Elephant Drill

F. David Mathews, 41, returning to the University of Alabama as president after serving for 17 months as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare:

I came here with some skepticism, if not antagonism. The Government was so cumbersome, so hard to get to. I was outraged by its processes. There were assumptions and naivete in social policy, especially in the separation of the people the Government dealt with--the blind, the old, the poor, all separated out. Of course that is not the way people live, or should live.

All I've tried to do is deal with how the public can be involved in making decisions. [Among other things, he instituted public hearings at earlier stages in the making of HEW's regulations.] Reality in this town is a law passed or budget numbers. But for people who have never been here, Washington is the way it deals with them.

There is no way to go back to the '60s. It's not in the cards, politically. We have to think of something else besides making new policies. Money, we've learned, is not automatically effective; what matters is how it's given out. Homestead, Florida, a migrant [workers'] community, built a hospital and a social and health center. It took 18 federal programs to put it all together. The Federal Government should have had it together from the beginning.

For that, we will need the help of Congress. You just can't get an elephant to do ballet. You can only get it to do what elephants do.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.