Government by Investigation: Congress, Presidents, and the Search for Answers, 1945–2012

5. Creating High-Impact Investigations

191 Acentral lesson of this book is that investigations can be very well done, but not have a significant impact on government performance . Moreover, even when doing it right matters, not all aspects of the good investigation carry equal weight in repairing or preventing a breakdown.Visibility is no doubt a valued investigatory goal, for example, but has little bearing on impact. Neither does complexity , seriousness, thoroughness, or even bipartisanship. An investigation can meet almost every test of “doing it right,”yet still fall short. Absent durability, failure is almost guaranteed. Moreover, even high-impact investigations can be works in progress. It is still not clear, for example, whether the massive Department of Homeland Security or beleaguered Office of the Director of National Intelligence that emerged from the 9/11 investigation will provide durable protection against terrorism. To the contrary, the two agencies have proven to be unwieldy bureaucracies with little of the hoped-for excellence needed for impact. Nor is it clear that the repairs from past investigations will always hold for long. Impact can be fleeting when the topic involves government fraud, waste, and abuse, for example, and may not hold much beyond a decade or two even on celebrated investigations involving Social Security rescues, intelligence agency abuses, presidential aggrandizement, taxpayer abuse, space programs, or automobile safety. Congress and presidents seem to have a special gift for repeating the same errors in execution over and over, even as history challenges settled programs with ease. Creating High-Impact Investigations FIVE 05-2268-7 CH 5:0322-8 9/26/13 11:45 AM Page 191 Finally, even when an investigation fails, it can have impact by creating a turning point in history, albeit sometimes barely noticeable and often more a consequence of changes already set in motion than a clear break toward setting the agenda or resolving doubts. In 1965, for example, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) changed course from its long-running search for communists in government to a detailed examination of the Ku Klux Klan. The change was driven almost entirely by the appointment of Rep. Charles Longstreet Weltner (D-Ga.) as HUAC’s new chair.Although Weltner received little support for his efforts to expose the Klan’s racist activities and never received even a hint of support for his Organizational Conspiracies Act of 1967, he nonetheless used his chairmanship to raise issues that HUAC had long avoided. The committee was disbanded in 1975.1 The history of modern congressional and presidential investigations reveals similar patterns in investigatory conduct. If not unique, each investigation has its own twists and turns as it moves forward. This variation is often set by the basic choices made as investigators frame the problem at hand, assess the political environment, and begin their work in determining ownership and venues, responding to triggers, defining the issue at hand, establishing purpose, and adopting an appropriate method for fixing the initial government breakdown. Yet even as they work to increase the odds of impact, all investigations are shaped to some extent by prevailing norms and mandates. It is not at all clear that congressional investigators have much choice over their initial venue, for example, although plenty of cases in this book demonstrate the significant competition that arises as different venues seek to control a given breakdown, not the least of which involves the growing use of presidential commissions. Moreover, many investigatory choices are beyond immediate control, most notably the freedom to investigate, bipartisanship, and the availability of a well-known, often insistent leader. Even well-known leaders can be intimidated by threats of removal from strong-willed party majorities and leaders such as House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who bullied his committee chairs into fruitless investigations of White House misconduct. Nevertheless, investigators still work within strict boundaries and with little-known leaders and can use their external political capital to force the fact finding that is so important to ultimate impact.Although they may have limited choices in the search for answers, their choices appear to make a significant difference in both shaping investigatory footprints and producing ultimate impact. 192 Creating High-Impact Investigations 05-2268-7 CH 5:0322-8 9/26/13 11:45 AM Page 192 The rest of this chapter examines the general findings of this book in more detail before turning to the core underpinnings of the high-impact investigation. These investigatory norms speak...