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technology, shifts from rural areas to cities and from the cities to the suburbs,
public health, social security, housing, education, relations between the
federal government and the states and localities, etc., etc.

The newly emerging challenges are innumerable. For instance, our
society must ask how we can meet the economic, social and political problems
of our vast new urban complexes with political machinery shaped during the
19th century. Our metropolitan areas involve large concentrations of people,
industry and administrative resources. Many of them cross State lines.
Many of their ramifications into fields of highway transportation, social
welfare, education, governmental services and protection, involve the interests
and services of the Federal government. In their local manifestations they
are the more difficult to cope with not only because the sources of leadership
within the central urban city seem to be drying up as the groups trained most
in leadership flee to the suburbs, but because the fiscal resources needed to
cope with them are being increasingly absorbed by State and Federal govern-
ment taxes for other purposes.

And we have dodged the real and proliferating problems of the inter-
relations of Federal, state and local responsibilities by a complicated,
inefficient maze of intergovernmental compromises. The kinds of tasks,
responsibilities and resources needed at the state and local level are a
first-level and unsolved challenge to democratic leadership. Our state and
local machineries of government are woefully neglected and inadequate.
And the effectiveness of our nation in dealing with all aspects of its problems

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depends in good part on effective performance by state and local leaders --
not only in government but in community life. Civil defense is one example
of how most of our problems of national security reach into the states and
localities.

Our domestic life moves on to new wealth, security, and maturity.
Its technical, political, and social framework unceasingly changes in ways
that require greater comprehension and wise decision -- from the handling of
atomic energy or automation or a better highway system to the surge of the
Negro towards social equality and the revision of our educational system.
We have learned how to maintain full employment but can we learn how to
avoid voting ourselves into chronic inflation?

In the past, the process of solving national problems has been made
easier by the fact that many major issues involved urgent and direct special
interests of particular groups within the nation. These articulate and
powerful groups forced decisions by pressure and by bargaining. The agenda
of American domestic life for the next decade will consist in large part of
issues where the problem is not so much to compromise conflicting group
interests as it is to realize and expand the great areas where most citizens
have common interest and can therefore act in consensus.

This is the case with the problem of inflation; with school buildings
and teachers' salaries; with enlarged road-building programs; with the re-
building of the old cities, including the clearance of slums; with public
health; the care of the aged; and so on. If some or all of this agenda is to

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be dealt with, the community must decide that extra dollars spent on communal purposes outweigh the value of marginal dollars spent within the private budget.

These problems must be faced at a time when the public budget is strained by security outlays, and by the unavoidable consequences of providing minimum public services for a rapidly expanding population. They confront the community either with inflation or some alternate form of sacrifice: for instance, the nation may well have to choose among such seemingly unrelated sets of actions as the risks in the decreased missiles expenditures; the money it will spend for high quality education for the young; and the size and horsepower of its automobiles.

## U. S. Bias for the Status Quo

The United States stands at a particular unresolved stage of its evolution as a nation in which it is essential that we consolidate our accumulated experience into a working consensus which will serve as a basic national frame of reference for National Security Council papers and for the judgments of responsible citizens in every community. Such a consensus on the character of the national interest at home and abroad does not now exist, and no mobilization of leadership in our system nor the recruitment of the ablest and most public-spirited of civil servants, or refinements in governmental organization can substitute for such a consensus.

Therefore, a fundamental task for the whole American community is the development of a consensus concerning the national interest sufficiently

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concrete so that the nation is likely to recognize and respond to the dangers --
that confront it -- either in domestic or international affairs -- before they
emerge as flagrant crises. Response to the challenges of the next 10-15 years
will demand a pace of innovation and adjustment in public policy for which
neither our national history nor our present institutions have adequately
prepared us.

Historically, the United States has tended to recognize and respond to
threats to the national interest only in the midst of grave crisis. This recurrent
weakness in the national performance is rooted in a general lack of consensus
concerning the character of American interests in the world. There has been
no wise concord among American leaders frustrated by schism and ignorance
among the citizens at large; American cabinets in recent decades have been as
badly split as the public.

From the earliest days of our national life down to the present, observers
have noted that we are a nation of operators rather than men of reflection;
we are pragmatists, approaching our problems in the specific terms in which
they presented themselves -- be it a hard New England winter or an incoming
cable. This quality is one of our strengths, lying as it does at the root of
our operational vigor and our will to regard specific obstacles as things promptly
to be removed; but it is a sufficient approach only where the broad directions
for action are set and agreed. Amid today's rapid innovations and revolutionary
changes, American emphasis on operating efficiency at the expense of creative
thought, which has been built into our military and foreign policy establishments,

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is inappropriate to our needs.

Our heavy-handed, pyramidal methods of administration make very
difficult the creation of policies which will be something more than convulsive
reactions to crises. Such methods were admirable for a nineteenth century
railway or post-office or for an army in piping times of peace or for any
operation where fixed, specialized tasks can be defined and remain stable;
but they are destructive of initiative and creative energy, freighted with a
dangerous bias for the status quo in situations where rapid innovation is
essential. Given these American attitudes in philosophy and administration
the status quo tends to become a policy hurriedly worked up to deal with the
last crisis, perpetuated thereafter by the weight of bureaucratic inertia, until
the next crisis comes along.

Often men successfully operate processes by accumulated experience,
by sensing recurrent patterns rather than searching out logical connections of
cause and effect. This is how successful American captains of sailing vessels
have worked, successful politicians, successful business men. This has
been the typical American style in operating and developing the nation's
society. Its success, however, is dependent on two alternative conditions:
first, that the problems confronted be relatively familiar and capable of
solution on the basis of existing principles or institutions; or second, that
there be enough time for the experimental exploration of possible changes
which would lead to a solution. Or, put another way, the American style
is least effective when it confronts issues which require prompt or radical

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innovation.

It is here that we are in trouble. We live in a world of extremely rapid change, where the survival of our society hinges on prompt innovation, while our intellectual style and our national institutions are accommodated to slow and carefully balanced modifications of the status quo. For example, we have in Washington many White House and interdepartmental committees whose function it is to recommend new national postures in response to emerging challenges. Yet these committees tend to be in actual practice reconciliation committees representing the major bureaucracies in our executive system: Pentagon, Commerce, Treasury, etc.

With their members bearing the responsibilities and conditioned by the thinking of these institutions of the status quo, ideas and major innovations do not emerge easily from such hierarchical bureaucratic organizations. It is the tendency of an orderly bureaucracy to perpetuate the status quo. Innovations emerge in the heads of lonely men, or from small like-minded groups, thrashing freely about for the answer to a problem that fits no particular section or division of the bureaucracy, neatly delimited by professional administrators. First-class ideas are as unlikely to emerge from a committee of hard-pressed bureaucrats as a first-class book to be written by a committee of professors.

And so, for these and many other similar reasons, present day American policy-making tends to consist of a series of short-sighted and

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belated reactions to major crises. Having failed to define, to anticipate, and to deal with forces loose in the world, having tried merely to keep the great machine of government ticking over from day-to-day, at last the problems never recognized, or ignored, come ticking in over the cables. Then, at least we turn to with vigor and rig up an ad hoc solution -- often by-passing all the bureaucratic machinery created to deal with our affairs, launch hastily some new courses of action; and these become the working norms of policy until the next crisis comes along.

It is altogether possible that the crises to come in the next 10-15 years will take the form of situations where even the most vigorous ad hoc effort by the nation will be too little and too late to protect our system.

(cut? For instance, we Americans have yet to rationalize into an entity the contradictory convictions which have shaped its foreign policies: the selfish but necessary forces of national interest and the unselfish but desirable drives toward world betterment. We are faced with the fact of power in the world and the need of the United States actively to apply its power on its world environment in order to ensure its national interest. We also have a broad interest in the world which is rooted in the deep conviction that our experiment in democracy has a meaning which transcends the American scene.

But right down to the present -- right down to the application of the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East -- we are uncertain as to how these two elements relate to each other and to the ultimate interest and purpose of the United States as a society. Are we committed in the Middle East to stop

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the extension of Soviet military power or are we there to help build viable, independent, increasingly more democratic societies. These are closely related questions, but they can be regarded as identical questions only at our peril, cut?)

The Constructive Use of Crisis

It is fair to conclude the American processes are facing their ultimate challenge. Putting first things first, the very question of our own national survival is at issue.

If we are able to maintain our lives and our country, another dimension of the challenge is less dramatic but as serious: how can we conserve and broaden achievement. We have created materially most wealthy, physically most healthy, industrially most productive, politically most free mass society in the history of the world, but can we continue and deepen this achievement?

And there is an even deeper dimension to our problem: in surviving as a system and in broadening our material achievement, can we maintain and help spread those moral values and political institutions without which expanded material output could strangle the spirit and survival itself could be a defeat?

Of course, however, all three challenges are interlocked. Survival is necessary to the continuation of our moral and political life and material achievement furnishes weapons for survival as well as underlying our unexampled opportunity to share broadly throughout society the chance for every man to make the most of himself.

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And it may well be that the single greatest challenge to our democratic society lies in this question: can we survive and achieve in the face of mortal threat while preserving and expanding the spiritual values of our system. And no longer can we restrict this action to the domestic scene: from now on we must survive and achieve in a worldwide frame of reference. We must adapt the essence of our political, economic and social institutions to the ever-broadening horizons of capacity and opportunity opening up as a result of our geometrically-increasing scientific and technological capability.

We need to create and communicate a more adequate and better-explored system of expectations about the world system of the future than we now have shared broadly. We need a view of the probable trends in the distribution of power and influence so conceived that current problems can be realistically related to them and courses of action can be chosen with some dependable idea of how their consequences will lead toward fulfilment of our aspirations.

One of the most difficult parts of this task is the creation of a dependable and realistic notion of the meaning of crisis for ourselves and for others. In the past, we have sought international peace and tranquility, regarding international crisis as something to be avoided, outwaited, or overmastered, after which we would return to a tensionless normal existence. We are now beginning to realize that we must live with world tension for a protracted period. We can interpret this either with pessimism or with optimism. Our earlier assumptions favor the pessimist approach, but such an

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approach leads surely to frustration, a sense of weakness because we are
unable to abolish crisis and failure.

There is now great need for us to take an optimistic view and create
a doctrine of the constructive use of crisis. If we can do this, we can
generate expectations among our own people and among our companions abroad
that our policy can take advantage of the opportunities for change implicit
in crisis, to advance our cause in the world. This is critical to the general
requirement that leadership should instill confidence the job can be done;
that many situations of crisis can not only be shouldered off with little
damage, but can be turned to positive advantage. If this can be done, the
country can demand and get more sacrifice of energy and treasure for public
ends. We can abolish the frustrations inevitable among those who expect
early surcease from struggle. We can foster hope and breed courage among
all who meet crisis with a belief that the democratic processes can prevail.

Thus, on every side, the challenges call insistently for us to make
up the well-recognized lag in our philosophy and practice of government,
management and administration. It calls for fresh, creative and imaginative
adaptation of old human verities, for here as elsewhere we must adapt,
innovate and change to preserve our ancient dedication to the fullest
development of the potentialities of every soul.

If we cannot achieve this, we deserve to lose. If the responses
of our system are adequate, our opportunities are infinite.

H.K.

More re Chapter II.

I am putting this at the end because I didn't want to prejudice you before you read it. I have a feeling that a greater depth of analysis of the challenges to the Democratic Processes is needed. The status quo and the constructive use crises seem to be good examples of what is needed. I wish there was one or two more, e.g., I raise in passing the question of the moral use of force. Perhaps it will be suitable also to raise the question of relevancy between our processes and other specially evolved or semi-democratic processes in other parts of the world. The trouble is if they are raised at all, it seems to me they have to be discussed at some level and with considerable depth. Since VI chose to ignore such areas, I should think it would be a distortion of their work to include such material...?

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### III. LEADERSHIP

Leadership in a democracy flows out of the society in every aspect and is found at every level. Leadership is exercised here by the educated and there by the unlettered, here by the well-to-do and there by the poor, here by the government official and there by the business executive or labor leader. Sharing in the process we find the scholar, the scientist, the technician, the farmer, the labor leader, the pastor, the journalist. Democratic leaders are found wherever a man or women shows special abilities to see a little farther ahead, to Marshall resources, direct action, and precipitate consent.

#### The Irrationale of "The Elite"

This is far from totalitarian concepts of leadership by an "elite" or a "leader".

A democracy finds there is no basis in fact for the notion of elite leadership, that leaders must come from any one group in a society or constitute a special class set apart by birth or social barriers, that it is the function of leaders to do the thinking, and to sell their solutions to those whose collaboration or acquiescence is necessary to carry them out.

In any society which operates under the leader principle -- one absolute ruler who bows not even to God -- the leader works to condition all responses to his will. He is not concerned with letting men pursue happiness or share individual responsibility. The disciplined kind of animal

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or insect life, the rigidly determined production and controlled distribution
which one sees in its perfection in an ant heap or a beehive, is the measure
of totalitarian success. The nature of such leaders demands the suppression,
not the sharing, of moral responsibility by its members; it requires the
monopoly of all the sources of the expression of social responses in every
group throughout the society by a one party system and a hierarchy with com-
plete powers of terror and purges. The leader knows no higher law than his
own will. He relies on fear buttressed by indoctrination in myths and induced
conformity from "conditioned" subjects. The never-solved problem of this
totalitarian control is that it works to destroy the human in men and that
ultimately men rebel against their own destruction.

Perhaps the ultimate difference between elite leadership and demo-
cratic leadership is measured by how much choice is granted to the people.
A dictatorship operates in a frame of reference where little or no choice is
left to the public. In a democracy, leadership is a two-way process even
though it must succeed in producing in times of great national crisis a center
of policy formulation and decision-making which has to be vested by a
popular mandate in the President, as Commander-in-Chief. Even in war the
President is always under the check of his constitutional responsibility.
He is removable by Congress through impeachment, he has to depend upon
Congress for funds, and he is circumscribed by the powers of the Supreme
Court.

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## Democratic Leadership

In a democracy, leaders occupy a place in the chain of consensus, not the place. They function as a particular kind of specialist in the society, invaluable and irreplaceable but not the be-all and end-all of the community. And national leadership -- the sole important leadership in the elite concept -- is only one among the important kinds of the various sorts of leadership which a democratic society needs.

Our leaders are recruited and selected by competition, and trained for responsibility by all varieties of groups in our society. There are big-L and little-L leaders, not only in politics and government, but elsewhere. The nature of their leadership differs, resting as it does on different competences and skills in the fields of science or business, the professions, education, agriculture, labor, etc. Some leaders compete with other leaders both within fields and across fields. It is a separate task for still other leaders to create the conditions of purposes, resources, and motivation that will call forth a maximum degree of leadership collaboration for American goals.

Such a complicated interrelation of leaders is another disproof of the "elite" concepts of the structure of leadership in which leadership in one field is assumed to be leadership in many or all and leadership is organized into a graded hierarchy. Such concepts of leadership do not fit the facts of our democratic system, nor do they provide a framework in which we can think most effectively about our leadership problems of the future.

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Recent Studies in the field of public opinion reinforce the concept of leadership as a highly specialized function. Those who lead their fellows in matters of fashion in clothes, games and art and those who lead in matters of political preference are found to gain and maintain pre-eminence because of particular knowledge, insight and skills they are able to demonstrate at particular times and on particular issues. To a surprising degree, a leader influential in one field possesses little influence or authority in others for which his special competence does not fit him. This implies a system in which leaders who lead in one or some roles, find themselves followers in many others.

Moral Qualifications for Leadership

Leaders cannot deduce objectives and goals by a mere rehearsal of facts. For we are bewildered and overwhelmed by enormous arrays of facts thrown up by our elaborate machineries while at the same time we reach out for new sets of data to cast light into hitherto unmeasured areas of our physical and social environment. Leadership must create the framework of belief, thought, and doctrine within which facts gain meaning and become operationally useful, a framework of moral dimensions. Leaders must do more than arrange facts and persuade decision, they must generate actions that testify to an inner faith in man's dignity and destiny. This can only be done by moving men in their deepest realms of feeling, faith and convictions.

Paramount in the qualifications which a democracy imposes on its

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leaders is the capacity to perceive and invoke the moral values and aims of the society. For there must always remain a sense of identity between leaders and their societies. The strongest levels in this sequence of identity are the moral goals and values revered in common. If leaders and the rest of their societies differ on these, leadership disappears.

Certainly, added dimensions of responsibility rest on democratic leadership. That responsibility must be discharged within the limits imposed by a mutually held confidence that it is ultimately the truth that makes men free. Since he must reflect its freedom of thought and association and nourish the elements that give a free society strength, a constitutional leader must keep fertile the seedbed of initiative and growth for those ideas and beliefs that germinate from the individual's freedom to disagree. Lincoln during the most difficult times of the nation, had to use stern measures to deal with treason within his own lines and to repress rebellion against the Union and threats from without. Yet few men were ever more considerate of the view of others or careful for their protection -- up to the point where the survival of the constitutional system itself became the supreme law.

Since this be so, it indicates the best way a society can create and improve leaders at all levels of the community: by educational emphasis on training for excellence, on acceptance of sacrifice and hardship as ways to train courage, patience, understanding and endurance.

Above all, true leaders can neither talk down to their people nor fail to

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evoke what is their best, even if to do so sometimes involves temporary unpopularity or taking risks by firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right. Thus leadership is not principally a function of intelligence, but of moral and spiritual qualifications. It requires motivation strong enough to sustain extraordinary exertion and devotion to duty. Leaders must possess sufficient faith in long-run goals, values, and procedures, and in the assumptions underlying them, to be able to sustain temporary frustrations.

Whenever the issues involved go beyond morally indifferent choices of expedient means to gain approved ends, leaders and their society must find a basis of mutual faith and trust, and mutual recognition and acceptance of the rightness of the relationship and its consequences. And of course, this moral quality comes inescapably into the field of national leadership wherever it involves the nation in international action, for here the great portion of the body politic must place faith in their leaders, since they cannot themselves know and judge the full range of facts and opinion governing their nation's action in the world.

Moreover, the leader who accepts and acts on this faith bears a moral obligation. Morality involves the acceptance of responsibility, while mere moralizing means the evasion of it. The power of leaders depends not only on identity but also on the extent to which the people recognize that their leaders exemplify a common moral sense. This does not exclude wordly wisdom; at times it is necessary for leaders to appear both as wise as serpents

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and as innocent as doves.

The Tasks of Leadership

While leaders are the evocation in one sense of the moral values of their society, their functions and tasks do not cease here. The leader, moreover, must both symbolize and dramatize. His reflection of his times is not one merely of mirroring the needs of a society. He transforms and clarifies. He brings to a focus. He gives direction. He moves towards the ends chosen by programs of action. In all these ways he symbolizes, in some measure, as an epic example, the character of his society.

In a democracy leadership is required for two reasons. All men are not equally gifted or enthralled by the special tasks of handling the affairs of the community and, quite aside from natural endowment and interest, the handling of these affairs requires a knowledge of special areas of fact and of situation which all cannot equally know. In social and political organi-zation, as in virtually all else we do, specialization is required.

But it follows directly from the basic character of American society that the delegation of leadership is not a simple affair. In assuming special powers of decision in communal affairs the leader must look in three directions; and if he is successful, he must harmonize what he sees. First, he must perceive -- and if possible anticipate -- the urgent new problems faced by his society which could be solved without changes in method or in policy. Then, he must search out effective solutions to these problems and throw his

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weight behind those which are in harmony with the constitutional and moral
rules of the community. And finally, he must persuade his society to swing
into action along his proposed course of action.

Thus, the leader in a democratic community must be at once the
innovator, the keeper of his societies' historic values and institutions; and
he must, finally, combine the talents of educator and short-run political
tactician. This is quite a package, but in a modern democratic society these
multiple facets of leadership can be observed in all sorts of successful
organizations, including those formally outside the political.

A great business leader is more than a mechanism for making money;
he peers ahead to anticipate his firm's future problems; he persuades his
board of directors, his stockholders and his management staff that his decisions
are wise; and he makes certain that his company's policies harmonize with
the moral values of the society in which it lives. Similarly, outstanding labor
leaders concern themselves not only with the current and foreseeable agenda
of problems affecting the real income of the labor unions, but he is always
concerned with carrying along with him not only his immediate constituency
but the more distant but still more powerful constituency of the American
community.

Being at once the innovator, the keeper of its abiding constitutional
rules and moral values, and a key builder of consensus to effective communal
action, the democratic leader must perceive in good time the community's

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problems and their order of priority; he must organize the staff work required to expose alternative solutions to these problems of which the most creative minds of the community can conceive; he must boldly throw his weight behind those which are both efficient and harmonious with the community's abiding values; and he must be both the good educator and good politician in moving the community to prompt and effective action.

The Intuitive Aspect of Leadership

If a prescription could be drawn up for leadership, or even for recognizing leaders, the problems of a democratic society would be immensely simplified. Obviously, such a definition is an impossible hope. But there are certain major psychological functions which most leaders seem to share and which most non-leaders do not seem to possess. And these qualifications are not primarily matters of the reasoning process or logical judgment in the usual sense of the words.

Leaders must have a capacity for making value judgments, flair for sensing or determining objectives and goals. Studying great leaders, this often seems to be a process in which alternate goals are weighed, selected and discarded by intuitional processes. This is perhaps the reason that Jesus went to the top of the mountain, why Lincoln brooded.

It is in one sense a prescience, a special ability to focus on a spot or problem before it happens. It is a kind of meditation, a weighing of things which are out of time and space which seems to enable a leader to determine

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better than his fellow men where his society should go. It is probably for
this reason that leaders seem to emerge in times of crisis.

Another special function of leadership is of course the ability to express
these goals in language of the people. Psychologically, it is the ability to
express values and goals in feelings, and not in logic and reasoned definitions
but in parables and analogies.

And another factor in the personality makeup of a leader is his special
ability to manipulate the how-to-do means to serve his ends. While reasoning
and scientific method become more important here, it is still a flair which most
men do not possess in sufficient degree to become leaders.

Then, flowing out of his moral kinship with his society, but going into
considerable other areas as well as moral values, is the leader's capacity to
identify himself with individuals and make them feel they are participating with
him. The democratic leader somehow gets people to feel that the decision,
even at which he is heading, is the one simple practical level of operation, is
the decision they would take in his boots. In performing this function a leader
seems to have two special sorts of intuitions about his fellow men. He senses
where there is a fairly widespread intensely held opinion he can capitalize on
just by connecting his programs to this attitude. And, more complicated to
describe, he has a special gift of giving focal meaning to public opinion which
is not well focussed in the public's mind and where the means of obtaining
desired goals are not clear or are seemingly contradictory.

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The Special Case of American Political Leadership

Though there are leaders in every group in society and diffused
throughout these groups at varying levels, the political leader who attempts
to assemble a consensus for a government which can act with speed and
decision while maintaining the protections of a constitutional system occupies
a special position in the ranks of leadership. He has to assume risks and to
make decisions on inadequate evidence through the very nature of a system
that cannot be reduced to mechanical science. He must show a receptivity
to his people's own expressed values and views, in order to be responsible
and to reflect his own times and his support.

These requirements of receptivity and responsibility hold for the other
fields of leadership as well. But only the political leader has to integrate
into a workable and broadly acceptable program all the diffuse pressures of
a society by finding a basis for getting common purpose out of the diversity of
these other purposes and interests. In doing so he has to compete for loyal-
ties in a very broad market indeed. Even though the American political party
system may offer a relatively restricted competiton as between the parties
or among them, there is always a struggle for control and leadership within
the party. Indeed it is precisely this competition which toughens a leader
for his growth to a position of national responsibility, makes him understand
the realities of political processes, and tests out whether he has the capacity
to frame the problems of the nation in terms that will evoke a nationwide

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response.

National Leadership and Contemporary America

American life has, from its colonial origins, constantly faced con-
ditions which required changes in our system and our ways of looking at
things. This in turn has required men of answerable courage, capable of
leading their fellow citizens on to the right next step, in the face of new
problems. Over much of American history, however, our society has developed
successfully without the exercise of strong leadership at the national level.
There was, of course, four occasions before 1945 which did require strong,
national leadership and where it was supplied with varying degrees of success:
in the twenty years after 1776; in the Civil War; in the First World War; and
in the world crisis of the 1930's when we faced the depression and challenge
of the Axis powers. Aside from these crises leadership was generally exercised
on a diffused basis: within families in our schools and churches; politically,
in small communities and towns, and at the state level; and, above all, in
the development of the American economy.

We have never lacked men who not only enjoyed the fruits of liberty,
but who have also accepted a degree of responsibility for the fate of the
community. But given our relative safety in the world of the nineteenth
century and given an expanding frontier society where affairs of state did
not draw the best talents, men with qualities of leadership -- were drawn
in high proportion into the adventure of American economic growth. The nation

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spread out over the continent and brought its resources into production mainly through the enterprise of individual men. With an occasional assist from the army, from diplomacy, and from state and national legislatures, the central tasks of our history, down to 1900, were accomplished with relatively little national political leadership. Aside from the Civil War, the American nation was permitted to grow by an extension of familiar processes, requiring little intervention by the national government. And when we came upon our one great crisis of this era, we found Lincoln.

There is a considerably more serious problem for national leadership today. Even a cursory glance at the problems with which our democratic processes are now confronted shows we are in a far different national position. Our needs are more acute, and added difficulties face today's leaders.

In this twentieth century era of international peril which has forced such a rise in the importance of foreign relations in the business of the state, the performance of the national leader in the foreign field is more vital and more difficult to measure. Even specialists are hampered by lack of access to many forms of information that would illuminate the situation in which the leader operates in his tasks of representation, negotiation, and marshalling of world opinion. Broad estimates as to whether the "results" of our diplomacy are adequate are hard to cast up in the absence of a sharp and just sense of the limits within which we are free by our actions to influence the outcomes of negotiations or other international jousting. And the common man has always

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been at a disadvantage in concerning himself with pros and cons of international affairs, since so much of this field is removed from his daily experience.

Moreover, much of the information upon which national leaders act is closely held, since so much of the context of national leadership is that of struggle with a mortal enemy in which the practices of security are unavoidable. This fact alone tends to set apart those chiefly concerned with national security matters. Because information and reason cannot be fully shared, there is a temptation to expect support based on little more than faith; to ask that personal trust supplant common reason -- in a situation where distance easily breeds distrust.

## Special Problem of American Leadership

The converse of the leadership function of concentrating the nation's resources on the most vital problems, is the creation in the society of some sense of the existing limitations on the capabilities of governmental action, some sense of those things which the government cannot do by government action. Our leadership has been less the wholly successful in transmitting something of its own sense of these limitations.

No leadership concerned with constant problems of priorities can ever forget that there are some tasks that must be postponed, or not attempted; and no leadership aware of the difficulties of conducting foreign relations in a world including enemies, neutrals and friends, metropolitan powers and

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former colonial areas, totalitarian and democractic powers can long ignore
the fact that some moral and urgent objectives cannot be sought by our unilateral
action, or may not be pursued directly at all. Yet there are strains in our
politics that are fostered if not generated by a misplaced sense of omnicompe-
tence. McCarthyism is a prime recent example.

Widely held, such a sense of omnicompetence contributes to the
belief that there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved in terms
compatible with our interest, provided our leaders take care and forehanded
action, and devote the necessary resources from our presumably limitless
reserves of power. Given such a belief, frustrations are bound to arise when
situations abroad develop in ways that we do not like: the extension of
Communist domination, or the rise of neutralism with its frequent expressions
of anti-American sentiment. It is a function of leadership to communicate
a sound sense of those areas in which we can effectively exercise influence
and in which we may legitimately expect favorable actions, at the same time
that it indicates those problems which we must bear with equanimity because
there is nothing that we can do about them without drawing off resources from
other more vital activities -- or that are not within our power to control.

The emerging concept of gyroscopic leadership, however, is an even
more serious problem and potential limitation. In the business world, the
entertainment world, and in all the other aspects of American society, leaders
are being required and selected much less for their creative, imaginative and

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evocative abilities and much more for capacities to act as balance wheels
and compromisers. There is an increasing tendency among Americans to think
of leaders as those who can most effectively adjudicate between varieties of
public. This could become a pernicious influence on the nature and function
of the democratic processes.

Because our society disperses power and initiative widely through-
out our institutions, our governmental leaders are constantly tempted to
respond to these multiform pressures by seeking accommodations and compro-
mises, least-common-denominator solutions. This tendency is pronounced
in the domestic field, in the absence either of demands enforced by world
crisis, or of any controlling philosophy that regulates conflicting demands.
It is not absent from the foreign field, where the urgencies of the world
situation may tempt an executive to seize the quickest, least argued solution
simply to be able to respond in time to the external situation.

In any decentralized society such as ours, in which there are a host
of interests and groups each seeking to achieve its values and command human
and material resources for its purposes, leadership faces the special problem
of identifying those great national problems to which the country's resources
must be somehow related; and to cast them in an appropriate order of priority.
Once this is done, it is necessary to identify alternative solutions to these
problems, to estimate the consequences following from each alternative to
select optimum courses of action, and to create working consensus in support
of those chosen.

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Obviously society as a whole cannot do these things. Governmental leadership -- especially that of the Executive Branch -- possesses the most information about resources and capabilities available to us and to our opponents in the great world struggles. Therefore governmental leaders are usually in the best position to cast up the relevant alternative courses of action.

But their action needs to be complemented by that of others, to be fully effective. Executive leadership must be questioned, tested, and modified by Congress; and programs of legislative action must meet the tests of constitutionality and control posed by our judiciary. Leaders and critics outside government can do much to generate alternatives that those in government may miss or underestimate; and in the estimation of consequences those outside the government have a vital role to play. For every pressure group or interest group worthy of the name knows its particular business and interest as well as or better than those governmental agencies concerned with it, and is in good position to estimate what the specific effects will be of any given government course of action on that interest.

Also in the selection of optimum courses of action, the judgment of the consequences must be taken fully into account: including the consequences for public opinion. Governmental judgment of these matters may be hasty, prejudiced, or ill-informed. The consideration of public interest may be caught up in inter-departmental committees emphasizing particular functions or departmental positions.

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Therefore the selection and pursuit of alternative courses of action
should intimately involve leaders in and out of government, and leaders and
led. Governmental initiatives need to be modified by opinions from outside,
both for effectiveness in execution and for the creation of the consensus
needed for effective performance.

No wonder, amid all this interplay of contrary forces, unrelated
groups, emergency challenges and need for decisions that leadership at the
national level has become such a sine qua non of the American system.

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IV. THE PRESIDENCY

In these troubled and demanding times, a crucial measure of the
vitality of the democratic process is its ability to project the high level
national leadership and to precipitate the broadest ranges of consensus.

The process of persuasion and decision in a democratic community
is a vastly more complex and interacting affair than any picture model of
the President as teacher and advocate of the common position would indicate.
No matter how positively the President interprets his constitutional responsi-
bilities -- no matter how strong or weak he may be, achievement of decision
and consensus in modern America is a diffuse and many-sided process,
embracing the activities of a whole spectrum of governmental and non-govern-
mental institution. Political leadership at every level plays a part, as well
as the world of mass communications, voluntary associations, and, even,
determined private individuals.

And if the President is capable of making the national purpose under-
stood in terms that are familiar to the people and yet capable of being brought
to bear to meet new dimensions of challenge, he must find widespread support
throughout all these great associations and basic communities of the society --
the church, the professional association, the labor union, the community
organizations and club life, the schools, and the educational system. There
is in the democratic process a filtering process by which the individuals as
members of groups test the successive stages of leadership in terms of what

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they can understand of their leaders' character and consistent behavior.
Ideas and programs are in that way the product of many leaders and of the
conflicts of views about them from which democratic consensus must emerge.

But in the light of the international position of the United States today
and the deadly struggle in which it is engaged with Soviet Communism as the
leader of a totalitarian bloc, the national leadership of the United States must
be at once more decisive and better staffed at the top for organized integration
of policy, and, at the same time, supported by a national consensus that can
survive the communistic attempts to exploit the internal differences that are
normal to our kind of a system.

To fulfil its part of the responsibility, national leadership must
develop a better organization both in policy formulation and in policy imple-
mentation.

The selected recommendations that follow in this Report touch, therefore,
upon aspects of the leadership process from the office of the President to
voluntary organizations at the grass-roots, from the National Security
Council to the popular view of the national interest; for if the quality of
American leadership in national policy is to be strengthened, it must be
strengthened not in any one place but all along the line -- in men's minds as
well as in tables of organization.

The President

Under our Constitution the President, in his person and in his office,
is and must be a central figure in any consideration of leadership in national

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policy. Reverting to our threefold definition of the functions of leadership, it is the President, above all, who must identify and if possible anticipate the urgent new problems; it is the President who must listen to the nation and then generate the staff work which will yield solutions acceptable to public opinion, and he must play an important role in making our society aware of its problems and in persuading it to support effectively the courses of action which he regards as both effective and in harmony with the community's constitutional rules and moral values. Notably in military and foreign policy, but also to an important degree in major domestic issues, the President must be, in fact as well as symbolically, the community's mind and voice, if the community is to function effectively; the President is often the only lobbyist for all the people. In each of these three dimensions of leadership there is a complex interaction between the President and the other institutions of the nation. For example, the problems requiring new national policy are not defined simply by a President's intelligence. They may be forced on his and the nation's attention by events in the world so flagrant that it would be politically dangerous for the President to fail to make new policy. A problem may be brought to the President's attention by one of his principal advisers. The act of primary initiation may, even, come from outside the Executive Branch: through the controversy of the two parties; from the Congress; or from informed and even excited elements in the public.

Similarly, staff work -- the exploration of alternative solutions -- will certainly be conducted not by the President alone, but through his interaction

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with the various institutions of the Executive Branch. In foreign and military affairs, for example, the President's freedom of action and, indeed, his vision of what alternatives are open to him will be limited and colored by views and interests of the Department of State, the three military services, and the Department of Defense. At any moment in time the President may be able to influence the great bureaucracies only marginally.

Moreover, the President's definition of the situation he confronts in the world -- and thus, by implication, the routes of action open to the nation -- will be profoundly affected by the intelligence picture drawn for him by the Central Intelligence Agency and by other agencies charged with informing him. Often an extremely important if not decisive role in the definition of alternative solutions may be played by special Presidential commissions or by other groups outside the normal machinery of the Executive Branch.

And, finally, the Congress, despite its limitations in the conduct of staff work, has played in many domestic issues a role of greater importance than the Executive Branch; and it has demonstrated that it can, on occasion, do so in foreign affairs as well. For example, the shape of the 1957 foreign aid bill was basically determined by the Senate.

Problems of the Presidency in mastering the gaps in our government created by our system of representation and our federal system of government stem directly from the basic pluralism not only of our society but of the organization of power in government itself. There is a good deal of *de facto* decentralization of political power within the Executive Branch, because

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the great departments often can depend on the support of the powerful
non-governmental pressure groups for the functions it has in charge, against
the opposition not only of opposing interests but of spokesmen for the national
interest or the President himself; -- for example, the Department of
Agriculture on the national Grange and the Farm Bureau, the Department of
Labor on the AFL-CIO, the Treasury on the great banking complexes of
economic power, etc.

Thus there is a continuing tendency for spokesmen within government
to form coalitions and compromises, bringing together common aspects of
particular interests. And the President, with formal power clearly in his hands,
still must consult the spokesmen for particular interests, and under existing
staffing patterns has nowhere to turn within government for the formulation
or statement of an overall view.

And while the President is the unique representative of all the people
and the spokesman for the general interest, it is impossible for him to bring
that representative quality home in detail to all the work of the interdepart-
mental committees that mould the fundamentals of our national policy. Our
Panel has no concrete definite recommendation on this point but certainly the
most sympathetic consideration should be given to proposals for including
within the structure of the National Security Council complex of committees
a group of spokesmen for the general interest, who can improve the working
of present structures for analyzing the implications of proposals from the

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various departments or other spokesmen for functional and specialized interests, and put them over against larger concepts of national policy.

## Reorganization Powers

But whatever the other problems it is abundantly clear that if the organization of the vast and complex Executive Branch of the government, with its burgeoning and changing responsibilities dictated by the sweep of events, is to be maintained at anything near maximum effectiveness, there is going to be a continuing need for the President to have adequate powers to reorganize his branch of the government as he deems it desirable. Historically that power has been used both by the President and by the Congress with Congress reserving both in theory and practice the right to prescribe details as well as broad principles. Today, reorganization authority is granted to the President in fairly sweeping terms, but only for two year periods and subjected to Congressional veto.

The problem is to find some sort of basis for continuing reorganization authority for the President that gives him the organizational flexibility he needs, while allowing Congress the chance to pass on reorganization proposals that affect basic matters of public interest; and, most important, that does not impose undue statutory rigidities upon organization and procedure.

The temporary value of a particular reorganization may be nullified if it is purchased at the price of statutory rigidity.

We conclude that two steps are in order.

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First, we recommend the President should be granted on a permanent basis the reorganization authority he has recieved from Congress in the past on a two-year basis. For the President to take full advantage of this power in the public interest, the existing machinery for consideration of questions of government reorganization -- now located in the Executive Office of the President -- should be strengthened.

In addition, the President should have permanent authority to reorganize the Executive Branch to meet its responsibilities as he sees fit. Every executive, and notably every President, has a highly personal style and approach to his duties and he should be accorded wide flexibility in translating that style into administrative arrangements. During the period of protracted international crisis since 1932, each American president has organized the key institutions of the Executive Branch in a different way, establishing distinctive relations with his personal advisers, his Cabinet, the ranking military leaders, etc. Whatever views one may hold as to the relative efficacy of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower in the Office of the President, it is clear that they required -- and their successors will deserve -- great latitude in orchestrating the institutions of the Executive Branch to their policy and purpose.

But under the American philosophy of checks and balances, together with any greater power for the executive should go greater checks upon any unbridled exercises of that freedom of action. The President's administrative decisions should be made within a framework of public surveillance of the

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workings of the Executive Branch plus disinterested professional advice.

Second, therefore we recommend that permanent machinery for review of Executive Branch organization should exist in the Congress (as well as in the Executive Branch) and that periodic reports be made to the Congress through the Government Operations Committees. And to offer the necessary perspective and corrective of a more detached and broader-gauged point of view than may be available from any continuing intra-governmental agency, we recommend further that arrangements should be made to have at periodic intervals -- say every ten years, or sooner if need be -- a thoroughgoing study of the whole problem of Federal government organization, with full reports to the government and to the people.

And we note, finally, that the scale and complexity of security affairs, and the powerful bureaucratic vested interests that inevitably grow up around their day-to-day operation, require the President to struggle unremittingly to avoid seeing his power of choice, of initiative, and of decision diluted, to the danger of the national interest.

## The Executive Offices

In recent years, there have been vital gains in the organization and staffing of the Presidency. The rise and strengthening of the Bureau of the Budget, the creation of the Executive Office of the President, the creation of units like the Office of Defense Mobilization and the Council of Economic Advisers, coupled with the constitution of a series of interdepartmental

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committees such as the National Security Council, have made it possible for
the President better to cope with the increasing and unprecedented challenges
to his Office.

But the problem of ensuring that organization of the Presidency remains
comprehensive and flexible enough presents a dilemma. The White House is
today the major focus of those powers and functions on which the nation
depends most completely. It already disposes of enormous power, authority
and influence. And it is widely accepted that there may be, from time to time,
serious need for increase in these formal powers and for recasting of
organization of the White House and the Executive Office to cope with crises
of fresh intensity or novel form.

But it seems to our Panel that the difficulties that would be raised
by the effort to gain more formal powers, or to change the organizational
pattern, might be too great, and the effort to get them might create situations
worse than those obtaining at present. Demands for greater formal power in
time of peace are bound to create difficulties and frictions with the Congress.
And demands for changes in organization may lead to fresh restrictions or
inflexibility rooted in legal prescriptions or legislative understandings. A
request for added powers might be interpreted as a drive to consolidate
Executive supremacy, and Congress might respond by cutting into the current
fields of Executive discretion.

Can anything then be done to improve the exercise of the existing
formal powers of the Presidency? Whoever tries to answer that question

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should recognize that there is no simple or permanent organizational solution
to the internal arrangements for policy decision and the control of execution
at this level. And there is clear danger in over-organization frozen into
statute. The question whether the structure around the Presidency is the most
rational or the most convenient turns in part on the work habits and requirements
of whoever is President. This is another reason for keeping the formal structure
and its legislative underpinning as flexible as possible. Despite the scale of
the organization he must command and the intricacy of the problems on which
he must make decision, the President and his Office remain and must remain
a highly personal affair. Every device within the wit of man capable of easing
his task should be explored and installed if judged helpful; but we should
never cherish the illusion that the essential functions of the President can
safely be institutionalized in inter-departmental committees or delegated to
other men.

These points having been raised, it is then pertinent to observe that
at several points the organization and functioning of the Presidency falls
short of adequacy in our current needs. These include the organization of the
Presidency itself -- especially insofar as it relates to the generation of
national policy; problems of federal reorganization; recruitment and develop-
ment of top personnel and the organization under the President of the staff
work concerned with military and foreign affairs. Looked at from the per-
spective of the President, the problem posed by the new scale and complexity
of American military and foreign policy may be described in a question:

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-Whatever the system of organization, adopted for coordinating policy and operations in the field of military and foreign policy how can the President insure that the key issues requiring his attention and decision are brought to him in time in order that American policy shall be made; that they are well defined; that the widest range of alternative solutions are developed and presented for his choice; and that his decisions are then in fact, translated into day-to-day operation by the bureaucracies chiefly concerned?

## The Staff Institutions

The fact of the matter is that in these all important military foreign affairs areas of today's national decisions, neither our history nor our present institutions give us adequate guidance. The pace of technological and political change makes it essential to strengthen the innovating forces at work in national policy and weaken the inertia innate in all operating bureaucancy. And, the need to interrelate many arms of national policy around specific defined purposes as well as the need to interweave the requirements of domestic and foreign policy make it essential to enlarge and strengthen those institutions of government charged to examine the nation's problems as a whole rather than specific operating segments of them.

While these observations are true of the entire range of the American political process, they are especially relevant to the Executive, where the National Security Council and its related institutions, although remarkably

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developed in the past decade, do not now meet the requirement for developing and enforcing within the Executive Branch a forehanded national policy.

Similarly, in the Department of Defense, the present organization and present staff structures fall far short of meeting the requirements of developing and enforcing among the three services a forehanded and unified military policy.

The two Executive institutions designed to assess the overall position of the nation in the world and to prescribe unified policies to guarantee our survival: the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each has access to enormous staff structures, filled with experts on every region of the world, every sort of weapon, every sort of expertise the national and social sciences can afford. At first glance it would appear that we have organized intelligently to deal with burdens as a world power; that Washington is staffed with the best products of our graduate schools, each in a specialized section fitting his doctoral working papers; and that we have crowned the structure with unifying institutions to formulate neatly and cleanly the choices open to the Commander-in-Chief.

Unfortunately this is not the case. For when and if ideas and programs work their way up the long ladders of bureaucratic hierarchy, what is at the top of the staff edifice? The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who must make the ultimate strategy and mission decisions upon which our entire military security, and even survival depends, is made up of the chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The National Security Council is a committee of chieftains of the executive departments and experts assigned to it by those departments,

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representatives of State, Army, Treasury, Central Intelligence, etc.

Each member of the JCS or the NSC is freighted with large vested
interests in the status quo; each is forced by his responsibilities within his
own department, and by his years of training and conditioning in that depart-
ment, to look at a situation first in terms of what it can do to his department
and only then what his department can do in an emergency.

In a world caught up in revolutionary change, successful policy
making requires major new ideas, quite discontinuous with past experience.
The change of weapons models from year to year cannot be conducted by
adaptation of existing equipment; one cannot deal with Nasser, or with
the disintegration of Indonesia, or with the current mood of Western Europe
by formulae relevant even to such recent experiences as the Korean War or
the Marshall Plan. Try sincerely as they may as individual Americans,
these men and the staff institutions they serve cannot supply the urgently
needed broad perspective nor can they now formulate the desperately needed
policies which would effectively unify and give direction to the nation's
day-by-day operations.

Staff Recommendations

As these examples demonstrate, it is apparent that no recommendations
for limited organizational changes will eliminate the main American problem
here illustrated: the nation's philosophic and bureaucratic style makes us
relatively weak at creative staff work, at a phase in our history where the

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need for rapid innovation is being thrust on us from every direction. Yet it is
no longer accurate -- as it would have been only a short while back -- to hold
that Americans were unlikely to contribute first rate original ideas to the
physical or social sciences. We have now the intellectual capital required
for the process of innovation; but our systems of administration are geared
for static processes and for slow change. And something of an administrative
revolution in our major governmental establishments is required to deal with
the problems we face.

An adequate consideration or even discussion of this revolution reaches
out far beyond the scope -- or indeed the competency of our Panel. We
therefore are only touching on the problem with restricted comments. Where
feasible institutional change could play a role. The NSC would, for example,
be vastly improved if it had an independent staff of first-rate men, freed of
ties to particular bureaucracies, instructed to think in terms of the totality
of our policy problem empowered to lay proposals on the table. The three
military services evidently need to be unified and the Pentagon provided
with a top-level staff of men assigned to think about the character of our
military problem as a whole. The Department of State needs to develop its
Planning Staff so it will not be caught up in convulsive responses to urgent
unanticipated crises. And so on.

Therefore our Panel would make two comments.

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First, the size, quality, and independence of the staff of the National Security Council should be upgraded; and the authority of the post now held by the Presidential Assistant for National Security Affairs be recognized and confirmed. Whatever the President's tastes and choices are in administration, the many-faceted character of the nation's current and foreseeable problems require that the President have available to him staff work done independently of the operational vested interests of particular departments; and that this work be directed and its results articulated by a strong independent figure in the President's councils.

Second, the President must be prepared to conduct an endless struggle to ensure that the problems and analyses brought to him have not been pre-compromised in such ways as to conceal the real issues and choices faced by the nation; and that his decisions are not sabotaged by the passive resistance at which all bureaucracies are expert. To a degree the President must make a choice between injecting himself directly and personally in major issues of policy-making and their execution (at some cost to his role as unifying symbol in the government as well as the country) or going along with whatever his operating subordinates can negotiate among themselves by way of agreement (at some cost to the pace of innovation, and unity of impact of national policy). Recognizing that this choice is a matter of degree, our Panel is convinced Presidents should lean more to the first choice of method in this time of chronic international crises when American policy must move sensitively if the nation's interests are to be protected.

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Personnel in the Executive Branch

It is inevitable that any examination of leadership in national policy
should come finally to this question: how can able men and women be recruited
for work in the Executive Branch and be persuaded to stay at work there. When,
as the Report has tried to set forth, the governmental machine must, against
every built-in bureaucratic vested interest and instinct, change rapidly the
cast of its policy, then, indeed, men of special gifts of force and initiative,
are required.

Within the limits of current procedures for recruitment and classification
it is possible to make some small gains in training, but this process cannot
be pushed much farther, unless the government makes it possible for higher
grade officials to develop administrative alter egos, and to devote substantial
amounts of time to in-service training and executive development -- so notable
a feature of the more progressive personnel policies of our business organiza-
tions. But without far better machinery in the civil service system for
recruitment, training, and utilization of its highest-grade officials, is it
really possible to coordinate any institutions such as the Federal government
by procedural devices alone? Or does the best coordination not depend on the
availability of men in top ranks with varied as well as long administrative
experience and broad training? Can interdepartmental committees reach
agreement on fundamental policies when there is no system of personnel
discipline and no opportunity of promotion across departmental lines? Is it
possible for any political executive to control a department when he cannot

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have a career executive at the apex of a hierarchy under him?

The implications of these questions seem to our Panel to be so compelling that _we recommend steps toward the elaboration and installation of a Senior Civil Service, an improved system for the government-wide use of top career administrative talent_, along the general lines of the recommendations of the second Hoover Commission for such a civil service.

Our Federal personnel system is gravely weak in its higher ranges, largely unable to produce executive discipline and a sense of devotion to the purposes of government as a whole rather than to individual departments or bureaus. Procedures for the identification and flexible use of the best administrative talent in the higher civil service are as yet rudimentary. We do not have today a career system for civil servants comparable to that of the military or of the foreign service; and we may be paying a considerable price in reduced attractiveness of the Federal service to the most competent administrators -- at a time when top administrative talent is in great demand. In our civil service generally, we relate status and pay to a job, not to a man, thus increasing the risks borne by the individual servant of the top grades in transferring under the current system from department to department, as the government's needs suggest.

But in addition to this measure, and without waiting for a Senior Civil Service to be established, _the Executive Branch should promptly begin to set up machinery to provide for easy transfers of personnel from one govern-

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ment department to another. This would do a great deal to widen the operating experience and broaden the insight of the ablest men in the government service. And by such a system of transfers, the Executive would be, de facto, creating the nucleus for the Senior Civil Service.

### The Special Problem of the Assistant Secretaries

It is possible, in the case of permanent civil servants, to prescribe certain changes in roles and prerogatives which might well induce able people to stay within the Civil Service and to widen their experience and increase their effectiveness if they do stay.

Policy-making has been hampered in recent years not only by the lack of first-class permanent civil servants but also by a chronic weakness at the Assistant Secretary level. In part this has been due to the rapid turnover of men brought to Washington who did not choose to stay long enough to apply what they had learned in an inevitably long apprenticeship. Also salaries at this level are so low that many men of appropriate rank will not accept the economic downgrading which inevitably has also been a prestige depreciation.

What can one say about the problem of recruiting and holding able men at the Assistant Secretary level? There is, of course, no simple answer to this question. But it is true that the quality of the men a President can draw and hold within his administration in political posts is one measure of his ability to dramatize his program and his purposes. There seems little doubt that first-class Americans are prepared to give of their time and their

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talents within government if they are convinced that the tasks are important and if they are convinced that they as individuals have an opportunity to leave a constructive mark on the course of great events.

The first requirement for good men at the Assistant Secretary level is, then, a challenging, clearly articulated program of national policy. But there is another dimension as well. Our conventional methods of administration often make it difficult to attract and to hold first-class men in relatively high positions. When a man is hired to undertake a relatively clear-cut task under the personal direction of the President or of a major Cabinet officer, the chances are that he will be drawn into his work, feel a sense of personal identity with its purposes and its success, and be tempted to stay with the program. When decision-making becomes embedded in endless inter-departmental committees, the responsibilities of the individual are diluted. The high administrator may find himself merely protecting the vested interests of a bureaucracy to which he has been attached as a political appendage, not sharing centrally in the making of a policy and a program. This is not the setting or the mission in which a good man is likely to remain long.

In short, the problem of improving the quality of personnel in government service at relatively high levels, is not merely a question of new incentives for high-level career men nor can it be solved by enjoining the President to try harder to get able men for Assistant Secretaries. As in every other aspect of national policy, the burden of responsibility does not lie wholly with the President. As at every other point in the democratic process, the

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American people too are intimately involved. They must infuse the whole government with a sense of clear purpose, of adventure, and of service before first-rate men are likely to undertake and to sustain the real sacrifices and frustrations that inevitably must go with work in the Executive Branch of the Federal government.

The President must organize his program and his administration so as to exert an effective pull on good men; but the private institutions of American society, which normally harbor these men, must shoulder their part of the responsibility and urge some of their executives into government service. If this is too much to ask of many private institutions, they must at least refrain from setting obstacles in the way of those who feel drawn to serve for substantial periods in the national government.

The good Assistant Secretary is likely to be recruited from business or law, from the university or the foundation. Every instinct of these institutions is to hold onto their best men; and, increasingly, the policy of these institutions is to keep their best men out of controversial politics. Even if the Civil Service should be strengthened in its higher reaches it is clear that we are committed as a nation to filling a high proportion of bureaucratic posts by appointment.

This is a workable method only if the ablest men in the society take their politics seriously and if they are willing to serve when their political party holds the responsibility and power. And this in turn depends to a very large degree on how wholehearted private institutions and groups and

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V. THE CONGRESS

Under our system of government, the Congress and the Executive
are in many important senses independent of one another; separately they
cannot function, yet their joint efforts must be such that each makes its
unique contribution to national policy and action. The Congress has many
powers through which it can control and hold accountable the Executive. It
may listen to the President's proposals for budgets, but without its action,
no money is forthcoming to support Executive programs. It makes the laws,
subject to Presidential veto and Executive initiative; and in so doing, it
has reserved the right to set conditions for the operation of the administra-
tive branch, and has written into law many provisions governing the organiza-
tion and operation of executive agencies.

By its powers of hearing and investigation, the Congress can hold
not only the top officials, but all ranks of the Executive accountable, both
through publicity and through the fact or prospect of legislative provision.

The President has a dual function as Chief Executive: it is his task
to administer the Executive Branch and to give political leadership to the
Congress and the nation. The President is elected by all the people, and
stands, with the Vice President, unique as a representative and guardian
of the national interest. The Congress is elected by States and by Con-
gressional districts, bearing representative responsibility to those consti-
tuencies from which they come. Both forms of representation are important.
Possessing superior resources of information and technical staff, the President

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is in the better position to take the initiative both on matters of legislation
as well as on governmental action, his is the power of proposal and of
overall integration. Congress considers the President's proposals, relates
them to the interests of regions, districts, and of important interest groups
in the community, and refines them or rejects them. Both the organization
and the procedures of Congress help to conserve the interests of minorities
and to protect the concurrent majority on which our constitutional consensus
rests.

The Executive Branch and the Congress

The central problem of Executive Branch relations with Congress
in foreign affairs and military policy is familiar enough: Congressmen
generally speaking are elected on the basis of local and regional issues;
and when such issues become directly enmeshed in foreign or military
affairs -- as with racial groups, tariffs, or local military establishments --
Congressmen are likely to reflect only partially the general American interests
involved.

There is nevertheless need to examine and improve the interrelations
of Executive and Congress within the existing broad framework, because of
their joint concern with the initiatives and legislative backing for policy.

It is a central theme of this report that leadership in modern American
democracy is a diffused process rather than the job of one man. Nevertheless

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a heavy and inescapable burden of personal leadership is allocated under
our Constitution to the President. And present and anticipatable trends for
the next 10 - 15 years indicate that certain additional power should be granted
to the President by the Congress.

Leadership meets its most dramatic challenge at the national level where it must first secure political party backing for nomination to office and then popular backing for election to office. Yet a President may be successful in both and yet not be able to lead in our system where Congress may be, and often is, of a different complexion politically than the President.

There have been many drastic suggestions for constitutional reforms which might solve this set of executive problems, ranging from proposals that the U. S. system should move closer to that of Canadian parliamentarianism over to advocacy of a constitutional amendment giving the President the right, at least once during his term, to call a general election to break a deadlock in Congress. More moderate than these proposals, and meriting much more serious consideration and continued exploration and debate by the American people is the idea that the members of the House should have a four year term of office in order that relations between the executive and the legislative might be rendered less vulnerable by mid term elections.

Another area of reform which deserves thorough and careful study is the proposal that very serious study should be given to the possibility of having the President's official family or some selected members of it be

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given the right to speak and perhaps vote in the Congress, on the theory that the President alone represents the nation as a whole and that our system tends, particularly in the Senate, to overweight particularistic interests as against national interests.

However, our Panel has three recommendations which it believes should be put into effect now to strengthen the President's hand.

First, the Constitutional Amendment forbidding a third term should be repealed.

Our Panel is unanimously convinced that the recently passed constitutional amendment forbidding a third term to Presidents was in itself a serious mistake, quite without regard to its application to either the President in office at the time the amendment was passed or to the current President. To limit any President from succeeding himself is to weaken his control over his own party in Congress, and may cost him even the ability to have any basic influence on the selection of his successor. It may be quite reasonable to expect that a President would not wish to run again and might be practically precluded from doing so. On the other hand, the possibility that he can do so or may do so greatly strengthens his hold on Congress, and particularly his hold on his own party through the selection of his successor in the Nominating Conventions.

Second, the President should have the right to veto specific items in bills brought to him from the Congress.

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The President's hand should be so strengthened, if possible by a
constitutional amendment and certainly by a statutory self-denying ordinance
of Congress which would afford him the item veto -- an Executive prerogative
enjoyed by many of the state governors. Without explaining all the reasons
for this, the main one suffices: This ability to veto items in bills, particularly
in those carrying appropriations, prevents the Executive from having to sign
a bill that carries matter not germane to the major purpose of the bill, which
he would veto if it stood alone but which he now must accept unless he is
willing to reject the entire bill.

Third, limitations on the President's negotiating and treaty-making powers, beyond those already in the Constitution, should be opposed.

Taken together these three positions would strengthen the President's
hand in pressing his program with the Congress, in dealing with the domestic
political process during a second term, and in fulfilling his inevitably personal
role as a leader of a world-wide coalition at a time of continuing crisis.

The President, the Congress, and the Budget

At first glance the preparation and presentation of the federal budget
might seem one of the smaller items in a discussion of American democratic
processes, but as our system operates, the Congress' consideration of the
budget is almost the only place in which the legislative branch can, or rather
could, take a look at the entire policy and operation of the federal government.

For the federal budget raises first the question of overall fiscal policy
and intentions: what is the planned expenditure of the U. S. government

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and how will its amounts, timing and direction affect the economy as a whole.
This aspect, as budgets are now presented can to some extent be determined
by the Congress by such individuals and organizations as choose to study
the lengthy, technical, and frequently obscure presentation of the Bureau of
the Budget to the Congress.

And there is a second question which should be -- but is not now --
properly raised or answered in the budget: what are the directions and
intentions, in the broadest terms, of the government for the next fiscal
years? and to what extent are those plans in balance and directed in proper
priority to the objectives intended by the Executive and the Legislative?
Needless to say, the budget process in itself is neutral on the basic issue of
how much the country can afford for all government services; nor can it do more
than provide a systematic procedure for deciding how to balance the actual
requirements of particular programs against the wider issues of the federal
budget's impact on the national income, employment and economic health.
The problem is how to use the machinery of the budget most effectively to
reveal the implications of overall fiscal decisions and to square them with the
needs of the various functions and activities of government.

The budget in its present form is far too detailed and time-consuming.
It stands as a temptation to Congress to try to use it as an instrument of
management and control within the Departments, and for the promotion of
efficiency and economy. Congress, in its efforts to achieve these ends now

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gives close scrutiny to plans for spending money and administering appropria-
tions, emphasizing justification in advance and in detail, rather than a post-
audit of performance against general legislative prescriptions. The current
process not only takes great energy and time, but leads to administrative
rigidity whether imposed by legislative rider or by the warnings of appropria-
tions committees.

The Military Budget

A fine example of the what not to do is to be found in the present form
of the Department of Defense budget, a virtually unpenetrable document. The
monies requested are departmentalized under the three services and under
technical categories of needs in each service. Faced with a technical
document involving the future expenditures of over thirty billion dollars a
year, for incredibly complex expenditures in weapons systems and military
operations all over the world, the Congress is expected to decide whether
national safety requires it, grants to the military all the money they want --
always more money than Congress wishes to appropriate -- or whether the
military budget should be cut.

Yet under the present system, nowhere is the Congress given the
opportunity to consider what kinds of military policies and security questions
are being decided by the expenditures it is asked to finance: nowhere is
there a presentation of this budget in terms which would show a Congressman
what percentage of the budget is to be spent to replace obsolescent equipment,

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or how much is spent for the strengthening of an offensive deterrent air force versus the proportion of the public monies wished for defensive arms or for forces capable of fighting the limited wars which are the most likely security threat to the U. S. in the next 10-15 years.

The military budget underlines another area of the weaknesses of leadership in military policies at the Congressional level.

This weakness has been obscured by the willingness of Congress to go along on matters of national security but this is not the democratic process at its best. In a world caught up in revolutionary military change, with the nation facing all manner of danger, it is unwise for American democracy to proceed with its legislators in a fog of ignorance, apathy, and irresponsibility about military matters.

## Towards a Better Presentation of the Federal Budget

The needed improvements in the federal budget fall into three categories all of which would provide far better opportunity for the Congress and the people to come to wiser consensus on how much money to spend and for what.

There are two broad categories of improvement of the budget, both would provide far better opportunity for Congress and the people to exercise their prerogatives and be better prepared to judge and approve proper and wise executive requests for money to carry out wise programs. One improvement involves procedures in making up the budget; the other concerns the form in which it is presented.

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The first area of reform is in the field of Executive Department co-
ordination: the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board system, the Council of
Economic Advisers -- and other relevant executive agencies concerned with
major components of fiscal policy -- should be much more closely coordinated
so that the budget as finally decided upon by the executive will reflect the
overall executive intentions in fiscal and tax policy as well as its spending
requests.

This improvement would of course require a less thinly manned Bureau
of the Budget for its slender resources have had to be rather sharply concen-
trated in only a few sectors of government administration. Much the same
could be said of the resources of the Bureau available to the huge task of co-
ordinating high-level government staff work as it is reflected in the budget
process.

The second improvement would be to record the form in which the budget
is now presented so that it will as far as is possible show proposed expenditures
in terms of the broad national programs and policies for which the executive
is requesting funds.

Some start has been made in the direction of program budgeting, owing
to the initiatives of the first Hoover Commission. But we are still well short
of the ideal, in which the budget should be presented in meaningful program
terms -- so that the Congress and the public can have a clear conception of
the nature and the cost of the great programs of government -- in particular
of the military strength to be supported and other services to be rendered by
the government.

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A broader presentation by the Executive might discourage attempts to legislate in advance and in detail, and might help readjust the balance between substantive and appropriations committees within Congress, which will be discussed later in this chapter.

## The Organization of the Congress

The organization itself of the Congress adds other dimensions to the challenge of leadership at the national level, for no matter how the budget is presented, the way the Congress is organized forces it to deal with legislative proposals in piecemeal fashion. Congress divides up its work among committees that rule very largely over the consideration of its business subject to sporadic discipline from the Rules Committee or to the variable influence of the policy committees of the two parties. The strategy of Executive presentation and persuasion is perforce directed to the particular composition and preferences of the members of the several committees, as it is only the most challenging or controversial problem that can provoke debate on the floor leading to an overturn of committee action. Such attempts to override committee action usually involve a powerful appeal to the electorate as a whole buttressed by the most skillful analysis of the particular pressures that will bring a majority of Congressmen into line, and appeals to the interests so revealed.

Focusing again on the critical area of the American democracy and military or foreign policy, Congressional performance in this area since 1940

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has been approximately as high a level as that of the Executive branch. And, while Congressmen bear the special professional responsibility of seeking re-election in local and regional constituencies, they are as a group most unlikely to behave irresponsibly when the nature of responsibility is made clear to them by a wise and well-presented Executive Branch policy.

Also it is encouraging to note that in foreign affairs the knowledgeability of the Congress has markedly increased in postwar years. The Senate, the House of Representatives, contain men who are remarkably well informed and who are relied upon to lead their parties and the Congress as a whole in major matters of foreign policy. On some issues, as recently with foreign aid, the Congress has demonstrated that it is capable of acts of initiation previously associated with the legislative branch only in domestic policy. In military affairs, however, the problem of security has combined with the confusing military budget and the continuing split of the three services to make the decisions of the Congress less sure. And in general, the problem of Congressional performance remains a massive challenge to leadership and the democratic process.

Partly because of and partly in addition to its committee system other aspects of Congressional disorganization detract from the performance of the American democracy.

There are rarely united party positions within the Congress on military and foreign policy; therefore there is rarely a single party leader with whom

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the Executive Branch can negotiate and so it must construct catch-as-catch-can coalitions, drawn from both parties, to carry through major legislation.

The separation of the policy-making process from the appropriation
process in Congress adds extra strains and hazards to Executive Branch
advocacy of policies.

The seniority rule in the Congressional selection of committee chairmen
adds another element of hazard and weakness to the leadership process.

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Congressional Reforms

There are, however, certain areas far short of complete reorganization where the Congress could reform itself, and do much to improve legislative-executive efficiency in policy formation.

The existence of both authorizing committees and the appropriations committees is a case in point. The present distribution of power over the substance of legislation and the extent and timing of governmental programs force the Executive to present its programs twice. The Executive must not only convince the authorizing committees of the propriety and appropriate scale of a given program, but it must convince the appropriations committees as well, and to a large degree start again from the beginning to do so.

The range of power exercised by the appropriations committees usually goes well beyond the questions of availability of money or capacity of the Executive to spending within given time periods; they second-guess the authorizing committees and in most cases appropriate less money than was authorized. This puts tremendous pressure on executive agencies, in conceiving and proposing programs, to set their sights for legitimate estimates since their program must successively run the gauntlets of the authorizing and then the appropriations committees of both houses. Because the appropriations committees concern themselves with fine detail, both Congress and the country can easily lose sight of the larger issues of program and fiscal policy.

Beyond pinpointing the problem our panel can make no special suggestions here. For these and other Congressional procedures for considering

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important legislative proposals are not easily altered. Some are rooted in the Constitution. Others like the rules of seniority on committees, and the requirement that representatives shall reside in the districts from which they are elected, are rooted in political practices or in rules of Congress sanctioned by long practice. -

Despite demands by powerful interest groups (notably those interested in labor legislation and in civil rights) that the seniority rule and the Senate rule governing cloture should be altered, Congress has shown little disposition to find a substitute for seniority and has not proved receptive to proposals to bind committee chairmen to uphold party policy as enunciated in the party platform. The Senate seems wedded to a particular interpretation of the cloture rule that gives representatives of particular regions of the country an effective veto on legislation.

Executive leadership could live better with the seniority system for choosing committee chairmen if the chairmen of key committees were pledged to uphold the same lines of political policy followed by the executive. Invo-cation of loyalty to the party platform is often urged as a touchstone; but this has great shortcomings in the light of two facts: first, the necessarily general language of platforms; and second, the forms of political responsi-bility in our Federal system that hold a Senator or Congressman responsible in the first instance to his district, and only secondarily to whatever concept he may hold of the national interest -- or the value he may place upon support

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of and by the President. Here as in the field of international alliances,
guarantees of performance rest more on perceptions of interest than upon pacts.

But there is no reason why the Executive should always have to shoulde
the extra burden of winning support for its proposals in committees where the
accidents of the seniority rule and of elections in the several States bring to
power chairmen who are unalterably opposed to programs that are desired by
the majority of the party in charge of a branch of the legislature, or who are
simply not adequate to their jobs.

Therefore our panel recommends that _the seniority rule should be abol-
ished_, despite its occasional usefulness in upholding particular elements of
the concurrent constitutional consensus. _It should be replaced by a system_
_of selection of committee chairmen by the party caucuses in each House of_
_Congress_, in which weight is given to the elements of competence and willing-
ness to put through the political programs espoused by those caucuses.
Selection of committee chairmen thus would clearly remain a matter for deter-
mination by the parties in the Congress.

Party Discipline and Consensus

At bottom, however, the interrelations of Executive and Congress must
rest on the distribution of political power in our decentralized form of govern-
ment. Not through the party system as we have it can the executive leadership
exercise stringent discipline, for the choice of Congressmen is as much a
local matter as a matter of national issues. The national political leadership,

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if powerful, may proffer or withhold valued help; but an executive intervention
to defeat a locally solid candidate is almost always bound to fail. Again, the
exercise of judicious and persuasive leadership, based on insight into the
position of the local representative and its relation to national interest, is the
nub of the issue.

Party discipline in our country is far more a phenomenon of state and
local politics than it is of national politics. Our parties are characteristically
coalitions, living by compromise, exhibiting the centripetal tendencies of
loose groups seeking for combinations that will be successful at the polls.
As such they must show the same hospitality for diversity that characterizes
our whole political system; they must refrain from pushing unanimity of prin-
ciple very hard, and must concentrate on finding the agreements on the con-
sequences of particular proposals and programs that will command enough
assent to get approval and action.

The development of a consensus is, however, an essential condition
and a flow of day-to-day actions capable of forestalling crises is an essen-
tial condition for any soundly functioning political system, particularly is
this true for the military and foreign policy required to maintain our present
national security.

This is perhaps first the responsibility of national leadership but ulti-
mately such a consensus can be achieved only if and so long as each factor
in the chain of consensus does its particular job and does it well.