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WHO IS GOVERNMENT?

A SERIES FROM POST OPINIONS


THE SENTINEL



Casey Cep on Ronald E. Walters of the National Cemetery Administration


Acting Undersecretary for Memorial Affairs Ronald E. Walters at the Alexandria
National Cemetery on July 29. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)
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By Casey Cep
September 10, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
38 min
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There was no room for a parachute and nowhere to hide from the Devil. Cradling
two machine guns, Staff Sergeant Robert Ferris Jr. was curled up inside the ball
turret, a three-and-a-half-foot plexiglass sphere that hung like a snow globe
from the belly of a B-17 bomber. It was four days before Christmas in 1942, and
he was barreling toward the Normandy coast with eight other airmen and orders to
attack a German factory in Romilly-sur-Seine.


WHO IS GOVERNMENT?

SEVEN WRITERS GO IN SEARCH OF THE ESSENTIAL PUBLIC SERVANT

The 2024 conversation has been driven by a handful of names. Trump. Harris.
Biden. Vance. Walz. These individuals have put themselves forward to lead our
government. But who really is our government? What is it made of? And what is at
stake when politicians say they want to expand or dismantle it? To find out, we
set seven stellar writers loose on the federal bureaucracy. Their only brief was
to go where they wanted, talk with whomever they wanted, and return with a story
from deep within the vast, complex system Americans pay for, rebel against, rely
upon, dismiss and celebrate. In the coming weeks, we will publish their
discoveries.

The Canary: Michael Lewis on the Department of Labor

The Sentinel: Casey Cep on the Department of Veterans Affairs

The Searchers: Dave Eggers on the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab

The Number: John Lanchester on the Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Rookie: W. Kamau Bell on the Department of Justice

The Equalizer: Sarah Vowell on the National Archives

The Cyber Sleuth: Geraldine Brooks on the Internal Revenue Service

Show more

Ferris was 20 years old and 3,500 miles from home when the flak and Luftwaffe
found him. Trapped in the ball turret, all he could do was watch as smoke
spiraled up from the engines and the plane spiraled down to the ground. The tail
gunner parachuted out and was taken prisoner, but Ferris and the other seven
crew members died when the B-17, named the Danellen for the pilot’s parents,
crashed near the shore of the Seine. What bodies could be recovered could not be
identified; they were buried in the graveyard of a nearby village, then moved
after the war to the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach. Above each of
their graves, a marble cross read: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in
arms known but to God.”



For eight decades, Staff Sergeant Ferris remained an unknown soldier on the
other side of the Atlantic Ocean. But a few years ago, the Defense Department
and the American Battle Monuments Commission exhumed remains from the crew of
the Danellen at the Normandy American Cemetery. An elite team of forensic
anthropologists with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency studied those remains
as they do hundreds of other such cases each year, identifying veterans of the
wars in Vietnam and Korea and, occasionally, World War II dead. When they turned
their attention to the ball turret gunner, his parents and siblings had long
since died, so a niece so young she never met him provided the DNA to verify
that it was her uncle who had lost his life all those decades ago. Eighty-two
years after his plane was shot down, Ferris finally came home.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Casey Cep, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is the author of “Furious Hours:
Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.”

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Earlier this year, that niece and her neighbors in New Bern, N.C., gave him a
hero’s welcome: A parade of motorcycles escorted him from the airport, an avenue
of flags lined the approach to the funeral home and the cemetery, and all along
the route he was saluted by fellow veterans, men and women who knew that, no
matter when or where or how they died, they too would be buried with such
ceremony.

The New Bern National Cemetery in New Bern, N.C. (David W. Haas/Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
The temporary grave marker for World War II veteran U.S. Army Air Forces Staff
Sergeant Robert L. Ferris Jr. (Casey Cep)

Ferris was laid to rest at New Bern National Cemetery a few days before Memorial
Day, and when the community returned to celebrate that holiday, among the
speakers honoring his service was Ronald E. Walters. Walters isn’t from North
Carolina, and he isn’t a veteran, but he leads the National Cemetery
Administration, which had arranged the burial with full military honors for
Ferris and placed the headstone that already marked his grave, not to mention
the 7,500 others that are perfectly aligned with it. The NCA maintains the
pristine, precisely mowed grass between every row of graves in every section of
the cemetery; provides the directory of gravesites so that anyone can find
Ferris’s grave or any other; makes sure all the flags are flying, every marker
and memorial is legible, every road is pothole-free, every trash can is empty,
every flower bed is weeded, every mulch bed is mulched, every tree and shrub is
trimmed, and every edge is freshly cut. Walters and his 2,300 colleagues bury
more than 140,000 veterans and their family members every year, and they tend to
the perpetual memory of nearly 4 million other veterans, from the Revolutionary
War to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, interred in 155 national
cemeteries around the United States. It doesn’t matter if you were a seaman
recruit who died without any family or a four-star general who lived into your
eighties: If you served this country, then the NCA serves you.



The work Walters does would be admirable no matter how well he did it, but, as
it turns out, he and his colleagues do their work better than any other
organization in the country. Not just better than other cemeteries and funeral
homes — better than any other organization, period. Seven consecutive times, the
NCA has received the highest rating of any entity, public or private, in the
American Customer Satisfaction Index. Developed at the University of Michigan’s
Ross School of Business, the ACSI has been the gold standard for measuring
consumer experiences for the past 30 years; its satisfaction scores range from 0
to 100, with Costco pulling a whopping 85, Apple a respectable 83, McDonald’s a
middling 71 and Facebook an underwhelming 69. The average ACSI score for federal
agencies is 68, but the NCA most recently scored a 97 — the highest rating in
the survey’s history, except for the last time NCA participated, when it also
scored 97.

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Walters has a lot to do with these satisfaction scores, but he himself isn’t
really satisfied with them. He believes the NCA owes those it serves a perfect
score. “We only get one chance to get it right,” he says, and he’s spent the
past two decades obsessing over everything from the life span of a backhoe to
how many days it takes to manufacture and engrave a headstone, working with
scientists to determine what chemical best cleans marble, consulting with
groundskeepers about the exact number of millimeters a grave settles every year,
creating the 40 pages of standards and measures that regulate every national
cemetery, and then refining those standards annually to make sure every day that
the agency is improving the services it offers veterans at the time of burial
and for all of eternity. He is probably busy refining one of those refinements
right now.

This relentless pursuit of excellence could easily make Walters exhausting or
annoying, like the high school sophomore who wears a tie to school every day.
Instead, for so obsessive a man, he is surprisingly serene and easygoing. He has
an even higher customer-satisfaction rating than the agency he runs: His
subordinates adore him, his superiors have never received a complaint about him,
and spending even just a few days with him will make you yearn to be excellent,
too. This is perhaps the most striking thing about Ron Walters: His agency is
one of the world’s leading experts on death, but he is an expert on how to live.

A plaque honoring veterans sits in front of a window looking out from the
offices of the National Cemetery Administration at the Department of Veterans
Affairs in Washington on June 13. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)Acting
Undersecretary for Memorial Affairs Ron Walters meets with National Cemetery
Administration staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington on June
13. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)

Walters was born in the nation’s capital, and he’s worked there his whole life.
His mother was a federal secretary, first for the State Department and then for
Health and Human Services. His father, after serving in the Coast Guard, became
a machine specialist for Remington Rand, mostly repairing typewriters. Not long
after Ron’s birth in 1962, the family moved into a tiny apartment in Falls
Church, Va., where he and his older brother James shared a room at night and
cane fishing poles on the weekends, the two boys as close then as they are
today. Both attended Catholic schools, and Ron thought he might become a priest.
His heroes growing up were Augustine, Ignatius and quarterback Billy Kilmer: the
first two because they blended faith and intellect, the third because “he was
not your prototypical football player.” Walters elaborates: “He had a beer belly
and threw passes that wobbled like a duck, but he was team-oriented and not into
self-aggrandizement.”

Author Casey Cep, interviewed by Michael Lewis
“It’s a vicious cycle because the better you do your job, the less likely people
are to hear your story.”
Listen
13 min
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Listen to Michael Lewis talk to Casey Cep about The Sentinel

Walters has been a Washington Commanders fan for as long as he can remember.
Cerebral as they come, he compares football to a chess game. “Everybody thinks
it’s just people running around slapping each other, and that’s part of it, but
there’s so much more.” He likes tennis, too, and for decades, he’s admired Chris
Evert, chiefly for her grit and determination. “She probably wasn’t the best
player ever, except on clay,” he says, “but she was always up there. She was
always in the quarterfinals and the finals, even if she didn’t win, until the
very end of her career — she was always pushing herself.” Even as a kid, Walters
was interested in how good players become great; what fascinated him was how
people improve.

Chris Evert displays the winner's trophy after winning Wimbledon in 1976.
(AFP/Getty Images)

But he also liked people for whom greatness was a given: A connoisseur of
superheroes, he liked them best when they came in teams, like the Avengers and
the Fantastic Four, combining forces to do more than any of them could
accomplish on their own. Walters bought comic books by the dozen at the local
drugstore, and then completed his collections by ordering any back issues he’d
missed. Although he always paid for the comics, he knew his parents would frown
on such extravagance, so he recruited his older brother to help conceal the
evidence: “I felt like Ethel helping Lucy smuggle them into the house. We’d
literally tuck the comics under our shirts,” James told me. Once the comics were
inside, Ron shifted from concealing to cataloguing. “He would lay out the books
according to the name in the series, like at a comic book convention. Everything
was so orderly.”

James Walters also remembers his brother as an exasperatingly good student. He
jokes that while he himself never brought a book home and preferred watching
“Gilligan’s Island” to doing homework, his little brother was devoted to his
studies. “Ron never did anything with half a brain,” he told me. “There were
times where he’d have school assignments that weren’t due for weeks, but he’d be
hard at work every night without any thought to the timeline.” Both boys
idolized their parents, who were known for doing their best and nothing less,
admired equally by colleagues and neighbors.

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Partly because he was drawn to the priesthood, Walters chose to go to Georgetown
University. He double-majored in government and English, was named a Baker
Scholar, and found himself inducted into just about every honor society on
campus. Although he befriended some of the Jesuits there, he soon realized the
priesthood wasn’t for him. Public service was, though, and after graduation he
enrolled in a master’s degree program in public administration at George
Washington University, which had cooperative education agreements with various
federal agencies. As part of his studies, Walters was assigned an internship at
Veterans Affairs. “I thought it was just going to be a summer job,” he said.

That was 39 years ago, and, except for a brief stint in the Office of Personnel
Management, Walters has been with VA ever since. He began as an analyst in the
Central Budget Office overseeing the construction service, scrutinizing
financial statements and operating budgets, space plans and staffing levels,
workload projections and construction contracts. A line-item genius, he was
promoted to senior analyst, then assistant director and then director; in less
than a decade, the budgets he was responsible for had grown from $45 million to
$1 billion. Another promotion followed, managing the finances not just for the
construction office but 10 staff offices.

This is when Walters first got to know the National Cemetery Administration.
Among the $2 billion or so worth of VA projects for which he was responsible,
Walters oversaw budget formulation and execution for the NCA. The part of him
that had wanted to be a priest was moved by its work with veterans and survivors
during some of the most difficult periods in a family’s life. As soon as he
could, Walters joined what he considers to be the best-kept secret in the
federal government, then promptly made it better.

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Almost every other nation, past or present, would have left Staff Sergeant
Ferris where he lay in Normandy. But America’s commitment to leave no
servicemember behind extends to the dead. The first national cemeteries were
established during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln launched an
extensive campaign to scour battlefields and beyond for hundreds of thousands of
fallen soldiers. Ever since, we have honored those who “gave the last full
measure of devotion” by bringing them home to their next of kin or burying them
with honor in a military cemetery.

Color guards, Taps, marble headstones, military escorts, flags draped over
coffins: So many of the traditions we associate with burying fallen heroes were
standardized in the aftermath of the Civil War, when more than a half-million
Americans had been killed and their loved ones struggled to make sense of their
grief. Few people remember today that the occasion for Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address was the consecration of the national cemetery at that battlefield, where
some 3,000 men were respectfully laid to rest, and the president declared: “The
world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here
to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced.”

A photo shows the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Soldiers' National
Cemetery in Gettysburg. President Abraham Lincoln is visible facing the crowd,
not wearing a hat, about an inch below the third flag from the left. (Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

The national cemeteries were part of an effort to unite the living in the
pursuit of a lasting peace, creating a space where the soldiers whose lives had
been sacrificed for the preservation of the Union could be glorified — to honor
their memory, and also to ensure that no American would forget the wages of war.
It was the first time in history that a country had gathered its war dead this
way for reburial, a practice the United States continued throughout its foreign
conflicts. The largest repatriation effort came after World War II, when
President Harry S. Truman promised next of kin that they would get to decide
where their loved ones would be buried, no matter how difficult it was to
identify them, no matter how far from home they died. Well more than half the
men who perished fighting alongside Staff Sergeant Ferris — more than 170,000
veterans — were returned to the United States for interment after the armistice.
The effort to bring the others home has never ended.


COMMUNITY CORNER

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It is sometimes difficult to know what makes a nation distinctive, to recognize
which among our traditions and habits are essential to our collective identity.
But repatriating the war dead is the deepest expression of the commitment we
make to those who serve this country, an act of loyalty and gratitude that
endures beyond the grave. By reuniting fallen warriors with their families and
communities, we also bind their memory to our national identity, following
rituals that turn each individual loss into something like the legend on a map,
showing us the true scale of something we might otherwise never see. “There is
no place where the price of freedom is more visible than in a national
cemetery,” Ron Walters told the crowd gathered at New Bern earlier this year.

Ronald E. Walters delivers a Memorial Day address at New Bern National Cemetery
in New Bern, N.C. (Casey Cep)
A map outlining national, state and tribal veterans cemeteries hangs on a wall
in a meeting room at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington on June
13. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)The Veterans Administration became
the Cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs in 1989. (Kent Nishimura for
The Washington Post)

Over his long career, Walters has visited many of the 155 national cemeteries,
and he wishes every American would visit at least one. Perhaps the most striking
thing upon doing so is how profoundly egalitarian they are, affording the same
ceremonies and markers to every person buried there, regardless of rank or
station. There is no towering obelisk for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, no lesser
location or diminishment of care for the recruit who died without bars on his
sleeve: Those who died in battle and those who died in peacetime are honored
equally for their service. Nor is there any distinction between those who
sacrificed their lives in what history has subsequently deemed a just or an
unjust war; these are not memorials to the victories or failures of war, but
monuments to the hope of peace. Beautiful and contemplative, these hallowed
grounds are designed to stir our moral imagination. They both inspire courage
and summon humility, reminding us headstone by headstone of the gravity of
sending men and women into harm’s way, hopefully, although not always, on behalf
of our highest ideals.

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You can still reach Robert McDonald on the cellphone number that he gave out
during his first news conference as secretary of veterans affairs. McDonald had
just stepped down as CEO and chairman of Proctor & Gamble after a 33-year career
there when President Barack Obama tapped him to run VA in 2014. McDonald’s
predecessor had resigned because of a health-care scandal in which
whistleblowers revealed that veterans had died waiting for care at hospitals
around the country while staff falsified records of their treatment. McDonald
gave out his personal number because the department was in such free fall that
he felt the need to make clear from the beginning that he would be directly
answerable for its performance.

After McDonald took over, he began studying the organization he was expected to
lead, trying to figure out what had created the crisis by investigating VA top
to bottom. What he found mostly dismayed him, but then there was “this jewel,”
with unbelievably high rates of staff performance and customer satisfaction: the
NCA, which was handily outperforming the rest of VA. McDonald wondered why. “And
then,” he told me, “I discovered Ron.”

At that time, Walters was principal deputy undersecretary for memorial affairs —
an incomprehensible collection of nouns parading as adjectives, but Walters was
all verb. He’d been overseeing the cemetery administration’s Organizational
Improvement and Assessment for eight years, which, unlike OIA work elsewhere,
actually worked. In management speak, Walters loves the Baldrige criteria, named
after President Ronald Reagan’s commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige Jr., which
focus on seven categories of performance: leadership; strategy; customers;
measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; workforce; operations; and
results. In total quality terms, Walters is big on the “PDCA cycle,”
implementing Plan-Do-Check-Act at every scale of his operation, from the height
of the grass to the annual budget. In everyday English, he established high
standards, figured out how to meet them, then raised those standards and did it
all over again. McDonald had implemented a similar program years before for
Procter & Gamble, but Walters, he said, “was out there doing all this by
himself.”

In 2016, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, from left, Secretary of Veteran Affairs
Robert McDonald, Interim Undersecretary for Memorial Affairs Ronald E. Walters
and Director of the Omaha National Cemetery Cindy Van Bibber unveil a plaque
during the dedication ceremony for the new Omaha National Cemetery. (Nati
Harnik/AP)
Department of Veterans Affairs leaders testify during a House Veterans' Affairs
Committee hearing in Washington in 2015. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)Robert McDonald
is sworn in during a Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing to examine his
nomination to be secretary of Veterans Affairs in Washington in 2014. (AP)

Naturally, though, Walters only wants to talk about everyone else who was
involved: the managers at each of the national cemeteries and employees at every
level of the organization. Every time we talked, Walters took the opportunity to
praise the field workforce, “the most dedicated in the federal government,” he
said, over 65 percent of whom are themselves veterans. Walters told me a story
about a technician at Mountain Home National Cemetery in Tennessee who raced to
the side of a woman during a bone-soaking rain, taking off his boots so she
could make her way through the muck to her grandfather’s grave. “He helped her
find the grave, then stood in the mud in his socks while she visited,” he said,
tearing up. “Those are the kind of employees we have.”

There is no entry in the employee handbook that covers giving up your boots, but
Walters has helped cultivate a culture where every interaction is an opportunity
for excellence. It’s one thing to sloganeer vaguely about “being the best” or
“reaching new heights,” but succeeding, at customer service or anything else, is
mostly a matter of attending to a shocking number of minute details. The key to
any kind of improvement is often the boringly specific work of breaking down
every job into discreet, measurable tasks. Want to walk more? Get a step
counter. Want to save more? Make a budget. Want to improve your mortuary and
cemetery services? Have your fieldworkers figure out how long it takes to do
every task they are expected to complete — digging and squaring graves with
pneumatic equipment, applying fertilizer, mowing, setting the interment
schedule, placing permanent markers — and use those figures to arrive at
standardizations to insure consistency and customer satisfaction across all your
cemeteries.

Steve L. Muro, a Vietnam veteran who rose from automotive mechanic at Los
Angeles National Cemetery to undersecretary for memorial affairs during the
Obama administration, remembers when Walters began the organizational assessment
that revolutionized the NCA. For decades, the national cemeteries had been
largely independent from one another. “Directors went from one cemetery to
another,” he said, “and you did things your way, not really the VA way. You just
sort of did what worked. But Walters’s group collected all this data, and we
learned things right away about little things that gave cemeteries high scores,
like having chairs with the name of the cemetery on them or blankets for
mourners on a cold day or having a rifle squad — or low scores, like how long it
took applications for burial benefits to get approved.”

Reviewing the 40 pages of standards and measures, you get a sense of how clearly
the expectations are defined for all national cemeteries, and how fairly those
expectations are evaluated, whether you work at South Florida National Cemetery,
Fort Richardson in Alaska or the Punchbowl in Hawaii. Every cemetery, whether it
has turf, sand or mineral-based ground cover, is expected to create “a sense of
serenity, historic sacrifice and nobility of purpose.” To this end, the
operational self-assessment asks, among other things, whether signage is
convenient and helpful; whether maintenance and service records are current and
accurate; how clean, functional, sanitary and appropriately supplied restrooms
are; whether gravesite grades are level and, if there’s grass around the
headstones, whether it is trimmed to the recommended height; and if the
headstones, markers or niche covers are all set within 60 days of interment. All
this goes on for pages and pages, with each expectation ranked from medium to
high to critical priority, sometimes with illustrations and color coding.

Established in 1862, Alexandria National Cemetery, one of the original national
cemeteries, in July. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)
Alexandria National Cemetery. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)

After developing the operating standards and measures, Walters’s team also
helped develop a center for training cemetery directors and caretakers. On the
VA campus, classes for new employees and for those taking on management roles
create a culture of continuing education and advancement that is nurtured at
every cemetery when these new and old staffers return. The NCA also offers
training for employees of Arlington National Cemetery, which is run by the U.S.
Army. In addition to the training center, the team helped open a national call
center in St. Louis, which is staffed six days a week with hours for every time
zone from Puerto Rico to Hawaii to field questions whenever veterans or their
family members need answers. Now, if a veteran dies on a Friday night, her widow
can make funeral arrangements right away; alternatively, and unlike in the past,
a veteran at any age can apply for “pre-need” eligibility, making his
arrangements in advance to ease the burden on his family.

These and other initiatives have been so successful that Secretary of Veterans
Affairs Denis McDonough has said that the NCA could teach the private sector a
thing or two. “There is no mission more sacred than honoring these heroes and
helping their families through such a hard time,” McDonough said in a statement,
“and it’s a job that Ron and his team do with excellence and compassion every
single day.”

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Overall, veteran trust in VA — not only at NCA but across the whole department —
has risen to more than 80 percent, up from 47 percent just after McDonald was
appointed. NCA’s always high satisfaction has gotten higher even when Walters
worried they might suffer, namely during the pandemic, when military burials,
like all others, were restricted in ways that were devastating to the bereaved.
But the NCA had always managed to impress people even though it generally
encounters them during some of the worst moments in their lives, and Walters was
accustomed to leading the organization during periods of unprecedented change.
Over time, the veteran population has expanded, aged and diversified, with more
than 100 World War II veterans dying every day, and requests coming in for green
burials or columbarium niches in addition to traditional interment — and for an
increasingly diverse set of emblems for their headstones, among them more than a
dozen different crosses, Kohen hands, a Druze star, an atheist atom, a hammer of
Thor, the Farohar and a Wiccan pentacle. And yet, today, only 1 percent of
Americans serve in the armed forces, an all-volunteer military that is less and
less visible to the public it protects.

Walters thinks a lot about these two contrasting demographic destinies since he
leads an agency increasingly burdened by its workload in a country increasingly
ignorant of the history of sacrifice that has secured its freedoms. But then
Walters thinks a lot about a lot of things. Around the same time that he was
selected for the senior executive service, he finished a doctorate in political
science at Johns Hopkins University. Alongside his VA work, in the evenings and
summers for nearly a decade, he’d been taking courses and writing a dissertation
on the restructuring of the veterans’ health-care system. He began teaching
courses on public administration, policymaking and the federal budget, which he
still does most semesters at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

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Dr. Walters the professor is a lot like Ron Walters the boss. Boyish and buoyant
beyond his 62 years, he’s generally sporting nerdy glasses, trendy suits and
sandy hair a little too tousled to meet military standards. No matter what he’s
wearing, though, he’s patient, kind and exacting, somehow just what any given
student or colleague needs him to be. Jacqueline Hillian-Craig, a former Army
logistics officer, has worked for Walters for more than 10 years now. “In the
military,” she told me, “you mostly have authoritative leadership that’s very
clear and direct, taking orders from your higher-ups. But Ron is a different
kind of leader: He’s not just top-down; he leads in different ways — he’s more
fluid.” He describes his own leadership style as “intuitive,” and, shadowing him
one day at the central office as he moved between one-on-ones and meetings with
two dozen members, tackling everything from unfulfillable sod contracts to
artificial intelligence, it was obvious how well his intuition serves him.
Although Walters is a stickler for punctuality — his meetings always begin on
time — there’s a gentle give and take of ideas, feedback and follow-up no matter
the rank or standing of the participants. He’s famous for his “blue sheets,”
to-do lists he prints on blue paper to track outstanding tasks and topics so
they don’t get lost in the white paper of daily agendas and correspondence.
Everywhere at the NCA, a military culture of sirs and ma’ams is infused with
Walters’s almost Midwestern politeness, hellos and thank-yous echoing through
the halls like ringing phones.

Acting Undersecretary for Memorial Affairs Ronald E. Walters in an office at the
Department of Veterans Affairs headquarters in June in Washington. (Kent
Nishimura for The Washington Post)

Walters’s own phone can be heard but barely seen on his desk, although he had
apparently cleaned it not too long ago. The wall cabinets above it had been
mostly de-Post-it Note-ed , but there were still stacks of printer paper,
scattered accordion files, pages torn from his daily briefing books, and
programs from events honoring Jewish veterans and one of the “hello girls” who
operated a military switchboard during the First World War. Books proliferate
there and on a coffee table, too — military and cultural histories such as Drew
Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War”
alongside business and leadership guides such as Peter Schwartz’s “The Art of
the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World” — since the actual
bookshelves are taken over by old budget binders, budget hearing binders and
budget submission books: a kind of trophy cabinet for a financial all-star like
Walters. He’s nowhere near as neat as you expect him to be and yet nowhere near
as messy as he could be, given the diverse duties he’s managed for decades. He
has a plant of some kind near his desk, but mostly he seems to be growing
American flags: A tiny burial flag is framed on his desk, handheld parade flags
wave from the bookshelves, and a floor-to-ceiling, eagle-topped number nearly
blocks the view from the only window in his office.

Acting Undersecretary for Memorial Affairs Ronald E. Walters, center, meets with
National Cemetery Administration staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs
headquarters in June in Washington. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)
Replicas of military flag display cases sit on a table in the waiting area of
the offices of the National Cemetery Administration at the Department of
Veterans Affairs headquarters in June in Washington. (Kent Nishimura for The
Washington Post)The office of Acting Undersecretary for Memorial Affairs Ronald
E. Walters at the Department of Veterans Affairs headquarters in June in
Washington. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)

There’s an empty office three times as big across the hall that he could be
using, but he doesn’t want it. “Ron’s a servant leader,” Matthew Quinn told me.
“He always thinks of the organization more than himself.” Quinn, a 36-year
veteran of the Army and the Montana National Guard, just stepped down as
undersecretary for memorial affairs. Walters took the job, but not the office: A
career civil servant rather than a political appointee, he stepped up to become
acting undersecretary of memorial affairs, just as he did during vacancies under
President Donald Trump and before that under Obama.

“There’s no Republican or Democratic way to bury a veteran,” Walters says,
though partisanship and calls for privatization have come for VA as for so many
other seemingly apolitical aspects of our national life. Yet he has served
through seven administrations and earned admiration from both parties. Stephen
Shih, who worked with Walters years ago at OPM and is now the director of the
Office of Civil Rights at USAID, said Walters is admired and trusted by leaders
on both sides of the aisle, because even though “he has his own personal
philosophy, his thinking and decisions are not rooted in politics — they don’t
align to a political view. For Ron, it’s about serving the American people.”

“Our government is designed to change,” Shih told me, “so there will necessarily
be these periods of transition, and Ron has navigated that masterfully, finding
a balance between providing continuity and moving the government forward.”

Complacency is one of the great dangers to a great organization, but Walters,
despite still having an AOL account, is a born innovator. Alongside making sure
the NCA does its core work better, he’s also worked to expand its mission and
update it for the digital age. He created the Veterans Legacy Memorial, a kind
of combination database and memory book for those buried in national cemeteries
— what one Vietnam War widow called “my radio to heaven” since it allowed her to
share and gather stories about her husband’s service. The VLM hosts nearly 10
million records for veterans, with a webpage for each one, along with their
location, whether he was interred in 1864 or she was cremated in 2024 — so that
fellow service members, relatives, historians or the general public can submit
photographs, memories, newspaper clippings or a note of thanks. Walters can
summon a tribute from the page of a second lieutenant from the Second World War
whose son wrote: “Dad, Even though we never met Mom made sure she kept your
memory alive for me. I was born on July 26th and you were killed 2 weeks later
on August 9th. I have the knowledge that you at least knew of my existence and
that you had a son. … Please know that I have never forgotten you. Your memory
will always be alive in my heart especially on Memorial Day. Love, your son,
Bobby.”

The waiting area of the National Cemetery Administration offices at the
Department of Veterans Affairs headquarters in June in Washington. (Kent
Nishimura for The Washington Post)Ronald E. Walters greets Barbara Weiss,
surviving niece of U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sergeant Robert Ferris Jr. (Casey
Cep)

Mindful of the many children today who do not have a family member in the
military, Walters also launched the Veterans Legacy Program, which tries to
connect younger generations with the sacrifices of earlier ones. VLP provides
lesson plans for children and teenagers to bring more school groups and scouting
troops into the cemeteries for field trips and service days, and runs a
multimillion-dollar grant program for schools and universities that funds
student research into the forgotten stories of the armed services. This year,
the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater won a grant for a study of Hmong American
veterans, while Troy University in Alabama received funding to write an account
of the United States Colored Troops buried in Mobile.

Walters is most proud of an apprenticeship program he started 12 years ago to
employ homeless veterans. Men and women chosen to be apprentices are guaranteed
a caretaking job if they complete the year-long training in national cemetery
duties, learning about grounds, equipment and building maintenance. Their duties
include not just landscaping, but also digging graves, placing caskets and
aligning headstones. Some graduates have relapsed or stumbled, some have taken
their training to private cemeteries closer to their families or support
systems, but many continue to work at the national cemeteries where they were
first placed.

Francisco Zappas, a caretaker at Fort Bliss National Cemetery, served in the
Army for 15 years but struggled with the return to civilian life. After a
drinking problem ruined his marriage and left his finances in shambles, he was
desperate to escape his addiction: “I was down and out. I came to El Paso with
everything — a wife and family, a house — but I lost it all.” The apprentice
program was the second chance he needed, and he found meaning in tending to the
graves of veterans like himself. He was in the first graduating class of
apprentices, and even though he’s 71 now, he still goes to work with the same
gratitude and purpose as the very first day he stepped onto the 82-acre
cemetery: “Every day I feel happy to come to work. I’ve probably pruned and cut
every bush in this cemetery three or four times now — it looks like a big,
beautiful park. We make it look like a shrine, just like the White House.”

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The White House, of course, gets a lot more press, positive or otherwise, than
the NCA or any of the other executive agencies. Rosemary Freitas Williams, a
former assistant secretary of Public Affairs at VA, told me that joining the
civil service is basically like being in the witness protection program: “No one
ever knows about the good you do.”

She came to the federal government after 22 years in broadcast journalism, and
she couldn’t believe how little attention people such as Walters get for all
their innovative work. “This guy wanted to put QR codes on headstones, so
anybody could walk into a national cemetery and learn some veteran’s story of
service and heroism with their smartphone,” she told me. “I felt like it could
change everything: the way we grieve, the way we learn history. I was just
stunned. NCA still uses fax machines for forms, not all the workforce has an
email address, but Ron got the Veterans Legacy Memorial going.”

“True leaders are people like Ron,” McDonald told me. “They are quiet, confident
people of character who always go back to their purpose, and his purpose is to
serve others. Ron cares about integrity, commitment and advocacy — never ‘what
does this do for me?’ Look at his paycheck. Look at the alternative jobs he
could’ve had or how much he could have made in the private sector. Look at how
he teaches at night after work. This guy is all about service to others.”

Of course, Walters doesn’t see it that way. He would never do a TED Talk on
management; he claims he can’t write a book on mourning; he refuses to believe
there’s anything like a Ron Fan Club, no matter how many members I find. When
pressed about some of his best ideas, he tells me that he hopes in a few years
no one even knows they were his: “The best thing in the world is when no one can
remember whose idea it was. Then you know you’ve succeeded because the greatest
thing that can happen is no one can remember who did it or how it was done;
everybody has taken a piece of the idea, and it’s been institutionalized.”

Acting Undersecretary for Memorial Affairs Ronald E. Walters in an office at the
Department of Veterans Affairs headquarters in June in Washington. (Kent
Nishimura for The Washington Post)

“I used to joke that good ideas in government get put into the inertia machine,”
Williams said. “But Ron knows how to get things done, and he doesn’t get
impatient. The magic of Ron is he always figures out the shortest distance
between where we are and where we need to be.”

For Walters, of course, distance itself is a problem: something to be assessed,
measured and improved. Among his many other projects, he led an analysis of
veteran population data and service gaps, striving to make sure every veteran
can be buried close to home. This led to opening additional cemeteries in
Colorado, Florida, Nebraska and New York based on their burgeoning veteran
populations; creating columbarium-only cemeteries in densely populated cities
such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Indianapolis; and meeting the needs of rural
veterans by establishing military cemeteries in eight states that previously
lacked them, including Maine, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin and
Wyoming.

In addition to establishing new cemeteries, including by offering grants to
states and tribes, Walters figured out a way to expand existing ones. Until
recently, the NCA could not always purchase the land it needed for cemetery
expansion because it depended on the sluggish federal budget process, and
prospective sellers were often unwilling to put a sale on hold for the multiple
years it could take to get the needed appropriation. Rather than try to get them
to wait, Walters persuaded Congress to change the way funding worked, creating a
line item in the VA budget for national cemetery land acquisition so the NCA
could move quickly to buy properties for expansion whenever acreage became
available. Thanks to Walters’s efforts, 94 percent of American veterans live no
farther than 75 miles from a veterans’ cemetery.

“Not having to drive long distances to visit a loved one’s gravesite has made a
world of difference to our families and survivors,” Walters told me. As a Coast
Guard veteran, Ron’s own father was eligible for burial in a national cemetery,
but he chose his family’s plot at a private cemetery in Pennsylvania, where he
and two brothers have bronze military markers memorializing their service;
buried beside him is his wife of 61 years, Ron’s mother, who was tended to by
both her sons before she passed away.

Like Ron’s father, 4 out of 5 veterans are not buried in veterans’ cemeteries,
in some cases by choice, but in others because they or their family members do
not realize that it is an option. Yet any member of the armed forces who dies on
active duty is eligible, as are veterans who were not dishonorably discharged,
along with spouses and dependent children, and some National Guard members and
reservists. Many veterans also do not know that, regardless of where they choose
to be buried, the NCA can contribute to the costs of interment, as well as
provide a headstone or marker, a burial flag for the casket, and a Presidential
Memorial Certificate for the deceased.

Very rarely, under special circumstances, civilians outside of immediate
military families are buried in national cemeteries as well. Earlier this year,
before stepping down as undersecretary for memorial affairs, Matthew Quinn tried
to extend this honor to someone he believed deserved it. “I went to Ron and I
said, ‘You know, I have the power to bury civilians in a military cemetery. I
can grant that waiver, and I’d like to do that for you.’” Walters refused. He
himself was not a veteran, Walters insisted, and as such, he did not belong in a
national cemetery; it was more than honor enough to get to spend his life there.

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Like many civil servants, who plainly aren’t in it for the money or the glory,
Walters is married to his work — in his case, happily and exclusively. He is
generally the first to arrive and the last to leave the office; outside of
sharing season tickets to the Commanders (for which he maintains a spreadsheet
to insure equitable distribution) and getting away to Rehoboth Beach when he
can, he mostly spends his free time, such as it is, teaching and mentoring
colleagues. But Walters assures me that there are no blue sheets on his
nightstand, and that he has never created Baldrige criteria for his off-hours.
Still, he has always loved St. Ignatius Loyola’s “Spiritual Exercises” and finds
it meaningful to think through a personal inventory of things done and undone.
“He would’ve made a great priest,” Rosemary Williams, a lifelong Catholic, told
me. “There are people like Ron who work in the federal government, and you can
tell they’ve answered a call. Ron always makes me want to be a better person.”

Just about everyone I talked to about Walters told me something similar. They
could remember specific encounters where he gently illuminated a professional
blind spot, recommended Ron-isms that improved some aspect of their work and
recounted conversations where his emotional intelligence helped them understand
something about their own life. “I think people leave every interaction with Ron
feeling better about themselves,” Steve Shih said. “People who come into contact
with him are inspired, and, to me, that’s the mark of a great leader.” I
experienced it, too, leaving every interview with him wanting to be the Ron
Walters of my writing, the Ron Walters of my exercise regimen, the Ron Walters
of my marriage.

Who among us doesn’t want to be better at everything? Not just our work, however
momentous or mundane it might be, but every aspect of our life: relationships,
friendships, health, hobbies, community, stewardship of the earth, everything.
Most of us, thankfully, aren’t terrible at what we do. We’re okay or pretty
good. But Walters reminds us: Why not be better? Why not be the best? It isn’t
impossible; it simply demands our constant devotion. Perpetual care, it turns
out, is not just for cemeteries.

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