Arthur Y. Webb has literally written the book on civil service.

This summer, he published “Honorable Profession: My Years in Public Service” because he feels the United States is at a juncture when public servants are not valued.

He notes that, in the 1970s, when he started his career in public service, three-quarters of Americans believed in the good that government does while now just a quarter do.

Faith in public service, Webb believes, declined with President Ronald Reagan’s approach that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” 

“When you wake up and you go out on the street and the lights are working and the streets are clean and the schools are open and the libraries are there,” Webb says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, “just think about that — those are all done by public servants.”

Webb’s book comes in two parts. He wrote what is now the back of the book 30 years ago. As he reread that 1994 manuscript, Webb said, “It seemed so current to me … like a travel guide for public servants.” The front part “put some meat around what I was saying.”

In one passage, he describes himself, at age 38, newly named as acting commissioner of the state’s massive Department of Social Services and, in the midst of the Regan cuts to social services, is “responsible for implementing some of the most onerous and immoral social service cuts … Many colleagues and friends in the governor’s office were bailing. And during this professional upheaval, my family and I were grieving for my father, who passed away two weeks before I assumed office.”

His father was a steel worker, who rose in the ranks to management. Webb himself had his first jobs wearing a hard hat in steel mills in his native Ohio and nearby Pennsylvania.

He learned about management on those jobs because of how absent, even offensive, the managers were — handing out cheap liquor at Christmas but never showing up to see how work was going.

Webb said that, even when he managed a state department of 28,000 workers, he knew half of the workers by their first names. “I was always out in the field. I was trying to make sure if what I’m saying in the central office translates down to the front lines.”

Webb came of age politically when he was 16 listening to the words of John F. Kennedy. “I was so inspired by that, I devoted myself to student government and was very involved in the national youth movement,” he said. He wanted “to improve the quality of life of all Americans.” 

Webb went into the military and “did what I was supposed to do there.” He then got “very involved with health care early on, working with young drug addicts, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early ’70s when heroin was just rampand.”

It was when Webb was working on a Ph.D. at New York University that he jumped into New York state government. His dissertation was on Medicaid and he “wanted to get firsthand information” and so applied and became “a Medicaid budget person.”

Leading the Department of Social Services in the era of the federal cuts, Webb released “truth” information packets to the press every day. “Instead of blatantly taking sides on the issues,” he writes, “we demonstrated factually that welfare was a core program for the needy.”

As always, he relied on a clear moral compass. Virtually every day, he held “moral sessions” in his office.

The sessions were discussions about the cuts “and what’s our ethical responsibility to families who are being kicked off of welfare or losing their food stamps, losing their daycare program. What is it we can do? We know we have to do it; otherwise we’re just going to lose all our federal funds. What do we have to do ethically and morally to try to protect these individuals and try to soften the blow.”

Webb’s moral compass directing his approach to management is clear when he writes about  “the weighty decision to close all state institutions.”

“I had very little contact with individuals with intellectual developmental disabilities and so, when I was asked to become commissioner, I said, ‘I just need to get smart. Who are these individuals? What’s going on in their lives?’

“So I went out and visited every institution within the first 30 days of being on the job. I came away and I said, ‘This is no way to treat anybody, being in these hard institutions.’ They just were so disturbing to me. However, it was a way of life.”

That way of life applied to the workers at the institutions as well as the residents. Some of the workers came from families that had had staffed the institutions for generations.

“These institutions were major economic entities, their engines within their own communities.”

Webb’s thought was, “Our field should be designed around the qualities of the individual and making sure that they have the greatest opportunities to be integrated and included in our communities … I finally had to orchestrate a way to get the governor to agree to close all the state institutions.”

Webb writes in his book that the change would not come from a simple announcement. “Such an approach would guarantee that our bold plan would be DOA: ‘Dead on arrival.’ Influential individuals and entities had to be consulted. Unlike politicians, you just can’t declare a bold action without precedent or predicate. This was a core principle of Governor [Mario] Cuomo. As he said: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.’”

Before any announcement, Webb said, he got to know by name virtually every local union president with workers at a state institution. He tried to give them confidence “we are going to find a job for virtually everyone in the institution, but we’re going to move them into the community,” said Webb.

He went on, “So, once I could put the politics together convincing Mario Cuomo that it was the right thing to do for him and for the state, I did editorial boards because most editorial boards thought the most economical way to serve people was in big institutions.

“So I had to find a way to dispel all those uncertainties, frustrations, anxiety … into a coherent systematic approach to closing institutions. And the way we did that was to build community-based services.”

Webb concedes “It was very bold. A lot of people thought I was nuts.”

He would frequently employ the metaphor of a flywheel, used for grinding wheat. “It’s very difficult to get the flywheel moving … but once you get it going, it’s amazing how it works.”

People started buying into the idea of community-based services, Webb said, and he was set on closing Willowbrook, the large facility on Staten Island that had become “the symbol of neglect.” 

“I had to get that out of our system,” said Webb. “It was like poison in many ways.”

Mario Cuomo “immediately got it,” said Webb. “The big thing he got, which was absolutely wonderful, being able to convert the Willowbrook campus” into the College of Staten Island.

Converting the campus “from a state institution, one of notoriety and neglect, to one of education and learning …,” Webb said, “became somewhat of a model.”

Webb ends each chapter in his book with a list of short, pithy pieces of advice.

His chapter called “Correction Crises” — in 1979, prison guards went on strike — concludes with pieces of advice that include: Be ready to take on the unexpected; Leadership is based on respect; and Ensure there is humanity in everything you do.

Ensuring humanity is one of the through lines in Webb’s life.

Most people would not use the word “humanity” when talking about prison, Webb notes. “You’re taking away one’s freedom because they did something, in many cases, violent, brutal — abusing the society and abusing people and getting off the street.”

But, as deputy commissioner for program services in the state’s prison system, Webb saw the value of humanity and was part of starting college-education and employment programs, introducing religion, and enabling family gatherings in prisons.

Webb had served as deputy commissioner under Thomas Coughlin who was Commissioner of the Department of Corrections. A military veteran and former state trooper, Coughlin was a “tough, tough Irishman,” said Webb.

Coughlin said, “Part of our job is to make sure you don’t come back,” Webb reported, noting, “The average stay in prison was 27 months.”

So part of Webb’s job, he said, “was to try to introduce some things that humanized the experience of people and benefitted them so that they wouldn’t be coming back.”

Webb says that in his book as well as in his life one of the keys is “making sure your moral compass is very clear all the time.”

He concludes, “At the end of the day, many people won’t remember all the things you did as a manger but they will remember, in terms of your character, how you treated people and how you respected even the most difficult individual … and how you tried to respond to them in terms of making them feel good about living in America.”

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 “Honorable Profession: My Years in Public Service,” a 174-page paperback book, is available from Amazon for $20.