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# BUREAUCRACY AND POLICY MAKING:
The Effect of Insiders and Outsiders on the Policy Process

## Henry A. Kissinger

The most frequent question that one is asked when abroad, or by people who are concerned with international affairs and have not seen policy made, is "What is American policy?" Foreign policy is additionally complicated in the contemporary period by the fact that the actual decision-making process leads to a fragmentation of the decisions. Also, research and intelligence organizations, either foreign or national, attempt to give a rationality and consistency to foreign policy which it simply does not have. I have found it next to impossible to convince Frenchmen that there is no such thing as an American foreign policy, and that a series of moves that have produced a certain result may not have been planned to produce that result.

Foreigners looking at American policy have a tendency to assume that anything that happened was intended, and that there is a deep, complicated purpose behind our actions. I wish this were true, but I don't believe that it is. In fact, I think that in any large bureaucracy it probably cannot be true and this is probably the case with the Soviet Union also. We probably ascribe more consistency to Soviet foreign policy than really exists. The only foreign country which I believe has understood American policy making at all well is Great Britain. Most foreign countries that deal with us wait until we have done something, and then try to prove to us that what we have done is either illegal or undesirable.

Once the American decision-making process has disgorged an answer, it becomes technically very difficult to change the policy because even those who have serious doubts about it become reluctant to hazard those doubts in an international forum. There is no telling what would come out of a re-evaluation of existing measures. If one wishes to influence American foreign policy, the time to do so is in the formative period, and the level is the middle level of the bureaucracy--that of the assistant secretary and his immediate advisers. That is the highest level in which

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people can still think. Above that, the day to day operation of the machine absorbs most of the energy, and the decisions that are made depend very much on internal pressures of the bureaucracy. Great Britain seems to me to have correctly identified this, and attempts to influence us through a whole set of personal relationships. This does not prevent such things as the Skybolt Affair and others, so it is not an infallible process, but the British system works better than that of any other foreign country.

Why is it so difficult to change policy? Part of the reason is mechanical, and part of it seems to me to be psychological. The mechanical reason is that as the bureaucracy becomes large and complex, more time is devoted to running its internal management than in divining the purpose which it is supposed to serve. The two things tend to merge in the minds of the top decision makers.

When I first started advising at high levels of the government in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, I had the illusion that all I had to do was walk into the President's office, convince him I was right, and he would then naturally do what I had recommended. There were a number of things wrong with this view. Most of the people who advise the President are plausible, so he constantly sees individuals who sound very convincing. His time is so budgeted and the pressures on him are so great, that it is almost impossible for him to know whether he should listen to one convincing individual or the other.

Also, even if by chance I persuaded him that his whole bureaucracy was wrong and I was right, he would then have the next problem of going about implementing what had been suggested. And that is not a negligible issue. There is only so much that even the President can do against the wishes of the bureaucracy, not because the bureaucracy would deliberately sabotage him but because every difficult issue is a closed one. The easy decisions are made at subordinate levels. A closed issue is characterized by the fact that the pros and cons seem fairly evenly divided and/or because the execution really depends on certain nuances of application. Unless you can get the willing support of your subordinates, simply giving an order does not get very far.

I have reason to believe, for example, that after the Nassau meeting President Kennedy intended to extend to France the same sort of consideration that had been given to Britain at Nassau. Indeed, he was prepared to put France into the same position, with some nuclear assistance as well, since that formal offer would not have meant anything unless France had some help on its nuclear warheads. It is also clear that the State Department and certain groups in the Defense Department were opposed to this. In order not to force this issue, President Kennedy kept his

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intention relatively vague. Why fight the State Department before you even know what de Gaulle will accept? There existed a wide margin within which the State Department people could operate in interpreting their directives, not because they were deliberately trying to undermine the President's intentions, but because they sincerely did not understand his intention. Certainly, one of the contributing factors to the failure of our post-Nassau diplomacy was the fact that while presidential emissaries were saying one thing to the French, State Department embassies were saying something else to other European countries. Leaving aside the question of whether Kennedy's intention was correct, one can nevertheless illustrate the difficulty that even a president can encounter when moving in a certain direction without the willing and perhaps even enthusiastic support of most of his bureaucracy.

When the bureaucracy is large and fragmented as it is, decisions do not get made until they appear as an administrative issue. One cannot convince a high level official that he has a problem until it appears unambiguously in the form of an administrative conflict. There is no such thing, in my view, as a Vietnam policy; there is a series of programs of individual agencies concerned with Vietnam. These programs are reconciled or not, as the case may be, if there is a conflict between the operating agencies. In the areas where there is no conflict between agencies, it would be very unusual to get a high level consideration of a problem. When conflict exists, the environment becomes receptive. For example, when General Westmoreland asked for 200,000 troops, that forced a high level review. But the day to day operations of a war or of an alliance diplomacy will not generally engage the President and the Secretary of State.

In the late 1950s it was axiomatic among my colleagues that the United States was lacking a sense of national purpose, though in the early 1960s this was remedied. The top officials are too busy to deal with anything except the several thousand cables that arrive in Washington every day. Typically, they are too busy to plan ahead. Planning involves conjectures about the future and hypothetical cases. They are so busy with actual cases that they are reluctant to take on theoretical ones. As an illustration: in 1963 or 1964 the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department produced a long document about American national purposes which somebody leaked to the Senate Foreign Committee. That Committee subsequently called Secretary of State Rusk to testify about this document. That was the first time that Mr. Rusk had ever read it, and his feelings are easy to imagine. This is the typical fate of policy planning in the State Department. In my experience I do not recall a single instance in which, when a decision had to be made at a high level, a policy planning

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paper was discussed or a member of the policy planning staff was asked to join. I report this as an empirical fact. I don't believe it has happened in the Vietnamese war at all.

I think most policy planning staffs in our government are created as sops to administrative theory and spend their time projecting the familiar into the future. They are not used for real innovation or even for developing criteria by which one can judge progress properly. This creates considerable rigidities. The executives become extremely conscious of the morale of their staffs.

Modern policy makers face a problem which is quite unique. I recently wrote an article about the foreign policy of Bismarck and discovered in the process that the German Foreign Office in the 1870s had exactly four permanent officials, roughly the scale at which all foreign offices operated at the turn of the century. It would never have occurred to any cabinet minister as late as the outbreak of World War II that he knew less about his problems than his subordinates. Yet, in the contemporary world, policy makers have to make decisions on a range of issues in which they may not give many hours to the same problems that their experts have spent years studying. This creates a congenital insecurity and a quest for administrative consensus behind which executives take refuge. It also leads to a situation in which rather than the executives using the bureaucracy, the opposite may be true: the bureaucracy often tries to use the executives. I think the history of the MLF is a good example.

Our governmental process works reasonably well in relation to specific technical issues and also when there is an adversary procedure. If one department is strongly for something and another department opposed, then the President or cabinet officer has a chance of elaborating an overall purpose. The system goes awry if you have a small, dedicated, unopposed group. I would argue that the MLF was put over by five or six highly motivated, highly intelligent individuals, in a government where a considerable number of people were indifferent and nobody was really opposed. The process by which it was done involved, at least in its early phases, a fairly deliberate manipulation by the bureaucracy of the senior executives.

For example, sentences were put into a Presidential speech which in themselves were perfectly sensible, but the full import of which was perhaps not understood. These were then used to start study groups which were subsequently used to present a new claim for a little more progress, and so on until the point where the prestige of the United States had become heavily committed to something the implications of which, in my judgment, had never been submitted to the adversary procedure.

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No systematic case was made for the opposition to the MLF during the most formative period of the relevant U.S. policy.

Because of this gap between expertise and decision making, a great deal of communication occurs by means of a briefing. Now, briefings reward theatrical qualities. They put a premium on the ability to package information and to present a fore-ordained result. Every briefer worth his salt says, "Interrupt me at any point with a question." Usually the victim of the briefing is very proud if he can formulate a question. The briefer has heard the question a hundred times before, and it is like throwing a fast ball across the middle of the plate to Mickey Mantle. He gives a glib response which is overwhelming. All this creates a state of mind where the policy maker may have the uneasy feeling of knowing he is being taken, even though he doesn't quite know how. This magnifies the sense of insecurity.

Because management of the bureaucracy takes so much energy and precisely because changing course is so difficult, many of the most important decisions are taken by extra-bureaucratic means. Some of the key decisions are kept to a very small circle while the bureaucracy happily continues working away in ignorance of the fact that decisions are being made, or of the fact that a decision is being made in a particular area. One reason for keeping the decisions to small groups is that when bureaucracies are so unwieldy and when their internal morale becomes a serious problem, an unpopular decision may be fought by brutal means, such as leaks to the press or to congressional committees. Thus, the only way secrecy can be kept is to exclude from the making of the decision all those who are theoretically charged with carrying it out. There is, thus, small wonder for the many allegations of deliberate sabotage of certain American efforts, or of great cynicism of American efforts because of inconsistent actions. In the majority of cases this was due to the ignorance of certain parts of the bureaucracy, rather than to malevolent intent. Another result is that the relevant part of the bureaucracy, because it is being excluded from the making of a particular decision, continues with great intensity sending out cables, thereby distorting the effort with the best intentions in the world. You cannot stop them from doing this because you do not tell them what is going on.

Now, finally, this explains why sometimes outsiders can play an influential role. In the majority of cases, the outsider will say nothing that the bureaucracy has not already developed on the inside. The most frequent question that one is asked, if one is a consultant in Washington, is: "Have you had any new ideas lately?" This notion that foreign policy consists in constantly sparking new ideas, as if constant originality is the essence of foreign policy, is in itself open to question. I do not

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believe that de Gaulle is a considerable statesman because he comes up with a new thought every Thursday. Most ideas that masquerade as new ideas in Washington have been around for quite a long time. The utility of the outsider is that he can inject at a higher level certain ideas that have been around. He is not part of the bureaucratic battle. He is not a problem person whom the decision-maker has to placate. He can be listened to without the implications that are almost inseparable from listening to the bureaucracy. One corollary conclusion I would draw is that the outside adviser should never advise unless his opinion is asked, and he should get out as soon as it is delivered. When he himself becomes an advocate of his policies, that is, as soon as he becomes a bureaucratic problem, he loses his effectiveness, and he is gradually degraded to the level of other bureaucrats.

The tendencies which seem to me to be inherent in the nature of modern bureaucracy tend to be compounded in the United States by the particular cast of mind of our top policy makers, many of whom come from the legal profession. Lawyers are notoriously reluctant to take on hypothetical cases. All planning involves hypothetical cases and therefore there is a tendency among the legal professionals to deal with problems on their merits.

Secondly, the lawyers and some of our business executives are comfortable only with adversary proceedings; without them, they don't know how to guide policy. In the areas where I have seen American negotiations being carried out, I do not recall a detailed negotiating position ever existing before a date for the conference was set. And this reluctance to spell out what we are after is due to the fact that professional negotiators want to see what the other side has to offer before they commit themselves. Therefore, in periods of preliminary diplomacy, our position is very rigid and tough, but this changes rapidly when a negotiator has been appointed because he acts as spokesman for the other side. It is not his problem to worry about the overall picture. He worries about the success of the negotiations, and you make the negotiations succeed by taking very seriously into account what the other side has to say. Therefore, one notices a tendency in American foreign policy to spasms of rigidity and spasms of tactical flexibility.

Another group that deserves mention is the business executives whom Secretary McNamara excluded to some extent. They have the conviction that their special skill consists in making decisions between administratively produced proposals on the basis of some general rule of thumb or a strong will. Within the government they lack the familiar framework of the experience they have accumulated over a long period with their businesses. They become as often prisoners of the bureaucracy as its leaders.

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In all of these observations I must consider Secretary McNamara as an exception--a man of unusual intelligence, toughness of mind, and long range conceptions. In his case, however, a number of very serious problems existed. One was a very curious bent for theoretical combat which would allow him to leave no stupid argument go unchallenged, even if no practical conclusion followed from it. Secondly, he had a tendency to want to be right at all times and to be so far superior to most people with whom he was arguing that he would win even without fully convincing them. I feel that Secretary McNamara gained control over procurement and over procurement-type decisions in the Pentagon at the eventual cost of losing control over major policy decisions. He lost control over these because he not only unified the Defense Department (which is one of his great achievements) but he also managed to unify the military services in a common dislike of the sort of control he was exercising, so that for the first time the civilians were confronted with unified JCS views on most policy issues. As long as the JCS remained divided, a certain element of civilian choice existed, but when they became united and started seeing every issue theologically as defending their special prerogative, McNamara's profundity in analysis had to give way to a very practical problem: how many times a month could he go to the mat with the JCS? He had to decide very deliberately which issues he could confront them with. If one wants to explain why it is that McNamara's theories about the war in Vietnam were not always matched by implementation, especially toward the end, the primary reason was that he felt that confronted with issues of ABM, troop deployment, force levels, renewal of the strategic force, and Vietnam strategy, he could only handle so many of these cases simultaneously. He picked those which he thought were crucial at the moment. Therefore, McNamara does not illustrate the general observations with which I started, but he nevertheless shows that it is not enough to be in charge of a Department. The management of the bureaucracy does tend to play a very large role.

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COMMENT: I think your indictment of Mr. McNamara is correct, but too narrow. The problem with Mr. McNamara is that he lacks an appreciation of the unifying influence of theory (be it political, mathematical, or economic) and he deals too much in the concrete. This is his flaw, but let us give him his due. What he did in one year was change the war plan of the United States, communicate this unequivocally to our allies, who found it a magnificent reinforcement of our commitment abroad, and assert command over the most stubborn parts of the military bureaucracy.

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MR. KISSINGER: Let me comment briefly. I did not mean to say that McNamara addressed himself only to procurement. McNamara, in the nature of the decisions that had to be taken during the first four years of his being in office, addressed himself primarily to general doctrinal issues, and to putting some sense and order into the problem of force levels of the various services. He did this with extraordinary ability. In the process, whether avoidably or unavoidably, and largely unavoidably, he made so many enemies that in the actual conduct of policy he then had to pick his objectives. I disagree with you when you say that the doctrine he developed was considered by our allies as a magnificent reinforcement of the American commitment. I consider it a taking on of a theoretical argument that had no great consequence and produced considerable difficulty. However, that is a question of judgment that any defense secretary has a right to make and has nothing to do with the bureaucratic process. I feel that political sensitivity was not included among McNamara's great qualities and therefore he would not always be conscious of the political impact abroad of theoretical arguments he was making. I often felt he was doing things with which I agreed but in such a way as to be counterproductive. However, that was a question of personality rather than of structure.

QUESTION: Could you comment on the ways in which a new president may or may not be able to shake the inertia of the system in regard to the problem of Vietnam?

MR. KISSINGER: I have the impression that much of Vietnam is going to be shaken up before a new President comes in. As a general rule, I believe a new President, in the areas where he wants to effect change, must do so within the first four months. He need not complete it within this time, but he must give enough of a shake to the bureaucracy to indicate that he wants a new direction and he must be brutal enough to demonstrate that he means it.

It was easy under the Eisenhower administration to ridicule the formalism of the decision-making process. In effect, it was somewhat ridiculous--there were many documents which were really diplomatic treaties between the various departments, and which enabled each department to do what it had wanted to do in the first place. But it had the great advantage of a regular procedure for getting decisions made. Under Kennedy this procedure was dismantled, and he substituted for it a sort of nervous energy and great intellectual activity, which worked well because he was an enormously intelligent man, surrounded by a very lively group of people, so that all sorts of ideas were floating into the very receptive White House.

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The drawback under the Kennedy Administration was that there really was no regular procedure to getting things done, except on crisis issues, because you never could be sure who was being heard in addition to the constituted people, who did not always present their cases in the presence of the others who disagreed with them. It was a somewhat amorphous process. Under Johnson you had the disorganization of Kennedy without the intellectual excitement, and with somewhat of a fear of the President superimposed on it. The organizational problem seems to be to combine the procedural regularity of Eisenhower with the intellectual excitement of Kennedy. Whether that is possible, I do not know.

Eisenhower tended to operate almost exclusively with the National Security Council machinery, and he had divided the responsibility so that the current NSC business would be conducted by the staff secretary, while the planning side was conducted by the chief of the NSC staff. The operations coordinating board was the undersecretary's and was supposed to implement the planning decisions of the National Security Council. The drawback of the NSC as it was run under President Eisenhower was that it was terribly formalistic. One way to tell they really weren't doing anything was to take their papers, write down the opposite of what they had said, and see that this involved no policy choice. One is not saying anything by advocating that it is in the American interest to have a pro-American government in country X. No one would argue that is in our interest to have an anti-American government there. It turned into a series of abstract platitudes which were not very effective.

Kennedy used the NSC primarily as a sounding board; it rarely made important decisions. He had something called the Committee of Principals which met when concrete decisions had to be made--such as the Berlin crisis. There was no regular staff work for these meetings, it was all done on an *ad hoc* basis, on a very substantial intellectual level.

Johnson is compulsively secretive and will not say what he thinks, so it is very hard to discover people who think they know what he wants. There is less of a premium on coming up with new ideas under him. I think something like the Committee of Principals, or the National Security Council with a staff of McGeorge Bundy qualities is needed. There is a staff which keeps groping and is not primarily a diplomatic instrument.

Probably what is needed is something similar to what McNamara did in the Defense Department, that is, to try to establish some criteria by which to judge success and failure. McNamara got control of the Defense Department by flooding the various agencies with questions which they had to answer and which gave him good information. It took several

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years to bring home to them that the usual bureaucratic double-talk wouldn't go. Something like that is needed in the national security area, where it is much more difficult to establish, because the criteria are more elusive. There isn't any clear notion of what the American national interest is, and this presents a great problem. Most of the traditional concepts of balance of power just don't apply to the contemporary theory of national interest. To develop criteria in this sort of intellectual vacuum is very difficult.

All the thinking of balance of power has been related to territorial control. You could judge whether there was an equilibrium by what country changed allegiance. We live in a curious period in which territorial control may not be that important. We have good categories for resisting what we call aggression. Leaving the issue of whether we are correct in our assessment that the Vietnamese war was Chinese instigated-- which I don't happen to believe--one would still be able to argue that no conceivable territorial gain of Communist China in Vietnam, or for that matter in Southeast Asia, could compare in terms of augmentation of its strength with the acquisition of nuclear weapons so far as concerned its impact on the international situation. We have some criteria for judging one, and none for the other.

It is hard to argue that any area is essential for American survival from the purely physical point of view, but there is such a thing as a psychological, moral balance. What would it do to the U.S. to be completely isolated, irrelevant to the rest of the world, even if we had enough of a nuclear arsenal to prevent a physical attack? This is an area in which I have not seen any very systematic thinking, although it is a chief problem in international equilibrium to which we have to address ourselves.

**QUESTION:** This is really on a broader scale. Mr. Kissinger, must we worry about neutralization until the time and place has been set? Don't we have within the bureaucracy some kind of planning for negotiations?

**MR. KISSINGER:** There are two parts to plans: first, to get them; second, to have to take them seriously. We have more plans than we have plans that are taken seriously. Take the problem of negotiations on an issue that is highly controversial and may even have political implications. No doubt some planning paper gets prepared, maybe even an interagency one. Yet the people involved have in the back of their minds the question: why should they fight with that issue now? It will be just as bloody later on, but at least they will be paying the price then for a possible result. Why fight it as a purely theoretical issue?

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And therefore my experience with any sort of negotiating plan shows that usually we'll get a multiplication of tough positions. Nobody wants to take on the unpleasant role of advocating major changes; nobody wants to be called before a Congressional committee. Therefore, that sort of plan, if you're talking about a negotiating plan, is very abstract and theoretical.

Secondly, in my experience, which is limited, it rarely receives the serious attention of the principals. Either the principals won't look at it at all or they will look at it in a way that requires no practical consequence. They won't do it in a way that requires implementation to follow, and this is especially true if there is no one who has a primary responsibility for it--if it is simply said that it would be a good thing to have a negotiating position but there is no one whose own bureaucratic success depends on having one.

**QUESTION:** Do you feel that negotiation is good in and of itself?

**MR. KISSINGER:** Do I think so? Don't apply what I said to Vietnam, although some aspects of it would apply. The tendency is to say that something is either a military problem or a diplomatic problem--and if it's a diplomatic problem, then it's the State Department's job. The State Department, probably for reasons of the background of its personnel that one could go into, tends to approach it on a largely tactical level. They'll develop a position, they'll want to see what the other position is, then they'll see what is negotiable. The difference between what is negotiable and what is desirable may be very wide. And if you don't know what is desirable and operate only on the basis of what is negotiable, you really encourage the other side to take a very extreme position. If the other side knows that you're going to compromise considerably, they are encouraged to take an extreme rather than a conciliatory position. So the problem with the State Department approach to most negotiations is that it is entirely tactical.

**QUESTION:** Could you comment, please, on the seizing of the Pueblo by North Korea?

**MR. KISSINGER:** It was quite an intelligence coup for the other side to get the equipment and all of these people. I think it also shows the extent to which we have become overextended by the Vietnamese war. It would have been inconceivable five years ago that North Korea could capture an American ship, tow it into Wonsan, and that absolutely nothing would happen. In our public discussion we say we must get it through diplomacy--well, diplomacy unrelated to other things can't achieve a great deal, and we can't do many other things because of Vietnam. Another thing the Pueblo incident illustrates or highlights to me is the following: I always

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thought it was a mistake to get South Korea involved in Vietnam for
many reasons, one of which was the fact that at any level the outcome
of the Vietnamese war was not likely to be very agreeable to Seoul,
even before the Tet offensive. Besides, it created additional incentives
to what is already a very tough regime in North Korea to get itself in-
volved. But I have no brilliant solution on how to get these people back.

QUESTION: I have a double-barrelled question. Would we do better without a monumental State Department? It seems we do better if we have a small number of chairmen and officials than a huge array, or are they necessary? The State Department is habitually accused of being tedious and of not producing anything. Is that a plausible accusa-
tion?

MR. KISSINGER: I must say I hold the view that we are so overstaffed
that it makes thinking almost impossible. When you have in embassies
abroad individuals assigned to particular small groups, each of them
filing endless reports, the result is that no senior official can possibly
read everything that comes in--no new official in turn will say that he
has nothing to report, so the machine keeps churning on. I've often
been struck by the fact that when a U. S. embassy would use me to get
people in that weren't easily accessible, there would be about twelve
Americans hanging over these people taking down practically every
word, so that they could include it in their reports the next day rather
than to let it develop in a more normal way. I think the handling of all
of this material does make it more difficult to reflect. Which part you
cut out is a big problem, because the world has become more compli-
cated and you have to know more things. On the whole, if we could get
rid of the bottom half of the Foreign Service we might be better off.

Now about the State Department. There is a definite problem in the
State Department, and it consists of many factors. One is that State
Department training is in the direction of reporting and negotiation, not
of thinking in terms of national policy. They are trained to give a very
good account of what somebody said to them. They can give a much
less good account of what this means. Also, if an officer works on the
Iran desk, he can tell you every detail about Iran. Then he gets trans-
ferred to another job and you can never get him to talk about Iran again,
but he will know everything about Austria or whatever.

Another quality that is rewarded is a certain negotiation skill. But
what is not encouraged in the State Department hierarchy, though it is
in a military hierarchy, is an assumption of responsibility and the
tendency to think of problems from the vantage point of a higher level.
I think the first eight to ten years of a State Department man's career

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tend to be such as to drive the more imaginative and more purpose-oriented people out of it. When I look at people that I see engaged in it at lower levels, I think this is probably true that they are the least adventurous.

**QUESTION:** Can you make some comment on the role of intellectuals in the bureaucracy?

**MR. KISSINGER:** I don't think you relate intellectuals to the bureaucracy as one undifferentiated group. For example, in the preparation of the strategic posture document it was the practice--at least on some occasions--to call in outside intellectuals to help in the preparation. And there they were useful on their merits, just as if they had been in the bureaucracy. They were not being called in just because they could referee the disputes but because of their expertise in a particular field. Other intellectuals are called in not because anyone cares about their opinion but because they are judged to be useful in defending the policy elsewhere. This has the risk that if the policy changes, you have made yourself a critic. Other intellectuals are called in in order to give some moral reinforcement to the decision maker who really has heard all arguments already, but would like to hear an outsider say the same thing. Thus there are many different roles that outsiders play. Sometimes outsiders are called in because it is the only way of keeping knowledge of certain things from getting too widely diffused in the bureaucracy.

**QUESTION:** There is in your presentation a kind of pessimistic historical inevitability in the American policy process. One almost has the impression that policy making by lottery might be almost as good, if not better. What then do you feel is rational and correct about the policy process as you have known it, and do you think there are improvements to be made?

**MR. KISSINGER:** I don't think policy by lottery would be better, but I think that if one wants to understand what the government is likely to do, one has to understand the bureaucracies of the problems. The ways in which intellectuals from the outside often go wrong are several: one is that they judge a policy by its plausibility to them without taking into account that the policy maker is responsible not only for the best thing that can happen but also for the worst thing, and that many ideas cannot be implemented not because they are bad but because the consequences of their failure would be too great. Another is that for the policy maker the most difficult problem is the problem of conjecture. That is, when the scope for action is great, the knowledge on which to base this action is relatively small. When the knowledge is great, the scope for action has often already disappeared. So you have to act on the basis of an

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assessment which you cannot prove true when you make it. It involves a moral and psychological act as much as an intellectual act.

And finally, there is the inherent dynamism of the political and bureaucratic process itself. In that sense, there is a certain necessity about this. If you do not know how this process operates, it is very difficult to predict on the basis of abstract rationality how it is going to come out. The reason why this particular problem is magnified is, it seems to me, that only in the rarest cases is there a relationship between high position and great substantive knowledge. Most of our elective officials had to spend so much of their energy getting elected that they can give relatively little attention to the substance of what they are going to do when they get elected. And therefore you get the curious phenomenon of people deciding to run for high office first and then scrambling around for some intellectuals to tell them what their positions ought to be. In many cases it is not that the intellectuals are used merely as speech writers for positions that the policy-makers already have; it is literally the case that you are starting with a *tabula rasa*, and that the position the political leader takes is much influenced by the type of intellectual that sometimes quite accidentally winds up in his entourage.

The top policy makers usually do not know that they have a problem until they have an administrative issue. They often show enormous reluctance to guide the project, because they are not really sure in what direction they want to guide it. Now de Gaulle has a conception of policy, and I would therefore not say that he is the prisoner of his administrative apparatus. The opposite may be the problem there: that this policy verges on the capricious. But still, the typical political leader of the contemporary managerial society is a man with a strong will, a high capacity to get himself elected, but no very great conception of what he is going to do when he gets into office. This is true of many of the cabinet officials as well, and in this sense, although I don't accept your notion of inevitability, I am pessimistic about the ability of modern bureaucratic society to manage a world which is quite discontinuous with its previous experience, and especially to do so with generosity and vision. I am not saying it's technically impossible, but the challenges are so much greater.

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