Page 14 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

1 Introduction

In the first term of the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, Dennis LeBlanc
- formerly a California state trooper, a chauffeur for Governor Rea-
gan, and a boyfriend to one of the President's daughters - was made
Associate Administrator of Telecommunications Policy in the US
Department of Commerce. On two occasions in the summer of
1982, a US military aircraft flew LeBlanc to California from Washing-
ton, DC. The special assignment that LeBlanc was selected to perform
involved work at the President's holiday home, Rancho del Cielo,
cutting wood and clearing underbrush.
The official auditor for Congress, the General Accounting Office
(GAO), took issue with LeBlanc's summer activities. When appointed
to work in the Commerce Department, LeBlanc acknowledged, 'I
have no communications background.' Nevertheless, LeBlanc
accepted the job of supervising twelve federal employees in the task
of developing vaguely defined aspects of US telecommunications
policy. In response to the GAO disclosure of his Rancho del Cielo
responsibilities, LeBlanc told a reporter, 'I think it's nitpicking.' A
Commerce Department spokesperson was more defiant. LeBlanc, she
said, will 'continue to make trips when the President requests it. The
President is the Commander in Chief.' Dennis LeBlanc resigned ten
months later.'
Although the LeBlanc incident was extraordinary, it was not excep-
tional. According to an unnamed state official quoted in a 1982 news
report on Commerce Department telecommunications activities,
'There is no expertise and virtually all of the appointees in top and
second level positions of authority are unqualified and unknowledge-
able.' In 1983, a well-known Washington telecommunications consul-
tant, Roland S. Hornet, Jr, warned Congress that 'A field that is
treated like a dumping ground begins to look like one.' 2
Despite the concerns of private sector spokespersons and the inac-
curate perceptions of innumerable academic policy analysts, the
neglect of US foreign communication policy and the dumping-ground
mentality related to it persisted for many years. Indeed, the impor-
tance, if not centrality, of the information and communication com-
modity sector for the late-twentieth-century economic development of
the United States only became widely recognized in the 1980s. This