Reason for Hope?

The convictions of Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling offer us reason to hope. Not because two highbinders were convicted--which, based on news reports (which are, it should be said, often wildly inaccurate in assessing what goes on in a courtroom)--they richly deserved to be.

I am referring to the skill of the Justice Department prosecutors, and the way that the Enron case shows that there is still something left of the independent civil service that made the United States the best-governed major nation in the world. Decades of relentless attacks on government have made a career in federal service unattractive, and the quality of those services has declined accordingly; the "conservative" attack on government has thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy, at the expense of the American people and the world.

It may seem hard to believe now, but for almost half a century, federal service was an honor, and many civil servants felt that they had a real mission. Even tasks that seem prosaic today, like bringing electricity to farms, preventing soil erosion, regulating the securities industry or setting standards for broadcasting were exciting. In the 1970's, your editor dealt with a large number of Internal Revenue Service employees (representing taxpayers, not on his own behalf!). Almost to a man (there were, regrettably, few women in the IRS then), these government workers were amazingly dedicated and professional. Those were the years that the right's attack on government was just gearing up, and I used to tell people that if the average American knew how dedicated and hardworking the people in the Revenue Service were, he would be amazed.

From all reports, the quality of the IRS--along with that of many other government agencies--has declined markedly. The story of FEMA's response to Katrina, the mess in Homeland Security generally, the developing scandal over the loss of millions of records from the Veterans' Administration, these are all symptomatic of the decline of the federal service.

That is why it is especially heartening to see the Justice Department going after people like Ken ("Kenny Boy" to George W) Lay and Jeff Skilling, and doing it the way that prosecutors did: no one accusd the prosecution of phoning it in. There are actually several examples of professionalism in the Justice Department over the past few months, in the investigations that have led to convictions in the congressional corruption and lobbying scandals, not to mention special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame-gate leaks.

This is important, because if we are to rebuild the federal government as an example of what civic institutions can be, we shall need at least a cadre of dedicated, career civil servants to show the way.