The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Memo to the Editors:

With all of the hullabaloo this week about a fancy new plan to require a balanced budget, I renewed my quest to track down the National Debt. You'd think it would be a cinch to find, big as it is. Remember Ronald Reagan's describing it in February 1981 as being a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high? I joked that they might have it piled on the Mall to scare tourists.

Who keeps track of this monster? What does it look like, feel like? At the White House a few years ago, I ran the question casually by the President. He gave me a blank stare.

I forgot about it for a year or so because it was not supposed to grow under Reagan's new economics. It got bigger. So I went over to the Treasury one day in 1983. Asked Secretary Donald Regan, Where does one find this Debt monster? He referred me to an assistant secretary, who referred me to another assistant secretary, who was in Japan or someplace. The trail got cold.

Stories begin in 1984 about Debt growing to $2 trillion. Scared to death. Back on the Debt trail. Second assistant secretary now home from Japan. He referred me to an office across 15th Street that is part of Treasury. Found a genial bureaucrat there, the kind we love to kick around. Turned out he was the first guy with a real clue. He explained that the Bureau of the Public Debt is a huge department with 2,000 employees and a $200 million budget. I asked him which one of those people actually writes down the National Debt at the end of the day, those figures that make bankers blanch and children save their pennies. He directed me to southwest Washington and an annex of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, a gray building across from the Central Heating and Refrigeration Plant. Thirty years in Washington and I'd never been there. Did I need a compass and extra rations for such a journey? I kidded. The bureaucrat roared. I liked him.

Excitement grew. Last Wednesday I hailed a cab and set off for the Bureau of the Public Debt, division of public debt accounting. I passed the Washington Monument, tall and splendid in the morning light, but only one six-hundredth as tall as Reagan's stack of $1,000 bills. Pressed on around the Department of Agriculture. What pikers! They have only 240 million bushels of surplus corn stored away. A nod down Independence Avenue to NASA. It would take one of their space shuttles nearly a year and a half in orbit reeling out end-to-end dollar bills to equal the current Debt.

Oddly, found four nice men. Thomas Minter, John Wesley, Ken Papaj, Albert Ozimek. Almost afraid to ask. What about Debt? They described an entire floor of computers hooked up to the nationwide Federal Reserve banking system. Millions of figures pour in each day. Yes, yes, but did they have the Debt captured and subdued on paper? Smiles all around. Of course, they answered.

Followed down a long corridor, heart pounding. Around a corner, over some brown carpet, into a little office. In the center was a computer terminal, no bigger than a portable TV. Moment of doubt. Everything so modest, so quiet. The terminal clacking casually. Could this contain the scourge of the world's moneybags, the thing that made Prime Ministers age and caused political parties to rise and fall?

Marsha Adams entered, tall, striking mother of two. She bent down, tore off the printout, held it lightly as a feather. I peeked. Eureka! There it was, the National Debt -- $1,823,105,258,488.19, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 1985, 11 a.m. When Marsha was born in 1956 the Debt had been only one-seventh as big. Did the burden crush her, I blurted? Not really, she said. She whisked it across the hall to be fed into more computers, which ultimately spewed it out to cringing auditors and suffocating finance ministers around the globe. Then what? Well, said Marsha, in a little while she would take the bus to her home in Hyattsville, Md., and if need be, she would help her ten-year-old son with his arithmetic.