While reading the research concentrate on the role of a personality in the historical process.

Ivory-Tower Activists

John F. Kennedy explained to campaign audiences in 1960 why he was running for the nation's highest office: "I want to be a President who acts as well as reacts – who originates programs as well as study groups – who masters complex problems as well as one-page memorandums." He vowed that he would be "a Chief Executive in every sense of the word – who responds to a problem, not by hoping his subordinates will act, but by directing them to act." The imagery of action clearly evoked the tone of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency; it also served implicitly to criticize the elderly and, to all appearances, passive President Eisenhower, a man whose ornate staff-advisory system and highly structured cabinet meetings struck Kennedy as self-imposed impediments on the president's freedom of action.

On the face of it, Kennedy's promise of presidential activism and the gentle dismissal of study groups and orchestrated deliberationsby staff did not bode well for all those experts who had obtained advisory posts within the increasingly institutionalized presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower. As part of a bureaucratic chain of command, the expert had clear lines of communication and a formal place in executive branch deliberations. Kennedy's promises of action suggested a return to the freewheeling days of Roosevelt's professors. Cultivating an image of cerebral activism, however, Kennedy managed to attract a breed of academic experts – "action intellectuals," in Theodore White's memorable phrase – whose Washington careers have shaped the modemmythology of the policy intellectual. If Gamelot had its handsome young king (and its beautiful and gracious queen), it also had to have its wizardlyMerlins and intellectual RoundTable.

Kennedy was not the leading presidential choice within the academic community in the early months of the campaign. In January 1960, a poll of prominentacademics and writers in Esquire showed Kennedy well behind Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon. Stevenson was obviously the liberal intellectuals' sentimental favorite. After his failed and rather amateurish 1952 campaign, Stevenson had been encouraged by a number of Democrats to put together a more permanent policy-planning group to prepare for 1956. "As the party of the well-to-do, the Republicans do not hesitate to use their dough," John Kenneth Calbraith wrote in 1953. "As the party of the egg-heads, we should similarly and proudly make use of our brains and experience." Under the direction of Thomas K. Finletter, former secretary of the air force, the so-called Finletter Group funneledposition papers and advice to Stevenson. Stevenson used their work in his speech making and met many of the academics individually as he traveled the country, but, curiously, kept his distance from their meetings. Early on he wrote Galbraith. "I am eager to avoid any impression that this is a Stevenson brain trust operation," The most scholarly sounding twentieth-century aspirant for the presidency knew he could not afford the further taint of too close an association with intellectuals.

Though not the first choice of the nation's intellectual elite, Kennedy was not an unknown quantity to some of those who later served him. Throughout his rather undistinguished senatorial career, Kennedy had called upon Harvard acquaintances for occasional advice. From time to time, he had telephoned Galbraith when he had questions about economic issues, especially agricultural problems that might understandably perplex a senator from a northern industrial state. Culbraith, like the other intellectuals who had served Stevenson in the 1952 and 1956 campaigns, seems to have been won over slowly by Kennedy, whose lack of scholarly distinction as an undergraduate still nettled some members of the Harvard faculty. Many at Harvard, as Galbraith confessed in a volume of memoirs, "had difficulty in believing that the Kennedy brothers are in the very first league, wholly worthy of the Harvard badge and blessing." But recalling occasional Saturday-night dinners at the Locke-Ober Restaurant with Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his tenor softened. "His conversation was wide-ranging and informed," remembered Galbraith; "my respect and affection grew."

But Galbraith also saw in Kennedy a streak of impatience and restlessness that, as president, sometimes caused him to cut off discussion and often kept his wordiest advisers from fully expressing their views. The impatience was doubtless a mark of mental quickness; it was also a sign of his eagerness to get things done. Though notably ineffective as a legislator and apparently unwilling to master the Senate's cumbersome political procedures, he fully understood how the forms of executive branch decision making might help or hinder him as president.

The nation's political elites were afflicted by great uncertainty about national goals. At the end of the 1950s, many Americans seemed to believe that the nation was adrift. General confidencein the country's scientific and technological estate, particularly its educationalsystem, had been dramatically shaken by the early failures of the American space program and by the Soviet Union's surprising success in launching Sputnik in 1957. Many also worried about the so-called missile gap, a spurious issue it turned out, but one that played on real concerns. Beyond these technological concerns, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had struck a responsive chord with talk about the "qualitative" deficiencies of American life, toward the end of his term. President Eisenhower summoned a national commission to assess the nation's performance and chart long-term goals. With the 1960 election approaching, Time's publisher, Henry Luce, commissioned and edited The National Purpose, a volume of essays by ten prominent Americans who were worried about a nation that they characterized as lost, becalmed, adrift, and without bearings. Several of the authors looked toward a new style of presidential leadership. "We arc waiting to be shown the way into the future," wrote Walter Lippmann. "We arc waiting for another innovator in the line of the two Roosevelts and Wilson."

With his coolly rational style, Kennedy appealed to liberal intellectuals, though less because of any explicitly articulated ends than because of the simple and often-repeated promise "to get the country moving again. "The candidate, sounding the themes of "vigor," movement, and activism, gradually won the support of intellectuals during a generally unedifying presidential campaign. The intellectuals' growing sympathy for Kennedy was obvious enough for his opponent, Richard Nixon, to make an issue of their support; he sought to stir up the anti-intellectual passions of one southern audience by labeling the Democrats "the party of Schlesinger, Galbraith and Bowles."

After winning the election by a hair, Kennedy designed his political appointments as much to reassure his detractors as to reward his supporters. C. Douglas Dillon, a Republican investment banker, was appointed secretary of the Treasury Department; Luther Hodges, a former governor and businessman, went to the Commerce Department; and Abraham Ribicoff, a respected Connecticut governor, was picked to head the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Only two cabinet appointments seemed to break with traditional patterns or to signal the emerging high-level alliance with the nation's intellectual elite. Kennedy chose Dean Rusk, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and a man with extensive prior service in the State Department, to be secretary of state; he did, however, surround him with much bettor known and more politically powerful under-secretaries. He also selected Robert McNamara, a former professor of business and recently named head of the Ford Motor Company, to run the Defense Department.

In his chronicle of White House service, Kennedy's longtime congressional assistant and White House special counsel, Theodore C. Sorensen, claimed that the president-elect had sought to create nothing less than "a ministry of talent." Sorensen noted that Kennedy had appointed more academics to important positions including (as he dutifully recorded) fifteen Rhodes scholars, than had any of his predecessors. But these "action intellectuals" were not located in the cabinet (except for McNamara and Rusk) or even among the senior White House staff (except for Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, and Sorensen). Rather, they were scattered in many subordinate positions throughout the government.

The real difference with past administrations lay in the concern with second- and third-tier appointments and in the personnel assigned to work in the various advisory and regulatory agencies. Kennedy, whose planning for the transition was shaped by studies under way at the Brookings Institution, as well as by memorandums prepared by political scientist Richard Neustadt, clearly understood that the control of such low-level appointments would offer the greatest leverage for policymaking (an insight the Reagan revolutionaries would revive in 1980). And Sargent Shriver, who was given the job of chief talent scout, cast his net widely in recruiting people for the administration.

The White House staff arrangements under Kennedy were much less formal – conscientiously so – than they had been under Eisenhower's hierarchically organized system. Cabinet and staff meetingswere rare, and the staff secretariat was abolished. The president's special assistants worked more or less as equals, operating with small staffs in the White House and enjoying considerable access to the president. Kennedy described the White House as "a wheel and a series of spokes" with himself at the hub. When necessary, the spokes reached far into cabinet departments. But for the most part, Sorensen, who coordinated domestic policy, relied on staff work done in the Bureau of the Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy, McGeorge Bundy and his small national security staff, with its own area specialists and ad hoc task forces, were able to supersede the State Department's advisory apparatus. With several hundred policymaking positions to fill in executive agencies, expertise tended to be widely diffused in the bureaucracy and could be called upon as needed. Perhaps for the first time, one could also discern the ways in which advisory institutions – not merely individual advisers – were in contention with one another. "Action intellectuals were less likely to be adjuncts to a formal deliberative process, as in Eisenhower's While House, than intellectual insurgents seeking to shake up the administrative bureaucracy. McNamara's band of defense intellectuals recruited from the RAND Corporation were the most notable.

In this environment, the outside expert, whether drawn from life in academia or the think tanks to work full time in the government or merely consulted while employed in a university or think tank, could play a major part in shaping policy. When James Tobin of Yale demurred at the suggestion that he join the Council of Economic Advisers, modestly describing himself as something of an "ivory-tower economist," Kennedy reportedly won him over by responding, "That s all right – I'm something of an ivory tower President." But, in truth, Kennedy was interested in ideas mainly when he could see their practical consequences. And he knew that most intellectuals, however much they might disavow an interest in the active, political life, were drawn to service not because he appealed to their "ivory-tower" sentiments but because he promised them proximity to action – the opportunity to employ their ideas. And, indeed, many of them were experts whose notion of an idea was no less practical than his. They were technocrats and social engineers, people primarily interested in crafting the instruments for getting things done. At the same time that the action intellectualsdescended on Washington, however, some Americans had been contemplating the end of ideas as a driving force in politics.

The End of Ideology

In becoming a political adviser and intimate participant in policy-making, the expert had little choice but to serve as a problem solver and technician, While historians like H. Stuart Hughes and Richard Hofstadter distinguished between intellectuals and mental technicians, sociologists coined the oxymoronic term "bureaucratic intellectual" to characterize the role of experts working in governmental agencies. Robert K. Merton described how some experts adapted to their new dependence on policymakers and bureaucratic superiors: "This sense of dependency, which is hedged about with sentiment, is expressed in the formula: the policy-maker supplies the goals (ends, objectives), and we technicians, on the basis of expert knowledge, indicate alternative means for reaching those ends." The formula may have been new, but the underlying assumptions were not. The pragmatists' retreat from abstract theories and absolutes at the turn of the century had set this course for intellectuals and experts. The policy expert in the United States was primarily a technician of means.

The experts' move into the inner circles of political power in the 1960s was paralleled by a steady diminution of the interplay of ideas in political life. The then twenty (nearing thirty) years war against fascism and communism had strongly reinforced long-standing American suspicion of ideological systems (especially among those intellectuals who had flirted with one or the other before the war). Writing in the 1950s, the so-called consensus historians – principally Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter, and Louis Hartz – proclaimed an underlying homogeneity in American political and intellectual life. Whether the absence of serious intellectual differences was explicitly non-ideological – traceable to the primacy of the struggle for survival in settling a new continent, as Boorstin saw it – or was simplemindedly ideological in accepting a cluster of Lockean dogmas, as Hartz maintained, Americans were generally not inclined to reflections on ultimate values. As historians, adherents of the consensus approach thus expressed their generation's skeptical view of the older Progressive idea of conflict as the driving force in history; as witnesses to the domestic and international turmoil wrought by the depression, World War II, the Cold War, and McCarthyism, they were expressing, perhaps less consciously, a need to find and reassert the fundamental unities of American society.

President Kennedy took up the twin themes of knowledge and political action when he addressed Yale's graduating class of 1962. He, too, celebrated the era of diminished ideological passions, echoing the widely shared conviction that there was now a broadconsensus on liberal values. The central domestic issues of the time, said Kennedy, "relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals – to research for sophisticated solutions to complex and obstinate issues." Sounding like one of Lane's graduate students, Kennedy stated that the problems of the 1960s, unlike those of the 1930s, posed "subtle challenges for which technicalanswers, not political answers, must be provided." Outdated cliches and myths and a distracting "false dialogue" had to be cast aside, he said. Kennedy was no doubt looking beyond his immediate academic audience toward members of the business community in the wake of that April's bruising battle over price increases in the steel industry. "What is at stake in our economic discussions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a moderneconomy. What we need is not labels and cliches but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead."

Kennedy, suspicious of abstractions, was more concerned with managerial efficiency and expertise, and he was generally confident about the benefits of applied technology. A familiar Progressive commitment to non-partisanship and a reliance on politically neutral expertise resonated in the sentiments he expressed at Yale, already reflected in his political appointments. Whether Kennedy, who was, after all, a tough professional politician, rather than an intellectual, agreed entirely with Lane's rosy predictions, he certainly believed that policy-making demanded subtlety, complexity, sophistication, and technical virtuosity. The men he chose to serve under him seemed to share his belief that knowledge could serve the goals of policy in highly refined ways – through "flexible response" to military threats and economic "fine-tuning," for example.

Thus, the vaunted "idealism" that Kennedy's administration tapped was really an expression of faith in the powers of rational intelligence and technical virtuosity to overcome social and economic problems. At its core was a conviction that policymaking is a pragmatic endeavor, driven by knowledge; seeking to solve specific problems; and devoted, when necessary, to experiment. And especially in its Cold War struggles against a formidable technological enemy, the country needed public servants who were technically competent, quick, and imaginative about political means. The ends and ideals of political life appeared as self-evident truths, too obvious to require examination.

Experts on Tap

The word think tank was not yet secure in the popular lexicon when Kennedy was elected, But journalists were quick to note the existence of a cluster of so-called brain banks and think factories along Massachusetts Avenue. Far and away the most prominent was the Brookings Institution, which had established its imposing new Center for Advanced Study a block from Dupont Circle in 1960. In reporting on the center's official opening only two weeks after the election, the Washington Post, offering editorial encouragement, expressed the hope that "men of learning and ideas have taken over our government again." The Washington News was more circumspect, however, describing the affair under the headline "Eggheads See Sunnyside." Less than a year later, The Economist describedthe Brookings researchers as Kennedy's "experts on tap" and hailed "the educated approach to government" as a characteristic feature of the new administration.

Experts inside government inevitably look to experts outside. The ties are often casual. Such links were establishedearly on with Brookings. With no official space for the Kennedy transition team to work (later legislation setting aside federal funds for presidential transitions was a direct outgrowth of Brookings studies of the problems of transition), some members foundnot only offices, but a library and meeting rooms at Brookings. The transition "task forces" consulted widely. They relied heavily on the nearly one hundred scholars (counting affiliated university researchers) who were working on policy issues for Brookings. One of the most useful was Laurin Henry, whose work on past presidential transitions guided the Kennedy team.

The researchers and analysts at Brookings and RAND typified the new policy intellectuals of the 1960s. And these institutions, more than any others, came to symbolize the era's technocratic style. For both, the means of their influence were diffuse and hard to measure. Brookings had the advantage of being the premier organization for policy research in Washington, with a research program covering many fields and having long-standing ties to the federal bureaucracy and congressional staffs. RAND, a continent away and focused on defense research, not only had contractual ties with the air force and other governmental agencies, but was the principal recruiting ground for Robert McNamara as he sought to gain control over the defense establishment. Its influence was largely through the people it sent into the government and the methods they brought to policy analysis.

Hubert Calkins, president of Brookings since 1952, managed to create a solid and experienced nucleus for the Economic Studies Program. The new fellows included Joseph Pechman, who had worked for the Committee for Economic Development, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Treasury Department, and Walter Salant, who had studied with Keynes and Hansen and held a number of governmental posts, including work for the Office of Price Administration and the Council of Economic Advisers. The programs in Government and Foreign Policy studies proved more difficult to build, but by 1960, with a budget of about $2 million, a staff of approximately forty senior researchers and sixty research associates, and expanding links to the universities, Brookings was poised to play an important new role in Washington.

Throughout the 1960s, seventy to one hundred research projects were continuously under way. Though not primarily a contract research organization, Brookings responded to projects initiated by governmental agencies and foundations. Between 1955 and 1967, one foundation, Ford, gave some $39 million to Brookings. Its aim was to create what a staff member at the foundation described as "a private intelligence unit for government operations .";The FordFoundation financed much of the cost of a new building, contributed to Brookings's endowment, and gave long-term funding to research projects. The connections among governmental agencies, foundations, and research centers were informal, much less constrained by the competitive processes for submitting proposals and formal mechanisms for determining accountability. In 1964, for example, theStateDepartment wanted a memorandum to outline U.S. policy options with regard to new technical assistance programs of the United Nations. State Department officials told the Ford Foundation that they needed outside help; the Ford Foundation agreed to pay for it, and Brookings had staff members who were already studying the United Nations who were willing to prepare the report. On another occasion, the Ford Foundation approached Brookings (after conversations with members of the Council of Economic Advisers) and suggested that the institution study the impact of the 1964 tax cut. Soon, with many governmental agencies seeking its services (and the administrators at Brookings complaining that there were more requests for research than they could ever undertake – a far cry from the competitive search for funds a decade later), the Brookings program expanded into many fields.

Economic Studies, the largest and consistently regarded as Brookings's strongest research division, centered its work on policies for economic growth and stabilization, the effects of industrial concentration, fiscal and tax policy, and international competition. It produced studies on automatic economic stabilizers, governmental investments, and the individual income tax, as well as on monetary policy, all subjects that were of interest to the Keynesians who dominated the policy debate. In 1960, with a Ford Foundation grant of more than $2 million, Brookings began a series of studies of governmental finance under Pechman's direction, which would ultimately yield more than thirty books.

The researchers in Brookings's Government Studies division produced book-length reports on the higher reaches of the civil service and on the government's personnel policies. Calkins's new staff broke with the older managerial traditions of public administration, moving from nuts-and-bolts concerns to projects that examined the political contexts shaping the work of governmental bureaucrats. They also began to study politics, focusing on presidential nominations and the electoral process and exploring the legislative branch by looking at the job of the congressman and the need for new rules and organization on Capitol Mill. Meanwhile, Brookings continued to look for practical ways of improving the skills of bureaucrats, setting up training seminars and ultimately the Advanced Study Program for senior government employees, whose successor, the Center for Public Policy Education, is now Brookings's largest operating unit.

Researchers on foreign policy studied the United Nations, international economic development, and the administration of U.S. foreign assistance programs, especially in Latin America after Kennedy initiated the Alliance for Progress. They were also interested in the training of political leaders and managers in developing countries, spending several years on an advisory project in Vietnam. In addition, they analyzed the role of education in less developed nations.

Each year Brookings's annual reports tallied up the diverse advisory roles played by its researchers, but the core of the institution’s work was still its book publishing program. The staff grounded their work in book-length studies; advising was secondary because all seemed to agree that long-term influence lay in books. Brookings, which had issued eight to ten books a year in the late 1950s, was publishing twenty-five a year by the end of the 1960s. Opportunities for consulting and advising, whether through personal contact or the preparation of brief memorandums, did not as yet provoke much reflection on the nature of a policy research institution's influence and the best strategies for increasing it.

In the 1960s policy researchers must have shared Robert Lane's convictions that the domain of knowledge was expanding and that of politics contracting. Opportunities to serve, formally and informally,were plentiful. And often, it was governmental officials who were seeking assistance, not the institutions that were pushing their services on the government. Clearly, however, a market for professional services was taking shape that would restructure the environment in which the older think tanks, such as Brookings, had operated and that would change the career opportunities and professional incentives of the expert. Although Brookings expanded considerably throughout the 1960s, it was dwarfed by the RAND Corporation.

Tools of the Trade

There was much in the Kennedy style that appealed to the analytic ethos of the RAND Corporation, just as there was much about the RAND style that seemed to appeal to Kennedy. Some of RAND's analysts had forwarded memos to the Kennedy campaign and provided material for speeches as early as 1959. Their opposition to the doctrine of massive retaliation, their idea that the "missile gap" was growing, and their proposals to build up conventional war capabilities struck resonant chords with the candidate and his inner circle of advisers.

After the election, RAND's direct influence increased as its staff and alumni accepted governmental posts. Kennedy selected Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense and McNamara, in turn, picked a number of budget analysts, economists, and strategists from RAND as the nucleus of his team of so-called Whiz Kids. McNamara, who at age forty-four had only recently been named president of the Ford Motor Company, was no stranger to systems analysis. During the war, he had been a member of an operations research group that helped the air force solve logistical problems – getting planes, men. and equipment to the right place at the right time. After the war, McNamara and some of his associates banded together to sell their services to American industry. Hired by Henry Ford II, they began to apply the new analytic techniques to the troubled automobile company.

The group McNamara assembled when he left the Ford Motor Company included men like Charles Hitch, the first head of RAND's Economics Division who was hired as the Pentagon comptroller, Alain Enthoven, deputy assistant secretary for systems analysis; and Henry Rowen,a deputy to the assistant secretary for international security affairs. Consulting relationships allowed many other RAND disciples to contribute to defense decision making. Their employment was based not on broad knowledge but on confidence in the specific analytic methods with which they were skilled.

But analysis is inevitably embedded in the political process, and once in the government, the RAND analysts quickly learned about the limits of their analytic tools. McNamara asked Hitch and Enthoven to determine how many intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) the nation needed. No stranger to quantitative analysis, McNamara thought that roughly 400 ICBMs would inflict sufficient damage on the Soviet Union to deter an attack. Enthoven's calculations generally concurred with McNamara's assessments, and both saw no justification for the 2,400 missiles the air force requested. Some analysts at RAND thought the vastly lower figure was a post hoc calculation to justify the direction in which the administration already leaned. But when the decision was finally made, analytic premises and careful calculations had to yield to the reality of pressure from the military services and Congress, leading the administration to commit itself to build 1,000 JCBMs.

RAND analysts set out to apply system and method to problems in which new technologies and budgetary decisions intersect. Procurement decisions, long-range planning, and measures to control a huge and complex budget seemed to lend themselves directly to the quantitative rationality of operations research and economic analysis. But even in areas that are most susceptible to quantitative analysis – the acquisitions of weapons, budgeting, and logistical decisions – there are no guarantees that analysis will shape the outcome of events. Nor can there be full proof that analysis determines the outcome, even when the decisions conform to the analysis.

The experts who were drawn to Washington in the early 1960s acknowledged – even celebrated – the complexity of domestic and international problems. Rather than speaking of cures for social ills or adjustments to imbalances in the social and economic order, as earlier experts had done, they found a new metaphor for thinking about the political uses of knowledge. They spoke of "systems" and "design," adopting the language of engineers and employing the most refined tools of mathematical and economic analysis. Systems analysis and computer modeling were rooted in engineering, while theoretical developments in game theory, input-output analysis, and linear programming linked engineering to economics and broadened the application of its conceptual tools.

RAND and other contract research organizations, as they always had, produced reports for particular clients, not for the public. But even those institutions that had once aspired to wider influence now committed themselves to serving relatively narrow subcommunities of policy professionals and political decision makers. Both Robert Calkins and Kermit Gordon, who succeeded him as president of Brookings in 1967, saw their audience as a group comprised mainly of policymakers, university-based experts, and other members of the policy elite. Among the older groups, the National Bureau of Economic Research produced technical studies for economists, while Russell Sage worked increasingly within the framework of academic sociology, engaged primarily in studies of the methods and techniques of social science. Only the Twentieth Century Fund, where journalists August Heckscher and his successor, Murray J. Rossant, directed the program, remained committed to publishing books that might engage a wider public.

As the national research enterprise expanded during the 1960s and found eager clients in the government, problems of technique and methodology led discussions farther from political ends and values and the assumptions that underlay policy. As experts reveled in their technocratic skills, they grew more and more detached from even the educated public. Knowing how valued their skills were in the government, the career expectations among the policy elite began to change as well. The Kennedy appointments suggested that there were any number of academic routes to public offices. Deanships, foundation presidencies, prestigious teaching appointments, and writing on public issues had opened the way not merely for informal advising but for a period of highly visible public service. Roosevelt's Brains Trusters (Raymond Moley, Rexford G. Tugwell, and Adolf A. Berle) had been uncertain about their role after the election, preferring to return to their academic careers and let the politicians deal with the official chores of government. And Roosevelt himself had not been sure where he should use them. But there were fewer such uncertainties for those who went to Washington in 1961. Knowledge and power seemed comfortably joined. For aspiring members of the policy elite, the new analytic techniques, as well as the new institutionalstructures far professionaladvancement, helped to define policymaking as a career, rather than as a series of fortunate accidents.

The sudden ascent of the expert in the 1960s was the result of a rare coincidence of favorable circumstances – public officials set a tone by emphasizingtechnical competence and intelligence in addressing issues of public policy, a receptive president brought experts and academically inclined generalists into important positions, apparent agreement on national goals produced a focus on the technical means of attaining them, analytic techniques and insights from social science seemed on the verge of making political decision-making more rational, governmental agencies were willing to fund research, and a period of sustained national prosperity created hefty endowments for foundations and produced generous grants for public policy research institutions. Nonetheless, Lyndon Johnson'suse of the experts quickly exposed both their pretensions and their weaknesses in serving power.

The Labyrinth of Power

"Is our world gone?" Lyndon Johnson asked in his 1965 inaugural address. "We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man." Relying on the straightforward queries and declarative sentences drafted by special assistant Richard Goodwin, Johnson captured the simple optimism of the American spirit of reform. He blithely dismissed the past, while confidently asserting that the government could bend and shape the future to conform to America's highest ideals.

A man with limited oratorical skills (yet so amply endowed with a Texan's capacity for exaggeration that the term credibility gap was coined to describe his efforts to persuade the public), Johnson nevertheless effectively used the power of words to drive and control the policy process. His awkward gestures and studious delivery sharply contrasted with his uncanny and typically overbearing private powers of expression. Goodwin, who wrote many of the president's major speeches during 1964 and 1965, instinctively grasped the way Johnson used language. Johnson knew, Goodwin observed, that "in exchange for words – only words – many men would make concessions, yield their will to his, enhance his power."

Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty were captivating terms that encapsulated a whole administration and its aims. They linger more insistently than have any terms coined by speech writers to describe subsequentadministrations. They embody his ambitionsfor the simple reason that speech writing and policymaking were not viewed as separate functions in the Johnson White House. In fact, nine of Johnson's eleven special assistants could wield words skillfully enough to contribute to the writing process (Nixon movedhis writers to the Executive Office Buildingand his successors left them there, thus symbolizing a widening gap not only of personal credibility but of political speech and action).

The term Great Society was first worked into the fabric of a presidential speech at the commencement ceremonies at the University of Michigan in J964 after several months of casting about for a theme and rationale that would link the new administration's myriad bills and programs, express its aims, and, ultimately, suggest a progressive course distinct from the New Deal obsession with relieving material want. Goodwin had proposed the phrase, conscious of its resonance with Walter Lippmann's The Good Society (1937) and Graham Wallas's The Great Society (1914), an influential Fabian-socialist document. What was initially "a fragment of rhetorical stuffing" for an unimportant speech grew into a phrase that Goodwin (encouraged by Johnson) used in the commencement address to epitomize the president's ambitions.

The idea of a military struggle against poverty had emerged four months earlier, in the 1964 State of the Union message, when Johnson still lacked a coherent program. Although many antipoverty proposals had been under consideration in the Council of Economic Advisers – where Walter Heller, the chairman, had begun work on a poverty program several months before John Kennedy's assassination – the formal declaration of war preceded any detailed battle plan. Throughout his presidency, whether driven by militant rhetoric or the grandiose ambition to construct a Great Society, Johnson's experts constantly raced to devise programs that would keep pace with his rhetorical commitments or supply the rationale for legislative initiatives that had already been announced. At Michigan, he acknowledged that he did not have the answers, but he promised to assemble the "best thought" for dealing with the problems of cities, education, and "natural beauty" (the term "environment" was not yet widely used). A few days later, still exuberant about the audience's cheering response and the overwhelmingly favorable reaction by the press, Johnson reportedly told Goodwin, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti, "Now it's time to put some flesh on those bones.... Let's get to work, bring in all those experts and put it all together. And don't worry about the politics. I'll get it done."

The Great Society was not intended to evoke images of material prosperity as much as to summon Americans to deal with the qualitative and spiritual dimensions of life. However grand the project of constructing a Great Society sounded, it was to be a structure fashioned from many small pieces of legislation, rather than a few stolid pillars. And for all Johnson's military rhetoric, the so-called War on Poverty was neither lengthy nor hard fought as most wars go. The major legislative campaigns were mapped out and won in a brief two-year period that saw the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, all in 1964 and 1965. The pace was rapid fire. From 1964 to 1968, roughly four hundred pieces of domestic legislationwere passed, and by the time Richard Nixon took office in 1969, morn than 400 domestic programs were in place – ten times more than when Eisenhower left office in 1961.

But the most protracted battle of the War on Poverty has been the bitter intellectual conflict over how to interpret its successes and failures and in what ways to apportion the blame for the perceived excesses of American liberalism. The legacy of the War on Poverty has been one of the most keenly disputed subjects of the past twenty years, shaping the ideological contours of conservatism, liberalism, and their "neo" variations in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the political success of the conservative claim to be the party of "new ideas" is best explained by the wide perception of the breakdown in domestic policies that occurred in the 1960s.

Among the most serious casualties of the official War on Poverty were the many policy experts who left the field with wounded reputations. Indeed, some of the first critics of the Great Society programs had been the programs' architects, suddenly skeptical of the weapons they were using to combat domestic problems and even of the political role they had chosen to play. The recriminatory passions unleashedby these struggles ultimately raised doubts about the experts' claims to neutrality; their knowledge of politics, economics, and human behavior; and the analytic weapons in their arsenal.

The social science enterprise – in government; in universities; and in various think tanks, contract research organizations, and consulting firms – had blossomed during the 1960s. Theodore White watched it unfold during the Kennedy years, and in 1967, with much of the Johnson legislation complete, he proclaimed the emergence of "a new power system in American life... [a] new priesthood, unique to this country and this time, of American action intellectuals." Their ideas seemed to propel the whole machinery of government and politics, shaping defense, foreign policy, and economic management; redesigning schools and cities; and planning to reshape entire regions of the country. White and others had already noted the number of cabinet members, under both Kennedy and Johnson, who were onetime college professors. But White also observed a new reliance on think tanks, university-based research, foundations, and expert commissions; the presidency had become "almost a transmission belt packaging and processing scholars' ideas to he sold to Congress as a program." When the early reports on Johnson's domestic programs came in, White was poised to ask the perennial questions about experts and intellectuals: "Do social scientists yet know enough to guide us to the very different world we. must live in tomorrow. Do they offer wisdom as well as knowledge?"

Though the transformation of ideas into policy could hardly be described as a smoothly running conveyor belt, social scientists and policy experts had been among the most significant purveyors of the optimistic mood that launched the decade, a mood that helped to justify wider governmental intervention in American social and economic life. But what contributions had they actually made to public policy? How much had they really contributed to the design of specific policies and programs? And, balancing the decade's accomplishments and disappointments, how much had their failures done to undermine the confidence that any social goal could be accomplished by government?

Lyndon Johnson drew eminently talented people into governmental service (though they were less heralded as intellectuals than were those on the Kennedy team), while managing to retain a handful of Kennedy's appointees. In the inner circle, Bill Moyers, Harry McPherson, Richard Goodwin,Douglas Cater, and Horace Busby were skillful writers and, for the most part, comfortable with experts and intellectuals. Johnson's inner circle sifted and filtered ideas and turned them into legislative initiatives.

Others brought more specific analytic tools to the job of crafting the president's legislative program, among them Kermit Gordon and Walter Heller, two economists who had early won Johnson's trust. Gordon, a former member of the Council of Economic Advisers who served both Kennedy and Johnson as budget director, and Heller, chairman of the council, were the architects of bills on tax reduction and the budget. Heller also shaped the early antipoverty proposals. Although he was a lawyer, Joseph Califano, who had assisted Robert McNamara at the Defense Department, brought a familiarity with systems analysis into the domesticpolicy circles of the White House. Those techniques were embraced with typical enthusiasm in 1965, when Johnson issued an executive order requiring all governmental agencies to use the so-called planning-programming-budgeting system. It was a "very revolutionary system," in his words, which he claimed would make the decision-making process "as up-to-date as our space-exploring equipment."

Johnson was genuinely interested in the technical advice the community of policy experts could give him, but he also viewed them warily – as an important political constituency that was not inclined to support him. He would ask his staff to solicit their advice and in the same breath condemn "the Harvards" and other intellectuals for their superior airs. His unsurpassed mastery of detail and strategy awed those who served him directly (aides were continually astounded by his formidable memory). Still, he desperately craved the respect of a wider intellectual community, the very group to whom his civil rights initiatives ought to have appealed most. Yet from the beginning of his presidency, he was uncomfortable and inconsistent in his dealings with them. "This Administration feels no discomfort in the presence of brains," he felt compelled to tell one early gathering of domestic policy thinkers. To the contrary, the graduate of Southwest Texas State Teacher's College and onetime high school teacher always seemed uneasy in the company of Ivy League professors. But Johnson knew he needed the professors,as much for their influence on public opinion as for their policy expertise.

Among the intellectuals Johnson turned to was Eric Goldman,a historian at Princeton who specialized in twentieth-century American history. Summoned to Washington as a presidential "special consultant," Goldman served for more than two years as Johnson’sprincipal emissary to the American intellectual establishment. Johnson's ambivalence toward having an intellectual in the White House was palpable. At first, he insisted that Goldman's consultancy be kept secret {Goldman was even discreetly advised not to hang the document commissioning him on his office wall). Moreover, not wanting Goldman to appear to be playing the same visible role that Schlesinger had played for Kennedy, Johnson explicitly forbade him from occupying Schlesinger's former office.

Goldman spent much of his time assembling task forces and distinguished advisory groups for Johnson. Johnson preferred to see even these groups functioning as secretly as possible, which compounded Goldman's problems of recruitment. It is not surprising, then, that the groups were never used, in Goldman's view, to great effect. The domestic policy group had significant influence on only two substantial programs and a lesser role in another, although Coldman identified neither in his memoirs. As Goldman saw it, outside experts and intellectuals could wield only limited power in the intimate circles in which policies are made, particularly for a hard-driving political force like Lyndon Johnson. But he also conceded that the experts he recruited were probably not up to the task of policymaking. "Over the long pull," he observed, "instant ideas were not their specialty; indeed, men of this type have little use for them."

The role of Goldman's advisory groups was further complicated by the president's compulsion for secrecy when mounting a legislative campaign. Although an expert's ideas might find their way into his special messages to Gongress and the ensuing legislative initiatives, any deliberative scheme of advisory commissions or task forces proved difficult to implement, given Johnson's personality. Planning processes moved rapidly and erratically, and ideas were always mediated by those closest to the president. Goldman, a self-described loner, politically unskilled and meeting rarely with the president, echoed the dismayed assessment of anthropologist Margaret Mead who, after serving on one of the tusk forces, described government as a "labyrinth compoundedby human beings." Johnson, the master of the legislative labyrinth, did not need social scientists to design a program or craft a bill. Nor did he particularly trust them.

Moreover, the "politics of haste," as biographer Doris Kearns noted, typifiedJohnson's style, undercutting the work of his advisory task forces and other planning and deliberative mechanisms. When ideas were adopted,it was not because they were intrinsically sound or well-thought-out, but because they filled an immediate political need. Haste and urgency were Johnson's trademarks, and his capacity to outrace the intellectuals was evident in his instinctive decision to move ahead with the War on Poverty. Like Roosevelt, Johnson's view of an idea was different from the scholar's. When he called for an idea, he wanted something that could be done immediately. "An idea," wrote Goldman, "was a suggestion, produced on the spot, of something for him to do tomorrow – a point to be made in a speech, an action, ceremonial or of substance, for him to take promptly, a formula to serve as a basis for legislation to be hurried to Congress.” Jack Valenti's kind but shrewd recollections of his White House years echoed Goldman'saccount. Presidents are always demanding ideas. They "need to be constantlyoffered ideas with a possible fit to a specific problem, whether it be an appointive vacancy, a gristly crisis, a need to be filled, or a charting [sic] to be explored."

 

1. to originate programs - создавать программы

2. to master complex problems – справляться со сложными проблемами

3. in every sense of the word – во всех смыслах этого слова

4. to respond to a problem – реагировать на проблему

5. to bode well for smb. – сулить что-то хорошее для кого-л.

6. to perplex smb. – ставить кого-л. в тупик, приводить в недоумение, сбивать с толку

7. to be adrift – плыть по течению

8. to chart long-term goals – наметить, сформулировать долгосрочные цели

9. to win the election by a hair – одержать победу на выборах с минимальным преимуществом

10. to contemplate smth. as smth. - рассматривать что-л. в качестве чего-л.

11. a retreat from abstract theories – отступление, уход от абстрактных теорий

12. to be inclined to reflection on smth. – быть склонным к критике чего-л.

13. ultimate values – основные ценности

14. in the wake of smth. – вследствие, в результате чего-л.

15. to be at stake – быть поставленным на карту, быть в опасности

16. to be on tap – находиться под рукой, быть готовым к использованию

17. to be circumspect – быть предусмотрительным, осторожным, осмотрительным (о человеке), syn: cautious; быть обдуманным, продуманным (о действии, плане), syn: well-considered

18. to cover many fields – охватывать многие сферы, области (чего-л.)

19. long-standing ties – длительные, продолжительные связи

20. to be poised to do smth. – быть готовым к действию

21. nuts-and-bolts concerns – конкретные дела

22. to tally up smth. – подсчитывать; подводить итог

23. the domain of knowledge – область знаний

24. the doctrine of massive retaliation – доктрина массированного ответного удара, массированного контрудара

25. political ends – политические цели

26. to attain a goal – достигать цели

27. on the verge of smth. – на грани чего-л.

28. to enhance power – усилить, укрепить власть

29. to be under consideration – находиться на стадии рассмотрения; обсуждаться

30. to keep pace with smth. – идти наравне с чем-л., не отставать от чего-л.

31. to map out a campaign – планировать кампанию

32. to be sound and well-thought-out – быть тщательно, хорошо продуманным

33. to fill immediate political needs – удовлетворять насущные политические потребности