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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 population and our rising scientific and technological
capability. This challenge goes to our capacity to build and operate human
institutions. It calls for us to make up a lag in our philosophy and practice of
government, management and administration. This 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 human soul.

Within this category 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 concen-
trations 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 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.

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In short, our national life is in the process of radical transformation.
We have come now in mid-century to face a flow of problems requiring rapid
innovation in the face of changing circumstances. In our relations with the
world and in our relations with one another at home, we face issues which
require that the democratic process function with heightened effectiveness
at every level of our society. As nearly as it is given to us to peer ahead,
this requirement will remain with us over the foreseeable future.

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The Constructive Use of Crisis

In the face of these manifold challenges there is now great need for
us to 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. 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.

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. Our sustained involvement in world affairs since 1945 has
strained and tested American democracy in many directions: from a tax rate
that passes resources to the state at an unprecedented peacetime level to
a reconsideration of the meaning of civil liberties under conditions of protracted
communist assault on our society. Meanwhile, at home our national life has
maintained its dynamic character; and, in consequence, we confront many

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new domestic problems -- from the baby boom to the reconstruction of our
cities. Like those problems we have solved in the past, the emerging
challenges demand that we continue to adapt our ideas and ways of doing
business if we are to remain a healthy society.

The weakness of democracy in military and foreign affairs, except in
a major war, is, of course, a familiar theme. In modern America this weak-
ness does not arise from a lack of public information; nor does it reflect an
unwillingness of the American voter to make sacrifices in the national interest.
But it does link directly to a lack of consensus on the character of the national
interest. Yet we can hardly fail to respond to the military, political and
moral challenge posed by world communism. An adverse shift in the balance
of power would force us to re-examine our every goal and aspiration. The
relative military power of the United States is very rapidly being equalized,
and with the advantage of surprise, may even be neutralized or surpassed
by a determined enemy bent on destroying everything that we call freedom
and on enforcing the rule of a single center of world communism. The
successes of that enemy in taking over huge areas and populations without
major war, plus division among our allies and growing neutralism, sow doubt
and confusion in many minds here and abroad.

These challenges call for a new dimension of effective leadership
and dedication by our people. We need not only to confront our own diffi-
culties, but to impose difficulties and ultimate defeat on the obvious enemy,
if possible by changing his nature and purpose.

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Without a convincing demonstration that basic values are at stake, appeals for sacrifice, strain and achievement at home and abroad in a common cause are ineffectual and frustrated. The objectives of the free society of the United States must be cast in such terms as to have universal appeal to all men who wish to live the lives of free communities and free nations. Economic prosperity is not enough. Basic moral values are needed if we are to capitalize on the weaknesses now being shown in the monolithic control structure of the Soviet system: weaknesses revealed by the demands of its own people and those of its satellites for more freedom and for greater wellbeing. By offering a morally acceptable alternative, demonstrated by putting our basic moral demands for ourselves to the test of free debate and example, we can capitalize on our own strength and on the basic weaknesses of the Soviet system.

Because we cherish and seek difference, while we insist that those who espouse difference make clear their authorship, the way we deal with differences is the difference between our political philosophy and practice, and those of others. It should lie at the heart of our process of consensus. If from the many different voices in our society we can project abroad a picture of ourselves, faithful to the ideas on which this nation was founded, out of this world crisis may emerge a new vision of human freedom and happiness. We shall now examine the process and obstacles which will aid or block this realization.

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## II. THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS OF CONSENSUS

### The American Approach

American society has sought to resolve the eternal dilemma of liberty vs. order by a subtle set of compromises. Formally the resolution has been accomplished through the institutions and procedures of the Constitution. Constitutionalism lies precisely in subordinating any government to a concept of justice that is embodied in a fundamental law by which the government is restrained and in accordance with which it must operate. This is the essence of a constitution. Its absence precisely characterizes a totalitarian system which knows no limits to authority. But the Founding Fathers did not try to guarantee national unity and security merely by constitutional means. In the end they left the nation's destiny substantially in the hands of a free electorate, on whose responsibility -- as well as upon the checks and balances of the constitutional institutions -- they counted.

This measured faith is the ultimate basis for our freedoms. Where the faith does not exist men live under one form or another of autocracy -- or worse. Where the faith proves misplaced the independence of nations and the liberty of men are lost.

It is on this commitment to the responsible individual that all the fundamental institutions of American society are built.

But these institutions and procedures could never have survived the vicissitudes of one hundred and seventy years if they had not been operated by men who shared not merely a sense of responsibility for the community but

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also a set of moral values. It is because, in the end, even the most purposeful and ardent special interest groups accept the moral as well as the legal rules of the national game that our society is a going concern.

Our moral consensus recognizes that men are not angels, and that they differ in their capacity for self-government and even moral responsibility. The capacity for the exercise of freedom differs with the degree of advancement and the experience of peoples in the exercise of freedom and the responsibility of self-government.

The moral limits of our common life suffuse the nation's legal and constitutional procedures; but they transcend them. Without a widespread and often inarticulate agreement on moral values -- on what it is right for a man to do and what it is wrong for him to do -- our constitutional and legal structure could not operate. Although as a nation we have placed great faith in written, constitutional law, we are more of a common law society -- more governed by custom and traditional values -- than we usually acknowledge.

The central characteristics of our democratic organization of power are these: limitations upon the power of government, whether Federal, state or local, and the location of residual power in the people; a holding of governmental action to account through popular consent and due process of law; respect for the underlying constitutional consensus that recognizes that the will to be a community rules out action by majorities or minorities that will destroy the community for its fundamental objects; and that ultimate power over important decisions is widely distributed and shared.

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The Chain of Consensus

American freedom under law: our deepest and most broadly shared
<u>consensus</u>, since it frames the fundamental agreement that makes possible
differences on party aims and programs. The United States of America is
a <u>constitutional democracy</u>. It is not a government founded on the proposition
that a majority of the adult people of the United States rules on every issue.
In its Federal system, which gives special weighting to the states, particu-
larly in the Senate, and in its protections of basic civil rights, the Constitu-
tion restrains the operation of simple majoritarian democracy. The system of
government of the United States is one that limits majorities to their
appropriate areas of consensus and competence, in territorial, in moral, and
in functional terms. The Constitution itself can only be modified by very
extraordinary majorities. The judiciary of the Federal system, as well as
of the states, enjoy special protections against intimidation and have in the
main, throughout our history, occupied the role of umpire, sustained by the
constitutional morality of acceptance by the bulk of the people, and by their
elected officials.

Our system rests, in turn, on a recognition that no man or class of
men possesses a monopoly of virtue or wisdom; that the sense of the
community itself, while presumably wiser than the single view of any
individual, is also conditioned, and that today's judgment should not pre-
judice tomorrow's freedom to judge.

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In this pluralistic system, the main political problem of American society is to be able to secure continuity and responsibility in government. Our society not only has several competing parties as a part of its system of government, but it also has to persuade or placate or neutralize large numbers of groups and associations whose interests may be affected, directly or indirectly (and sometimes injuriously from their own point of view), by a proposed action.

The political context within which laws are made and actions taken in the United States must increasingly take into account the existence of a very highly organized and pervasive group life with political consciousness and activity. These multiform groups represent the interests and purposes of the great organized associations of the society to a greater degree and extent than any civilization has probably ever known. No one needs to be told of the tremendous power wielded by organized labor outside party lines, though often operating through them. Nor do we need to remind anyone of the existence and influence of groups like the professional associations, the representatives of business through the chambers of commerce, manufacturers associations and the like, as well as the organized activities of patriotic associations, women's clubs, and the pressure groups who are out to secure and protect their own special interests.

The sharing of power over important decisions is thus inevitable.
Throughout our history we have relied as a people upon checks and balances,

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and thus, in effect, upon the dispersal of both initiative and effective power,
not only in government, but in the private organizations through which we seek
our interests and self-realization.

Those grants of power that we have given from time to time to leaders
in or out of government, are conditional -- ~~conditional~~ upon situations, con-
ditional upon the special times and purposes for which concentration of power
has seemed proper and vital. Thus democracy~~ means at least two things.
It is a way of making decisions: ideally, a way in which all opinions will be
weighed, directly or through some representative process. And it is a
system of respect for common values that runs through all organizations,
governmental or outside of government, in a democratic society. Its essence
is a sober, calculated act of faith: a faith that individuals -- properly
nurtured, trained and educated -- are capable not merely of pursuing private
advantage but also of assuming a degree of intelligent responsibility for the
fate of the community.

The proposition might be put another way: ours is a chain of consensus
in which no decision is stronger than its weakest link. President, Congress,
state and local officials, every imaginable type of group organization at
every possible level of our society, and the individual himself are all linked
in a mutually effecting and effected process. It is this interjoined function
of each as part of the rest which our Report will consider.

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Our Past Record of Performance

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.

In the past, the process of solving national problems was 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.

American domestic politics are thus shifting away from the task of compromising special interests to the task of harmonizing private and public values. And within the area of public values there is a clash between the imperatives of a welfare state (with a rapidly expanding population) and the imperatives of American survival on the world scene. There is a clear and

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basic continuity in our political processes; but they must be adjusted to deal
with a problem familiar enough in kind, but new in its scale.

In our domestic life we are quite close to achieving an effective
consensus on many important issues. We have hammered out, in the century
or so since American industrialization began, a view of how industrialization
can be made consistent with abiding moral, social, and political values.
While there is still plenty to argue about, men inside and outside the govern-
ment are pretty well agreed as to what we ought to argue about. And looked
at closely, the range over which argument proceeds is relatively narrow.
Fruitful debate takes place, in similar terms, from the highest levels of the
government down to discussions within the family or local groups.

Nonetheless, we have dodged the real and proliferating problems of
the interrelations 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 levels are a
first-level and unsolved challenge to democratic leadership. Our state and
local machineries of government are woefully neglected and inadequate.

There is reason for confidence that our traditional method of
relatively diffused leadership is capable of identifying most of the domestic
issues we face, of formulating alternative solutions, and of ensuring action
before disaster overtakes us; although, as noted earlier, the character of the
domestic problems on the American agenda is likely to place an increased

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premium on the democratic process over coming years.

Historically, the United States has tended to recognize and respond to internal 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 are large; American cabinets in recent decades have been as badly split as the public.

There have been notable exceptions. The essence of what was done on occasions such as the Lend-Lease or Marshall Plan debates lay in a widespread sharing of responsibility for the nation's decision: the President and the Executive Branch responsibly laid before the public the facts bearing upon it, and the choices that appeared nation confronted, the facts bearing upon it, and the choices that appeared open to us; the President personally committed himself concerning the broad direction in which a solution was to be found; the Congress held extensive hearings, permitting all manner of opinion to be expressed, fixing public attention on the problem in hand over a considerable period; finally, the extraordinary sub-structure of private associations which characterize American life was galvanized into taking positions. Out of this complex, apparently disorderly, process -- wholly different from the image of a single wise leader charting his course, and an obedient public following along -- three things happened: first, a responsible view of the problem was

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presented to the public, with the President himself vouching for its urgency
and the general character of the decision required of the nation; second, a
wide range of representative and trusted communal and group leaders did their
homework and said their piece -- not merely Congressmen, but business,
labor, and farm leaders, churchmen, professors, etc.; third, a public,
informed to the limit of its absorptive capacity, with every opportunity for
communication open, evidently reached a majority consensus, and its assent
was registered by a Congress, which had been hard at work on its own, but
with a sharp eye for grass-roots conclusions.

The essence of what was done on these occasions lay in a widespread
sharing of responsibility for the nation's decision: the President and the
Executive Branch responsibly laid before the public the problem the nation
confronted, the facts bearing upon it, and the choices that appeared open to
us. The President personally committed himself concerning the broad direction
in which a solution was to be found. The Congress held extensive hearings,
permitting all manner of opinion to be expressed, fixing public attention on
the problem in hand over a considerable period. Finally, the extraordinary
substructure of private associations which characterize American life was
galvanized into taking positions.

These particular examples of mobilizing the intelligence and capacity
for action and sacrifice of our people are particularly important today when
the main political problem of American society is to find a workable consensus

II - 10

in the area of military and foreign affairs. It is essential to a degree unparalleled in our previous history to be able to focus national purpose rapidly and decisively on issues that may involve the survival not only of this nation but of the free world. We are faced by a combination of force that is able, as no opponent has ever been able to do before, to mass resources and conduct coordinated operations against us on a world-wide scale. Therefore we should be able not only to respond to that challenge, but, preferably, to anticipate it and to face our opponent with contingencies and conditions that he has not foreseen, and that rob him of the advantages of initiative and favorable ground.

There must, in short, be a national purpose, marked by a basic unity of moral front, to meet the challenges with which the nation is now confronted in the sort of world we have created or seen grow upon us. This requires a leadership that can infuse into the political process a sense of acceptance of the destiny of the nation, of confronting its challenges and challengers, and of understanding and serving with dedication its basic moral values.

Defining the National Interest

We stand at a particular unresolved stage of our evolution as a nation in which it is essential that we consolidate the accumulated experience of dealing with the world--notably in the past fifty years -- into a

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working consensus, on the nature of the national interest. This is not the occasion for an exploration of the character of the national interest.

The development of a consensus is, however, an essential condition for a policy--and a flow of day-to-day actions--capable of forestalling crises; it is an essential condition for the nation's allocating adequate talents and resources to deal with the challenges and to exploit the potentialities it now confronts; it is an essential condition for the public support of a military and foreign policy required to maintain the nation's security under rapidly changing circumstances. Put another way, one of the first substantive tasks of our leadership is to develop this consensus and our institutions of leadership from the President on down cannot efficiently function until that consensus is established.

We need an understanding of the national interest so precise that major problems can quite easily be identified and that work can proceed on appropriate and acceptable solutions before the nation slides into a crisis so dangerous and self-evident that some form of national response is evidently called for.

The nation's problem in defining the national interest usefully and operationally reflects a more general difficulty to be seen in many aspects of American life: a tendency to articulate our purposes in terms of large ideal goals while operating from day to day in a pragmatic way. Special interests and the facts of power play a larger role in American behavior than our

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political orations make clear. In our domestic life we are subtle and expert at reconciling moral and ethical values and special interests; and we have been so ever since our remarkably sophisticated and wise Constitution was formulated. But we are still awkward in articulating our purposes to ourselves and before the world and acting upon them in such a way that our real ideological and real power interests are put into an orderly relationship, and lead directly to well-balanced, well-articulated lines of action.

We need more realistic and dependable concepts of the nature of the emerging world system within which we seek our national interests. These are being conceived and elaborated not only by our governmental leaders, but by our publicists and scholars as well. The whole process is an example of the joint functioning of our multiple system of leadership. A necessary part of it, however, is broad sharing of emerging concepts, so that the people as a whole can gain some idea of the ways that governmental leaders conceive the rules of the game and the skills of the players.

We seek our ends in a world in which the distribution of power is changing: and as that distribution changes, our foreign policy, our network of alliances, and the practices of diplomacy must change too. One per- suasive school of thought now asserts that we are moving from a system of world politics in which the preponderance of power has been clearly located in two world centers, around which all other powers have been arrayed, toward a system in which power and initiative is more widely distributed. Such a change means revising estimates of the nature, potentialities and

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limits of our power which were compatible with the power distributions of a
bipolar world, into estimates compatible with the new distributions of power
that appear as military technology and postures change.

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 share
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. The
position, power, and prospects of the United Nations; the prospects for a
multipolar world; the impact and future of foreign aid; these and many similar
topics are ripe for fresh analysis and appraisal -- with the results available
for world communication.

Recent developments both in the Soviet Union and in Communist China
provide a specific example of the kind of concepts we need. Communist policy
and propaganda sense the value of the soft line, and are playing it skillfully.
It is a continuing problem for policy in the free world to keep sharply in view
the unchanging nature of the communist threat, while fostering those develop-
ments in the communist world that initially prevent their effective exercise
of power against us, and that ultimately will lead to fundamental redirection
along lines that are compatible with the survival of our freedom. We know
enough of the nature of our adversary to know that he is implacable and patient.
Our struggle will be a long one. Therefore we must demonstrate to the

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American people that there is no prompt, radical and enduring solution to the problem of relations with communism; there is only the road of eternal vigilance and eternal devotion to the practice of freedom. We need to be ready to clarify the way we should use power in a protracted struggle, to explain and sustain the expenditure of money and manpower for the objectives appropriate to such a conflict and to make clear that skillful pursuit of limited aims does not mean any lack of determination to wage the Cold War to a successful outcome.

If, in the course of the conflict, it should be necessary to wage limited war, it behooves us to create in advance the freedom of action that makes this course feasible; that anticipates the kinds of problems sure to arise under conditions of limited war; and that conserves the morale and heightens the understanding with which such a course can be pursued in the national interest.

Paper No. V-A
Standards
(Riesman)

- 13 -

kind of ingratiation of personality evinced by TV performers, isn't too likely
to value appropriately either the performance of her children or of those
still unbureaucratized people such as her doctor on whom she depends.
Young people today tend to be precocious and even sophisticated in their
appreciations and many teachers of the humanities teach denigration
rather than appreciation fearing to be corny so that spreading down from the
educated classes an atmosphere of condenscension and connoisseurship
prevails which makes people safe in acclaiming only the already acclaimed
and is unsympathetic to new, diffident and unpolished talent. In a way,
like so many other changes we have been discussing and some times
deploring, this marks a change for the better in American life as standards
of taste have risen. But it also creates new and as yet barely understood
problems in our attitudes towards performance and in our ability, which
is increasingly tainted, to identify with the performer and against the
obstacles with which he must cope. We tend to be the cash customers
with only a perfunctory sense of kinship - something I have often observed
and hated when I am in the audience at a theater or movie or concert. By
the same token, we often inhibit our own performance because we know
how unappreciative we are of other performers. Even the in many respects
necessary search for objective standards of performance which Dean Brown
so cogently criticizes is in large part motivated by the fear of people to
judge performance on their own and to take the risks of judgment through
empathy and appreciation.

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# III. THE FUNCTION OF LEADERSHIP IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

## The Nature and Range of Leadership

While respecting the legitimacy of our common insight, we were, perhaps, embarrassed to find ourselves persistently placing so high a premium on a function not conventionally emphasized in discussions of the democratic process; for, in common discourse, the concept of leadership has a faintly undemocratic flavor. We were forced back, then, to first principles in order to clarify the role of leadership in the democratic process and to satisfy ourselves why it was that leadership seemed to be a major problem for contemporary American democracy.

Let it be clear at the outset that we do not hold any select concept of leadership in the sense that leaders must come from any one group or constitute a special class set apart by birth or social barrier. Leadership in a democracy touches society in every dimension and is found throughout. Leadership is exercised here by the educated, there by the unlettered; here by the well-to-do, there by the poor; here by the government official, there by the business executive. Sharing in the process we find the scholar, the scientist, the technician, the farmer, the labor leader, the pastor, the journalist. Our leaders are found wherever one man or woman rises above his fellows in the tasks of indicating directions, marshalling resources, directing action, and building consent.

The ultimate difference between elite leadership and democratic leadership is measured by how much choice is granted to the people.

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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. For even this crucial kind of leadership to be fully effective, however, it must draw strength and support from the rest of society. Whether by precept or example, leaders must possess the capacity to inspire their followers, and to breed faith. Leadership must rest on a recognition of superior insight and integrity. Yet the personality and role of leaders must be close enough to the people so that they can both identify themselves with their leaders and judge their leaders' adequacy to fulfill the tasks society lays upon them.

The leader in our society who operates through consent must be sensitive enough to understand experience vicariously and be able to suffer with and for his people by understanding their deep problems. On the other hand, he should have the strength to show a way out of the trials and to instill in them confidence and faith in the future.

The other basic ingredient of leadership is the ability to respond to challenges and to thrive on surmounting them. A leader has to grow. He

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cannot be nurtured in a hot house. Harsh times, hard lines, periods of tragic upheaval, produce the conditions of great leadership.

Tragic times demand firm roots and inner strength to master them. In this sense the leader is the product of his times; but, in turn, he shapes them. Many of the qualities of leadership come from the studying of great men. No society that has lost or fails to produce its epic models can count on the production of leaders broadly enough and deeply enough grounded to nourish each other by the vital competition needed to produce leaders. The books men read, the images held up to them to emulate from childhood, the pressure of social esteem, the "tone" of the society, all shape the leaders. Their competition helps to measure them in many walks of life. Experience strengthens leaders and weeds them out at the same time.

There is need for a more adequate notion of the various sorts of leadership of which our society requires, and the various ways in which leaders of all levels and in all fields develop and collaborate effectively with one another. There are big-L and little-L leaders, not only in politics and government but elsewhere. The nature of their leadership may differ, resting on different competences and skills in the fields of science, of business, of the professions, of education, of agriculture, of labor, and in other callings. Leadership may compete with leadership both within fields, and across fields; and it is a continuing national task to create the conditions of purposes, resources, and motivation that will call forth a maximum degree of collaboration contributory to broad social goals.

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Leadership in the United States is a living process running across
from the national government into the smallest community gathering. And the
whole of this leadership process is -- from time to time, and to a degree --
caught up in the making of national decisions. National actions result from
a subtle and sensitive interaction among the Executive Branch, public opinion,
and the Congress. To this interaction our two-party system imparts an
extra cross-cutting dimension, as do the myriad private voluntary groups
which give to American communal life a unique inner strength and depth. At
every stage and in every dimension those individual Americans who take acts
of responsibility in the face of communal problems are part of the leadership
process.

In our Report we choose to put extended attention and devote several
chapters to this process of leadership -- national, regional, local, private --
not only because this area is more prominent than ever in our history, but
because it is so vital to an understanding of how to cope with the challenges
which now confront us.

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.

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In a democracy leadership is required for two reasons. All men are not equally gifted for 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 organization, as in virtually all else we do, specialization is required.

It follows directly from the basic character of American society that 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 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.

Such a leader, of course, has to learn the ways of appealing to opinion as well as of commanding it. His own stature, if he can once establish it and maintain the role in a way that is especially difficult in the informal setting of democracy, protects him from being pulled to pieces by the inevitable pluckings of the many-fingered interests which are the essence of political life in a democracy. He has the continual problem of being close to the people and yet removed from them so as to protect his own powers for sustained thought and for understanding.

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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.

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 seems to enable a leader to determine 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.

Moral Requirements of Leadership

Leaders cannot deduce objectives and goals by a mere rehearsal of facts. For we are bewildered and overwhelmed by enormous arrays of facts while at the same time we reach out for new sets of data concerning our 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 leaders therefore 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

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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.

In most if not all leadership-followership relations, there must be a
basis of mutual faith and trust, and mutual recognition and acceptance of the
rightness of the relationship and its consequences. But as has been hinted
above, this moral quality comes inescapably into the field of national leadership
as 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 the nations' action
in the world.

Moreover, the leader who accepts and acts on this faith bears a moral
obligation. Morality involves the acceptance of responsibility. The power of
leaders depends not only on identity between leaders and led in operational
matters, but also on the extent to which the people recognize that their leaders
exemplify a common moral sense. This does not exclude worldly wisdom; at
times it is necessary for leaders to appear both as wise as serpents and as
innocent as doves. Sometimes the exigencies of leadership pull the leader
toward a moral dilemma: how to manifest confidence in the face of mortal
danger even to the point where the leader strains truthfulness to keep his cause
(and thus the vehicle of his moral purpose) alive.

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 un-
popularity 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.

This is the first ingredient that must enter into the making of our national
policy today. We must be willing to show our moral purpose by the test of
sacrifice and commitment, as opposed to the moralizing (the latter merely attempt
to escape responsibility by a form of words and wishful thinking). The quality
of a nation's leadership and its support of leadership is, therefore, tested in
terms of its ultimate purposes and objectives and those values for which it is
willing to sacrifice not only in periods of crisis, but over long sustained
struggles with opposing systems. The sustained character of the struggle is
rendered more difficult because it is carried on in forms that are not always
obvious unless their deeper moral implications are clearly understood.

Here we face a serious danger, however. Because our society disperses
power and initiative widely throughout our institutions, our governmental
leaders are constantly tempted to respond to these multiform pressures by
seeking accommodations and compromises, least-common-denominator solutions.
This tendency is pronounced in the domestic field, in the absence either of

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demands enforced by world crisis, or of any controlling philosophy that regulated
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 an external solution.
The challenge to our national leadership is to bring these multiple sources of
power and initiative to bear on vital objectives, and to create a moral consensus
on the most important goals and tasks that the whole country must serve.

Unless there exists or can be created in the leadership of the nation,
both at the highest levels and in every community, a sufficiently dedicated
group of citizens to whom the public duty is superior to private interest; and
unless standards of excellence are held up as a model for the democracy to
imitate, the natural tendency is to work out the low order of compromises.

Unless a democracy can produce within its own matrix the protection
for maintaining standards of excellence and for making effective, the resistance
to mass pressures and to the pulls of special interests, the true nature of the
republic is endangered. The essential wisdom of every great writer on politics,
from the time of Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Politics and Cicero's Republic, has
been to emphasize this need for balance and for the protection of the public
purpose and duty, as against mere private interest.

Against this measure of excellence the emerging concept of gyroscopic
leadership, however, is another serious threat. 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 special interest. This could become a pernicious influence on the nature and function of the democratic processes.

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 toward 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 must inspire and command confidence in ways that meet the test of democratic judgment. To manipulate opinion and smother opposition, sooner or later forfeits this confidence. And it is not enough for a leader to cite his origins to gain and maintain confidence, for a healthy constitutional democracy does not create and cannot tolerate an oligarchic and closed-system elite. Its leaders are recruited and developed by competition, and trained for responsibility by all the great natural groupings of the society. With us, a leader is tested both by formulating and realizing the aspirations and the goals of his nation.

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Another special function of leadership is of course the ability to express 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.

Leaders must do more than order thoughts; they must order feelings too, thus generating actions that testify to this inner faith in man's dignity and destiny. This can only be done by moving men in their deepest realms of feeling.

Flowing out of his moral kinship with his society, but going into considerable other areas as well, 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 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

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the public's mind and where the means of obtaining desired goals are not clear or are seemingly contradictory.

The leader in a democratic community must also be an innovator -- the man who perceives new problems and organizes solutions for them; he must be the protector of the community's long-run continuity, the keeper of its 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 are everywhere to be observed in successful organizations, including those formally outside the political process. The successful businessman is not merely an automation, making rational market calculations; he is the leader of his firm, peering ahead to understand its future problems of technology and markets; carrying with him not only his board of directors but also his managerial staff and his labor force; harmonizing his decisions not only with the legal but also with the moral values of the society of which his firm is a part. Similarly, the successful labor leader must concern himself with a wide range of problems.

At once the innovator and 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 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

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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.

A high level leadership is certainly the ability to move a society in a
chosen direction, either one already established by traditions and beliefs, or
into a new and sometimes revolutionary change of beliefs. In short, it is the
response of those who have a goal or a moral direction, a belief, to the needs
of the society as they see them. Its effectiveness depends upon winning the
support of the members of that society, whether it be for a small group or a
large nation-state or a whole culture shaped by a religion. A true totalitarian
system can really have only one top leader; an aristocracy has a group; a
democracy, many leaders.

These requirement of winning support hold all fields of leadership.
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 other purposes and interests.
In doing so he has to compete for loyalties in a very broad market indeed.
Even though the American political party system may offer a relatively restricted
competition as between the parties or among them, there is always a struggle
for control and leadership within the party. Indeed it is precisely this competi-
tion which toughens a leader for his growth to a position of national responsi-
bility, makes him understand the realities of political processes, and tests

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out whether he has the capacity to frame the problems of the nation in terms that will evoke a nationwide response.

A constitutional democracy has at all times the necessity for balancing trust in a chosen leader and support of him in a fashion that at one and the same time transcends the lesser divisions of the society by a critical appraisal and yet keeps a far-sighted view of consequences that reach beyond the immediate crisis.

Effectiveness of leaders in a democratic society depends not only on the estimate of a leader made by the follower, but also on the leader's estimate of his own position and effectiveness, as well as on his skill in dealing with problems confronting him. The problems of making a just estimate of leadership by followers have always been large, although they have been reasonably well discharged by the common man in the domestic field of action. But in an era of international tension, governmental secrecy, and a rise in the relative importance of foreign relations in the business of the state, the performance of the national leader in the foreign field is both 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.

All methods for the creation of a sense of identity between leaders and the people gain power if they profit from the observation that example is an even more potent teacher than precept. Example is the more pointed and telling

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if it is reinforced by concepts of leadership that are stated and demonstrated
throughout our manifold system of information and education. Modern communi-
cations -- especially television -- give leadership today new opportunities to
demonstrate the practice of leadership; new opportunities for leaders in many
walks of life to view the performance of our top political leaders, to learn from
them, to judge them, and to enter into a system of free but powerful association
in discerning and coping with the problems of the age.

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# IV. COMMUNICATING WITH THE PEOPLE.

## Duty and Response

In our democracy leadership must foster and maintain an adequate sense of identity between leaders and led -- identity in the sense of mutual understanding of the nature of the role of the leader and of government, and of the various participating elements of the body politic involved in common tasks. This is partly a matter of information and education; partly a matter of the behavior of leaders themselves; and partly a function of joint action involving both leaders and led, in which each perceives and experiences the role of the other.

The political leader must show a receptivity to his people's 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 other human enterprises as well.

Leadership can usually count on favorable response to the broad principles of our society, but this acceptance does not guarantee public approval for specific proposals. Leaders must learn better how people interpret programs. People usually ask, what will a government program do to me? Having accepted a principle for public policy, citizens are still free to disagree about the operational consequences of specific programs, and it is a main task in building consensus to take account of those disagreements in public opinion.

Beyond a widespread public concern with the nation's external position

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-- perhaps, simply, a chronic uneasiness -- there are varying degrees of knowledgeability and, especially, of confidence of judgment within the American public. In domestic affairs the average citizen sees the impact of national policy in terms of the familiar round of his life; he not only knows the essential facts, he also sees what they mean in terms of situations and values with which he is at home. In military and foreign affairs even the interested and knowledgeable citizen remains an outsider in these important and expensive matters, an observer of the Washington insider, even if his newspapers and magazines, his radio and TV programs are full of pieces of relevant information and opinion. Under these circumstances, short of a major crisis, or short of some special effort in which the President makes an effort to focus his attention, the typical American citizen will read his paper, listen to the news, absorbing more or less information as his background, taste, and intelligence dictate, but remain an essentially passive figure -- friendly, suspicious, hostile or neutral, in his attitude towards current policy -- but lacking a sense of involvement or of personal responsibility.

However one characterizes American public opinion in military and foreign policy, the fact must be faced that in our democracy taxes can not be raised and men can not be called into the armed forces without a popular assent which transcends a mere majority vote in the Congress. Although military and foreign affairs sometimes can for a time be conducted as an insider's operation, in the end the public weight people will take back their right of determining policy.

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Although there is ample evidence that Americans remain reluctant in assuming international responsibility a substantial majority of Americans will support military and foreign policy measures when they become convinced that they are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the nation's world position; and a substantial majority will shy away from positions they believe associated with an isolationist retreat or an abandoning of major alliances.

The people at any one time are not all wrong or all right. Their wisdom is in the averaging out of their fluctuations. They do not see very far ahead in long-range interests; their strength lies in a kind of suspicious resistance to any abstractions which take them too far from their own experience. But this, while this is wisdom of a sort, it is also a limitation which leadership must help them get beyond since too many of the great problems which face people cannot be decided on the basis of the limited experience of the present year or the present moment.

In a democracy, if leaders allow people to think they have a choice when they do not, there will be trouble. If there is no choice in a situation, it is the responsibility of the government leaders to make it clear that there is no choice and to state the situation so it cannot be misunderstood. For example for some time there was much reluctance in national circles to give the American people the facts on the peril they faced because of nuclear warheads. Without this information, consensus cannot possibly be achieved on the necessary measures for civil defense in the United States. And as we

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have previously suggested only if the government candidly shares common ideas about the nature, the strengths and limitations, and the prospects for limited war, can leaders and citizens generally understand what our military purposes are, appraise the wisdom of our government's defense policies, and be willing to pay for them.

Despite the understandable reluctance of our people to move in too deeply into the troubled waters of world affairs the government often estimates the willingness of the American people to go ahead with a program that may entail sacrifice of taxes. There is much evidence that the public is willing to go much farther than leaders ask them to go, in terms of measures that affect our national interests -- if it truly understands the issues involved.

A democratic society is entitled to the generation and dissemination of a fully adequate conception of policy. National government leaders must play a prime role in explaining the concepts of policy and action within which they operate, and in furnishing the main elements of information bearing on these policies. But because of their role, they cannot always be fully candid. Any diplomat who gives an account of his strategy and information in advance risks defeat in negotiation. Both in diplomacy and war, there must be a certain amount of ambiguity and uncertainty.

The aspect of security affects discussions by the executive, and thus the total flow of specialized communications. As originator of much of the information and of policy decision on national security questions, the Executive

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must decide how much of its information and intentions should be made public,
when.

Frequently, therefore for a fuller exploration of the alternatives of policy
and their consequences, the country must turn to its educational and to its
specialized research institutions. The educational system must create the
foundation of historical sense and ability to master and marshal relevant facts,
and to make clear the full range of policy alternatives among which government
leaders can choose. Independent research organizations can be more concentrat-
ed and specialized, exposing in full detail the complex areas of fact and
analysis bearing on fundamentals of national policy.

But the power and relevance of the response of specialized publics
depend on the kinds of information that are at its disposal, and the extent to
which the Executive can take them into its confidence without distorting their
discussion on muzzling the expression of their findings. The Executive as well
as the general public has a vital interest in seeing that the reports of special-
ized groups are as well founded and as freely expressed as possible.

In this way the government can nourish the elements that give a free
society strength by keeping fertile the seedbed of initiative and growth for
those ideas and beliefs that germinate from the individual's freedom to disagree.

In military and foreign affairs the citizen -- even the interested and
knowledgeable citizen -- can rarely feel that confident that he understands
the problem. To improve the citizen's level of confidence an important dynamic

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element must be added: education. Interest, knowledge, and concern with foreign policy are positively correlated with schooling; and the average level of education is under a powerful trend rise in the United States. One can, then, anticipate with confidence a progressively more knowledgeable and responsive public in international affairs.

Here a warning is in order. It is usually assumed by leaders that if the people will not agree to a wise policy it is because they lack information; give them the facts and they will change their opinion. This is frequently not borne out by polls.

People often will not alter their false opinion when they are presented with more information; they will not change their mind until a crisis comes along and actual events prove that their ideas would not work. In other words, they have to be frustrated into a change of action.

This, of course, does not mean that knowledge and facts are completely irrelevant. But it does indicate that they have a more limited role, or at least that they must be used and presented to people more imaginatively than many of the usual education presentations through which people are offered information. In experimental work it is found that knowledge plays two important roles: it makes it easier for people to find relevant cues to get better correspondence between what they think is the situation and what the situation will turn out to be when they act; and it gives them a greater consistency of interpretation. Incidentally, it seems that the more educated a person is, the more

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consistent his opinion is apt to be. But knowledge must apparently be tried
and put to use before it becomes a part of a person's working assumptions.

Nevertheless, despite all the difficulties the development of a consensus
by the people is, an essential condition for a policy -- and a flow of day-to-
day actions -- capable of forestalling crises; it is an essential condition for
the nation's allocating adequate talents and resources to deal with the challenges
and to exploit the potentialities it now confronts; it is an essential condition
for the public support of a military and foreign policy required to maintain the
nation's security under rapidly changing circumstances.

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THE PROBLEM OF COMMUNICATIONS

The Problem of Communications

Because of the need to maintain a vital flow between leaders and the people, communications are of special importance in a democracy. For democratic society, although it uses force as any political society must to repress violence and to preserve the physical basis of essential values, stresses persuasion and consent. Communications appropriate to democratic government must involve more than the issuance and acknowledgement of orders. This applies equally to the domestic realms as to the problems of world leadership.

In a broad sense, "communications" in the democratic processes means the perpetual education on a two-way basis of the nation by its leaders and of the leaders by the nation. It is embodied in every aspect of the political process itself through the selection of leaders; the relation to party programs and machinery; the working of liaison and cooperation -- or its opposite,-- between the Executive and the legislator; the use of the press and the other media of mass communications; the effects of public opinion on policy formulation, etc. But communications must involve more than education by information; it must also be the effective two-way exercise of influence. George Washington remarked that "Influence is not Government"; it is a prime ingredient of the democratic process that shapes government and makes or breaks its leaders.

This vigorous two-way flow can be cut down if leaders fail to recognize their communications responsibilities, or discharge them ineptly; and it will

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XXXXX

be diminished if citizens do not understand the degree of their involvement, or
do not think the expression of their opinion can be timely or important. The
role of leaders in national security matters is hampered by legitimate require-
ments of secrecy for much fact and intention in this area. Somehow leaders
must strive for a sufficient and trustworthy flow of information in this field
so that citizens believe that they can grasp its issues intelligently, while
maintaining a prudent reserve of discretion. If citizens lose faith in their
ability to judge national security matters from the facts made available, support
for our policies depends on faith in leaders; and a change in leadership may
touch off surprising changes in policy preferences among the people. Such
changes can surprise leaders, too, as witness Wilson's discomfiture in the
change in temper of the American people on basic issues of international involve-
ment.

Communications of leaders in a society paying genuine respect to the
opinions of its citizens, need to be well rooted in reason and in doctrine.
This does not mean that our government has to have an ideological basis; it
does mean that the reasoning behind any of our great programs must be cogent
and clear. Citizens are entitled to know not only what the government is doing,
but also the reasons for the nature and shape of its programs; they need to share
a sense of expectations about the future, and the kinds of consequences that
may follow from government action -- not to mention the kinds of risks the
government is taking and the reasons for them. This, in short, is what they
should be able to gain from doctrine.

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If doctrine is lacking, communications remain unfocussed and their effects are uncertain. Without doctrine, leadership is constantly forced into improvisations about what to say on important issues. Program budgets for the defense services, for example, are meaningless figures unless they can be related to some coherent thought about the need for the kinds of arms we have or are getting; for the kinds of research and development we are carrying on; or for any of the related matters that go to make up a key government defense program.

The key communications tasks of a society are to awaken interest and create a broad sense of involvement in the most important issues facing that society; to identify major operational issues, anticipating crises insofar as possible; and to carry out a threefold process of creating consensus, elaborating doctrine, and fostering the flow of communications between leaders and led. Needless to say these are not serial steps; these functions constantly interact among themselves. Since society does not work automatically, the initiative in doing these tasks falls on leadership, within and without government.

Thus leadership, while reaching for new dimensions of both understanding and organization of effective national purpose, must also strive for new dimensions in the fields of communications as well. This calls for a better understanding and an improved operational use of all the techniques of communication, from the simplest principle of confidence in demonstrated character to the sophisticated and morally responsible use of mass media.

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Today it must be clear that leaders at every level in a democracy who do not understand the uses of the new media of communication will not be effective in reaching and educating and winning the support of the potential supporting leadership, or in sensing the critical evaluation by their supporters and followers, which they must have to carry out their continued and burdensome work of national leadership.

At the same time, it is equally clear that no technical proficiency, no manipulation of the sources of information, no smoothness or skill in presentation carries anything like the basic conviction that firmness and reasonableness, combined in the expression of the leader's public appearances and in his consistent handling of crises and difficulties, imply. His communications, in short, depend upon his total impact as a character upon the public of which, today, television appearances and films add a very direct and important new dimension. The days of a nationally-shared Town Hall are not quite here, even though the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate in their press conferences are far more insistent and sometimes less restrained in their questions than are neighbors in a Town Meeting. The responsibility of the press and the limits of its inquisitorial powers are things that are brought in question by the very nature of the democratic process.

In addition to the nation's politically elected leaders, there are other groups within the American public who can play a special role in communicating the range of ideas on major issues. They include the outside expert, the semi-professional, and the leader of voluntary associations. The expert,

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XXXX

say, in military and foreign affairs outside the government is probably a less powerful influence on the general public than he would like to believe he is; or, put another way, his power is mainly exercise by catching the attention or influencing the thought of those with direct political responsibility and power rather than in influencing public opinion at large.

There is the group of responsible leaders of business -- labor, farm, religious and other groups -- who do not specialize in a given area of affairs, but who are prepared, when occasion demands, to do their homework and to take public positions. This group is exceedingly important in achieving a national consensus; for its members often stand closer to the individual citizen and his interests than elected officials. Their responsible assent in measures of military and foreign policy is a two-way signal of some power. It is an important reassurance to their special constituents that the measure is, in fact, necessary for the common good; and it is a message to the Executive and the Congressional branches that public support is likely, when the issue is clearly explained.

Every American community contains a small group of citizens who maintain an active interest in some area of affairs and who tend to be exceedingly well-informed. These semi-professionals participate in the regional Councils on Foreign Relations, lead the work in the Foreign Policy Associations and the relevant committees of the League of Women Voters, write the surprisingly thoughtful and mature editorials to be found in newspapers from coast to coast, speak the wise Sunday sermon on international affairs and teach the foreign

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XXXIX

policy courses in colleges and high schools.

Increasingly, the members of these special groups are getting to know one another. One facet of the rapid evolution of an American community is that leaders in special segments of national life are being brought together to consider major problems, foreign and domestic. Businessmen and professors, labor leaders and churchmen, farm organization executives and foundation officials gather now as a matter of course from every part of the country on one occasion or another. As a result, there now exists as never before the physical and human possibility of thrashing out rapidly a nation-wide consensus among those outside the government who can play important roles in leading the community towards agreement and action in military and foreign affairs.

They play an important role. Because of their special knowledge, experience, or judgment they cannot be persuaded to support a line of public policy unless the case is fully, honestly, and persuasively made. Neither as individuals nor as special groups are they in any one's pocket. They generally stand for the common good. Hence, an ultimate opportunity for the democratic processes may lie in these all important intermediate and intermediary groups between the agencies of official leadership and the infinite resources of the American people.

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# V. THE OPERATING STRUCTURE OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP

## The Place of National Leadership

The problem of leadership at every national level has become a central issue in American life because the maintenance of our interests on the world scene and the maintenance of the quality of our domestic life require that we innovate at a pace new in our national experience and that we behave increasingly as a national community rather than as a loosely associated group of regions and special interests. The dynamics of our world position and of our domestic evolution as a tightly knit continental community have thus powerfully converged in ways which justify and require a fresh look at the operating structure of the American democratic process.

The problems of interrelations of Federal, state and local governments now are being worked out in a complicated maze of intergovernmental relations bear directly on our world position. State and local governments are part of our system for the training and seasoning of leaders available for national and world roles. The problems of distribution of powers in our Federal system are important insofar as the kinds of tasks, responsibilities and resources found at the state and local level are such as to challenge high-caliber leadership in their own right.

American life has, from its colonial origins, constantly faced conditions which required changes in our system and our ways of looking at things. This in turn has required men of answerable courage, capable of

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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.

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 organized and, at the same time, supported by a national consensus that survives the tactical diversions and deceptions of Moscow.

The actions of our national leaders need 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.

Yet, amid all this interplay of contrary forces, unrelated groups, emergency challenges and need for decisions that leadership at the national level has become a "sine qua non" of the American system.

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The President and His Office

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,
a heavy and inescapable burden of personal leadership is allocated under our
Constitution to the President. A modern-day President, serving in a period
of continuing struggle for the survival of the free systems of the world for
which we have had leadership thrust upon us, plays a unique role. In a
curious way the Presidency today goes back to the original conceptions of the
founders of our Constitution, which was to erect a national Executive leader
who became a symbol of strength and national unity and who was not intended
at that time to assume a partisan role. The times require a new dimension of
leadership on the part of the American President and an approach to the problem
of national support that, in the last analysis, requires mobilizing public
support in order to assure Congressional support. But it also requires dealing
with Congress in a way that transcends partisanship and that takes advantage
of the President's role as the leader of the nation, selected by the only
national suffrage we possess, and having in his hands the powers which
inevitably safeguard the security of the nation and the issues of peace or war.

Under our Constitution the President, in his person and in his office,
is the central figure in any consideration of leadership in national policy.
It is the President, above all, who must identify and if possible anticipate
urgent new communal problems; it is the President who must generate the

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staff work which will yield the array of alternative solutions open to the community: and he must play an important role in making the community 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 the only lobbyist for all the people.

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.

Regardless of how major problems come to him, 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

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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.

How can the President best 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?

This question concerns the organization and functioning of the
Executive Branch which seem to fall somewhat short of full adequacy to 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 organization and reorganization; the budget; personnel; and top
staff work and the relation of key staff to Cabinet and interdepartmental
committees.

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The question whether the structure around the President is the most
rational or the most convenient turns in part on the work habits and require-
ments 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 interdepartmental committees or
delegated to other men.

Federal Organization

Problems of organization and control appearing in the office of the
Presidency ramify into the larger subject of organization of the Executive
branch. The general problem of how to bring our functional-hierarchical form
of organization into line with the government-wide implications that most
issues present, is important on the domestic side. And in the field of foreign
affairs, there is literally no problem of any magnitude that does not concern
more than one Federal department. Thus there is a twofold pressure: to see
to it that the basic organization of government matches as nearly as may be
the large contours of our most prominent government functions; and then to
see to it that there are adequate procedures for the consideration and

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disposition of problems that cut across those contours. As technology changes, as the nation develops both domestically and in its world relations, the problems of government change. So there is a constant need to scrutinize the organization of government to make sure that it is appropriate both to the basic problems and to the talents and skills of those leaders -- and most especially the President himself -- who must operate the system.

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.

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

There is a good deal of *de facto* decentralization of political power
within the Executive Branch, because our government is functionally organized
and for the most part departments can call on the support of the spokesmen
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).
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.

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 pro-
fessional administrators.

These reasons, together with other powerful forces, argue that the
balance between staff and line elements in the Executive Branch be shifted

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significantly in favor of the former. First, 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 bureaucracy; second, the need to inter-relate many arms of national policy around specific defined purposes and 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.

The National Security Council and its related institutions, although remarkably developed in the past decade, do not now meet the requirement of developing and enforcing within the Executive Branch a forehanded national policy. Similarly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense do not now meet the requirement of developing and enforcing among the three services a forehanded and unified military policy. Although attached to no particular formulae for altering the security institutions of the Executive Branch, Subpanel VI agrees that the techniques of innovation and unification by interdepartmental committee is grossly inadequate to national needs; and that a purposeful strengthening of the quality and independence of the staff elements within these institutions is necessary. Our systems of administration are geared for static processes and for slow change. And something of an administrative revolution, shifting the balance between staff and line in our major governmental establishments is required to deal with the problems we face.

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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. 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 more 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 further its Planning Staff so it will not be caught up in convulsive responses to urgent unanticipated crises.

## The President and the People

A democratic society is entitled to the generation and dissemination of a fully adequate conception of policy. The President must play a prime role in explaining the concepts of his policy and action. In fulfilling his role, the President is endowed with a considerable capital fund. The American public is inclined to give him a considerable latitude and to be influenced significantly by his assessment of external events and their meaning for the national interest. This latitude varies with many factors: it was, for example, great for President Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War, much narrowed by, say, the end of 1951. Nevertheless, while the American public is not inclined to follow blindly the President's lead, his view is a powerful element

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in the equation which determines public opinion. The President's role can, even, operate negatively: the press, the experts, and, even, Congress can become quite exercised about a military or foreign policy problem; but if the President chooses to remain passive action is unlikely, unless a crisis as flagrant as the Fall of France, Pearl Harbor, the attack on Korea, or Suez occurs. To a significant if limited extent, then, public opinion in military and foreign affairs is a function of what the President wishes it to be.

In one sense there is no clear-cut public opinion in military and foreign affairs until the President has taken his position; the American public is inclined to give him a considerable latitude and to be influenced significantly by his assessment of external events and their meaning for the national interest. While the American public is not inclined to follow blindly the President's lead, his view is a powerful element in the equation which determines public opinion.

No national leader in the White House today could confront the grave task of his responsibilities to the nation and educating the nation, in order to bring to bear its opinion in his support, without a skillful mobilization of all the channels of support that are open to him. Indeed, it has become essential for a democratic government today to be able to put its own case to its own people and to the world as skillfully as possible. By virtue of his office, the President is able to command nation-wide coverage to discuss matters of national interest, and to present his views on the broad outlines of

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public issues. But also, by virtue of his position, he is unable to pursue
matters in sufficient detail to drive them home; and those key assistants who
could devote the time to it, are not able to command the requisite attention in
our mass media by virtue of their position.

The Executive and Congress

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 Congressional
districts, bearing representative responsibility to those constituencies from
which they come. Both forms of representation are important.

As our government is now organized and functions, the President is
in the better position to take a broad and inclusive view of the nation's
problems; his is the power of proposal and of overall integration. And
possessing superior resources of information and technical staff, he is in
the better position to take the initiative both on matters of legislation as well
as on governmental action. 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 organiza-
tion and the procedures of Congress -- especially of the Senate -- help to
conserve the interests of minorities and to protect the concurrent majority
on which our constitutional consensus rests.

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Members of Congress and the Senate are responsible American citizens. And, while they bear the special professional responsibility of seeking re-election in local and regional constituencies they are as a group -- on balance -- most likely to behave responsibly when issues are made clear to them by a wise and well-presented Executive Branch policy.

There may need to be changes in the relationships of the Executive as a whole toward Congress. These relationships are sometimes characterized by a disposition to treat Congress as an agency to be cajoled, persuaded, or gotten around, if not as a maleficent force in the body politic that for captious or parochial reasons interpolates particularist conceptions of interest in the way of generalized and imaginative programs proposed by the Executive. These tendencies to treat Congress as an unequal or worse in the governmental structure are reinforced by the organization and performance of Congress itself. These tend on the whole to force Congress to deal with legislative proposals in piecemeal fashion.

Whatever the justification of these modes of Executive treatment of Congressmen, it seems clear that these procedures themselves tend to perpetuate the kind of Congressional responses that seem to justify further Executive deviousness. If Congressmen respond to Executive efforts to discuss policy proposals before they are publicly released, by leaking the proposals and taking prompt counteraction against any threat to particularist interests, the Executive can hardly be expected to take Congress into confidence in

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advance. But it is equally improper to expect Congressmen to accept with
good grace Executive leaks of policy proposals to newsmen in advance of
information to the appropriate Congressional leaders or committees.

The President must find, in his harried schedule, a systematic method
of consulting the leaders of both parties and of bringing them into his confi-
dence as never before. Any administration today must be bipartisan to this
degree and must take certain risks with security leaks in the interests of the
dynamic and effective leadership that alone can command continuing support.
Perhaps the National Security Council could be used to bring in leading
Congressional figures, under the strictest pledge of sharing the responsibility
for the future of the country's survival, after the policies have been developed
sufficiently by the Executive to make a coherent package for presentation.

It was also the general feeling of the Panel that very serious study
should be given to the possibility of having the President's official family,
or some selected members of it, given the right to speak and probably vote in
both houses of 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. But here
again there was no such consensus in the group as would carry a definite
recommendation, but rather a feeling that the idea deserved thorough and
careful study.

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The Performance of Congress

In addition to conflicts between Congressional and Executive Branch
responsibilities and outlook, there are additional problems of Congressional
disorganization that make grave difficulties for American democracy,
particularly in its military and foreign policy performances:

1. There are rarely united party positions with the Congress on military and foreign policy; and there is, therefore, rarely a single party leader with whom the Executive Branch can negotiate with confidence. The Executive Branch must, as it were, construct an *ad hoc* coalition, drawn from both parties, to carry through major legislation.

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

3. Finally, the seniority rule in the election of committee chairmen adds an element of Russian roulette to the leadership process in military and foreign policy.

In foreign affairs the knowledgeability of the Congress has markedly
increased in postwar years. The Senate -- and even the House of Representa-
tives -- contain a group of 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.

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In military affairs, however, the problem of security has converged with the continuing split of the three services to make the education of the Congress more difficult. It is an extraordinary fact that the largest item in the national budget is voted annually by the Congress with only a minimal knowledge of what is involved. The defense budget is a virtually impenetrable document, in no way presenting clearly the nation's military policy and the programs which are designed to implement it; and this ambiguity fairly reflects the results of the negotiator process by which budget is achieved.

In short, the process of leadership in military policy at the Con-
gressional level is peculiarly weak. This weakness is obscured in the short
run by the willingness of Congress to "go along" on matters of national security,
partly because Congressmen regard it as unsafe and, even, unrewarding to
take strong independent positions on major military matters, until the nation
has worked its way into a crisis so unpleasant that it appears safe and
rewarding for the party in opposition to exploit it. 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 irresponsi-
bility about military matters.

This is not to say that even in this field Congress or Congressmen are
important in important roles of leadership; for the inability to create a complete
and self-coherent legislative program does not prevent individual Congressmen
or groups of them, who have particular programs or interests in mind, from

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prodding the Executive Branch, demanding from it proposals for legislation, examining the Executive in detail on its views of the costs and consequences of such proposals, in effect, forcing the Executive to act its role of leadership.

## 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 an issue 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.

Congressional procedures for considering important legislative proposals turn on particular aspects of the legislative process that are not easily altered. Some are rooted in the Constitution, others are rooted in

[Y]

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political practices or in rules of Congress sanctioned by our representative
system and by long practice. These include the rules of seniority on com-
mittees, the terms of representatives, and the requirement that representatives
shall reside in the districts from which they are elected. 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 an appropriate
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. This is of course anathema to the upholders of majori-
tarian democracy, and a source of continuing irritation to those who support
the kinds of legislation denied.

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 executives.
Invocation 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 responsibility
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

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support 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. Such joint conceptions of responsibility may be operative in the party system, and find expression in party platforms; but these always need to be reinterpreted in the light of particular proposals and conditions.

But there is no reason why the Executive should always have to
shoulder 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 we conclude that the
seniority rule be abolished, 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 willingness so put through the political programs espoused
by those caucuses. Selection of committee chairmen thus clearly remains a
matter for determination of the parties in Congress; but such a system would
offer better opportunities for the President as Party leader to bring his
weight to bear.

This is in the very nature of democracy. Congress, on its part, has
a tremendous apparatus of information service, reaching back to every
constituency in the country, utilizing also the media of communications, and

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nearly every Congressman today makes television appearances or certainly
radio broadcasts by platters (as they are called) in his own constituencies.
He speaks on the floor rather rarely; but he gets the attention of the press by
various other devices and he keeps his views before his constituents as much
as possible -- where they are likely to win votes or need defending.

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 this reason we include the budget process as a particularly important
one of Congress and Executive relations.

Problems of budgetary procedure and organization go beyond problems
of organization of the Executive Office of the President and of the Executive
Branch, into the effects of the budget process on policy formulation and execu-
tion. This process combines at least three emphases of vital significance.
First is the budget in its overall fiscal aspect: how does the amount, timing
and direction of Federal spending affect the economy as a whole, and its
major segments? Second is the presentation of Federal activities as a whole
in their dimensions of costs against revenues, with a sub-dimension of the
costs and yields of particular programs. Third is the area of management,
efficiency, and the coordination of staff work.

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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 military budget in particular underlines the weaknesses of leadership in military policies at the Congressional level. It is unwise for American democracy to proceed with its legislators in a fog of ignorance, apathy, and irresponsibility about military matters. Yet under the present system, nowhere is the Congress given the opportunity to consider what kinds of 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, 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 decade.

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

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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.

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 gives close scrutiny to plans for spending money and administering appropriations, 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 appropriations committees. 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.

This improvement would involve reform in the field of Executive Department coordination: 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.

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Another 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.

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 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 substantive committee of the propriety and appropriate scale of a given
program, but it must convince the appropriations committees as well, and to
a large degree from the beginning. Appropriations committees characteris-
tically second-guess the substantive committees and in most cases
appropriate less money than is authorized by substantive legislation. And
these reductions are usually made in response to *ad hoc* and not to overall
budgetary or fiscal considerations. There emerges a tremendous pressure

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on Executive agencies, in conceiving and proposing the funding of programs, to set their sights well above the figure they feel may be legitimate.

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.

Cabinet officials are often brought up by Congressional committees under the injunction *not* to bring along the responsible officials in the agency who have been making the decisions which are to be discussed. This places the Cabinet member at a grave disadvantage in discussing the details of policy matters and the background of decisions not only without benefit of counsel, so to speak, but without being able to have the development by the experts concerned of the points which are at issue. This is a practice which is obviously pursued by Congress through some of its committees with the object of exploiting some partisan advantage in getting unfavorable publicity resulting from such "loaded" hearings.

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Government at the Local Level

It is when one leaves the more dramatic national arena that one begins to see more of the day by day problems of leadership and consensus in the United States. In our local governments our people see democracy close up and they form strong impressions concerning the effectiveness of their government based quite largely upon their local experience. In the local government they find their greatest opportunities for participation and in addition to that in their local governments they feel quite sure that they have the greatest influence. They cannot do anything about the federal income tax but, they can go to the school meeting and tell the school board what they think about the schools. There are great variations in the distribution of powers between the states and their localities and even greater distribution of powers among the localities in one state as compared with another.

A problem which sharply underlines the need for better and broader leadership and democratic action at regional and private levels is the vast complex of predicaments brought about by metropolitanization and the ever-increasing number of Americans who have left rural areas to live in or around a few large metropolitan centers.

Take for example one unsolved problem precipitated by metropolitanism, urban blight, slum areas, and the jotting away of the physical plants of the centers of our cities. As the slums fester those who can afford to flee the city for the suburbs. Urban centers are left with a declining revenue base,

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the delinquency, crime, and disease problems of the slum areas, and an
unbalanced residential population which has been described as the poor,
the very rich, and the childless.

When existing rural labor, negro or white, moves into the cities, it
almost invariably finds itself committed to slum dwelling. Thus, the very
segment of the community most badly needing assistance in its transition
from an uprooted rural society to a new urban environment become slum dwellers.
A full scale integrated attack on the slum problem is required if renewal efforts
are to work. Our present process of letting the slums develop, razing the
debris and rebuilding is monumentally wasteful and expensive of capital,
labor, material, and above all, human resources.

Unless we can summon the state, local, and private leadership to
make the necessary investments to bring our cities up to par and to develop
and redevelop them in correspondence to the nation's growth, we may find in
twenty years that our high personal consumption standard of living has been
bought at the cost of a nightmare of congestion, smoke, poor transportation,
inadequate recreational facilities, crime, slums and inadequate community
services.

Since for the U. S., within the framework of its national objectives
and structure, centralization is unacceptable, there is no doubt that new
forms of coordinating arrangements among governmental units and govern-
mental levels will have to be developed to solve this kind of problem. Some

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of these arrangements will be on an Authority basis set by the limits, for
example, of a communications center. Others may be regional; others will
require administrative coordination, as in the tax area.

There is no doubt we have the physical and material strength resources
to do the job. The open question is still whether or not the American demo-
cratic processes -- especially at the less-dramatic, non-national government
level -- can attract and maintain enough leadership material, enough men and
women, at every level of American politics, to provide the imagination,
training and integrity to run our local machinery.

There are fortunately changing community attitudes toward leadership
on the state and local level that are encouraging the development of potential
leadership. For one thing, the decline of the "Boston" machine in itself has
tended to make state and local government politics more reputable and an
area where more and more people can feel free to enter without being
endangered economically by doing so. Secondly, more and more people are
expecting government to be active in providing services. The modern
suburbanite is very keenly aware of the fact that he is not going to get his
local and state government services unless he gets involved in the process.
A third factor in changing attitudes toward government, local and state
government, comes again from the suburbanite, who has developed a pride
in his suburb that he could never feel for the city he left.

Where there are changing attitudes we also have changing areas for
recruitment for local and state government leadership today. For one thing,

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various group leaders who once thought that it was desirable for them to ignore state and local governments now recognize that they must become politically active. And we find that this is true in almost all types of what are usually called "pressure" groups -- the pressure groups have become politically active because the general public expects that the government can solve problems that they have not been able to solve themselves or that private business hasn't taken care of.

The development of the civil service has become important both at the state and the local level as an area of potential political leadership. The civil service in a few states has become an important organization in policy making and an important area for the bright young college graduate to enter.

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## Parties, Personnel and Private Participation.

Thus far in discussing the operating structure of our democratic process we have paid scant regard to the pressing problem of obtaining the kind of competent, dedicated men and women required to make the structure function effectively. We now propose to examine the personnel problems associated with government service. Although our discussion may center on matters that relate directly to the Federal government, the observations will generally apply with equal force to other levels of our political structure.

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.

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The absence of optimum scope in our civil service system for
recruitment, training, and utilization of its highest-grade officials makes
it almost impossible to co-ordinate any institution such as the Federal
government by procedural device alone. The best co-ordination depends
on the availability of men in top ranks with varies as well as long admini-
strative experience and broad training. Consequently we see: can inter
departmental 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 have a career executive at the apex
of a hierarchy under him?

As with all the other leadership incentives adduced in this Chapter,
the point under discussion applies only too well to national as well as
local leadership. Much of the business community and other private insti-
tutions are reluctant to have their personnel participate in the political and
career ranks of national government administrators. Boards of trustees,
directors, and at times large stockholders of important business have all
too frequently made it difficult or impossible for their personnel to take
periodic leaves of absence for government service, or to concern themselves
prominently with the affairs of a particular administration. The usual reason
for this is the fear that any prominent participation in political activity,
whether in party work or within the Federal administration, may offend one

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or another of the important persons or groups to which a business or a private institution -- (such as a foundation) -- must turn for support. Our business and professional leaders are not playing their part in encouraging young men with whom they are associated to devote at least a part of their life to political service and to recognizing that business or professional success in itself is not necessarily an indication of good citizenship.

There are some harsh facts to face in assessing the current supply of American leadership, notably within the Executive Branch. At the moment there are a substantial number of high-level offices in Washington which stand empty; and there are others filled by men whose names did not initially appear high on the list of desired candidates. There are specific, current reasons for this troubling -- even dangerous -- state of affairs. But there is a general observation to be made; namely, that the nation has not yet matched the rising importance of national policy with a shift in attitude towards government service.

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.

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. This, however, is true: the quality of the men

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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 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.

Outstanding administrators of great corporations as well as those
who have had broad experience in public office in the States and in war-
time service should be available for service. But no matter whether from
business, banking, industry, or other professions, including educational
administrators, the difficulty and risks of choosing to follow a "political"
career in the public service nearly always runs into the clash with the
personal interests of men who have the prospects of much greater financial
rewards and much greater security of employment outside the political
arena. It is a risky business for a top flight business executive to drop
out of his own concern for more than a year or two at the most and sometimes
risky to take a leave from his firm or partnership even for that period of time.
Washington duty is, therefore, generally regarded as a very temporary
interlude.

Retired presidents and chairmen of great corporations or lawyers
who have rounded out their careers or investment bankers with sufficient
wealth to permit them independence of operation can afford the risks of

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politics and the up-rooting of their home ties better than men in the lower
level, particularly at the more important level of the assistant secretaries.
But age does not always bring wisdom and it frequently brings mental rigidity
and a slowdown of energy.

At the bottom of the present difficulty is the persistence of
this classic American view that government service is, for the truly able
man, second order business. The low financial rewards of government service
are a part of the problem, but only a small part; for, at the highest levels,
of business and professional life, from which leadership in national policy
should be drawn, money is an ancillary and, often symbolic incentive.
People often see opportunity and advantage in a tough job. Probably the
prestige of government positions at the higher echelons is the greatest
incentive and there we are probably neglecting the opportunities that could
come from appropriate recognitions of those who have successfully reached
and held such positions.

In short, the problem of improving the quality of personnel in govern-
ment 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 and to hold abler men at the Assistant
Secretary level. The whole governmental process must be suffused by the
President with a sense of clear purpose, of adventure, and of personal
responsibility before first-rate men are likely to undertake and to sustain the

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real sacrifices and frustrations that inevitably must go with work in the
Executive Branch of the Federal government.

But therei 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.

The problem of attracting America's leadership potential into
political life vis our party system also deserves mention. There is a broad
feeling that parties can do much more than they have, not only in these
ways, but as a major solution to the problem of bridging the gaps inherent
in our Federal system, and as major institutions through which citizens
everywhere can participate in government. Most prescriptions for improve-
ment in our party system call for centralization, improvement in central

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organization and discipline, and for the setting up of "shadow governments" that might simplify the problem of transfers of power when an administration suffers defeat at the polls. Most of such proposals involve inherent difficulties and damage to our decentralized political structure. Fortunately it is not necessary to erect new formal and centralized structures -- such as would provide for a clear "governmental opposition" -- for the party system to undergo considerable improvement. As a flexible instrument, inherently responsive to vigorous expressions of political sentiment, the party system can do much more in the clarification of vital issues. And in turn, improved public understanding and support for the current realities of the party system can strengthen it materially.

The attitudes of the business community toward the parties have seriously handicapped the party system as a source of ideas and of leadership. Business has devalued politics and the party process, has discouraged participation of its best people within that process, and has demanded of parties and government direct rewards for contributions, not being satisfied with "a right to be heard and a fair shake".

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 principle very hard, and must

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concentrate on finding the agreements on the consequences of particular
proposals and programs that will command enough assent to get approval
and action.

If our government is to be by the people, it must be able to look
through our party structure to all parts of our community for its leadership
and for its administrative talent. The problem goes to the very root of our
own civilization, with its extraordinary rewards for executive talents in
the business and professional world and the lack of comparable rewards
or security for those who devote themselves to public service, particularly
by accepting political appointive office or by engaging in the never-ending
struggle for elective office.