The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 13

THE BOSTON GLOBE TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 25. 1980 13 Bv ART IU ClItt Al l) POLITICAL CIRCl IT By ROBERT L. TURNER Retrenching continued Clear as mud WASHINGTON You see them all over Washington these days. Bright young men and women in their best clothes, carrying their resumes in their briefcases, going DkKA ia from one private office to another hoping to TK flNF I' 'OA-, you got the lead now just sit there and study your Want a little free advice? land a job.

They are the walking wounded of the Carter defeat, which brought down not only a President but a also Democratic Senate. There are thousands of them, hired without the protection of the Civil Service, and now bright Republicans are going to get their jobs. Some of the wounded are qualified for the private sector and others, unfortunately, are not. "Mr. Walcott, I've been reading your resume.

But I'm not too clear on exactly what you did for the government." "I was in planning and statistics and dealt mostly with credibility discrepancies and shortfalls in the oversight department." "I see. Could you be a little more specific?" "My department made reports and studies Involving budgetary problems that were outside long-term outlay ratios. We would assess the Impact of these problems and then make recommendations on whether to pass them up the line to the seventh floor or send them back to the third floor for further clarification." "Then your office was above the third floor?" "Yes. sir, I was on the fifth floor with windows overlooking the Washington Monument. The people on the third floor reported to me and I reported to my superior who reported to the people on the seventh floor." "That's very Interesting.

Could you tell me exactly what your day was like?" "The first thing we did in the morning was to have a meeting on the fifth floor to discuss discretionary input policy. Then we broke up, and I went to my office and wrote a memorandum concerning the meeting, which I classified and then submitted to all those concerned, keeping a copy for myself just in case someone called me on It at a later date." "Could you give me a more specific example of exactly the services you rendered?" 'We made reports and studies involving budgetary problems that were outside long-term outlay Hire the young Watch Massachusetts 15 VCk CERMOND and Jl I KS WITCOVER Bv ROW LAND EVAN'S and ROBERT NOVAK must know when the climate is right for harsh action. Prop 2'i has scared the pants off most Massachusetts legislators. And they are hearing from constituents who are union members that the high cost of government, symbolized by the MBTA snarl, must be cut. But King, confronted with a crisis that gives him justification to be fiscally ruthless, has held back.

If Reagan, against the backdrop of the Nov. 4 mandate for change, similarly fails to bite the bullet, he will risk being perceived, like King, as a paper tiger. And that is no way to start a new Administration. Lie low BV RICHARD REEVES Now the long-knife government-cutters are sharpening their blades on each others' steels. Two of Ronald Reagan's chief economic advisers had a bit of a long-distance debate over the weekend about whether the Reagan Administration-in-waiting should push for an Immediate cut in federal spending.

Caspar Weinberger said a thick, $30 billion slice off the old bureaucracy would be fine right away, while Rep. Jack Kemp advised a more measured approach. But no one questions that both men and Reagan subcribe to the budget cutters' Rule No. 1 Less Is better. Meanwhile, at the State House and in city halls around the state.

Gov. Edward J. King and a legion of local officials are busy cutting their own budgets. King, who was elected as an antigovernment. budget-cutting candidate In 1978.

has actually produced moderate increases in the state budget that have knocked his promises of property tax relief cockeyed. Now he Is said to be planning major cuts in state programs to avoid state tax increases. And the local officials, of course, must cut in response to Proposition 2Vi. So virtually all of government that affects Massachusetts, except perhaps the Pentagon, is in a frenzy of fiscal retrenchment, apparently in response to a new national mood for governmental belt-tightening. A new study of government expenditures, however, indicates that the belt-tightening has been well under way for at least two or three years and at all levels of government.

Measured in terms of per capita total government expenditures, in constant 1967 dollars, public spending at the federal, state and local levels has been falling slightly each year since 1978. The decline Is caused partly by a dip in after-inflation personal income for the past two years. But the trend of slowed growth In public spending is still a major change. It is the more striking measured as a percentage of the Gross National Product. Measured by that yardstick, government spending at all levels has been declining since 1975.

This reverses a steady march of increased public spending that had continued relentlessly since 1929 at federal and state levels. Local government spending has been more constant. The figures are taken from standard sources, such as the Census Bureau's "Governmental Finances" and other documents, and have been in- terpreted by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, a permanent, 26-member group that examines the relationship among the various levels of government. The only New England member is Vermont Gov. Richard A.

Snelling. a Republican. The commission report contains a minimum of verbiage, but its tables point clearly to the conclusion that, in Washington, the brakes were not put on by the conservative-talking Administration of Richard M. Nixon, but at the end of the Gerald Ford Administration and through the Jimmy Carter years. Some other bits of information in the report are of national interest the fact, for instance, the California retains the title as the nation's most generous welfare state.

California has claimed this title since the beginning of Reagan's eight years as governor in 1966, and keeps it despite his assertion that he cut back welfare costs dramatically. Massachusetts, according to the report, now ranks second. The figures are based on state welfare expenditures as a percentage of state personal income. A number of the statistics are of special Interest in Massachusetts, particularly for officials deciding where to cut or raise new revenue in the face of Proposition 2W. State and local tax revenue in Massachusetts, measured relative to personal income, declined from 15.1 percent in 1977 to 14.8 percent in 1979.

However, the state's national ranking in this category actually rose during that period from sixth to fourth, because many other states were showing reductions as well. California, under the influence of Proposition 13, declined from 15.5 percent to 12.1 In that period. Despite persistent howling from members of the Massachusetts business community, the report indicates that taxes that have an initial impact on business (corporate, license and some sales taxes, for instance) have declined dramatically in Massachusetts from 33.6 percent of total state and local taxes in 1957 to 23.6 percent in 1977 the lowest of any industrial state and fifth-lowest in the coun- try. Personal taxes, meanwhile, have gone up. And for those who think government is par-' ticularly fat and easily cut-able in Massachusetts.

the report indicates that only 48 of every 1000 residents here were in state or local employment in 1978, a figure well below the national average. If Proposition 2XA runs its course unchecked, the ranking of Massachusetts as a heavy-tax state will certainly decline. But these new figures reinforce the fear that the cuts will be difficult for many. As a result of the election, Massachusetts, somewhat incongruously, can now be called Reagan Country. But something is happening here that should remind the President-elect that preaching economy is one thing and achieving it quite another.

On the same day they chose him over Jimmy Carter, Massachusetts voters resoundingly passed a proposition that among other things sets a limit of 2'j percent of fair market value on property taxes assessed by localities. Even under normal circumstances, it would have put localities in a bind; the state doesn't have the kind of surplus that California did when Prop 13 passed. Further, Massachusetts is in the midst of a colossal mass-transit fiasco that threatens to put an even tighter squeeze on towns in the Boston area. The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) has run out of money and its advisory board, made up of local mayors whose towns are on the system, refused to ante up any more. With Prop 2Vi facing them, they said they would not pay more unless Democratic Gov.

Edward J. King agreed to Institute money-saving reforms. King might have been expected to acquiesce readily. After all, he was elected in 1978 on the basis of strong conservative rhetoric and promises of more efficient management. Indeed, as a candidate he was a Massachusetts Ronald Reagan.

But the rub is that the Carmen, the major union in the MBTA and a strong King backer in 1978, was the obvious target of the reforms. MBTA drivers make an astounding $24,500 a year, and some employees who clean the cars make more than that, as a result of aggressive collective bargaining and MBTA management that declined to draw the line. Public knowledge of such salaries, a recent doubling of fares and continued ic service gave King an ideal climate for getting tough on his old backers. Instead, he declared an emergency, took over the system and asked the Legislature for $41 million more to keep the MBTA going to year's end. He offered only mild reforms and the Legislature refused him.

In one fell swoop. King dealt what may prove to be a death blow to his image as a classic conservative warrior against free spending. Even before this episode, his erratic performance had sent his stock plunging. Now he is rated a goner for reelection in 1982 by some Democratic pols and at best a long shot by others. What makes the situation particularly embarrassing for King Is that the MBTA is regarded hands-down as the most wasteful, inefficient bureaucracy in the state.

The significance for Reagan is that a candidate may be able to get by with talk and promises, but an effective executive must be willing to put his political stakes where his mouth Is, even if it hurts special interests that helped elect him. And he WASHINGTON "Aren't we a very old, team?" Winston Churchill asked Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on Sept. 2, 1939, surveying Chamberlain's proposed war Cabinet. It is a question President-elect Reagan also should ponder as he begins Cabinet-making in earnest. In fact, he should broaden the question: Aren't we in danger of becoming a very old, very gray and very establishment team of businessmen with reputations as managers but not as men of Ideas? The antidote happens to be very old himself but is anything but gray, is not establishment, not a businessman, not a manager and is surely filled with ideas: Ronald Reagan.

The Cabinet is taking shape in leaks from Reagan aides. New York lawyer William Casey. 67, at CIA, and Los Angeles lawyer William French Smith, 63. at the Justice Department are considered all but certain. Those twin executives from the Bechtel Casper Weinberger, 63, and George Shultz, 60, are prime possibilities to be named somewhere State Department, Pentagon or OMB.

Adding William Simon, at 54 neither old nor gray, only slightly modifies the gerontocracy of the presumptive Cabinet. Including Reagan, soon to be 70, its average age Is almost 63. But age Is not the most serious problem. Some Insiders call it an "embarrassment" to make an attorney general out of Smith, described by one Reagan adviser as "a society lawyer." Old Reaganites blame him, as Reagan's family lawyer, for Reagan's politically embarrassing zero income tax payments of the past. Whether the criticism is well-founded, nobody has accused Smith of serious thought about government.

The widely respected Shultz Is so much an establishment comformlst that even some of his admirers believe he would be an effective Secretary of State only In an Administration peppered with younger, more innovative personalities. Why are the names emerging from the kitchen cabinet so lacking in youth, dynamism and imagination? Because the advisers, elder establishmentarlans from the world of business, seek above all managerial ability. That is why the abrasive, Simon is welcome relief to Reagan supporters who worry about an old gray Cabinet. Whatever the complaints about his temperament, Simon lives in the world of ideas. What's more, he is willing to change them.

The conventional wisdom doubts Reagan will stray far from the advice of his old friends. But unlike those retired business tycoons, Reagan has never met a payroll. For the last 20 years, he has dealt with Ideas showing startling receptivity to new concepts. He might prefer a few younger colleagues with similar intellectual boldness by his side. LOS ANGELES Without having been asked.

I would like to offer the next leader of the Free World some advice: Establish a Quiet Presidency. Stay off TV unless you really have something to say. Don't brag about going to work at dawn's early light or falling asleep reading cables from Zanzibar and the collected speeches of Theodore Roosevelt. Don't propose a solution for every problem. Protect us from your children.

If the press complains that you are not talking or doing enough, tell them to shove it. And keep your "shirt on. Our last four presidents each a bit manic In his own way had this compulsion to undress in public. The three presidents I've covered have been obsessed with filling the Insatiable celebrity demands of the press, particularly television. More important, on the governing level, Nixon, Ford and Carter consistently rushed in where angels feared to tread.

As they used to say of Hubert Humphrey, he had more solutions than there were problems. Programs. Programs. Programs. Plans.

Plans. Plans. The United States in 1980 is not a good place or time to propose too much. Everyone out there Congress, special interests, the press Is just laying back, waiting to chip and claw away at the program of the day. Presidents are literally being nibbled to death by ducks.

So, let the ducks do the quacking. There is no good reason that the leader of the nation has to speak out on every issue. Leaders are not people who take a leadership position on everything. Leaders are people with an agenda, with priorities something Carter never had. Leaders often hold back their words and their deeds, until allies and opponents are worn out or cancelled out, until followers are ready to follow.

If Franklin D. Roosevelt had practiced the leadership of his recent successors, he would have declared war on Germany and Japan in 1938 nd no one would have come. Reagan could do very well with a short agenda. Something like: 1 Peace in our time. 2) Prosperity in our children's time.

The rest of the national agenda, important though 1t may be, could safely be left to the busy, busy men and women who take working vacations. "Of course. Let's say that at the meeting we discussed a restructuring of the Infrastructure of the department. My superior wanted to know what grievance-response mechanisms had to be built Into the program for It to succeed, and how we could move the staff around without endangering the efficiency of his department by adopting the reforms. We didn't want to send a rocket up in the building that would crash down on our heads." "Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that one of your many functions was to protect your superior's job." "I never thought of It that way, but now that you mention it I guess that was what I was doing.

You have to understand how the department worked. The seventh floor kept sending down memos that they were getting flak from the eighth floor to cut out the fat in the agency. The seventh floor said they had no fat to cut, and it was up to fifth floor to enact a cost-saving program. We passed on their demands to the third floor for suggestions. But the third floor was very uncooperative and kept sending back memos insisting that any major savings In running the department could only be made on the upper floors.

Obviously, we had to protect our own turf." "How did you do this?" "By increasing the staff on the fifth floor, so that in case we were forced to cut back we would have the same number of people we started with." "I seem to be very thick, Mr. Walcott, but I'm perplexed as to how your Job served the people." "I don't understand the question." "What contribution did you make to the taxpayer to justify your salary?" "I believe that if you read the reports I've written over the past four years you'll see that I earned every nickel I got." "What happened to those reports?" "Twenty-six of them got to the seventh floor, and six, 1 was told, got to the eighth floor. I don't think that's a bad record." "One more question. Given your background, why do you want to be a steward on the Eastern Airlines shuttle?" "I've always been good with people." Robert L. Turner is a Globe political colum- nist.

He was quite a guy, Carl Velleca was I will miss him Bv MIKE BARMCLE ways ignored by a world too afraid, too Image conscious, too busy to treat a self-rehabilitated human being with a small degree of respect or to a decent job. He was at MCI Concord when he ran for selectman. Thinking this the height of mischief, I would go to candidate's nights with him. At one event, he was saying that trustees should do public service work like town garbage, collection and snow removal. He was talking about inmates who worked sucessfully with children at the Fernald School when he was interrupted by a woman who objected to prisoners working on town streets.

"That's the trouble, lady." Carl Velleca said. "You let us take care of the retarded but you won't let us take care of your garbage." He was my friend. I will miss him. alarm system and a $l6o-a-week nightwatch-man. What are you, He did almost nine months in solitary at Walpole for fielping to organize a hunger-strike.

He was the ultimate jailhouse lawyer, and his Ideas on prison reform were novel. "Look, there are some guys who should never be let out." he'd say. "There are guys who would shoot at STOP signs. "But Walpole ain't the place for them. Walpole ain't the place for anyone.

Tear it down. Burn it down. Take the worst of the bunch in there and put them out on an island. Put them on an Iceberg. Put them anywhere where they're going to be away from everyone else.

Let them kill each other if they want to." Inside. Carl Velleca was a stabilizing force on an inmates who were mostly younger, mostly of a different color. He had respect, common sense. He knew right from wrong. Outside, he was an example of the bankruptcy of the word He had brains, character and feeling.

He had something to offer but the offers were almost al ter's degree in common sense. He was funny. He was sad. He was right out of the movies. He was more than a number, more than a piece of paper.

He was an original. He was no "born again" ex-convict. He wasn't a guy trying to score points with a world that lived on the outside "by claiming that some new allegiance to God had set him straight. He always had his religion. And he always had his own code.

He never hurt anyone and he never gave anyone up and. as a result, he did some serious time In jail. He didn't carry a gun. and his stories of bank robberies were more comic than criminal. His life In jail, though, was real.

"You know what causes the most trouble inside." he would say. "You're standing there at lunch and you get talking to the guy next to you and you find out he's in for the same thing you did. Then he tells you he's doing five years. You're doing 15 for the same thing. What do vou think that does to vour head?" Carl Velleca came from Providence.

He finished the 8th grade, hung around for a few years and went into the service. "As soon as I got to Japan, I found out how to say, 'stick 'em up" In Japanese," he once said. "I got arrested by the Mounties In Canada in September, 1967. It was the worst fall I ever took. "They put me In a jail where there was no radio.

It took me three weeks to find out the Red Sox had won the pennant." He was arrested In 1968 when $250,000 worth of Paul Revere silver disappeared from Phillips Academy. The silver was stolen twice and Velleca was charged with receiving stolen property and sentenced to 30 years, basically for not telling who did the stealing. "First time it was stolen, they walked right in and took it." he said later. "After they got it back and before it was taken again, the school spent a bundle of money on an alarm system. "Everybody wondered how they bypassed the alarm when the stuff got stolen the second time.

I told them. 'Hey. you got a $100,000 His name was Carl Velleca and on Sunday he died on the altar of God. There, he was doing the thing he most enjoyed, talking, this time to some people at the LaSalette Seminary Shrine In Ipswich, when a heart attack ended 49 years of a life spent mostly In places like MCI Walpole. MCI Concord and the federal prison farm at Allenwocd, Pa.

They called him "Blue" or "Bluejay" and his friends ran the gamut from priests and cops to racetrack touts and mob guys. He hung around churches and stables. He read about politics and baseball and had an Ion on anything you could imagine. His word was better than a bank president's, his insight more keen than a professor's. He was a criminal who had spent most of the last 25 years behind walls and bars.

He was self-taught in many areas and had a mas Robert V. Jordan's mliimn will tomorrow..