Experts and Expertise

"This Whole Job, which is never easy, will be a lot less difficult if you can figure out a way to run it without the help of expert advice--something I have never been able to do."

Lyndon Johnson was within days of finishing his term as President when he volunteered this advice to his successor. Bitter experience had qualified him to testily as an expert on experts. For while Johnson could thank his own native shrewdness for his success in accumulating power, he had good reason to blame his failure to hold it on "the Harvard crowd," which was his generic term for any experts who had been trained northeast of Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

"Your job will be a damn sight easier," he told the heir to his misfortune, during their running dialog over the impending changing of the guard,"if you can get rid of, at the start, all of your technicians, including Dave Kennedy."

A wide range of experts had earned Johnson's mistrust, but he felt a peculiar resentment against the practitioners of economic occultism, as he showed when he singled out the Secretary-of-the-Treasury-designate for special mention among all the experts to whose expertise he attributed his fall. For one thing, the awe in which Johnson held money, and the insecurity with which he regarded intellectuals, led him to confuse the opinions of bank chairmen with the recommendations of economic advisors. When Walter Heller, Johnson's holdover chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, resigned in order to "go private" and make some money, Johnson made a man-bites-dog joke. "My economic advisor needs an economic advisor," he said. So it seemed natural for Johnson to lump bank chairman Kennedy together with the economists. But the irony of Johnson's mention of Kennedy was meant to convey a cabalistic warning to his successor. For, as the incoming President well knew, Johnson had been on the verge of asking the select club of major (continued on page 232) Experts and Expertise (continued from page 165) commercial bank chairmen to nominate one of their number to serve as his own next Secretary of the Treasury, if he had run for another term. And, as Nixon also knew, the designee of the group had been David M. Kennedy. The banker expert who was the special target of Johnson's sharp tongue was the very one Johnson would have picked to serve him, if the cards had fallen differently.

Johnson spoke as the last individualist in the age of organization men when he singled out the experts as the villains responsible for his undoing. But Johnson had never been fooled by experts in fields he knew more about than economics. Throughout his political career, he had known better than to let pundits and pollsters mislead him about elections. And early in his Congressional experience, he had learned to scrutinize military experts with tightly narrowed eyes. From the day in 1937 when he arranged his assignment as a freshman member of the House to its Naval Affairs Committee (as it then was), he began to build a distinctive if small power base within the still tiny military establishment; and his power there grew steadily with the military's power over the Federal budget. At the climax of Johnson's Congressional career, his power was so conspicuous that its sources were easily overlooked or forgotten; and at the climax of his Presidential career, Johnson was so emotionally involved in the bitter controversy over the Vietnam war that to his critics--especially the younger ones--he seemed merely the dupe of the "military-industrial-university complex." He was in some ways, though, much more its master.

While the generals and the admirals had learned to count on Johnson to be their best friend where preparedness was concerned, they had also learned to fear him as their severest critic where unpreparedness could be made an issue. Over the years, Senator Johnson used his strategic vantage point in the Congressional establishment controlling military appropriations to establish himself first as the protégé of his seniors and then as "Mr. Defense Appropriations" in his own right, with whom those who wanted slices of the defense pie would have to deal in order to get anything. Like the beadles in the New England Puritan churches, who policed the aisles armed with a double-purpose implement for tickling dozing ladies and slapping dozing gentlemen, Johnson used his large influence over defense expenditures to favor his allies, while simultaneously investigating miscalculations by the beneficiaries of this patronage inside the "Chair Corps," which was his derisive term for the brass during the Korean War.

In 1954, when Johnson sat in executive session with his senior colleague, Chairman Richard Russell of the Senate Armed Services Committee (both of them acting as the all-powerful check-issuing duo of the Appropriations Subcommittee), Johnson had not felt the need to consult any experts before he vetoed an interesting request from President Eisenhower, personally conveyed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The request was for Congressional acquiescence in America's first commitment to South Vietnam. It was the considered decision of Senators Russell and Johnson to reject Dulles' request and immediately adjourn the 1954 session--in order to free themselves from further pressure from the President. As they were informed to their dismay a few weeks later, their action prompted President Eisenhower's decision to initiate America's original involvement in Vietnam, without Congressional concurrence, through the commitment of funds for which no Congressional grant was required. To Eisenhower's credit, he at least instructed Dulles to tell Russell and Johnson what he had done. A decade later, Johnson would not be so considerate.

The military, who ended up being held responsible for the Vietnam escalation, never believed in--and always resisted--the battle plan for a land war in Asia, especially a war to be escalated on the installment plan. It was Johnson who ordered the step-up and at the same time restrained its effectiveness.

The dim view Johnson had learned to take of military expertise during his 23 years in Congress was unforgettably confirmed during the first of his three years of captivity in the Vice-Presidency. As John F. Kennedy's visible but silenced partner, he saw from the inside the disastrous Bay of Pigs episode, which was an entrapment Kennedy had invited as the result of his reliance upon military advisors whose credentials seemed unimpeachable because they commanded bipartisan acceptance and enjoyed bipartisan continuity. According to Arthur M. Schlesinger's definitive account of the Kennedy Administration, A Thousand Days, Kennedy exclaimed in uncharacteristically illiterate dismay,"My God, the bunch of advisors we inherited.... Can you imagine being President and leaving behind someone like all those people there?" Johnson felt entitled to add, "I told you so," and he made the point whenever the opportunity presented itself. Schlesinger adds: "My impression is that, among these advisors, the joint chiefs had disappointed him most for their cursory review of the military plans. About [Allen] Dulles and [Richard] Bissell [of the CIA], he said little. I think he had made up his mind at once that, when things settled down, they would have to go.... He set quietly to work to make sure that nothing like the Bay of Pigs could happen to him again. The first lesson was never to rely on the experts."

Unfortunately, Kennedy found this easier said than done. He soon discovered that the White House cannot be run without experts. By Kennedy's time, a President's administrative ability had come to be measured by the reputation of the White House staff for expertise; and with inescapable administrative dependence on experts had come irresistible political incentives to operate behind a screen of continuity. A commitment to continuity with the source of his predecessor's frustrations was enough to insulate a new President from blame if he failed to solve problems he had inherited. Although Kennedy lacked Johnson's experience in auditing the propensity of military experts to err, he was quick to see that, just because they were a necessary evil, the safest experts to have on display would be those whose presence supported a plea of innocence by association with Eisenhower. In other words, the experts Kennedy decided to depend on were the same ones who had persuaded Eisenhower to adopt their blueprints for the liberation of Cuba. When Kennedy took office, Eisenhower's name still carried the imprimatur of authority stamped on it during World War Two, the controversy over original sin in Vietnam not yet having carried back far enough to have compromised the reputation for expertise he had brought home from Europe. At that time, he was still the principal military man in politics.

But the public wanted more than the assurance of continuity from Kennedy, whose success story, after all, announced the long-awaited take-over by the now-mature post-War generation. The excitement of change and the promise of accomplishment were expected, too. How to select the areas holding the promise of new accomplishment, and how to differentiate them from the atmosphere of assured continuity, always constitute the acid test of a new President's judgment.

The sustained ring of Eisenhower's 1952 call for Peace and Prosperity limited Kennedy's freedom of action in 1961. His choice of where to promise change and where to preserve continuity was dictated by the circumstances of his election victory. Kennedy's youth had been a decisive asset during the campaign of 1960. The Affluent Society, whose Philistine achievements John Kenneth Galbraith had memorialized during the quiet Eisenhower years, had become ready for a cultural revolution, and Kennedy spoke with the voice it wanted to hear. Kennedy found the Affluent Society taking Eisenhower's peace-keeping operation for granted but complaining about the lean ration of the prosperity it delivered. By 1961, the country had come to feel that it was stuck in a rut and it was increasingly impatient with the Republican Administration's obsessive fear of inflation, an inflation that, in fact, was not to reach pernicious proportions for a decade after premonitions of it sent Eisenhower into a panic and prompted him to permit the Federal Reserve Board to plunge the country's markets into a recession in 1957. During the 1960 Presidential campaign, the overconservative miscalculations of Eisenhower's economic advisors had swung the delicate Election Day balance from Nixon's to Kennedy's favor. The country was ready for the stir and bustle of inflation--in ideals and aspirations as well as in incomes and profits. Kennedy's memorable campaign promise "to get the country moving again" exploited popular dissatisfaction with Eisenhower's economic advisors and freed Kennedy from any temptation to select them or their economic theories as the area of continuity.

At the same time, Kennedy's youth had burdened him with a corresponding liability. Johnson had blown it up to potentially embarrassing proportions in his challenge to Kennedy's nomination in Los Angeles, where he warned that "no man is qualified to be President in the nuclear age who does not have a touch of gray in his hair." So while Kennedy selected his own advisory corps of new economists to emphasize the changes he meant to make, he elected to establish continuity with General Eisenhower's old team of military advisors to show his maturity. Even after the Bay of Pigs, notwithstanding his angry outburst against Eisenhower for "leaving behind someone like all those people there," Kennedy disregarded the moral Schlesinger reports that the drew from the debacle his experts had organized. In fact, Kennedy's failure to make a success of the Cuban liberation plan, formulated by Eisenhower's military advisors, put him in even greater need of the protective cover of continuity after the Bay of Pigs than before. Consequently, he let them lead him further down the road that Eisenhower, disregarding the veto of Senators Russell and Johnson, had let the advisors pave for him into the Asiatic land bog.

The new practice of delegating Presidential responsibilities to specialized teams of "the best brains" was made to order as a protective device for Johnson when his turn came to make the same choices between continuity and change. Ever since his emergence as a national figure, he had complained of his inability to win credit for his accomplishments--or to avoid blame for his methods. The rise of the expert as a priestly caste, privileged to administer power by advising politicians on the uses of power, offered him an overdue opportunity to redress the inequity in his public relations. Unfortunately, although Johnson had learned the easy way what Kennedy had learned the hard way--never to trust experts--he failed to apply his knowledge beyond the specialized areas where he knew enough to mistrust them. Johnson's approach to the Presidency was conditioned by the circumstances under which he took over. As with Kennedy before him, his chance of vaulting onto the right side of any potential plausibility gap hinged on his shrewdness in selecting areas of continuity and of change. Johnson decided that continuity called for a fight to put Kennedy's program across and, meanwhile, to keep Kennedy's expert staff--his link with Kennedy's constituency. At the same time, he bet that the demand for change would be satisfied by a demonstration that he could succeed where Kennedy had failed--first, in moving the complicated, inertia-bound machinery of government and, then, in winning the support of business. Johnson killed both birds with one stone. Moreover, he got the stone back when he showed the country that he could produce a pragmatic consensus within Washington. The evidence that he did won him an emotional consensus outside Washington. Kennedy had failed to keep his promise to get the country moving because he had failed to work with Congress. Johnson kept Kennedy's promise because he managed with Congress where Kennedy had not known how to try.

Because Congress is oriented to serve the special interests of its constituents, business is sympathetically oriented toward Congress. Johnson's success with Congress won him a double success with business. In fact, Johnson's success in winning the confidence of the business and financial establishment at the outset of his Presidency was so electrifying that it prompted him to return the compliment and express his confidence in business--by giving his confidence to its economic advisors. Although Johnson regarded experts on political theory with contempt, and experts on military theory with suspicion, he became vulnerable to the claims and presumptions of the fraternity of economic advisors. Their more prominent spokesmen commanded ready access to him.

For 26 years Johnson had worked in complete isolation from the influence of economists, while he built his personal empire inside other people's power structures. Suddenly, he found himself catapulted into personal control of a two-platoon team of economists--one playing by the rules of the old economics, the other by the rules of the new. The business and banking representatives--devotees of the old economics--worried about inflation and "fiscal responsibility." The academic types--advocates of the new economics--sought to extend the real success of Keynes' contribution in preventing mass unemployment into a fanciful ability to "fine tune" the economy, as if the interplay between the way it performed and the way people expected it to perform could be governed by a computer.

Johnson was shrewd enough to know how to play on the politics of expectations more expertly than the economists had yet learned how to calculate the economics of expectations. On the tragic night of Kennedy's assassination, when Johnson established his first connection across the airwaves with a shocked and overwrought public, he was quick to shift his appeal from animal faith to the less chancy area of the pocketbook. He passed from eulogy to practicality and, by way of assuring the country that it was going to "get moving again," he cited Dr. Pierre Rinfret, then still a comparatively unknown young economist, for his encouraging (and, as it turned out, accurate) forecast that "capital expenditures in 1964 alone will be 20 percent higher than last year." The country had been shocked into a state of desperate susceptibility to any concrete reassurance that bore the mark of officialdom. Johnson's stratagem worked.

"Follow the leader" being the name of the game the Wall Street money managers play, the stock market reacted to the word that corporate management was putting up its money by doing the same. The game even extended to Congress. Opinion on Capitol Hill took this joint and spontaneous expression of confidence from corporate managements and investors as evidence that Johnson's persuasiveness, which they recalled so vividly, was working with businessmen as they had seen it work in the Congressional cloakrooms. So the legislative consensus decided that the old Johnson magic would prevail on business to keep the money coming, and Congress jumped aboard the new Johnson band wagon, relieved to think that this increasingly unpopular responsibility would no longer fall upon it. When the new academic economists saw the business establishment lead Johnson's legislative cronies onto the band wagon, they made the vote of confidence unanimous, on the practical enough assumption that, if more business investment would substitute for more Government spending, the most fruitful contribution Government could make would, indeed, be the tax cut they had been advocating anyway.

Johnson's new best friends in the business establishment and the Kennedy academics he inherited shared a common enthusiasm for strong stock markets, the corporate executives because they wanted stock prices to go up enough to make their options worth exercising and the new economists because they wanted their new boss to trust their recommendations. But if sometimes the two groups agreed, other times they did not. At the outset, Johnson was not aware that he was better off when his old and his new economists disagreed, neutralizing each other and insuring him against the high cost of acting on the advice of either. Not until it was too late for him to recoup his losses did he realize that any time a President acts on a consensus of old and new economists--as Johnson did in going all out for his ill-timed and ineffective surtax of 1968--he takes his political life in his hands.

Where Johnson all along handled assurances from the military with care, and kept his military advisors on a tight rein from the day he took office (going as far during the Vietnam war as to veto decisions on which hills to bomb and specifying at what angles airmen were to circle authorized targets), he was as reckless at the outset in acting on the assurances of his economic advisors as any eager stock-market newcomer ever was in mistaking a hot tip as a certainty. Where Johnson's sophisticated sense of the military power structure alerted him to the built-in class distinction between presentation makers and decision makers, his parting shot at Nixon's incoming Secretary of the Treasury revealed that he was unaware of a corresponding class distinction between advisors and chiefs in the financial power structure. Johnson made the double mistake of treating his military chiefs as if they were personal instruments whom he could control once they were activated, while he treated his economic advisors as gurus whom he could count on for infallible guidance.

In short, Johnson behaved as if he were unaware of the existence of the war he was masterminding on his own private wires. Because he looked down on military expertise from his own experience of it, he underestimated the power that gravitates to the military in time of war, even when the orders they follow limit their freedom of action. And because Johnson looked up to economic expertise as long as he remained innocent of firsthand experience of it, he overestimated the capacity of the economic mind to function in the political jungle under wartime conditions--especially when it did not know that there was a war on and when he had no intention of telling it that there was. The old saw about no one being able on pull out of a hat anything that wasn't in it to begin with applies to computers: No matter how high-powered they may be, their findings are fed only as usable as the premises that are fed into them. Johnson jammed the computers of his economists by dictating the premises to be used. Little wonder that at the end he felt disserved and actually cheated when the conclusions they fed back to "their President" failed to alert him to the consequences of his own deception. Clients consult counsel at their peril when they fail to tell counsel what it must know in order to serve them. Johnson's arrogant handling of his military advisors and his prayerful reliance on his economic counselors exposed him to double jeopardy. Right down to his last day in office, his generals took his orders as unflaggingly as he took the advice of his economists. The war was lost in Vietnam and the Affluent Society was defeated at home--all because of what was essentially an error in programming.

The unmistakable mark of both programmer and expert, as well as their fatal flaw, is a willingness to execute assignments rather than questioning the policy behind them. Errors on the part of the experts are generally small enough to be quantitative and are more or less cheaply corrected without forcing sea changes in social direction. When the economic experts set their sights on a four percent rate of unemployment among a work force of 75,042,000 and a 3-1/2 percent rate results instead, the miscalculation stirs up more or less good-natured second-guessing among the professional fraternity, but no permanent harm is done and no upheaval is forced. But when the complaint is tolerated at the policy level and the need for a cure is denied until the numbers themselves become less important than the condition of joblessness, the problem outgrows the reach of quantitative analysis and its solution becomes dependent upon a new qualitative analysis--by new policy makers. Social breakdowns big enough to be demoralizing result from policy failures; like the Depression, these are breakdowns too big to need measuring.

If experts at the computer-tending level could only be assured that their clients at the policy-making level would ask them the relevant questions, they could assure their clients that they would always come up with workable recommendations. The difficulty built into communication between experts and their clients--particularly between economic and military experts and their political clients--arises from the fact that the formulation of policy generally requires an exercise in qualitative analysis, while its implementation at the working level always calls for quantification by the technical staff. But again and again, the politicians put their experts to work quantifying old problems after the politicians have already moved on to the formulation of new ones. This was what went wrong during the formative phase of the Vietnam crisis. It was where Johnson went wrong and it was how he misled his experts. After he set out to win the war in Vietnam, he told his economic advisors to take the measurements of the Great Society--as if he meant to keep the war small enough to spare the economists the need to worry about it. Moreover, he neglected to alert his economic advisors to the advice he was getting from his military chiefs that the war was winnable. The patter of his running dialog with the members of his Pentagon team went on about "how much more we need to do to scare them off" and "if we do a little more, maybe they'll back off." Bill Moyers, who was Johnson's most intimate staff aide at that stage of his Presidential career, and also the one most alert to the entrapment threatening in Vietnam and most anxious for a commitment of priorities to domestic welfare projects, looked back on what happened during that fateful time as "an expression of the worst side of Johnson's nature, as a commitment to action for action's sake. He got in too deep and kept getting in deeper," Moyers recalled early in the Nixon Administration, "without having any idea how he meant to get out." At the same time, the better side of Johnson's nature led him to reach, with frenetic overenthusiasm, for sycophantic exercise in utopianism, publicized at the time as "the TVA on the Mekong Delta." A former New Deal assistant to Abe Fortas, by that time a permanent United Nations official, had presented the Mekong Delta project to Johnson as reassurance that, like Roosevelt before him, he could, indeed, keep his war an authentic New Deal crusade. Of course, his economic advisors could meanwhile have read in the public prints that General Goodpaster was insisting publicly, as all the generals were advising Johnson in private, that "Victory can be won in Vietnam."

As the great debate over Vietnam flared up and superseded every other consideration, first establishing the war as the issue and then focusing on Johnson's plausibility as the issue overshadowing even the war, Johnson's most authoritative spokesman was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. By that time, McNamara had become de facto deputy President by virtue of his self-advertised, officially respected and properly accepted reputation for expertise in quantitative analysis. McNamara employed the logic of the computer to minimize the importance of Vietnam. The smaller he claimed it to be in public (while in private supporting the assertions of the generals that making it bigger was the way to win it), the less of a diversion his critics could charge it was from the mandate Johnson had won in 1964. McNamara's response to the passions stirred up by the Administration's miscalculation in Vietnam was to present a ratio: If the Gross National Product had come to be counted in the hundreds of billions, the budgeted cost of Vietnam could still be reckoned as a nominal percentage (which he originally calculated at nine percent when Vietnam was admitted to be costing only 20 billion dollars a year, and which he adjusted downward by something like half when the real cost of the war was admitted to be something like twice as much, justifying the statistical exercise because the resultant inflation had driven the Gross National Product up more). If the budgeted cost of Vietnam was admittedly creeping upward, McNamara argued, nevertheless the Gross National Product was continuing to jump by tens of billions at a time, guaranteeing to keep the burden minor. In other words, McNamara invoked the very inflation Vietnam had irritated to talk down the alarm the war provoked and to demonstrate that its impact was easing when, in fact, it was sharpening.

Despite the pretensions of the wargame players, the logic of the computer is singularly unsuited for analyzing the complicated phenomenon of warmaking. War is not an abstract hypothesis or a rigorously rational proposition. Wars and crises are infections, and their logic is the logic of pathology. The question about a war or a crisis arising from a war is whether the head of the government has the power to localize it--as, for example, Bismarck demonstrated that he had and as, in fact, Johnson admitted that he did not, when he and McNamara based their dealings with Russia on the assumption that she would take time out from arming his enemy to end his war for him. A war is the military equivalent of an infection. If localized, it calms down and is forgotten; if not, it flares up and becomes a carrier of poison throughout the system. McNamara's blunder lay in confusing the algebra measuring the infected area with the pathology of the infectious process. Truman had managed to localize his Korean War militarily, even though his economic mobilization for war represented a studied exercise in expansion. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the massive inflationary consequences of the Korean economic mobilization, the crisis was limited in its military, political and economic consequences, so that the test of strength in Korea did not weaken die American social system to the point of exposing it to an infection too virulent to be confined.

The paradox of Johnson's Vietnam War (he bitterly resented that designation, insisting that it was "America's war" just as American opinion was repudiating the war) was that, while it remained limited militarily, it did not remain limited socially. More paradoxical yet, the restraint that limited its military scope was the very infection its economic and intellectual backlash spread through America's social system. The infection proved fatal to Johnson's promise to create a Great Society and, in the process, it killed America's older promise to administer the Pax Americana.

Because McNamara's appeal to the quantitative logic of the computer ignored the qualitative logic of the spread of a virulent infection, Johnson was unprepared to see his commitment to Vietnam become so overpowering that it reversed his domestic priorities and frustrated his original commitments to stabilize the economy and to expand it to the ghetto. The ideals of America's Affluent Society had wandered far afield in the decade since its age of innocence, when, under the protective cover of Eisenhower's assurance of Peace and Prosperity. Galbraith had discussed its conspicuous virtues. Johnson's calculated exercise in political deception--no doubt it was also an exercise in personal self-deception--rationalized the propaganda about pacification in Vietnam as if Saigon could be merchandised as a model city for democracy in the Asiatic jungle. This bet that it could doomed the hope that America could finance model cities for itself in time to shield its affluence from the despair and violence latent in American society. Johnson's miscalculations reversed the terms of the test of strength he had set out to impose on Vietnam. The question he had originally posed--about how long North Vietnam could stand the strain--became the question he forced America to ponder for itself.

Johnson's failure, which led to Nixon's take-over, confronted not merely Nixon but every participant in the crisis over which Nixon found himself presiding. Johnson had left a legacy of "instant lawmanship": Pass a law and solve a problem. Actually, this was something of an American tradition, far predating Lyndon Johnson. Slavery had represented an obvious abuse; and, after the abolitionists and the moderates had finally combined at great cost to legislate a prohibition against it, it remained an obvious abuse, but at least it was illegal. In the post--Civil War era, big-business combinations had made too much of a good thing for themselves and enough of a bad thing for others to pose a problem. Legislation--all the way from the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission to the reduction of the tariff--had promised to solve the problem. But, as the lawyers say, the case was won and the client remained in litigation.

The most celebrated fiasco of instant lawmanship was staged during the combined phase of synthetic hedonism and puritanical revival that maintained the "noble experiment," as it was called, in the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Alcoholism had been identified as a social abuse, and therefore the hoodlums made common cause with the reformers to pass a law that made the bootleggers rich and gave organized crime its start as a major growth business.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was addicted to instant lawmanship--it was sophisticated in its standard technique of mobilizing redundant legislative programs to fill the gap left by ineffective and self-contradictory economic policies. Roosevelt's repeated response to evidence of sluggishness in the economy was to pass a new set of laws to create a new set of alphabet agencies, instead of groping for simple policies that would avoid such increasingly complicated and unworkable administrative complexes. Truman had an alibi for his systematic retreat from policy making to slogan slinging while he out-Roosevelted Roosevelt in his advocacy of instant lawmanship. He was happily spared the responsibility for administering the lost causes that he fought for during his term.

When Eisenhower's turn came, he hewed stubbornly to one policy line: never to yield to the temptation to be drawn openly into a military engagement. (His start-up venture in Vietnam was an exception to his policy only in substance, because the commitment was kept secret.) In the domestic area, he substituted drift for both policies and programs.

Kennedy had captured the imagination of the country on TV at a time of critical transition from the years of Eisenhower's passivity, when the overorganization of society had left the individuals in it haunted by a sense of inadequacy, if not downright irrelevance. At the level of popular fantasy, Jack and Jackie had staged a revival of the glamorous legend of Camelot, in modern dress and in real life, for everyone to see. To their fellow adventurers in opinion making, they had promised, as Gloria Steinem said, nothing less than a new Periclean age.

Like Kennedy, Johnson started out by capturing the imagination of the country. Unlike Kennedy, he owed the hold he won on public confidence to no glamorous posturings. On the contrary, his personality was downright repulsive, embodying the typical television watcher's caricature of a political wheeler-dealer. But for just this reason, Johnson generated a distinctive and respectful appeal, which was irresistible while it lasted. The public's confidence in Johnson lasted as long as Johnson's political magic worked where it counted--with Congress--and not a day longer. Kennedy had represented a reversion to the Truman technique of instant lawmanship advocated but not passed--and thus not needing to be administered. Johnson represented a reversion to Roosevelt's reliance upon legislative overkill; like Roosevelt, Johnson got his laws passed, and thus was held responsible for administering them. And like Roosevelt, Johnson ran his version of instant lawmanship without policy guidance. No one could have passed more laws than Johnson, but the policies he stumbled into finally negated the benevolent thrust of them all.

Looking back on Johnson's 1964 honeymoon with Congress, while he was still persuading his former associates to legislate Kennedy's programs, one after the other, Daniel Patrick Moynihan recalled that what surfaced as the all-important poverty legislation "represented not a choice among policies so much as a collection of them." Legislative action for action's sake, Moynihan complained, came to dominate a program-packaging operation, so that priority of purpose was lost in the ensuing shuffle of excitement.

The average voters who gave Johnson a good "job rating"--until they turned against him and wanted him fired--did not know how Johnson did his job any more than he knew how to explain it to them. They were the members of what David Riesman called "the lonely crowd"; and they participated in its moods and decisions in the solitary confinement of their living rooms, linked to one another, to the White House and to the violence in Vietnam and in the streets by the television tube. The institutionalization of the modern television audience built a sensitive and continuous new dependence on political management into economic society. Many provocative old themes and slogans won an uneasy new lease on life--subject to the moods and whims of the well-fed, respectable, tranquilized mob whose members depended on television for their connection with the worlds of both reality and make-believe. A continuous circus was staged. The spectators could not be manipulated by rations of bread--they had all the cake they could eat.

Every man's home had become a castle crackling with power. Every man could play at being a king, sitting in front of the tube, enforcing his decrees on politicians, policies, products and the pollsters who rate them all. The kingfish in the White House was on notice that any management failure on his part would turn the lonely crowd into a lynch mob. To keep them quiet and watching from outside the orbit of power, a manipulator was wanted at its center--and, in the person of Lyndon Johnson, he was appreciated for what he was as long as he functioned as what he was. Before the loose alliance of the establishment of bigness--beginning with Big Government, including Big Business, Big Labor, Big Agriculture, and by no means excluding Big Education and Big Welfare--faced the challenge to grow into the Great Society, it had come to be held together by the belief that a master politician could be trusted to hold it together and by the evidence that the economic pudding being enjoyed by everyone had been baked by the experts who talked only to him. Earlier societies had tried and failed to fulfill the promise of continuous movement toward a better life for their citizens. But they, less ambitious than the Affluent Society, had aspired merely to continuous betterment, not absolute greatness.

In order to tranquilize and lead the Affluent Society, Johnson needed only to finance his programs to provide policy continuity for his experts and atmospheric continuity for his crowd of silent followers. The mechanics of fiscal politics had replaced the need for any philosophy of social purpose--that is, as longs as the mechanics of fiscal politics worked. The mechanics of fiscal politics had become the crucial framework holding the Affluent Society together as the plausible precursor to that Great Society over the horizon. And, for a brief time, fiscal politics did work, in miraculous defiance of remembered assertions and expected reassertions about the economic equivalent of the law of gravity. Suddenly, what went up did not come crashing down. As long as these policies worked, the momentum of money flows animating the economy was accepted as a reliable measure of the effectiveness of national purpose.

If, however, the methods of politics once failed to finance the continuous circus, and if the lonely, well-fed, well-housed, tranquilized, respectable army participating in the TV fun turned violent and took to the streets, no counter-violence ordered from Washington could hope to rule it. But as long as the Big Society looked better than it was and had a chance to grow into a Great Society without falling apart, Johnson was free to govern its members, to keep his mandate and to hold the Affluent Society together as a going society. It was intelligible philosophically and it was doable politically. It was not too good to be true, but it did depend on what Lyndon Johnson's sponsor and mentor, Franklin Roosevelt, liked to call "an iffy proposition." For the trouble was that the independence that the Affluent Society gave its President from the politics of principle left him dependent on the experts who dominated the practical mechanics--specifically those of fiscal politics. Politically, Johnson was as vulnerable to violent change she seemed invulnerable, as long as he operated behind the façade of continuity. Socially, the veneer of the Affluent Society was as flimsy as it seemed solid. When the political storm that drove Johnson from power cracked society's surface, it revealed a whirl of confusion and activity against a background that was big, rich and prone to violence--but no longer a society.

Johnson's failure determined the shape of the challenge Richard Nixon found awaiting him. In assessing the options open to him for selecting the areas of continuity and change, instant lawman-ship obviously seemed the course to avoid. For after a full generation of growth, the apparatus of Big Government had taken on elephantine proportions. Every one of its functions--from the making of strategic policy to manning the endless crazy quilt of duplicative and competing welfare agencies, and including the agencies wielding the authority to regulate the various sectors of the economy and to finance the Government--had lost the capacity to work with one another, much less to work toward the solution of the problems plaguing American society. Kennedy's characteristically ironical complaint, uttered in reaction to his own recognition that his Administration was developing into an exercise in showmanship rather than performance, was that the President, although expected to run the Government, could no longer even find out what was going on inside it. Johnson subsequently insisted that he not only could manage Government by meddling in it at all levels but that he meant to know every last detail of what was going on inside it, right down to what he could fathom from personal scrutiny of the daily logs the White House drivers turned in, in order that he might check up on who had been driven where and when. The reaction of the Nixon Administration was less personal and more in keeping with the professional character of auditors; namely, that merely to identify the endless administrative arms of the Federal apparatus was enough to explain the impossibility of making any of them work.

In an interview I published with Dr. Arthur Burns, President Nixon's counselor, in the May 8, 1969, Chicago Tribune, Burns summed up a new Administration's problems in this way:

There is an extraordinary continuity in American government. This is both good and bad. A new Administration appoints new Cabinet members. They come from all walks of life and at the start know very little about the intricacies of their new jobs. They depend on assistants to fill them in, and these in turn depend on their assistants. Consequently, you get a cadre of career staff people who stay on from Administration to Administration and provide continuity. The drawback is that they become entrenched and given to doing things in their own way, so that when a new Cabinet member wants to make changes, he has trouble getting his staff to go along.

The pendulum had, indeed, swung since Roosevelt had set out in 1933 to make Government effective by giving it more jobs to do. Nixon set out to make Government more effective by stripping it down to workable simplicity. The root of the difficulties Nixon faced grew from three decades of simplistic faith in instant lawmanship. Each new assurance, from Roosevelt to Johnson, that a problem had been solved because a law had been passed achieved a brief public-relations success for the lawmaker; and each success transferred the burden of responsibility--and the onus of prospective bankruptcy--to the innocent and helpless arms of the bureaucratic octopus charged with fulfilling the promises of instant lawmanship. Roosevelt made the most of this buck-passing process to shift the burden of responsibility from his Presidency to the Government bureaus for which the people's Congress appropriated their money. In his Senate days, Johnson had parlayed his power-oriented legislative leadership and a passive Presidency into an empire strong enough to supplement, if not actually to rival, the Presidency itself. But when he fell heir to the Presidency, he, too, exploited the technique of instant lawmanship to saddle the executive apparatus with the responsibility for future aimlessness of purpose and paralysis of function. The achievements of instant lawmanship proved easier to legislate than to operate.

Nixon was shrewd enough to opt for policy making as the source of his own expertise. He stood pat on programs and concentrated on finding policy priorities. The prudence that prompted Nixon to draw back from the expected speculation on instant lawmanship drew critical fire. But his selection of priorities drew the lines of battle for the 1972 Presidential contest before 1969 was many months old."Do-nothingism" was not the issue raised against Nixon. On balance, he had far and away the winning side of the argument provoked by his renunciation of instant lawmanship. His critics benefited from the freedom his emphasis on policy gave them to concentrate their fire on his priorities; and his policy-making operation benefited reciprocally from their criticism. The old war he had inherited in Vietnam started out claiming his top priority; and the new war he had proclaimed against inflation claimed his second priority."People" finished a poor third. But the experts in each area finished first--both in the department of policy making and in the department of policy implementation, where the experts are pre-eminent. Altogether, therefore, while Nixon's strategy for harnessing the uses of Presidential power benefited from Johnson's failure, he himself had ignored Johnson's advice.