Making Government Work: Lessons from a Life in Politics

by Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings

Book Overview

A bold call to action for those who would lead well and those who would be well led.

"Performance is better than promise" has long been the motto of Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings, a former Governor of South Carolina and six-term U.S. Senator whose distinguished political career speaks volumes about the potential of the elected and the electorate to use government for the good of all. Making Government Work serves as equal parts...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570037604
• ISBN13: 9781570037603
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

I miss Fritz!

This book is almost like having a conversation with Sen. Hollings. I really miss him and hope we'll have Senators more like him in the next two elections.

Making Government Work

That's the title of the most practical "political" book you'll ever read. It is a user's manual for representative democratic government, written by former Senator Ernest F. (Fritz) Hollings of South Carolina, who spent six impressively productive decades in public service.As a reporter and campaign worker, I've known Fritz Hollings since he was the movie star-handsome "boy governor" of South Carolina in 1960 and JFK's invaluable ally in rounding up southern votes to gain the presidency. "Fritz" is a master politician; even more, he is a tireles public servant who truly tries to make government work for everyone he represents. Hollings has a razor sharp wit and a natural gift for memorable story-telling. He takes the reader behind backroom closed doors and into dark corners of political intrigue and describes how vitally important things get done. Hollings, who has been called "a visionary workhorse," focused throughout his career on putting government on a sound financial basis and promoting economic development and job creation. In a half century in Washington, he sponsored legislation on the budget, telecommunications, defense, trade, the environment and space exploration. In 1975, he pushed through the Automobile Fuel Economy Act and tried to launch an energy conservation revolution. In his presidential campaign a decade later, he sounded the earliest warnings against "outsourcing" and the loss of essential American manufacturing jobs overseas. Americans need to read and embrace his practical messages in this remarkable book and follow Fritz's lead. Richard J. Whalen www.richardwhalen.com

The Last Senator

Every so often while reading Fritz Hollings' autobiography I had to stop and ask myself a question: Was there really ever such a person in American politics? Someone who actually ran for office with the intention of making his city, state and country better places? Someone who would admit to mistakes -- and even to a little political expediency -- and who then tried to make up for it? Someone unafraid to make fun of Sam Donaldson to his face on national television? This book should have been published by a mass market imprint and renamed to sell to a larger audience. But it's part of Hollings' charm that he hides the fascinating and candid narrative of his political life behind a practical and well-meaning title. He really wanted government to work for the people -- as a state senator, governor and U.S. Senator -- and often he succeeded. Unfortunately, he never made it to the White House, but that's an American political story best told by a historian of our locked-up, frequently suffocating two-party duopoly. There isn't quite room for a Fritz Hollings in a system that requires the president to be the leader of his party before he is the leader of his country. I first met Senator Hollings when I was writing a book about NAFTA and there is no more intelligent, or acerbic critic of "free trade" dogma than he. But Hollings' book is replete with other engrossing stories where his honest differences with the mainstream of his constituency and of the Democratic Party placed him in the role of dissident. From racial integration in the early 1950s to Iraq in the early 20th century, we get the always forthright account -- sometimes first-hand -- of how political reality in America conflicts with political honesty. And through it all shines Hollings' utter lack of cynicism -- his determination to make the system work, no matter how corrupt it may be. Making Government Work ought to be read by anyone who wants to know more about Brown V. Board of Education (the little known story of the Summerton 60 was particularly enlightening for me), trade politics, campaign finance, and the Senate vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq. But even if you're not a student of recent American history, or if you disagree with Hollings on his positions, you'll enjoy his sense of humor. A great politician tries to inspire, of course, but a truly effective politician knows just when to make his audience laugh. Along with Robert Dole, Hollings is the best I've ever heard, with or without a script.

Wise, well-written, and consistently absorbing

Rarely has Senator Fritz Hollings used his renowned wit to more devastating effect than when he was interviewed in 1990 on the ABC program, This Week with David Brinkley. Some weeks earlier he had reportedly bought a bargain-priced Korean-made suit on a field trip to Seoul. Given his role as a leading critic of Korean dumping in the American textile market, the alleged purchase was the sort of trivia that passed for news in some quarters. Although Hollings had arrived at the ABC studio expecting to talk about the federal government's worsening budget deficits, the interviewer Sam Donaldson lost no time in getting to the nub of the matter: whether or not Hollings was at that moment wearing the notorious suit. "Senator," Donaldson said, "you're from the great textile-producing state of South Carolina. Is it true you have a Korean tailor." Before Hollings could respond, Donaldson pressed on: "Let's see the label in there. What is the label in there?" "I bought it," Hollings replied, "the same place right down the street where, if you want to personalize this thing, you got that wig, Sam." The entire studio erupted. The blustery -- and bewigged -- Donaldson had had, if not his head handed to him, at least his tonsorial codpiece. But he was to exact a terrible revenge. Although Hollings had previously been a favorite on the program, Donaldson made sure that the courtly Southern Senator (and a man who still sports a full head of hair -- all evidently securely attached to its owner) was never invited back. Hollings had insulted a vain and not overly intelligent member of the new aristocracy of Big Foot media interviewers and for punishment he would be cast into outer darkness. In "Making Government Work," an autobiographical account of the steadily worsening problems that have engulfed the American political system in the last six decades, Hollings tells this anecdote as an illustration of how America has lost its way. Politicians, he writes, "are failing people because journalists too often are in the business of pursuing sideshows and not looking at the big picture." His point is, of course, irrefutable. But there is a deeper moral here that Hollings is too polite to state explicitly: while, by the standards of his trivia-obsessed profession, Donaldson might claim to have been within his rights in bringing up the alleged purchase, his insulting tone was utterly inexcusable. No decent person should have been addressed in such a way. That a member of the U.S. Senate should be so addressed bespeaks a degree of decay in the American body politic that bodes ill for the entire future of American democracy. In dissecting what has really happened to the American empire since its zenith in 1945, Hollings enjoys an unrivalled command of his material. Few if any political actors have played at such a high level for so long. A life-long Democrat, he was elected to the South Carolina legislature in 1948, became governor in 1958, and entered the U.S. S

A Smart and Saucy Book

For almost four decades, Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings had the quickest mind and sharpest wit of anyone in the U.S. Senate, which sometimes caused him troubles with the media and his political colleagues. Retiring in 2005, Senator Hollings has written a political memoir that is instantly a classic history of progressive politics during the last half of the 20th Century, much of which he helped shape. Hollings, a native South Carolinian and Citadel graduate, returned to Charleston in late 1945 after three years of combat in Africa and Europe. Eager to get on with his life, Hollings got a law degree in record time and joined a law firm, where his uncle was a partner. To give him some local visibility, the senior partners encouraged him to run for a seat in the South Carolina State Legislature, which he admits they thought he would surely lose. In 1948, segregation dominated work and life in the state. During that campaign, the daily paper in Charleston publicly questioned the several candidates, "Do you or do you not solicit the Negro vote." Hollings one-line written response was, "Do you or do you not solicit Negro subscribers and advertisers to your newspaper?" Hollings claims that the paper stayed angry with him for 20 years. Nonetheless, Hollings won. The day of his inauguration, the county superintendent of education asked the freshman legislator to go look at something with him. The next morning they went to the local elementary school for black children. It was a single room holding 80 children in two grades, all taught by one teacher. The school had no bus, forcing the children to walk as much as nine miles and back every day. It deeply impressed the young war veteran who had fought besides and commanded black troops during the war. Hollings' first action when he got to the South Carolina Legislature was to champion a 3 percent sales tax whose proceeds would be dedicated to improving education in the state and making the black schools equal to those for white children. It was a radical idea at the time, but Hollings prevailed. Over the next 14 years, his legislative colleagues elevated him to the position of Speaker Pro Tem and then the voters elected him Lt. Governor and Governor. Unlike as happened in other Southern states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, Governor Hollings in the early 1960s guided the state's transition from segregation to integration without riots or a single death and the state's economy from agriculture to industry. Relying on a "pay as you go" budgetary approach, Hollings helped the state get a three star rating from the national credit agencies, built the nation's finest adult technical training centers and attracted hundreds of new factories and hundreds of thousands of new jobs to the state. The theme of this book is "making government work," which Hollings did. A friend and supporter of Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy, Fritz Hollings was one of the progressive politicians who cre