When President Bill Clinton fished Jack Ward Thomas from the rural U.S. Forest Service ranks and elevated him to agency chief in 1993, the uproar was deafening. Many staffers liked the chief and the direction he wanted to take the agency. But many also cried foul about the process, which departed from the long-established tradition of selecting leaders from the career-track ranks: members of the senior executive service started in the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter was president.

The stated objection to Clinton’s actions was that he had politicized the top job, breaching the century-old firewall erected by Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot to keep the agency honest by protecting it from politics. Clinton elevated Thomas by firing F. Dale Robertson, the first chief to be fired since Pinchot lost his job in 1910.

“With all due respect, we oppose this course of action,” said seventy forest supervisors in a letter to Clinton. Elevating Thomas, they wrote, would “set a precedent for all future administrations, making it possible for the currently correct special-interest groups to control the national forests,” damaging agency morale and posing a “serious threat” to the land.

The angry chorus rose again three years later when Mike Dombeck succeeded Thomas; Dombeck was senior executive service, but had spent a decade away from the agency at the Bureau of Land Management, and he surrounded himself with “outsiders” as chief. The chorus quieted when George W. Bush moved into the White House and Dale Bosworth—career Forest Service and senior executive service—took over the chief’s seat.

In the traditionally close-knit culture of the Forest Service, the person wearing the chief’s hat is important to the people elsewhere in the hierarchy. The chief is often an accessible rallying point and an inspiration, a leader whom people speak of with personal familiarity. The chief is also a symbol of hope: Since the chief typically rises through the ranks, any rank-and-file staffer may also ascend if he or she tries.

And while it is clearly important to lend stability to an agency whose mandate is to manage a landscape—something done on the scale of decades, if not centuries—the idea that the Forest Service has lived outside of politics is manifestly false. As a government agency it must respond to changes in Congress, which in turn responds to voters.

The rise of laws establishing wilderness, protecting endangered species and cleaning the air and the water, along with the catalyzing debut of Earth Day in 1970, focused Americans’ attention on the environment and began creating conflicts for the Forest Service. Once left largely alone, the agency faced new mandates from Congress to manage federal forests for multiple uses while simultaneously allocating portions of the landscape for recreation or wildlife alone.

The increasingly ecologically savvy public began to sue over forest management practices such as clear-cutting. In the mid-1970s, when the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that clear-cutting on the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia violated the law establishing the Forest Service, the agency was forced back to Congress to clarify its mission.

The 2004 presidential campaign is one of the most contentious in modern times. As it stirs the populace, it raises a question: How do leadership changes in the capitol affect Forest Service employees on the ground? Bureaucracies don’t provide simple answers, but Doug MacCleery, Claire Lavendel, Jim Furnish, Wayne Williams and Patti Rodgers offer some complex truths about leadership from their many years of experience as employees of the Forest Service.

CULTURE

Back when Doug MacCleery began his Forest Service career in 1967, the agency’s culture and purpose were steady. When administrations changed, “it didn’t make all that much difference” on the ground.

“Now it does, after Clinton, when Clinton politicized the chief,” says the senior policy analyst, based in Washington, D.C. “Now it makes a difference, a big difference, which party is in office.”

MacCleery has observed changes from a front-row seat. The former timber lobbyist was the assistant undersecretary of agriculture during the Reagan administration.

Politicization is an outgrowth of changing values within society that have shifted in favor of recreation and preservation and away from the tradition of multiple uses, including logging.

“I don’t know that you can separate the Forest Service and its leadership from the forces at work,” he says.

Forty years ago, MacCleery says, decision making was decentralized, leaders came from forestry schools, and most staffers had rural, small-town roots. Urban kids weren’t interested in the work until the original Earth Day, in 1970, gave the environment cachet.

Even into the 1970s, however, forest issues weren’t partisan, and Forest Service leadership was widely respected. Chief John McGuire, whose tenure spanned the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, was a “hugely influential person in shaping the National Forest Management Act and guiding it through and dealing with both sides of the aisle in a bipartisan way,” MacCleery says. “The committees looked to him repeatedly for counsel during the markup phases. I just can’t imagine that happening today.”

In MacCleery’s view, one shared by many in the agency, the biggest political change to the Forest Service came when Clinton fired the incumbent chief Robertson and elevated Thomas to the job in 1993. Matters didn’t improve when Dombeck succeeded Thomas.

Elevating Bosworth to replace Dombeck was a good move, MacCleery says. “The fact that the career chief tradition was reestablished was a very positive thing for the organization,” he says.

Much of the issue has to do with morale, but there is at least one tangible way the chief affects staffers’ lives on the ground, MacCleery says. “It does change the papers you’re pushing when you have someone at the helm who understands the culture and what makes it tick and what can be done and what can’t be done.”

MISSION

When Claire Lavendel, supervisor of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington state, gets frustrated, she turns her mind to the Forest Service mission. “I am a very mission-oriented person,” she says. “That’s why I work for the Forest Service. I’m really bonded to this mission [of] caring for the land and serving the people.”

Lavendel got her start in 1980 on the Targhee National Forest in Idaho, recruited out of college under a program designed to bring more women and minorities into the agency. Her career has taken her to the Lewis and Clark National Forest, the Idaho Panhandle National Forests, the chief’s office in Washington, D.C., the Olympic National Forest and ultimately to the Gifford Pinchot, where she has worked for most of the past eight years.

And because that mission has remained constant since the agency’s inception, she says changes in the nation’s capitol, whether in the White House or the chief’s office, haven’t changed much on the ground. “Some chiefs focus more on collaboration on [Capitol] Hill, some focus more internally. They have different ways of getting things done, but that didn’t really affect us much.”

Each chief brings a different style and personality to the job, she says, and each emphasizes different areas of concern. For example, Bosworth has identified four major threats to national forests: fuel buildup, invasive species, habitat fragmentation and “unmanaged recreation,” including off-road vehicles.

When a chief declares a particular priority, Lavendel says, “I have to assume that the chief is right.” She looks for the reasons behind the policy statement and then works to support it. And when things get tough she returns to the mission.

“The mission…describes what we do and why we do it. And then, depending on where society is, we then start answering the questions of how we get that done, where and when and how much,” she says. “But the what we do and why is fundamental, has been there for a hundred years, and hasn’t changed: We’re here to conserve natural resources.”

QUASHED

Jim Furnish speaks with a mix of insider’s perspective and retiree’s candor. And his experience, he says unequivocally, is that leadership makes a big difference on the ground and in the culture of the Forest Service.

Furnish got his first job with the Forest Service in 1965 as a field forester surveying the Maine woods, rising through the ranks to serve first as deputy and then as supervisor of the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon’s coast range for most of the 1990s. He left Oregon in 1999 to work as deputy chief under Dombeck, Clinton’s second appointee to the top Forest Service job. Furnish retired in 2002 after Bush’s chief, Bosworth, replaced Dombeck.

“Who the chief was made a lot of difference to me personally in the conduct of my affairs as a forest supervisor,” he says.

Under Dombeck’s leadership, Furnish says, “I really felt that I was emboldened to take some stronger environmental stances on issues because I had the sense that Mike would back me.” With that backing, Furnish shut down roughly two-thirds of the road system on the steep grades of the Siuslaw.

“In the late 㥘s, that would not have flown,” he says. “I probably would have had my legs cut off and been jerked out of that office so fast it’d make my head spin.”

How people feel about the chief can change their experience in the job. Thomas’s appointment boosted morale, Furnish says, especially in the Northwest where agency staffers were reeling from lawsuits over the Northern spotted owl that found the agency guilty of flouting environmental laws.

“It was a really dark day to hear a federal judge say that our leaders had been guilty of willing violations of the law,” Furnish said.

Thomas came in and issued six edicts, two of which Furnish still remembers: Tell the truth and obey the law. The idea was, “we’re going to stand on principle,” Furnish says.

“We have a hard job, but we stand for certain things. It made me proud that he had the guts to kind of stare into our recent past, where he was saying in so many words, ÔWe have been playing a game and we need to stop playing the game, we need to get back to what makes the Forest Service a good organization.’”

When the chief’s job shifted from Dombeck to Bosworth, many in the agency breathed a sigh of relief. The chief was once again a “man of the cloth,” a career Forest Service employee and a member of the senior executive service.

But the change also shut other people down, Furnish says, quashing discussion and dissent. On a recent trip to Oregon, Furnish had coffee with a staffer from regional headquarters in Portland. The staffer later told Furnish that someone warned him to be careful whom he talked to, and that he shouldn’t be seen meeting with the former deputy chief. The staffer asked Furnish not to call or e-mail him anymore.

“There is a culture that has grown really in the last two-and-a-half years since Bosworth has become chief that you better watch your butt or we’ll hang you,” Furnish says. “And whether that’s absolutely true or not, there’s a culture of fear now for people who have strong environmental leanings that they’ll get their heads cut off.”

“Since Dale Bosworth has become chief it just seems like the discourse within the agency has quieted significantly. If you agree with Mark Rey and the administration you’re free to talk at will.”

To the extent that it’s true, he says, it marks a substantial change in the culture of the agency.

“The Forest Service I grew up in, even when it was pretty strongly of conservative stripes, Republican stripes… I felt that there was pretty much of an open mike. There was a culture that entitled people to speak and say what they wanted to say even if it wasn’t popular. And I felt I was outspoken to a degree in the 㥘s, and I don’t think that I was punished for it.”

POLITICS

The last time Wayne Williams had a summer vacation was 1973. He’s been fighting fires—first for the state of California, and since 1975 for the Forest Service—ever since.

Now the smokejumper foreman for the agency’s Rocky Mountain region, he’s seen administrations and funding come and go. His conclusion is that events—more than politics—drive what he’s able to do on the ground.

“Most of the changes I’ve seen at my level have been less caused by what the current administration is and more caused by an event that happened,” he says. “There was a lot of change from the South Canyon fire in 1994 and there was a lot of change in 2000 because of the fires that happened in Montana and Idaho that year. It doesn’t really matter who’s in power at the time; [what] really matters [is] the magnitude of the event, how it’s perceived by the media and the public, and then the timing.”

Some of the changes have been helpful, leading to increased budgets and innovations in fire prevention such as increased use of prescribed fire and judicious direction of natural fires to clear out overstocked areas.

But other events set firefighting back. The uproar over the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park that initially were left to burn led to a moratorium on prescribed burning for one year, he says.

The fact that leadership can’t control natural events doesn’t mean that his job is entirely apolitical, however.

“Whenever you work for a government agency you are going to be on a rollercoaster ride because of the budget process,” he says. “Any government agency—Forest Service, the IRS, anybody—is going to have to be used to that. And they’re also going to have to be used to politics, because all government agencies…are dictated by the policy of the specific administration.”

Nevertheless, leadership changes don’t show up instantaneously on the ground. “It’s not like if John Kerry got elected yesterday, today I would see an effect. It might be a whole year.”

DIRECTIONS

Patti Rodgers got her start with the Forest Service in 1970, working in recreation, picking up litter and cleaning outhouses. She went on to become one of the agency’s first female firefighters—getting trained for the job after putting out a fire on her own. Since 1990 she’s been a public affairs officer for the Willamette National Forest in Eugene, Oregon.

Rodgers agrees with many of her colleagues that leadership changes once had little effect on the ground. That changed after Clinton took over and inserted Thomas as chief. “Until that time, particularly, chiefs were less likely to be pressured by an administration to move in a given direction. I think there was far more autonomy.”

Since then she’s seen an increased control over information coming from the Washington office, something that makes a profound difference in her job. That tightening may have started in the late years of Robertson’s tenure as chief, she says. But it clearly jumped under Clinton’s administration and it hasn’t let up since.

“I see my job as being all about relationships,” she says. “It’s very difficult to sustain relationships if you’re unable to freely share information. It’s not my sense that [the change] comes from the chief so much as that it comes from the administration.”

More broadly, she’s seen the effect of leadership changes on policy and on funding priorities. “In carnivals they have those ducks that you shoot at, and when you hit it, it turns and it goes the other way,” she says. “Sometimes it feels like that.”

As an example, she cites the emphasis on ecosystem management that came to the fore under Thomas, implemented in the Northwest Forest Plan as the solution to the region’s timber wars. It’s just over a decade later now—almost no time at all in the life of a forest, and barely enough time to start building momentum within the agency—and the focus has shifted to forest health.

“We haven’t come very far to the goals and the promise of ecosystem management,” she says. “We just barely stepped off the curb.”

“We’re continuing to operate under the principles of ecosystem management. We’re not going to go back. But where there was a real focus and a real energy driving our experiences and our learning, now that’s not there.” Now, she says, “we’re struggling to keep some of those programs alive.”

In the end, however, Rodgers’s solution to frustration echoes that of Lavendel, her colleague to the north.

“At our very core we can reach down inside and know that our spirit is fed not by the politics but by what we do and where we do it,” Rodgers says. “So you let the negative stuff roll off as much as you can, and you go do what you know best to do.”