Ch. 7 - The Boss
Below is chapter 7 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
I was sipping champagne with Stephanie, celebrating my surprising achievement. I had been appointed one of the directors of my agency. At 62, a court administrator enjoying a third career, I had become a boss.
The first jolt came at the first meeting with my own new boss, Bill Vickrey, the Administrative Director of the Courts. Bill presided over the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), the state agency that administered the huge California court system.
I tossed him a softball: “Bill, thanks for your confidence in choosing me as one of the AOC’s leaders.”
Bill, I’d learn, did not swing at softballs. He offered no assurance of confidence in me. Instead, he launched into a soliloquy on his dissatisfactions with my division, its 75 employees and tempting multi-million-dollar budget.
I listened politely and repeated my prompt: “I appreciate your confidence in me to lead it.”
But he just rolled on about the problems with my division. “I could dismantle it,” he finally concluded, as I sat there in stunned silence. “I could merge your staff and programs into other divisions. I could use that funding. You have to do better.”
Was this guy serious? I hadn’t done anything yet except celebrate his announcement that I was the newest member of the agency’s top management team. I was still savoring Stephanie’s toasts to me, and he’s threatening to take away my division. Bill, I would learn, was spare with compliments and adept at squeezing every bit of productivity from his Directors. Welcome, Ken, to top management.
The employees of my division literally welcomed me with open arms. Immediately after Bill’s e-mail announcement of my appointment as a Director, a throng of my people spontaneously appeared in the aisles outside my office, clapping. Looking out over those smiling trusting faces as I delivered an impromptu thank-you speech, I thought about Bill’s threat to disband us. I considered my fearsome responsibility as their new leader. I wondered: “Can I do this?”
Soon after my 2005 appointment as Director, I came home with my secretary’s one-page organization chart. It showed an intricate web of boxes and reporting lines containing my division’s line staff, management team, and work units. Everything in this maze gravitated up toward my name – alone, in bold block letters, in a large thick rectangular box, dead center at the top, towering over the division. Stephanie and I stared at this dense graphic display of authority in my new kingdom, stunned, laughing, giddy. Stephanie knew my odyssey to the top of that organization chart.
Thirty-four years earlier, in 1971, a tourist had taken a picture of me and my girlfriend Katie on the UC Berkeley campus: genuine hippie student radicals. Indeed, the tourist was right. I was a graduate student, a leftist, and a dabbler in the counterculture. I was all for bringing down the System.
The Sixties student rebellion ended with the decade, but not for me. In the Seventies I became a historian who sympathized with socialist revolution and wrote about rebellious anarchist workers, Communist trade union organizers, and left-wing farmers. My life was contemplative, with years devoted to historical research and writing. My books were about challenging the System.
Run the System? Lead it? Unthinkable. Reactionary. A waste of my time. And, worst: dull.
And yet, a decade later I was struggling to enter the System. My books written, the Sixties rebellion long gone, I was fed up with life on the margins as a free-lance writer and part-time teacher. I went to law school and in 1986 became an attorney. I wanted to earn a professional living and catch up with my fellow baby boomers who had long ago left behind the Sixties. In a complete reversal, by the 1990s I was an attorney litigator devoting long hours to representing corporations and government agencies. No more rebellion. No more contemplation. I was an aggressive litigator. I defended the bosses.
Taking this job as an AOC Director in 2005 was my next move upward, my greatest leap after departing from the academic world. Now the attorney employees advised me. Now I made the big business decisions. I was the boss.
My rise had been meteoric. I arrived at the AOC in 2000, age 56, as a line attorney, looking for work more significant than endless litigation wars, and with a plan to kick back after my hard-driving years in private law practice. But this agency was more like a high-tech start-up than a sleepy government bureaucracy It was frenetic, innovative, half formed, and in constant flux, building a new state administrative infrastructure for the court system. There was no kicking back.
I saw opportunity everywhere, like Joe Montana spotting passing targets opening before his eyes in slow motion. I quickly rose through the ranks of the agency’s legal division to become a supervising attorney and then a managing attorney, collaborating with judicial branch leaders on the rules governing the court system, supervising a cadre of attorneys. Once again, like private law practice, I was working 60-hour weeks.
“The appetite grows with the eating,” goes the Yiddish saying, and so it was with me and this agency. I successfully campaigned for appointment as Assistant Director of another division. The day I showed up to start the new job, I was dumbfounded to learn that my new division Director, who had just hired me, was leaving. The next day I launched another campaign to be appointed her successor, the next Director. I knew little about my new division, but, no matter: I could learn, I could lead it. And within two months Bill appointed me Director.
Stephanie asked why I pursued these new positions, Assistant Director and then Director, leaving the familiarity of law work and the legal division.
“Because the vacancies were there,” I answered. “I knew I could reach the top. I had to do it.”
* * *
I quickly discovered that my job as boss was to satisfy others, above all, my demanding clients, the state courts across California. I dealt daily with the world-class egos of the judges who led those courts. They were state constitutional officers, former stars in private law practice, now operating in a cumbersome government bureaucracy, a combustible combination. I was responsible for delivering my division’s state services for their courts.
As a top dog, a Director, I had to collaborate with other top dogs, peer Directors in my agency, whose cooperation I needed and who ruled their own division empires. We were 15 Directors presiding over an organization of some 700 employees, administering a state court system with an annual budget approaching four billion dollars, working with 58 trial courts, six appellate courts, and the California Supreme Court. I described our Directors team as “the A plus club.” We were bright, accomplished, ambitious, and armed with sharp elbows. I had climbed into a formidable leadership team.
Ambition abounded in our high achieving agency. I had to direct my own division management team: friendly gifted people who’d be delighted to take over my job anytime and show they could do it better. I had to keep my talented, restless line employees working productively and, if possible, happily, and channel their love of risk-taking in directions that allowed me to sleep at night.
That first meeting with Bill, when he pondered eliminating my division, haunted me for years as I expanded our goals and fought bureaucratic battles over budget, personnel, and programs. I had to persuade many people to do what needed to be done, whether by reasoning, inspiring, cajoling, or threatening. I had to figure out if anyone was ever telling the complete truth to me, the guy who was responsible, the boss.
And there was “the Vision Thing.” Bill was all about vision, about a monumental transformation of the massive California court system from a loose federation of county-based trial courts to a strong, unified third branch of state government. Bill, with his own boss the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, was leading a multi-year struggle to establish effective judicial branch central authority and accountability, unifying the municipal and superior courts into a single trial court level, unified and equitable state financing for the court system, state management of over 500 court facilities, courts responsive to contemporary problems, uniform impartial justice across the big state, and greater public access to the courts. Bill, like his boss Chief Justice Ron George, was a visionary reformer with massive plans for transforming and improving the California justice system.
I was no visionary. I just wanted a practical to-do list with important tasks to cross off. But Bill inspired me to think widely and deeply about the organization and services of our state court system. And my job included strategic planning for the entire state court system; “state vision” actually was on my to-do list. And I had to develop my own division’s mission, goals, and strategies. What are we trying to accomplish? Why? How? And see that everyone understood it. Year after year, more vision.
“And, Ken,” Bill told me two more months into the job, “you should speak out on our views of issues.” “Which issues? What views?” I wondered, as I nodded my head yes. All issues, I soon learned, and the views of our judicial branch leadership. Bill wanted me to become an outspoken leader.
I worked out of a majestic corner office with two walls of bright windows, guarded by my loyal secretary, and surrounded by my people in a dense hive of offices and partitioned workspaces. My office was spacious enough for a conference table where I presided over meeting after meeting, with groups moving in and out like dancers choreographed to my all-important schedule. Every day I wore a dark suit and a colorful tie, the judicial branch uniform for men in high positions.
My responsibilities included administrative support to the California Judicial Council. Here I worked with the eminent judges, court executives, and attorneys who decided policy for the state judicial branch of government: budget, facilities, technology, court procedures, special programs for children and families, with a mind-boggling array of thorny issues. I collaborated closely with these state leaders, shepherding policy proposals through the system and keeping the Council on track with its own decision-making procedures. I admired the Council’s leadership in the great reform of the California state courts to a strong independent third branch of state government. Presenting innovative policy proposals and program initiatives at Council meetings, I felt like one of the wise men and women among them. But my finest work was backstage, seeing that the Council operated effectively and fixing problems. At one public meeting I beamed when a Council leader thanked me as his “consigliere.”
Directing a division of some 75 people, I was humbled by my solemn responsibility for personnel issues:
Compensation and promotion: so much at stake for my employees. I agonized over every decision.
An employee in jeans at a Council meeting? Irritating. Send out yet another firm reminder to my division about appropriate dress.
A complaint about a supervisor’s come-on to subordinates? She wasn’t even aware her attentions were unwelcome to young women employees. Find her a non-supervisory job in another division.
A leave request to explore romance in another city? Yes, I can approve; why not?
A health request for a quiet room? Good grief, a special room for rest? In a workplace? Well, this was the innovation I had wished for my dying father at his workplace 25 years ago. Yes, a quiet room, but where do these accommodations end?
Squabbling employees swapping poisonous e-mails copied to Supervisors? Stop the e-mails and talk with them, exercise control, preach cooperation. Why can’t we all get along?
Telecommute policy? Popular with employees, productive for some, but goes against all my traditional instincts to maintain control. How did I become so conservative? Yes, be flexible, but for God’s sake be careful.
So it went, employment issues without end.
As a Sixties radical, I always had been in solidarity with workers’ struggles. But now that I was a boss, these personnel issues seemed more complicated. As a former employment law attorney, I had faced every conceivable employment difficulty, but as an attorney my job had been merely to advise the employer on minimizing legal risk for his decisions. I was astonished by how different it felt to be the employer decision-maker, the boss responsible for making the decision and for the errors that followed. I had to balance the weight of my employees’ wants with the heartless operational needs of my division. Every day I seemed to encounter the confounding difficulty of promoting the agency’s interests while doing the right thing for employees. My Sixties social conscience had a nonstop debate with my twenty-first century Director responsibilities.
I never felt more like a clueless old man than with the young communications specialists under my direction. They were patiently educating me about using the internet and social media for court system communications. I, the head honcho, suspected that the internet made people stupid with fractured information in spoonfuls of pablum. News communications, in my thinking, began and ended with the print New York Times, which, they informed me, would soon be obsolete. But in one of those weird cosmic jokes, after my years-long bureaucratic battle with the information technology division, Bill, who was interested in all judicial administration innovations, had impulsively anointed me with responsibility for our mighty judicial branch internet communications program. In our agency-speak, “I owned it.” Now what?
I needed an open mind – that is, a mind these young communications innovators could pry open. In one of many instances when my troops pushed me forward, I found myself leading a vast “user-centric” redesign of our state judicial branch websites. “Better pablum,” I thought to myself, and kept the thought to myself as I led our charge to the inevitable online future. Worse, there I was meeting with somber California Supreme Court administrators, my soul brothers among the cautious old timers in funereal suits, advocating the value of Twitter, discussing who would control the tweets, for the solemn business of announcing Supreme Court decisions.
Doing things I did not want to do, I discovered, was a crucial responsibility for an important man in charge. Groveling, like periodically beseeching a willful judge to continue as chair of a difficult advisory committee...I needed her…she knew it. I did plenty of groveling, for others too, just part of the job when needed. I repeatedly heard myself publicly uttering administration buzzwords about “best practices” and “critical conversations” and “teachable moments.” “Did I really say that?” I’d think, but in the moment it somehow had seemed right. Taking responsibility for every mistake, delay, and initiative gone south in my innovative risk-taking division: “Yes,” I’d say, “my problem, I’ll fix it.” Implementing last-minute, mind-bending, back-breaking changes to new policy and programs, imposed by my boss for some greater organizational purpose that I reluctantly grasped: “Yes, will do, now.”
My boss Bill Vickrey was the bane of my life. He was our leader with the spacious mind and the iron will to remake the California judicial branch of government. Bill had endless inspired ideas for his leadership team and the court system, whether it was transforming the radioactive court financing system, daunting California Constitution revisions, giant facilities and technology programs, and ambitious statewide initiatives to protect foster children, reform the criminal probation system, and improve the judicial selection system. In our meetings, he’d spin out his project ideas in complex ruminations, thinking aloud, usually in a single sentence with endless subordinate clauses, delving ever more deeply into the big concept, which I would strain to grasp.
I admired Bill as an idealist with unyielding dedication to improving every feature of the California justice system. He was a canny veteran of years of politically charged policy struggles in California state government and its contentious “judicial branch family,” the most brawling family I ever had encountered. He had the extraordinary administrative skills to implement vast projects, and the perseverance to see them through. He was fearless in policy battles that raged through the California judicial system. And he was honorable. Had there been a Nobel Prize for “court administration genius,” I would have nominated Bill.
Bill was a policy wonk and a technocrat who believed in meritocracy, and I was flattered to be among his chosen leaders. Some Directors tried to steer clear of him, but there was no hiding, no evading his microscopic familiarity with our work across the sprawling state court system. So I went right at him to mobilize his support for my division’s initiatives, and he and I collaborated closely with the Judicial Council and the enactment of policy initiatives for the state court system. Bill would contact me at work or home, day or night, weekday or weekend, telephone or email, and I always made myself immediately available. Despite his impeccable manners, Bill was relentless and there was no saying “no” to what he wanted to accomplish, practical or impractical, due in five minutes or a year. My job was to figure out just what he wanted and how to do it, if not his way then another way. Get it done or raise a red flag warning of impending disaster. Meanwhile, keep him and his micromanagement impulses out of my kitchen, my division, by running it well.
Bill once complained to me about a formidable critic, a judicial branch nemesis who tried to subvert Bill’s plans at every opportunity. Bill constructed big tents for his initiatives, drawing in people with many viewpoints, particularly critics, but this person was impervious.
“Yes,” I commiserated. “You’ve got a tough struggle with him.”
“What do you mean ‘You’?” he responded. “It’s ‘we.’ You’re in it too.”
I silently groaned. Having been a scrappy radical in the 1960s, a left-wing historian in the 1970s, then a rough-and-tough litigator in the 1980s and 1990s, I had a strange aversion to the family fights in our fractious judicial branch. I preferred observing from a distance these ferocious disputes over the future of the California court system, cheering Bill on, and some day writing about it, like historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. chronicling Camelot for JFK. But as I well knew, my job was in the trenches with Bill, fighting shoulder to shoulder for our reforms.
“Yes,” I replied, as he wanted. “We.” And, a surprise to me, later events drew me into these battles, shoulder to shoulder with Bill.
The pressures on our agency’s leaders were brutal, with unpredictable tidal inflows of issues, initiatives, deadlines, and crises. “We ought to try and do everything,” Bill once said in a Directors retreat to “prioritize” our agency’s goals. We Directors looked at each other, speechless. For Bill’s next birthday celebration, we showed up in t-shirts emblazoned with his anti-prioritizing motto: “Do everything.” We laughed at our joke. He, however, believed it.
Bill had an administrative philosophy of continuous improvement to meet the ever-evolving needs of the California court system. I thought of it more like Trosky’s notion of “permanent revolution” following the Russian Revolution; that is, never halt through continuous cycles of revolution until the final overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We Directors were with Bill at the front of this perpetual upheaval, driving it and trying to manage it, before we were run over.
Almost every AOC employee’s desk was a massive clutter of papers and files, overloaded and teetering toward disarray. I struggled daily against dangerous disorganization, at least keeping my desk in order. As a Director, I wondered why I had left the university, an institution I had been grateful to escape, but it was an institution where I could maintain a current to-do list and think about the same topic for more than five minutes.
I am a worrier, and job worries travelled home with me, bubbling up anytime. I struggled to see the big picture, find my inner compass, divine the future, avoid mistakes, keep that mind open, make decisions and move on…but, wait, be sure those decisions are implemented. I had a mental breakthrough, not breakdown, when I realized one day that being the boss was better than not being the boss, where I would have even less control. I persevered, and occasionally I flourished. But I had no peace of mind as a Director.
When I had joined the Sixties rebellion, the “rat race,” corporate and bureaucratic, was a Fifties peril to be avoided. As an AOC Director, I tried to remember the dangers of boundless ambition and overwork in a large organization. On a remote corner of my large tidy Director’s desk was a framed New Yorker cartoon, a gift reminder from Stephanie, showing two rats in running wheels, one diligently galloping in circles, the other sitting pensively, saying, “I had an epiphany.” Bill once noticed this cartoon, and he looked at me quizzically, perhaps wondering if I was with the program, his program.
Not entirely. Believing in the best for his leadership team, Bill encouraged me to take executive training programs offered by the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. I declined. The prospect of a week discussing the latest in executive leadership techniques sounded stupefying. Participating in the dollars-driven specious academics of a university business school seemed like a betrayal of my rigorous Ph.D. training in history. Anyhow, I really did not think of myself as an “executive,” which sounded like the winner of a rat race: still a rat.
Looking back now, at the risk of having become a rat, I wish I had taken those opportunities Bill had offered for improvement of my management skills. Bill took me seriously as one of his top managers. My management skills were home grown and could have been much improved. Now I think I had been scared by the prospect of taking on that self-improvement project, of becoming a more effective executive. It was a hold-over fear of authority and expertise from the Sixties.
Now and then, I subverted Bill. Every few years a conservative judge would urge him to institute statewide Law Day events in California courts, an assignment that Bill passed on to me. I knew that Law Day, May 1, was an Eisenhower administration law-and-order response to May Day, a day of international demonstrations supporting proletarian solidarity against the bosses. May Day actually had begun with the insurgent nineteenth century Chicago anarchist labor movement, the subject of my own doctoral dissertation. I conjured up impenetrable bureaucratic obstacles to these conservative Law Day celebrations, which never happened on my watch. I have no regrets about this remnant of conscience and mischief from the Sixties.
Over the years I won Bill’s approval, and he never again spoke of dismantling my division. Bill took to calling me “Professor Kann,” at once needling and admiring. He recognized my Sixties idealism, commitment to the job, diligence with my programs, scrupulous grasp of Judicial Council workings, scholarly mulling over all sides of issues, and temperamental preference for cautious action. He tried to tailor his assignments to my strengths as a top administrator. He supported me in adversity. And in meetings with distinguished judicial branch leaders, Bill would introduce me with my advanced degrees and past professional careers – historian, writer, litigation attorney, and now highlevel executive – an academic jewel in his extraordinary, multi-talented team of Directors. I came to feel well recognized by Bill.
I believed in our mission, and that sustained me. Our dynamic agency was building a strong unified state court system in which every Californian would have access to impartial justice. My division contributed in countless daily works: administering the Judicial Council policymaking process, supporting statewide advisory committees of presiding judges and court executive officers, modernizing the court interpreter program, strengthening jury administration, handling media relations and public information requests and branch internal communications, developing civics education programs for schools, surveying court user satisfaction, measuring court workloads, and promoting efficient court operations. True to my academic past, we created a division think tank for innovative court practices for judges and administrators; and true to my activist present, we developed ambitious implementation programs for these innovations. I was dedicated to this important work. It was good government in action.
Our California agency, recognized nationally for administrative excellence, was filled with civic do-gooders, employees committed to public service, particularly Bill, whose leadership I embraced. Many, like me, came out of the Sixties student upheaval, but most of my generation had long ago left politics and public issues for private gain. I had become a leader in this public work for effective democratic state government. Our work seemed important and urgent to me.
I had a chance reunion in 2009 with an old friend from graduate school. This was Oliver who like me had been writing in the 1970s about the insurrectionary nineteenth century labor movement. This was the very same Oliver who had been a drinking pal with an interest in my hippie girlfriend Katie.
This 2009 reunion was like time travel. Oliver was the same as when my picture had been taken on campus with Katie as hippies. He was an unreconstructed radical intellectual who had continued with teaching. He still had that Sixties Einstein hairstyle, a curling bush of cultural rebellion.
I wanted Oliver to understand what I had achieved as a public official over thirty years later. Here was an opportunity to brag, so I invited him to meet at my office before our lunch. Decked out in my usual suit and tie, I walked him from the receptionist desk through my domain, most of the giant fourth floor, through the dense maze of cubicles and small offices to my huge corner office. I could see Oliver’s eyes open wide as we traversed my empire. It was like showing the new 2009 me to the old 1971 me.
“What is your job?” Oliver asked.
I explained my division’s support for the development of judicial branch public policy and our programs fostering a strong state court system.
“But what do you do?” he asked. I explained how I directed this work: meetings, meetings, meetings, and many speeches too. And then we went through it a third time, when I described specific programs I directly oversaw.
“I understand,” he finally concluded. “You’re a bureaucrat.”
Exactly what I would have thought in 1971.
It had been a long journey from when Oliver and I had been pals. I still celebrate my years as a young radical in the Sixties and Seventies. Oliver and I and our comrade generation spread democracy, advanced civil rights and racial equality, inspired new liberation movements, fought a war on poverty, challenged the Vietnam War and other imperial misadventures, began an ecology movement that later became mighty, cultivated a skepticism of all authority, and leveled a liberating counterculture assault on the constraining social conventions of our Fifties childhoods. In the 1970s I wrote a book about a community of left-wing Jewish chicken ranchers, a story of immigration and assimilation, of lost community and lost history, that I still consider my finest lifetime work, more important than any court program I directed.
After our generation’s uprising subsided, I struggled to remain faithful to my Sixties ideals in the cold conservative world that followed. The baby boom generation was coming of age with careers, earnings, and consumption off the charts. Retreat to private life, self-absorption, and “lifestyle” were the new hallmarks of our “me” generation in the 1970s. My Sixties comrades were struggling in competitive job markets to find work that was both purposeful and paying – as professors, teachers, journalists, labor movement operatives, attorneys, and therapists. Some flourished. Others floundered, uncertain what to do. For years, I searched with them.
I forged my path, and it was not straight. I became an attorney and made my way into the institutions I had confronted in the 1960s and 1970s. I hungered for a role in public life, beyond the academic world, and I wanted more compensation too, which led me to law school and litigation. For ten years I represented the bosses as a private attorney. I liked the challenges of that legal work, I was paid well, and I was treated with respect. But I still wanted work I believed in, work with greater civic purpose than representing big institutions in lawsuits. That propelled me from private law practice to the court system.
I thrived in the California judicial branch. I thought we improved the courts, working inside the System, playing by the rules, and instituting big strengthening changes. This was no revolution. I did not consider myself making history as I had felt participating in the movements of the Sixties, teaching at a southern Black university, and writing my book on left wing chicken ranchers. But I helped build an effective justice system for Californians, and I believed that was an important contribution to democratic government. For the first time since the Sixties and Seventies, working for Bill and the AOC, and directing my large, complex division with its important responsibilities, I felt like I was improving the world and making a difference.
It had required all my ability to become a leader in this public work through the court system. It took me decades to get there in a long circuitous journey. I was proud of my job as AOC Director.
Oliver was dismissive. Having determined that I was a bureaucrat and a boss, he had zero interest in my twisting journey from the 1970s. He had zero recognition of the importance of an effective state justice system. He only wanted to discuss our Ph.D. dissertations on the rebellious nineteenth century American labor movement. I recalled little more than May Day.
Bureaucrat! That stinging accusation resurfaced the same year, 2009. A California fiscal crisis revived long-simmering political differences within the judicial branch over its structure, financing, and governance. A coalition of insurgent public officials wanted more control for the local courts, more policy and administrative authority for judges, and reduced influence for professional court administrators like me. They blasted away at my agency as the Evil Empire of self-serving state bureaucrats. For two years I battled in daily firefights over the future of the California court system, defending the judicial branch state Establishment and our reforms. The insurrectionists waged a furious guerilla campaign in the judicial branch, the media, and the Legislature. We Judicial Council leaders, supporting judges and high-level court administrators, and my fellow AOC Directors, met them on every battlefield.
As a Director, I had signed up for building a strong state judicial branch of government, not for this ruthless internecine branch combat. More troubling, I thought my agency was buckling under the assault. A perfect storm was brewing with the continuing state financial crisis, the policy disputes and political challenges over branch governance and resource allocations, a failed big technology project to establish a statewide case management system, and a new chief justice.
I wanted no further part of it. I retired in 2011, at age 67, honored by the Judicial Council and celebrated by many of my employees.
At Bill’s request, a few weeks before my retirement I led our agency’s Directors in a discussion of a new biography of John Marshall, the great U.S. Chief Justice in the early nineteenth century. The book Bill gave each Director to read had over 700 pages of text and footnotes, which I considered an absurd burden on overworked executives, squarely in the category of Bill’s mantra “do everything.” But it was right in my wheelhouse as a historian, attorney, and court system administrator. Bill hosted a dinner, where I led our leadership team in a searching consideration of the young American republic’s emerging judicial system and our own current challenges in California. It was a warm reflective evening for a group that had struggled together through extraordinary events. Bill was right about assigning that book, and I felt well used by him again, this time as a historian. I was almost sorry to be leaving.
On my final day at the AOC, I met with Bill. We reminisced about our years of work together. We discussed our futures. And we hugged goodbye. It was odd, this hug with the Administrative Director of the Courts, two old men in suits, midday in his office teeming with papers and files on every surface, clutching each other. It was a real hug, a squeeze. It was intimate. It felt right.
Other directors, including Bill, left the AOC after me for their own reasons. Change came during the next years. The reforms halted. Our once proud and capable agency, after relentless pounding from judges in the Alliance, was reduced to a tattered shell of the organization I had joined in 2001.
* * *
I could not have done this Director job in my 20s, the 1960s, when I was busy overthrowing the System. Nor in my 30s, the 1970s, when I wrote books about rebels. I couldn’t have done it in my 40s and 50s, the 1980s and 1990s, deep inside the System, when I learned how to fight in litigation and defend the needs of large institutional clients. But in my 60s, as a top manager in the 2000s, I used every bit of this experience – rebellion, risk taking, historical perspective, legal analysis, adversarial struggles, ambition, achievement, mistakes, failure, victories and patience – to lead my troops, run my division, collaborate with Bill, and succeed as a boss in the state justice system.
Being a Director at the AOC was character building, if you had room for more character, and it seems I did. No work has demanded more from me, been more absorbing, or, day-to-day left me more surprised, rattled, and satisfied. No job has offered more opportunity to make a contribution, and I reached for every bit of it.
If I was a boss and a bureaucrat, I was a proud boss and bureaucrat, because for a few years I had solved one of the great conundrums of my generation: how to advance our lofty democratic values from the Sixties while I pursued my personal ambition in a government institution in the 2000s. After years as a rebel in the Sixties and more decades thinking of myself as a dissident, I made my way inside the System I once wanted to throw over. I helped to steer and reform the California court system, and I defended it, center stage as a leader. I was proud to be part of the California judicial branch Establishment.
And the results? Did we make the world a better place? Did we improve the California justice system?
The great California judicial branch reforms of the 1990s and 2000s, the changes we had fought for and accomplished and defended in my ten years at the agency, have largely remained intact. I thought we succeeded with the creation of a stronger, more unified court system, based on more stable and equitable funding. It was a system that was more accessible to Californians. Most important, I thought it was a court system that provided more justice to the California public.
I also can report that, true to my history in the student movements of the Sixties, I participated in that great 2000s reform of the California justice system. It was a struggle; change does not come without struggle. I was there. I was in the fight.
Before we completed the work, the California Administrative Office of the Courts, the agency that pushed through the reforms, the agency where I became a top bureaucrat, a boss, was decimated. It was a casualty of the bitter years-long fights over reform. I was gone by then, retired, but I heard reports of the reductions of budget and personnel, narrowed responsibilities, elimination of programs, departure of leaders, and demoralization of staff. It was no surprise.
In a bit of Stalinist-type rewriting of reality, the final blows included changing the name of our agency from “California Administrative Office of the Courts” to “Judicial Council staff.” It was a change to what I regarded as no name, as if we had been some random collection of people without any organization or purpose. It was an assertion by opponents that the organization I joined in 2001 will not exist again in the future, not with the independence, initiative, and drive for excellence that we celebrated.
I felt fortunate to have left before those final battles brought about the demise and disappearance of the California AOC. I mourned the loss of this organization. It was, after all, my bureaucracy, where I was a boss, among the leaders of the bureaucrats.