Long before unions were common in the construction industry in Oklahoma, my father tirelessly organized his fellows, served as president or shop steward, and extolled liberal politics. To this day, the term liberal connotes to me concern for the less fortunate. My family worked for local candidates and talked admiringly about powerful and remote national candidates and public political figures.

My own personal introduction to major political activity began in my sophomore year at Lawton, Oklahoma’s junior college. I became president of the Robert S. Kerr for Senate Club. Then Governor Kerr drove to Lawton with his aide Burl Hays to take me to dinner and express appreciation for my efforts. That treat fired my political engines for years.

The roots of both my professional political career and academic career were in Oklahoma in the early ‘60s. My first academic job was at the University of Oklahoma as assistant professor of speech. A few years later I took on additional responsibility as the first director of the Southwest Center for Human Relations, the first human relations center established west of the Mississippi. At that time school desegregation and race relations generally were urgent issues in Oklahoma and the neighboring states. The center worked with communities and minorities facing potential conflict.

As part of my work at the SW Center, I helped begin an Indian project in Lawton, Oklahoma with a Comanche activist named LaDonna Harris. LaDonna’s husband was Fred R. Harris, a respected lawyer and state senator. I first met Fred when I presented a panel discussion at Lawton sponsored by the Junior Chamber of Commerce on a day when we had one of Oklahoma’s famous ice storms. Although the out-of-town panel made it, there were only two people from Lawton.

The JC director, who welcomed the panel, announced he had another engagement and left. The sole survivor was Fred Harris who said if we didn’t mind, since all the panel members were already there, he would like to hear what the panel had to say about social change. That evening changed my life. Never judge the effect of a meeting by the size of the audience.

I became good friends with both LaDonna and Fred, and when Fred ran for Governor of Oklahoma, I became heavily involved in his campaign. While Harris ran a credible race, it was not a successful one. However, I had found my "candidate." Harris is a brilliant man with a dedication to issues, which--while not always popular with everyone--are concerns of mine as well. Two years later, Harris ran for public office again. This time he won the democratic nomination to serve out the remainder of Senator’s Kerr’s term after his death--defeating former governor Howard Edmondson in the primary and the popular Oklahoma football coach, Bud Wilkinson in the general election.

I had thrown myself into every aspect of the Senate race. Harris asked me to join his Washington staff, but I felt I still had some important goals to accomplish in Oklahoma. When Senator Harris got to Washington, he called me and asked when I would be arriving to help him with organizing his office. Surprised, I told him the university semester had started and I was teaching classes. There was no way I could move to Washington. Harris claimed that in conversations several months before I had promised to join his team. I still do not recall and am not convinced that conversation took place.

However, since Harris has a photographic memory and never forgets anything that he hears or reads, I didn’t want to call him a liar or be a liar. So I negotiated leave with the university, got my boat out of the water, chained it to a tree and left for Washington the next day. I made the right decision.

I’m always amused when students ask me what their game plan should be to "get into politics" because my own route was not highly organized. My path was similar to the Peter Sellers character, Mr. Gardiner, in the movie Being There. Mr. Gardiner, a simple but excellent gardener, through misunderstandings and circumstances not of his own making, becomes well known as an extremely astute political advisor. Thus I sometimes give this advice: "Be found doing well at what you are supposed to do and get lucky."

Once in Washington, my career could not have taken a more bizarre path. After two years with Senator Harris and following his election for a full six-year term, I prepared to return to the University of Oklahoma and teach. However, Secretary of the Interior, Stuart Udall, felt I should join him in an attempt to reorganize and redirect the Bureau of Indian Affairs which I had consistently criticized while "on the Hill" for having an extremely paternalistic attitude toward the people it served.

My appointment at the BIA was as assistant commissioner, and in this role I became a member of the team drafting President Lyndon Johnson’s historic 1968 message to the Congress on American Indians. I joined others in encouraging the creation of the National Council on Indian Opportunity to be headed by the vice-president. The NCIO would be composed of the seven cabinet members administering dedicated Indian funds and a like number of Indian leaders. Vice-president Humphrey chose me as executive director of NCIO and would not be dissuaded in spite of Udall’s refusal to release me from the BIA. Thus, after a couple of years at the BIA, I spent my last two years in Washington working for the White House primarily, but retaining a role in the Department of the Interior. This curious, brief career gave me first hand experience in essentially all of government except the judicial system and the spy agencies. During my Washington career, I could not help but contrast some of the realities involving political communication with some of the cherished shibboleths I had learned as a "communication scholar." Let me illustrate a few of these problematic concepts.

The curse and bane of traditional rhetorical critics is the ghost. Before Marie Hochmuth Nichols ever published her journal piece attacking ghost writing as an institution, I was privileged to hear her give vent to her outrage in class. She elevated ghost writing speeches from a nuisance to critics to an ethical issue. (I had not worked for Senator Harris for a year when Professor Hochmuth Nichols took me to lunch at a SCA convention to warn me of the folly of wasting my hard earned doctorate in Washington.)

I have often speculated about what would happen to government if political leaders heeded the admonition to actually write their own speeches and releases. Consider the presidential address on Indians I mentioned earlier. President Johnson, who probably knew more about the inner details of government than any president in recent history, requested the writing of the federal Indian policy address. Seven cabinet departments administer dedicated Indian programs, and 16% of the bills introduced in that session of the Congress dealt with Indian affairs. Thus it would be naive in the extreme to expect any one person to be abreast of the specialized legislation, economic and social circumstances, government interactions, and appropriate strategies involving Native Americans.

In the case of that speech, a committee of about 20 from all seven cabinet departments and the then Bureau of the Budget spent weeks debating and drafting a version for White House consideration. The speech was historic and complex and changed the direction of federal Indian policy from one of centralized governmental administration to the current policy of self-determination.

Is it likely or even possible that the president could have prepared the speech on his own? Absolutely not! The drafting team represented hundreds of years of experience and dozens of highly technical areas of expertise. Does this mean that President Johnson did not particularly understand the speech or stand responsible for it. Absolutely not!

As a matter of fact, Johnson became very personally involved at what might seem at first the smallest level of detail. I had insisted along with others working on the speech on including the endorsement of local tribal boards of education with the authority to administer Indian schools. No amount of effort could save that idea for the final draft for the president. The Bureau of the Budget was the last major group to handle (or maul) the speech, and they inserted the seemingly innocuous word "advisory" before boards of education. This term was in and out of the draft several times since it meant the difference in power for the tribes or simply token recognition. We lost and BOB won.

In desperation, we urged LaDonna Harris, then wife of US Senator Harris, to take the highly unusual step of bringing this dispute to the attention of Joseph Califano, the president’s chief staff member for domestic affairs. Califano promised to add a memo to Johnson’s "night reading." To our vast relief, Johnson came down on the side of boards of education and struck the word "advisory" from the draft.

When Johnson gave that speech to the Congress, he understood every nuance and detail of policy involved. But any fool could clearly see that he couldn’t have conceived or written it. In fact, neither could any one member of the committee.

Next let me treat the sacred concept of clarity and precision in the use of language. Rhetorical scholars know that this quality has been highly esteemed by everyone but Aristotle in the history of rhetorical theory. If this ideal were to suddenly become the norm, most serious deliberation would cease because those in authority would be precommitted to issues without an opportunity to understand them. We voters do ourselves a major disservice demanding unambiguous answers from candidates on every issue we can think of to raise during an election. With advanced apologies to Senator Harris, I will illustrate this dilemma with a misfortune that befell him during his campaign.

In a small town in western Oklahoma, a highly conservative voter at a rally demanded to know what action Harris, if elected to the Senate, would take if a national health insurance program (then usually called socialized medicine) came before the Senate. Harris, the would-be-successor to the renowned Senator Robert S. Kerr, knew that the Kerr-Mills bill on national health care was viewed by Kerr as perhaps his second greatest contribution (his greatest being a canal that opened Tulsa as a seaport with access to the Gulf of Mexico.) So, Harris understandably and honestly, affirmed with tragic clarity his confidence in the Kerr-Mills bill.

Sure enough, a year or so later, the Senate did indeed vote on a national health plan. If we had had the luxury of deliberation, we would have supported it, having learned in Washington that the Kerr-Mills bill, while well suited to Oklahoma with a high poverty percentage, was not even applicable or used in most states. Unfortunately, however, that luxury was foreclosed because of our splendid clarity during the campaign. It fell my lot to draft a speech making an excuse for a token first round vote against a good bill. We came up with the accurate argument that Medicare was not actuarially sound as a self-supporting program and should therefore be funded from the general treasury which the bill before the senate did not provide. That nice ambiguity sufficed for the constituents who only noted the vote itself and helped allay the horror of colleagues who knew the Senator’s true feelings about health care.

Let me offer only one more example of the curse of clarity at the expense of my long-time friend, Senator Harris. Oklahomans call the southeast quarter of Oklahoma Little Dixie because its terrain, climate and ideology are much like the deep south. Largely agricultural and democratic, support there was essential to Harris for a campaign victory. One of his young campaign aides suggested that nothing was so troubling to the residents of Little Dixie, who raised cattle and ran hunting dogs, as ticks. At times, ticks infested the area to the point that they were a health hazard as well as a nuisance. Harris, whose specialty in the Oklahoma legislature had been highways, accepted his aide’s advice. During his campaign, Harris made a clear unequivocal promise that if elected, he would make tick eradication a major national program.

That commitment became, perhaps, the most burdensome lodestone that Harris bore while in public office. Come to find out, the US Department of Agriculture already knew about the problem of ticks. They had been spending scores of millions of dollars for many years in an effort to control ticks through genetic sterilization and pesticides. It was hopeless. However, Harris did have one small satisfaction from the whole unhappy situation. The proposer of the issue, who went with him to Washington as an aide, had as a major dimension of his job the assignment to keep the citizens of Little Dixie constantly informed on Harris’ unflagging efforts at tick eradication. The rest of the staff usually greeted the aide each morning with "how is the tick campaign coming?"

After I left Washington and returned to the University of Oklahoma as chair of the Department of Communication, I was asked by the National Association of Teachers of English to read a paper at their New Orleans convention at a session on "doublespeak." I wrote as honest a piece as I could entitled, "In Defense of Doublespeak."

In essence, I argued that in dealing with future and sometimes hypothetical decisions, we do ourselves a disservice by demanding premature total clarity of candidates and public officials. Allowing politicians, instead, to make an honest answer such as, "Since that has not yet arisen, I will study it carefully and solicit your advice if it becomes a public issue" better serves our own interests. The electorate and the academics would berate that answer as weaseling, but it would realistically leave the door open to learning and prudent decision making.

Everyone praised President Bush’s crystal clear and totally unambiguous statement, "Read my lips–no new taxes." To Bush’s credit, he simply reneged on the promise when circumstances made his prior position untenable. Many, however, have not yet forgiven him this change of opinion. We would never ask a professor to take a firm unequivocal stand on a scholarly problem in his field with the promise not to revisit it. Yet we academics routinely hold that as a goal for candidates and elected officials. Wiggle room is a good thing.

Another problem in government service that many academics do not view realistically concerns the constraints dictated by governmental roles. If those who believe we should speak our mind freely and openly at all times attempted to become federal policymakers, they would be fired during the first budget cycle before the Congress.

It was my lot in Washington to testify before Senate and House of Representative Interior and Insular Affairs budget committees and subcommittees a minimum of four times a year. I cannot recall a single instance in which it was my privilege to speak my piece exactly as I felt.

Let me describe the process that I went through in simply testifying for a budget. Policy makers go through numerous budget submissions within their own departments before reaching a budget compromise at the secretarial level. The proposed departmental budget goes to the Office of Management and Budget, first for hearings and then for a top level director’s review. However, the expert witness who started the whole thing cannot be present. OMB then assigns a figure that you can advocate before the Appropriations Committee. Even as the expert witness who drafted the budget, you now at this point may or may not know what that new figure includes.

It was my practice to compare the approved budget with our departmental submission (which might be different from my personal submission) to reconcile if I could the monetary differences. Rarely was it possible. Once in a while, you could total programs in a complex budget and by looking at OMB reductions see what was eliminated–usually not. During hearings, a member of Congress might say to you "is the sum in your budget for Indian housing the optimum amount?" At that time a formal OMB budget regulation constrained you to say something like, "Yes sir, that is the figure we are testifying for." You might wish to say, "That figure is the result of the stupidity of an OMB budget analyst and has no business being considered." While such statements might be commendable, it would mean the end to your tenure as an executive level policymaker.

My own strategy for dealing with this dilemma endeared me to the BIA, incensed the budget office and was a sort of self-defeating suicidal strategy. However, it was a strategy available only to an official with a good academic offer in his pocket and absolutely no desire to build a governmental career. Having served on the Hill, I would call a friend in the staff of the budget subcommittee before my testimony and tell that person that I would be coming forth with some really off-the-wall numbers which had no basis in reality. Since the Budget Bureau stops short of ordering witnesses to lie, my confederate on the committee would prepare for his member questions like this: "Is the figure you are requesting an appropriate one. If you answered, "That is what I am prepared to defend," he could ask, "Did you have personal input in assessing that need?" If you answer affirmatively, he can ask, "What was your own estimate?" Now this gets you to a real statement of need as you see it and opens up a fruitful exchange. Rarely is this sort of cheating done because of career risks. But it is fun.

It is possible to offer more examples of the unreality of some of our expectations regarding political communication. However, as one of the last committed Aristotelians, I believe strongly in the rule of three, and like the modes of persuasions, we are better off with three examples to illustrate our thesis.

In conclusion, I can imagine an uptight, simplistic teacher like me giving an incredibly ethical and commendable list of goals to students preparing for public service:

• Do your own thinking.

• Always make clear, concise statements devoid of ambiguity.

• Speak your piece without regard to consequences.

That advice might please my sensibilities and my colleagues, but it most certainly will damn my students to ineffectiveness and frustration.