Into a Snake Pit

Finally the telephone rang. "I was on my way out the door," recalls Washington Lawyer Joseph Califano Jr., "and the Governor just said, 'Joe, I want you to come and help out at HEW.' " The Governor, of course, was Jimmy Carter, and the job was one of the nation's biggest: running the most visibly cumbersome bureaucracy of them all, the $140 billion, 149,000 employee Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Night Reading. The Brooklyn-born grandson of an immigrant Italian fruit vendor, Califano, 45, should feel at home. Once described as the "deputy President of the Great Society," he helped launch many of the programs he will soon be trying to run. As a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, he wrote so many memos for L.B.J.'s "night reading" that the President once testily asked another aide whether "y'all brought 'em up here by pack mule."

A graduate of Holy Cross and Harvard Law, Califano grew "bored with practicing law and splitting stocks." He fired off a job application to the then general counsel for the Department of Defense, Cyrus Vance, in 1961 and was hired four days after being interviewed. Three years later he emerged as special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and a year after that held the same post under Johnson as assistant in charge of domestic programs.

Califano helped to dream up such Johnsonian innovations as the Model Cities program and the Office of Economic Opportunity. He also ran interference for Johnson in the 1966 creation of the Department of Transportation, a mammoth reorganization achieved in only eight months. One colleague recalls him, not entirely kindly, as "an empire builder who had a kind of abstract concern for the disadvantaged."

Now a partner in Edward Bennett Williams' Washington law firm, Califano is married and the father of three. He plays tennis and religiously attends Washington Redskins football games. But most of his prodigious energy goes into his work. He will need all that energy when Jimmy Carter's promised Government reorganization gets around to his sprawling department, variously described as a "snake pit" and a "lovely pit of quicksand."

Typically, Califano sounds unintimidated. "We are looking at a variety of reorganization programs," says he. "There were a whole raft of programs in the '60s followed by eight years when there was no attempt to work with any degree of compassion. We'll take the best of those programs and discard the worst." Making those choices should keep Califano busy for quite some time.

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