| Description: | The Great Irony of the Reorganization |
| Text of article: | All the Governor's Men Part 1 The Great Irony of Reorganization By John Maginnis This is the first of an ongoing series about the people closest to Edwin Edwards. We'll start with his long-time friend and the man who helped put him in the mansion, Edmund Reggie. More than 30 states in the Union have undergone reorganization in the past few years and not one of them has been able to claim a reduction in the number of employees or expenses. So it is highly ironic that Louisiana, whose governor probably knows less about state government than does any of his 49 colleagues, may be putting into effect the first reorganization in the country to ever actually reduce the number of state employees and save money. Little of the actual credit can go to Edwards, except for one crucial decision that he made: to put in charge of reorganization his old friend and political sidekick Edmund Reggie. Not many people know about Edmund Reggie and the role he has played in Louisiana politics over the past 20 years. A thumbnail biography would show that he is a native of Crowley of Lebanese descent; that he was, at age 24, the youngest city judge in the United States; that he stumped for Earl Long and played kingmaker for John McKeithen and Edwin Edwards; that he was John Kennedy's campaign manager in 1960 and was and still is a close friend of the Kennedy family; that he may well be the most brilliant politician in the state and that he has never aspired for any higher office than city judge of Crowley — yet. Pope John and Farrah Fawcett To get a true picture of Edmund Reggie one must go to Crowley. His office is easy to find, on a corner of the courthouse square. The interior of the old renovated building says a lot about its occupant. The office has beautiful old pieces of furniture and lots of plants. The walls are shared by prints of scenes from ancient China, along with scores of political momentos, the status symbols of any politician. Reggie's memorabilia is top drawer stuff: pictures of Edmund with all three of the Kennedy brothers and with Jackie; Edmund with Pope John; Edmund being carried through the streets of Beirut on the shoulders of cheering Lebanese during his 1961 trip to the Middle East for Kennedy. Then there is the assortment of Louisiana politicians — the famous and the infamous — all with gushing "Dear Edmund" inscriptions. The only thing that seems out of place on the wall is a poster of Farrah Fawcett-Majors — "something the office staff gave me." Judge Reggie entered from his inner office, a trim, energetic man with hair the exact tint as Edwin's. It was one of the former judge's rare recent days in Crowley, but his mind was still very much on what had just happened in Baton Rouge. The day before he had presented to the Appropriations Committee his report on the implementation of state reorganization and had told them that his plan so far would mean a net reduction of 492 employees from the state payroll. "Implementation," he explained, is the key word to the concept of Louisiana's reorganization. After studying the reorganizations of 30 other states, Reggie could see that if this state followed the other states' lead that we would end up with nothing more than a cosmetic rearranging of present agencies. So once the broad reorganization bill was passed by the Legislature, he asked for and received the further power to implement the reorganization of the 11 executive departments. The departments' plans would have to be approved by the reorganization committee before they could receive their appropriation from this Legislature. "So we caught them in an ambush," says Reggie, "and it has worked very well." Not another Louisiana deal One of the main obstacles standing in the committee's way was the attitude of the entrenched bureaucrats. "At the start," says Reggie, "it was hard getting many of them to take us seriously. They thought it was another one of those Louisiana deals where either some friend on the committee would take care of them or they could call Edwin and he would straighten things out. But no, it didn't work that way." The way the committee did work was very hard. It has met more times than any interim committee in state history, but the backbone has been the staff. "The work of Ann Dunne and Gary Weill has been unbelievable. For each department they had to find and study every applicable statute just so that we could compete with the knowledge of the department secretaries when they presented their plans." One of the first and few departments that caught on to the committee's way of doing things was Transportation under George Fisher. According to Reggie, "Fisher's undersecretary, Roger Geisinger, really captured the textbook spirit of reorganization. He came in talking about abolishing jobs and consolidating functions and setting up pilot programs to evaluate performance — stuff that was light years ahead of what we had been hearing from the others." Despite that early success, Reggie says the task went very slowly for months: "For a long time we just couldn't communicate what we wanted from the secretaries until the governor wrote them all a letter a few months ago. He told them in effect to either shape up their plans or he would find secretaries who could. After that, business picked up considerably." Kingmaking It surprised many that Edmund Reggie would get so deeply involved in state government other than his periodic dabbling in kingmaking. But as the 50-year-old Reggie recalls, "I woke up one morning last year and realized that I had been city judge longer than I had not been. And that shook me up." He took steps right away to retire as city judge, then, he says, "Reorganization came along. Edwin called me and asked if I would help and I said, 'Let's go.' " Reggie gained his judgeship at age 24, when his senior law partner, City Judge Denis Canan, collapsed of a heart attack in his office in 1951. Before he died, Canan sent word to Earl Long that Edmund Reggie should be named his successor. Uncle Earl consented, and Reggie paid back the favor five years later by stumping long and hard for Earl (along with another youngster, Camille Gravel) in the governor's race of 1956, which Reggie remembers as the "last great stump campaign." That same year Reggie was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Louisiana happened to be seated across the aisle from the Massachusetts delegation and there Reggie met and became fast friends with Sen. John Kennedy. Four years later, he managed Kennedy's successful campaign in Louisiana and remained close to the president until his death. Reggie and Edwin Edwards met shortly after Edwin moved to Crowley to begin his law practice: "We were both in the starvation period of young lawyers. We became close friends as did our wives — we would double-date while Doris and I were still courting." Years later, when Edwards offered the fresh challenge of reorganization, Reggie just needed to know one thing: "I just asked him one question, 'Is anybody exempt.' 'Nobody,' he told me, and that was the extent of our charter. I trust him and he trusts me. That was important, because I couldn't have properly done reorganization if I had to run to the mansion every 10 minutes. I think I've been to the mansion twice on reorganization." A natural question to pose to Edmund Reggie is why, having helped elected governors and presidents, did he never reach for higher office himself? "Well," he explains, "I have six children and have always felt the obligation to be available to them. I speak to each one of them every day that I am in the state." But now that the oldest is 15, does he feel he may be ready to run for something? "Oh, I'm just an old broken man of 50 now," he laughs. A very unconvincing sidestep. Edwin, a fiscal hero? Reggie has not yet grown tired of reorganization — he is anxious to see it into its next phase, a shifting away from quantity of employees to quality of state services: "No one is now measuring the efficiency and output of each employee and program. That will be the job of the undersecretary in each department (to be appointed by the governor.)" He explains it as not an accountant's job, but one that will take the functions. and goals of each department and see how well the employees and programs are fulfilling those objectives. With better evaluation, Reggie believes there will be plenty of room for more cuts, which he says will take "guts and legislative cooperation." That there is more room for cuts is rather obvious. When Edwin Edwards took office, there were 27,000 classified state employees. Now there are 58,000, equal to the number of classified employees in the state of Michigan, which has twice the population of Louisiana. Observers attribute the over-employment situation to two factors: the proliferation of federal programs which require state employees to administer them; and Edwin Edwards' own administrative inexperience and lack of concern with keeping state spending in check during his first four years of office. So through the choice and support of Reggie, Edwards may be turning his own weakness into a strength. Observers believe that with the framework the Reorganization Committee is handing him, Edwards may be able to make even more dramatic cuts in state spending and thus go out of office as a fiscal hero. But getting that message across to a man who keeps his own counsel may be difficult for even as close a friend as Edmund Reggie. |
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