The Associated Press December 26, 2004
LSU and O'Keefe: mysteries of his hiring
By Adam Nossiter
LSU was "very fortunate" to hire Sean O'Keefe, said one university supervisor; "I couldn't be more excited," another said; a third marvelled that "someone of this stature, this capability," had deigned to choose LSU; two more called O'Keefe's hiring "an extraordinary opportunity."
And those were just the closing hosannahs on a long day in which officials at the state's largest university serially congratuled themselves, ex-NASA Administrator O'Keefe, and anybody else in sight for having landed such a miraculous catch.
All this lavish gratitude was only one of several mysteries surrounding last week's hitching of O'Keefe to LSU; after all, he had just snared a paycheck likely to be up to three times the $168,000 he made in the Bush administration. The thankfulness could reasonably have been expected to flow the other way.
Still, the Louisiana effusions must have been music to the man from Washington, where he is known as a friendly bureaucrat and loyal Bush servitor, but hardly as the Second Coming, in his low-profile NASA posting. That was a thankless job nobody - including O'Keefe's boss - was much interested in.
"They couldn't get anybody else to take it," said space expert John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, the former director of the Space Policy project for the Federation of American Scientists.
The unglamorous mandate was simply to hold down costs at an agency famous for overruns. The choice was O'Keefe, a "bookkeeper, a spreadsheet man" - though even here, audits both internal and external gave NASA dismal grades during his tenure.
The bookkeeper qualities were nonetheless much in evidence during O'Keefe's one public appearance last week before LSU faculty and students, where he demonstrated masterful command of the Washington art of imprecision - except when it came to praising the school's football players.
He danced around tricky questions about his position on stem-cell research ("There is opportunity in the context of existing lines"), minority hiring, and tenure, and referred delicately to his own scanty publications list as "developed for the purpose of informing pedagogical studies."
O'Keefe's ambiguous style was honed in years of Capitol Hill testimony. "I always thought he was there to use up time, not to give us information," said ex-Congressman Nick Lampson, D-Texas, who served on the House Science Committee. "I don't think he was really forthcoming before the committee," said Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn.
Similar qualities were on display at the LSU forum. "It was almost insulting to the assembled faculty," said Dominique Homberger, a biological sciences professor. "When he's asked specific questions, he didn't give clear, to-the-point answers."
The only departure from prosaic bureaucrat-talk came when thoughts turned to football. O'Keefe, becoming suddenly animated, paid a glowing tribute to the good behavior of the LSU football team when it visited the White House.
Then he addressed the academics-versus-athletics debate: "What I've found impressive to no end is how that balance has been achieved at LSU," O'Keefe said.
That observation left some faculty bemused. He was talking, after all, about a school where $18.45 million was to have been spent on the football coach's salary over seven years and $61 million on stadium renovations - in a state dead last in the South in university spending per student.
O'Keefe's assessment of this "balance" was either "naive, or uninformed," said Cecil Eubanks, Alumni Professor of politicial science, adding that at football-mad schools like LSU there is a "major crisis that needs to be addressed."
Whether O'Keefe is the man who will do it is unclear. At NASA he was considered a details man, commendably sympathetic to the grieving families after the Columbia shuttle disaster, but cautious and lacking in "vision," as one former agency official put it.
"He wasn't pushed out. But he wasn't asked to stay," another former senior official said.
Chief NASA spokesman Glenn Mahone responded: "Sean's leaving was Sean's decision, based on family considerations. He has an outstanding relationship with both the president and the vice president," Mahone said. "He certainly was not forced out."
At a meeting with the LSU search committee last week, O'Keefe dazzled the assembled company with paeans to openness and accountability. But in the Washington milieu he has operated in for nearly three decades, the words would have struck a curious note - particularly in the wake of Columbia.
"Basically, everybody got a plea bargain," said Pike. "Everybody would agree, we didn't do anything wrong. But we promise not to do it again."
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Editor's Note: Adam Nossiter is Capitol Correspondent for The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2004 Associated Press
