[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 122 (Tuesday, August 23, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
             JACK VALENTI'S VIEWS ON JUDGMENT IN GOVERNMENT

  Mr. PRESSLER. Mr. President, I would like to take a few moments to 
acknowledge a man who is known by all of us and is a friend to many, 
Jack Valenti. Mr. Valenti, as president of the Motion Picture 
Association of America for the past 28 years, has been instrumental in 
linking Washington and Hollywood. For example, Mr. Valenti travels 
worldwide to new and potential markets, expanding the video, movie, and 
television industries. This brings billions of trade dollars to the 
United States. He has helped to overcome barriers to American culture 
in Europe through the entertainment media.
  As a Washington insider since his days as President Lyndon Johnson's 
special assistant, Jack has been an insightful commentator on 
governmental procedure and human nature. Recently, the Los Angeles 
Times published an article he wrote regarding intuition and judgment 
and the role they play in government. Mr. President, I ask unanimous 
consent that Jack Valenti's article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Los Angeles Times, Aug. 9, 1994]

                 Judgment Day Comes for All in Politics


washington: because making the right call is intuitive, we will always 
                  have investigations like whitewater

                           (By Jack Valenti)

       Watching a young man writhing under the televised wrath of 
     a Senate committee investigating Whitewater is not a 
     congenial sight. One aches with compassion. Particularly when 
     the young Treasury Department official, laden with academic 
     credentials (Yale, Oxford), a civilized, educated, literate 
     young 28-year-old, stirs in visible discontent. If he had 
     been offered a blindfold and a cigarette, the scene would 
     have been complete.
       But his torment is an object lesson in one of the least 
     publicized requisites for any young man or woman who aspires 
     to be in any kind of high public office. The requirement is 
     all the more stringent if that aspiration takes him or her to 
     that icy, thinly populated level of the presidency and the 
     Cabinet.
       That requirement is judgment. Sound judgment. Wise 
     judgment. It is the dividing line that marks the difference 
     between the mostly right and the mostly wrong decisions. It 
     is the distinction, as Mark Twain said, ``between lightning 
     and the lightning bug.'' It is not to be found in academic 
     degrees or SAT test scores or grade averages nor does it 
     necessarily reside within the great universities.
       Judgment is that inner voice, that tiny elf who lives 
     somewhere in the brain and gut of a public official, and who 
     from time to time whispers. ``Go this way; don't do that 
     because it will get you in trouble.'' It is an intuitive 
     nostril that twitches and notifies the senses whether the 
     political environment that day is fair or foul. It's what 
     separates war from war games. It is a nameless instinct that 
     guides the public person through hidden political mines on 
     which judgment-less mortals blithely step and are blown to 
     bits on the evening news.
       The prime specifications for a presidential or Cabinet aide 
     are: loyalty--without loyalty nothing counts--and judgment, 
     which is learned often through bitter experience, or is 
     genetically inherited.
       If you examine every great issue that presses against the 
     Oval Office or within the committee rooms of Congress, there 
     is not one where the facts are clear, the direction precise, 
     nor any comfort level in an estimate of results down the 
     road. Every great decision taken emerges from the shadows 
     without a certainty of outcome. Or to put in more mystical 
     terms, as one philosopher said, ``Men must leap into faith as 
     they do into darkness, without any reassuring proof that God 
     is there.''
       In my service in the White House I was never once witness 
     to any presidential decision where the President had all the 
     facts he needed. Inevitably, data, information, knowledge 
     thin out, the pathway grows dim and then the President walks 
     down and unlighted corridor. At the moment when he must 
     decide, it is his judgment--call it instinct, intuition, 
     sixth sense--which he now summons, without any proof he is 
     right.
       Perhaps one day, some researcher will come up with a blood 
     test that will gauge the ``judgment level'' in each of us. 
     Meanwhile, the committee hearings and investigations will 
     continue as they have since the birth of this republic, all 
     targeting the judgment of the lack thereof of discomfitted 
     witnesses.

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