Page 193 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

about how much to budget for the Coast Guard for drug interdiction.
Meese was running the Drug Policy Board at the time, and he was arguing
that the Coast Guard needed $100 million. David Stockman said that
$50 million was all they were going to get. So they grabbed me, as I was
still in the Coast Guard, and said, ‘Let’s go talk to the president.’ Before I
know it I’m in the Oval Office with President Reagan, Jim Baker, Ed
Meese, and David Stockman, and Ed Meese is talking about how the Coast
Guard needs its money, and he turned to me and said, ‘Craig, tell them
why the Coast Guard needs the money,’ and I said that the Coast Guard
has been underfunded. They’ve got old ships and old assets and old equip-
ment, and in order to be effective they need to upgrade, and that takes
money. Then Stockman made his case that the Coast Guard already had
plenty of money. At that point Baker instantly jumped into the middle of
it, before the president had a chance to say anything, and essentially said
to Meese, ‘Now, Ed, you know that $100 million is going to be tough to
get in this kind of a budget, and David Stockman, you know $50 million
isn’t going to cut it. Why don’t we just split the difference and make it
$75 million and keep the president from having to make a tough choice
here, and then everybody will be happy?’ And that’s the way it settled out.
Jim Baker showed me the art of compromise. He made sure everybody won
something, and he also kept the president from having to make a decision
that he really didn’t need to make.”
Through that experience, Craig Coy learned that a good compromise
can save the day. In contrast, another former White House Fellow, Francis
“Fran” Harvey (WHF 78–79), learned just the opposite: Sometimes
refusing to compromise is the right thing to do. Harvey was working as an
engineer for Westinghouse Electric Corporation when he was selected to
be a White House Fellow. He was assigned to the Department of Defense,
where he worked to develop energy policy, and also served as a Defense
Department representative on a task force charged with promoting the
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty to the American public. Harvey was
assigned to work with Secretary Harold Brown, a brilliant but introverted
scientist who had earned three degrees—including a Ph.D. that he received
at the age of twenty-one—from Columbia University and had served as a
deputy defense secretary in the Lyndon Johnson administration. “The
lesson I learned from Dr. Brown was that you really do have to understand
the environment in which you operate, and you can never get separated

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