss man made few changes was because he hated hearing us all bitch so much about the letter answering process. So to show how progressive he was, he brought in a writing expert to teach us all how to write clear, legally correct letters. And we got to take two days away from the office to learn from a master.

The guy was really good. On the first morning he told us the story of the admirer of Michelangelo’s David who asked the artist how he turns rough stone into something so beautiful. Michelangelo was said to have replied: "I just carve away anything that isn't David.”

“Writing is no different,” he told us, “You must remove that which isn’t necessary to tell your story. Anything additional detracts from what is important.”

We each brought in samples of letters we’d written and he took us through them sentence-by-sentence, stripping away the unnecessary verbiage and substituting clear, direct language for the flowery obtuseness of government-speak.

We were enthusiastic, but equally sure that letters written in this new, direct and intelligible style would suffer a near 100% rejection rate from Irv and his masters. We were so adamant on this point that the instructor apparently told the regional director of our skepticism at the end of the day, so first thing the next morning our capo showed up in the classroom and gruffly admonished us for our cynicism and assured us he would not have spent good money to bring in a writing coach if he wanted us to keep writing the same old way.

It was at this point that one of the bolder among us gave him a handful of our rewritten, new and improved letters. His face became a scene from a silent movie. His eyes bulged and then popped. His hair stood on end. Smoke came out of his ears. A steam whistle blew. “Jesus Christ! You can’t say this!” he screamed. He turned on the instructor and boomed, “What the hell are you teaching these people?!”

It was at approximately this point in my life that I realized I was not cut out for public service, and that I wanted to write like that always.