academic social scientists and the presidency: from wilson to nixon

Academic Social Scientists and the Presidency: From Wilson to Nixon

HAROLD ORLANS

THE INFLUENCE of academic social scientists on the government of the United States has grown during the sixty-two years between the election of Woodrow Wilson and the end of the Nixon administration. Few were in it at the outset, and many were at the close. They were located in high positions, responsible for advising the mighty or for presenting the policies of the administration, and in many offices, with substantial staffs and funds devoted to research on practical and operational problems, planning, policy-analysis, the evaluation of the achievements of particular programmes and administrative effectiveness, and the preparation of statistical series and reports.

Social scientists often see their growing role as a recognition of the growing usefulness of fields which have acquired greater and more specialised knowledge, better theories and methods; having become better trained, organised, equipped and experienced, they can be relied on to produce information and advice useful for many governmental purposes. All that is true to varying degrees. Yet it assigns too much importance to the ostensibly scientific attainments of the social sciences, and too little to the historical and political context in which they have developed and the functions they serve in government and society.

That context has included the growing complexity, bureaucratisation and specialisation of society and government; the increased number and proportion of the population, government employees, presidential appointees, Congressmen and their staffs with higher education; the increased demands for specialised and popularised knowledge; and the need for voluminous social and economic data to record past, guide current, and plan future activities of public and private organisations. Minions must collect these data and experts must interpret them. The expansion of census publications from 56 pages in 1790 to 15,000 in 1920 and 200,000 in 1970 affords an illustration of our growing appetite for numbers.

Social scientists are recruited by governmental and private agencies not just to provide useful information and analysis, but to defend the interests of the agency against attacks made by rival experts. The emergence of experts stimulates the recruitment of other experts to watch over, negotiate with, and if necessary, combat these rivals.

The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson distrusted experts and used them less than might have been expected of the only academically qualified social scientist to

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serve as president. Twice during his election campaign of 1912 he spoke against an excessive reliance on experts, declaring:

What I f e a r . . , is a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job? Because if we don't understand the job, then we are not a free people.

I want to warn the people of this country to beware of commissions of experts. I have lived with experts all my life, and I know that experts don't see anything except what is under their microscope under their eye . . . . An expert feels in honor bound to confine himself to the particular question which you have asked him. 1

As a national leader and scholar, Wilson was a model and warning for subsequent presidents--including Roosevelt and Nixon--who noted his rare talents and failure, rather than the academics who assumed high government positions 20 years later during Franklin Roosevelt's first term. There are critical differences between the intellectual as a political leader engaged in advocacy and action and as a detached scholar and analyst.

The First World War brought to Washington a number of psychologists-- who worked on the testing and assignment of soldiers--and economists-- who worked with business men like Bernard Baruch and Robert Brookings on industrial mobilisation. Despite Wilson's warnings about the dangers of experts, his adviser Colonel Edward House organised "The Inquiry", a group of experts headed by President Sidney Mezes of the City College of New York, to assist at the Peace Conference.

Two long-lived research institutes were founded in this period with the intention of applying economic and administrative science to governmental affairs. The Institute for Government Research, established in 1916 with help from the Rockefeller Foundation, applied to federal agencies the "scientific" approach to government management and budgeting which, in the preceding decade, had engaged the attention of a number of independent and academic research institutes and informational bureaux. The practical research they conducted sought to remove corruption from, and improve the efficiency of, state and local governments. One achievement of the institute, which in 1928 merged with two other institutes to form the Brookings Institution, was the promotion in 1921 of legislation to establish an independent Bureau of the Budget and the Congressional Office of the Comptroller General.

The 1920s

The distinguished Cabinet of undistinguished Warren Harding, first of the three Republican presidents who held office from 1921 to 1933, included two

1 Cited by Davidson, John W., "Wilson in the Campaign of 1912", in Latham, Earl (ed.), The Philosophy and Policies of Woodrow Wilson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 94; the two paragraphs are from separate speeches.

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secretaries who were responsible for the most notable activities of social scientists in his administration and in that of his successor, Calvin Coolidge. The Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace (father of the Wallace who was appointed to the same post in 1933 by Franklin Roosevelt) created the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, headed by Henry C. Taylor, who had been professor at the University of Wisconsin, to provide information about market conditions that might help farmers to cope with the agricultural depression. The Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, a Stanford engineering graduate and member of the American Statistical Association, expanded the department's statistical publications on production, inventories, prices, exports and imports, consumption, employment, credit, etc., with the aim of helping business to adapt more effectively to changing economic conditions�9 "We hoped the business world might better detect the approach of booms and, slumps . . . . We did not claim that statistics were the final remedy . . . . ,,2 Much of the work was undertaken by the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce directed by Julius Klein, formerly a professor at Harvard, who became Hoover's "most trusted adviser". 3

President Harding himself was no scholar and, although respectful of academic social scientists, had little confidence in them and thought that he was incapable of understanding one who was worthy of his confidence:

�9 . . I can't make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then--Godl--I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started�9 I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but, hell, I couldn't read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but I don't know where to find him and haven't the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. GodI What a job! 4

Herbert Hoover was not an academic. His life before he entered government service had been that of an engineer. He did however have a great interest in academic things; he was a patron of learning and he "believed in science". Hoover's philosophy of promoting greater efficiency, productivity and wealth by empirical scientific analysis and the acceptance of voluntary standards by industry and society resembled that of the proponents of scientific reform in government and society: "efficiency meant not simply effectiveness and lower costs, but disinterestedness and professionalism. ''5 Hoover later applied this Progressive doctrine to governmental administration with much success in the first, and less success in the second Hoover Commission, which reported to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, in 1949 and 1955, respectively.

2 The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920-1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 176.

3 Murray, Robert K., The Harding Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 197.

4 White, William Allen, cited by Allen, Frederick Lewis, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper & Row, 1931), pp. 126-127.

5 Tobey, Ronald C., The American Ideology of National Science, 1919-1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), p. 16.


In 1921, Hoover asked Professor Wesley Mitchell to join the Department of Commerce. "If this Department is to become the economic interpreter to the American people (and they badly need one), it has simply got to be stiffened up with stronger economic operators . . . . we need you to come to Washington to give us a hand. ''6 Mitchell declined.

In 1923, Hoover was chairman of the President's Conference on Unemployment. In February of that year Charles Merriam, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, brought the academic social disciplines together in the Social Science Research Council. Asked if the new council would undertake research for the Conference on Unemployment, Merriam declined, agreeing only to help plan the research and to recruit personnel. 7

Merriam knew. . , that the temptation would be strong among his social scientists to become advisers to the President..., thereby certifying themselves as the experts they believed themselves to be, even at the risk of failing to produce the science their researches were intended to generate . . . . s

The Research Committee on Social Trends: Six years later, the Social Science Research Council was past its teething troubles and an invitation from President Hoover was more difficult to decline than one from Secretary Hoover. In September 1929, Merriam became vice-chairman and Wesley Mitchell chairman of the Research Committee on Social Trends, which Hoover appointed, the Rockefeller Foundation financed, and the Social Science Research Council administered "to examine and to report upon recent social trends in the United States with a view to providing such a review as might supply the basis for the formulation of large national policies looking to the next phase of the national development". 9 Over the next three years, several hundred scholars worked on that broad, loosely defined task.

The undertaking was marked by a deep cleavage between William Ogburn, who was professor of sociology at Chicago and research director of the committee, and Mitchell and Merriam, whose inconsistencies and ambiguities were characteristic of the social scientists' attempts to subdue their political inclinations in the search for truth, to be both objective and practical, scientific and influential. Despite his insistence on the neutral presentation of facts and statistics, Ogburn, eager to satisfy Hoover, was willing "to soft-pedal matters which were politically sensitive--race, birth control, the relation of immigration to c r i m e . . . " . 10 Mitchell and Merriam considered the draft report too optimistic, ahistorical and parochial in disregarding the international scene. Ogburn was glad to satisfy the

6 Karl, Barry D., Charles E. Merriam and the Study o f Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 321.

7 Ibid., pp. 208-209. 8 Ibid., pp. 209-210. 9 Quoted from The Memoirs o f Herbert Hoover, op. cit., p. 312. lo Karl, B., op. cit., p. 219.

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President who wanted to review the drafts�9 Mitchell and Merriam wanted to preserve the committee 's independence from the President and to avoid " the embarrassment arising from any suggestions for change, to which it could not agree, or from being charged with having made such changes, even if in fact not t rue". H

Hoover could not use the committee's work, as he had hoped, in a second term since he was defeated in the election of November 1932. In presenting their massive report , finally published in two volumes in January 1933, he wrote:

The significance of this report lies primarily in the fact that it is a cooperative effort on a very broad scale to project into the field of social thought the scientific mood and the scientific method as correctives to undiscriminating emotional approach and to secure factual basis in seeking for constructive remedies of great social problems. The second significance.. , is t h a t . . , it is the first attempt ever made to study simultaneously all of the fundamental social facts which underlie all our social problems . . . . The effort here has been to relate all the facts and present them under a common standard of measurement. 12

The first point was correct; yet the report itself, the conflict between the committee and its staff, and the larger national conflicts about how to break the grip of the terrible depression, demonstrated that facts alone could not uncover or secure the adoption of "constructive remedies of great social problems".

However much the report displeased those who were looking for recommendations for policy, it did make a case for employing social scientists--and the Social Science Research Council--to conduct additional research as a basis for governmental planning�9 It suggested that the Social Science Research Council might "prove an instrumentality of great value �9 . . in the integration of social knowledge, in the initiative toward social planning on a high level". 13

The Administration of Franklin Roosevelt

The election campaign of Governor of New York Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and his 12-year reign as President, inaugurated a new era in the participation of academic social scientists in government. Their participation was comprehensive and diverse. I will concentrate on the early activities of two social scientists, Raymond Moley and Rexford Tugwell, and the work of two committees, the President's Committee on Administrative Management and the National Resources Planning Board in which academic social scientists played an important role.

la 10 December, 1931 letter from Merriam to Edward Hunt, the committee's official liaison with Hoover, in Karl B., op. cit., p. 215.

12 The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, op. cit., p. 313. 13 Cited in Lyons, Gene M., The Uneasy P~trtnership (New York: Russel Sage Foundation,

1969), p. 48.


The "brains trust": A small group of advisers to Governor Roosevel t was first labelled as the "brains trust" in The New York Times in September 1932. Tugwell designated the members as Moley, himself and Adolf Berle, all of them professors at Columbia. The "founders" were Roosevel t ' s law par tner Basil O 'Connor and his counsel Samuel Rosenman; the "associates" were Rober t Straus of the New York State Tempora ry Relief Administrat ion, Hugh Johnson, and business man Charles Taussig. t4 According to Rosenman, he had suggested the idea to Roosevel t in January. "The big financiers, the industrialists, and the national political leaders had not produced anything constructive to 'solve the mess we are i n . . . so why not go to the universi t ies? '" According to Moley, who was professor of government and who headed the group, the idea " that Roosevel t needed expert , professional advice on national issues" had been on his mind for some time. 15 Roosevel t was busy as governor; to win nomination at the Democra t ic convention in June, he needed help in dealing with national issues, especially the deep depression that had afflicted the country.

In March, Moley, who had worked intermittently for Roosevel t since 1928, asked Tugwell, a Columbia economist who had been a pupil of Simon Nelson Patten at the University of Pennsylvania and Moley's neighbour on Morningside Heights, for his views on the depression. "Thir teen million m e n . . were unemployed; . . . the fires were out in most of the steel mills �9 . .; mines were closed; . . . and farmers were adding to a surplus . . . already of smothering size." Tugwell had clear ideas about what was wrong: "The government had to create income . . . . Incomes would make customers; customers would start the f ac to r i e s . . . , , . 16 Moley took him to talk with Rosenman and then, Roosevelt . The talk went on f rom dinner to midnight. To Tugwell, large-scale actions, scientifically managed and efficient, had to be taken. During the First World War, when anti-trust laws had been suspended, production had boomed and afterwards, when Taylorism or scientific management caught fire, the boom continued through the 1920s. With government priming the pump, Tugwell thought it could resume:

What I had to say was practiced enough to come out smoothly, but what was new to me was the possibility of its translation into some sort of action. No professor ever really expects that. His students listen; they even dispute him on occasion; b u t . . . that ends it . . . . He does not expect them to go out and do anything as a consequence . . . . I found the weight a heavy one. I was not sure I was prepared for such a responsibility. Still I was right. I knew I was right) 7

Roosevel t was not then in favour of deficit-spending: "he subscribed to views as frostily thrifty as those o f . . . Calvin Coolidge�9 Berle prepared a

14 Tugwell, R. G., The Brains Trust (New York: Viking Press, 1968), pp. xi-xiii. 15 Ibid., pp. 9, 11. 16 Ibid. , pp. 15-16. 17 Ibid., p. 36. 18 Moley, Raymond, The First N ew Deal (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966),

p. 200.

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m e m o r a n d u m on how to eliminate the Hoover deficits. Years later, Tugwell r emarked on Roosevel t ' s "amazing resemblance to H o o v e r - - u n d e r a contrasting m a s k . . , both saw the same light and both followed it. Hoove r had wanted [but could not o b t a i n ] . . , nearly all the c h a n g e s . . , brought under the New Deal label".19

However , at the time. Tugwell was smitten: " I was taken out of myself . . . . meet ing [ R o o s e v e l t ] . . . was somewhat like coming in contact with destiny itself. It was a t remendous, unnerving exper ience . '2~ Roosevel t was merely intrigued. He "loved the stimulation of unor thodox ideas" and, though rejecting many of them, "the professor 's range of interest provided for him a sort of intellectual cocktail". 21

Many who knew Roosevel t dismissed him as a country gentleman of no intellectual capacity or interest. Ar thur Krock, the correspondent of The New York Times, noted his "Lack of intellectual depth . . . . shallow grounding in history" and excessive reliance "on what is clever and slick �9 . .,,.22 Moley said: "Roosevel t always seemed to feel uncomfortable in the presence of first-rateness. ''23 Moley "never knew him to read a serious book . . . . Roosevel t was too restless to enjoy that . . . he learned by listening". 24 Doubtless, that helped Tugwell 's reception. Roosevel t and Moley knew little economics.

Perhaps this was fortunate for the country, because we were not burdened with or committed to long-held economic dogmas. We were wide open to the influx of ideas . . . . Both of us were bored and confused by long, learned memoranda with which so many people had inundated us . . . . Only a few . . . saw the national economy as a whole and saw what was politically possible and usable by Congress and what would stir up a minimum of controversy. 25

Roosevel t was not an intellectual; he was a politician, the type who seems sincere in what he says, but says different things to different people and is not bound by what he says; 26 who keeps his counsel, which is impenetrable because it is not finally formed until the moment a decision is demanded. To such a man, a wide circle of advice that circumscribes all alternatives is most useful, since it enables him to retain the widest f reedom of choice, to assess the balance of forces, and even to pick new cards before playing them.

Academics were useful, because, having no political support , they could be assigned, reassigned, and, if necessary, dropped without political damage. They were readily detachable from their institutions--like lawyers f rom their firms. Ideas were their stock in trade.

19 Tugweli, R. G., op. cit., p. xxii. 20 Cited by Moley, R., op. cit., p. 356. 21 Ib id . , p. 356. 22 Krock, Arthur, M em o i r s (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), pp.145-146. 23 Moley, R., op. cit., p. 72. 24 1bid. , p. 4. 2s Ib id . , p. 224. 26 Ib id . , p. 7.


To deal with the banking crisis in March 1933, five different proposals were advanced, each supported by significant factions in the party and the country at large. "Roosevelt 's lack of firm conviction proved to be a means of holding together this widely assorted group of advisers. He was willing to try them all, and he used many methods at the same time. ''27

Concerned that the "brains trust" had too many academic social scientists with too little political experience, Moley arranged, after the nomination, to add Senators James Byrnes and Key Pittman. Their "sage advice and wide acquaintance with party personalities saved us many mistakes" and their conservatism "helped to dissipate the dangerous idea that Roosevelt had surrounded himself with wooly-minded theorists"fl 8

In exchange for the excitement and influence, the professors had to give up their right to speak out freely in public. In private, they could argue as they pleased, but the price of participation in discussions about policies was the maintenance of confidence about them. Tugwell recognised and observed the rule:

As long as I could argue and have a say . . . . I found that I had no difficulty in accepting whatever decision was made. From the first, Roosevelt had felt confidence in my discretion. It was never mentioned between us, but it was understood that when he confided in me, or when he thought out loud, what he said was for my ears only. After some of those talks, I made notes, but almost immediately I destroyed most of them; if they were confidences they ought to be respected as such. Some I did not even talk over with Ray [Moley].29

Though one of the more radical figures in the New Deal, Tugwell remained in the government as Under Secretary of Agriculture and later, Governor of Puerto Rico.

After a short period as Assistant Secretary of State, Moley returned to Columbia, commuting frequently to Washington to help with Roosevelt 's messages and major speeches. As he grew more conservative and thought Roosevelt was becoming more radical, he grew uncomfortable with his work. The budget message to Congress in 1936, "a sort of demagogic masterpiece" which he had helped to prepare, was the tipping point. "When I heard the message at home over the radio, my feeling was that of deep regret and self-reproach for the part I had played in mixing this epithetical brew . . . . I had carried the speech-technician business too f a r . . . I would never again help with what I didn't believe."3~ Later, when Roosevelt asked Moley to accompany him during the 1936 campaign, he declined. "That was the last time I ever saw Roosevelt or talked with him."3~

The Brownlow committee: The report of the President's Committee on Administrative Management under the chairmanship of Louis Brownlow,

27 Ib id . , p. 228. 28 Ib id . , p. 366. 29 TugweU, R. G., op. cit., pp. 294-295. 30 Moley, R., op. cit., pp. 543-544. 31 Ib id . , p. 553.

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became, after its submission in 1937, a bible setting forth the gospel of executive management to which many academic theorists and practitioners of public administration have subscribed. Its main conclusions were that:

there should be clean, uninterrupted lines of direction from top to bottom, and of responsibility from bottom to top; the President's span of control should be reduced to a manageable number by the consolidation of all administrative agencies into a limited number of departments; independent agencies.., should be brought within the framework of appropriate departments for all purposes except those purely judicial in nature; the President's competence with respect to his administrative responsibilities should be greatly strengthened.., by providing him an immediate White House Staff with a "passion for anonymity"; and by giving him complete authority over the key staff functions of fiscal management, personnel, and planning. 32

These three staff functions, the committee said, should be assigned to the Bureau of the Budget, the Civil Service Administration and the National Resources Board, respectively; all should be strengthened and made part of the Executive Office of the President. Thus the report launched the growth of Executive Office staff which has continued with little interruption to this day.

Brownlow was a journalist and city manager whom Charles Merriam had brought to Chicago to head the Public Administration Clearing House, a non-profit research and consultation organisation close to the University of Chicago. The Public Administration Clearing House was part of Merriam's scheme for improving government through the application of social science. It was part of a larger programme on which Merriam and Beardsly Ruml were engaged, namely the development of a scientific social science for the "solution of social problems". It was "a 'brains lobby' whose function it was to convince departments of government that they needed the advice of the groups he represented". 33 In 1933, Brownlow offered, with the support of the Clearing House and the Laura Spelman Memorial, "to provide funds for any Cabinet member who wished to consult experts on problems of administration . . . . The President consented, and . . . several Cabinet officers made use of the service". 34 The other two members of the committee were Merriam and Luther Gulick, a leading academic theorist of public administration, president of the Institute of Public Administration in New York and a professor at Columbia University. Merriam had originally sought to have the study conducted by the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Public Administration of which Brownlow was chairman, but President Roosevelt refused to sponsor it "without some assurance that its final recommendations would be to his liking. He conveyed this sentiment

32 Mosher, Frederick C., Democracy and the Public Service (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 80.

33 Karl, B., op. cir., pp. 229-230. 34 Polenberg, Richard, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Pres~, 1966), p. 12.


[to Merriam] quite bluntly". A letter from Brownlow adumbrating the committee's conclusions finally satisfied Roosevelt, who appointed the members in 1936; " . . . names were canvassed but Roosevelt decided to settle for a snug group, knowledgeable and congenial, with a minimum of uncertainties . . . . -35 The committee and a staff of 26, over two thirds of whom held academic appointments, "urged what Roosevelt wanted. They wrote, he edited."36 Roosevelt taught the committee more political science, it has been said, than the committee taught him. On this occasion, Merriam had no objection to the President reviewing the draft or to revising it to satisfy him.

The report aimed at the rationalisation of the federal government under the President, who, as chief executive, would administer all the departments and independent agencies of the executive branch, even though they were authorised by separate statutes, subject to congressional surveillance and supervision, dependent on congressional appropriations, and were headed by officials confirmed by the Senate. There was much opposition. The bill to carry through the committee's recommendations was defeated and the Executive Office of the President was eventually established by an executive order issued by Roosevelt in 1939. "Over the years, however, the main ideas became standard among most administrative reformers and students of government.'37 The report had great influence, but its influence has never gone uncontroverted.

The report also fostered a distinction, stemming from the school of "scientific" management, between "policy"--formulated by political officials in the executive branch and Congress, and its "administration" or execution by dutiful civil servants. This was parallel to the distinction between "recommendations" and the "facts" produced through social research. This distinction legitimates the activities of academic social scientists who are normally experts in scientifically assembling and assessing facts. It is by implication a disavowal of the responsibility of academic social scientists for the exercise of authority through the determination of policy. Nevertheless, the acceptance of the validity of the distinction has not prevented academic social scientists from seeking access to the President, from attempting to influence policy and to exercise power.

In both the National Resources Planning Board and the Council of Economic Advisers academic social scientists have played prominent parts. The board prospered for a while but was in the end abolished. The council has endured since 1946.

35 Mansfield, Harvey C., "Reorganizing the Federal Executive Branch: The Limits of Institutionalization", Law and Contemporary Problems, XXV (Summer 1970), p. 478.

36 Neustadt, Richard E., "Approaches to Staffing the Presidency", in Cronin, Thomas E. and Greenberg, Sanford D. (eds), The Presidential Advisory System (New York: ]-Iarper & Row, 1969), p. 12.

37 Mosher, F. C., op. cit., p. 81.

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The National Resources Planning Board: The National Resources Planning Board was the best known and longest lived of four successive agencies, all having similar functions with a large component of social science.

The first, the National Planning Board, was established in July 1933, by order of Public Works Administrator and Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, to advise on the preparation of a comprehensive emergency programme of public works and the development of co-ordinated federal, regional, state and local plans for such programmes. One source states that Louis Brownlow gave Ickes both the idea for the board and the names of its members. 3s The board was under chairmanship of Frederic Delano, the President's uncle, then 69 years old, long active in regional and town planning. The other two members were eminent academic social scientists, Wesley Mitchell and Charles Merriam--whose campaign manager, when he was a candidate for mayor of Chicago in 1912, was Harold Ickes.

The National Planning Board lasted less than a year. Roosevelt wanted a "permanent long-range planning commission" to prepare a 25- or 50-year programme of national development. 39 Accordingly, the final report of the board, A Plan for Planning, recommended that it be converted from a temporary board appointed by Ickes to a permanent one reporting to the President. Though Ickes "hit the ceiling" upon learning of this, 4~ the National Planning Board was abolished on 30 June, 1934, and on 1 July was replaced by the National Resources Board, with the same staff director, Charles Eliot, and the same members, reporting now directly to Roosevelt. The secretaries of labour and agriculture, Frances Perkins and Henry Wallace, and relief administrator Harry Hopkins joined Ickes in protesting this decision to make a part-time board of persons, who were neither elected representatives nor appointed civil servants, "supreme in its field, without any Cabinet responsibility". 41 They were silenced by being added to the board and Ickes was named its chairman. Delano and Professors Mitchell and Merriam were also appointed to membership of an advisory board; they thereby became advisers to themselves!

The National Resources Board lasted three days longer than its predecessor. Created under the authority of the National Industrial Recovery Act, it was reconstituted by executive order, in June 1935, as the National Resources Committee, with the same membership, after the National Industrial Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional. Finally, in July 1939, under a presidential reorganisation plan, it became the National Resources Planning Board, without its Cabinet members and with the same board of Mitchell, Merriam and Delano as chairman, reporting to Roosevelt.

3s Memorandum by Charles W. Eliot, 2rid, staff director of the planning board, quoted in Clawson, Marion, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, pp. 42-43.

39 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr, The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 350.

4o Harold L. Ickes diary, cited by Clawson, M., op. cit., p. 45. 41 Karl, B., op. cit., pp. 247-248.


Roosevelt liked "Uncle Fred" (Delano) and "Charlie" (Merriam); he also liked to multiply his sources of advice and deliberately to complicate and duplicate responsibilities. He was willing to listen to advice from many sources but felt no obligation to protect his advisers. Their independence of all other political powers than that of the President was their undoing.

From 1933 to 1943, as the several planning agencies evolved, their staff grew from five to 261, and an increasing proportion of reports was produced by the staff-members with a large number of academic social scientists, but with little or no guidance from the board. The agencies also stimulated and published work by consultants, part-time staff, advisory committees, and reports prepared jointly with or primarily by other government bodies; 370 reports were produced in ten years. Many were unavoidably unrealistic, predicting developments which never occurred and offering proposals which had no chance of political acceptance. Others rode on the tide of opinion. Most of them disappeared without trace.

Some of the publications of the board went considerably beyond research. One pamphlet, After the War--Full Employment, produced in 1942 by Alvin H. Hansen, professor of economics at Harvard, advanced Keynesian views about government debt and spending. "It is the responsibility of Government to do its part to insure a sustained demand . . . . The public debt is something very different from the private debt of an individual . . . . A public debt is an instrument of public policy." The report "aroused fierce and emotional criticism, in the Congress, in the business world, and in at least part of the press". 42

Some publications of the board did not even purport to observe the austere canons of empirical social research. A pamphlet and one-page broadside, "Our Freedom and Rights", said:

We look forward to securing, through planning and cooperative action, a greater freedom for the American people . . . . The translation of freedom into modern te rms. . , includes, as the National Resources Planning Board sees i t . . . The Right to Work . . . ; The Right to Fair P a y . . . ; The Right to Security... ; The Right to Live in a System of Free Enterprise, free f rom. . , irresponsible private power . . . and unregulated monopolies . . . . 43

Whatever its merits as a call for social legislation, this was not a dispassionate summary of empirical research. It was a political tract which invited and received political attack.

A more solid piece of social scientific advocacy, the report on Security, Work, and Relief Policies released in February 1943, provoked much criticism. Prepared under the direction of Professor Eveline Burns, an economist at Columbia, with the help of many government and private experts, it recommended extensive programmes of unemployment and medical insurance, welfare, and old age assistance that critics called "the

42 Clawson, M., op. cit., p. 182. 43 Ibid. , p. 184.

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opening wedges toward socialism". This was "not merely a planning report on how to carry out established national policy". It was, in fact, "a policy-forming document of the most specific kind". 44 Yet the report was prepared by a group of experts, some of them academic, and it was released by a board of private citizens, predominantly academic, who, in true academic style, had given them freedom to say what they pleased. It was not a proposal of the administration, cleared with the departments and their congressional allies; yet it was forwarded to Congress by the President, the leader of his party and administration. The ambivalence of academic social scientists in government, the appearance of scientific objectivity, coupled with arrogated political aspirations under the protection of the President, was very clear.

The board had sought and gained a wider scope than public works; then it had sought and gained freedom from "the uncomfortable protection of a cabinet group". 45 Now that it served only Roosevelt and he was its main protector, Roosevelt, preoccupied with the war, lost interest. "Uncle Fred" and "Charlie" wanted to meet him; Roosevelt refused. He liked them, but their board had become a political liability. When Congress cut off its appropriation in 1943, Roosevelt did not fight for it. That was the fate of one foray of academic social scientists into the very centre of authority.

The Council of Economic Advisers: The Employment Act of 1946 reflected the hope that effective economic planning and full employment like that achieved during the Second World War might be continued in peace-time; that the high unemployment expected during the reconversion of industry to civilian production might be minimised; and that another great depression could be avoided. It proclaimed "the continuing policy and responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable means . . . to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power". A three- member Council of Economic Advisers, appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, was established to watch economic trends which might affect that policy and make recommendations thereto; to appraise the extent to which diverse federal activities contributed to that policy and make recommendations about them; to submit an annual economic report to the President and help him prepare one for Congress; and to make such other studies and recommendations on economic policy and legislation as the President might request�9

�9 . . the Council was expected to prevent depress ion, in te rpre t the E m p l o y m e n t Act , serve as a planning body in the light of that interpretation, provide expert and objective advice, and operate as an institutional form of presidential advice. As marching orders, these expectations were as broad as they were inconsistent, as discretionary as they were inhibiting. 46

44 Ibid., pp. 142-143. 45 Karl, B., op. cit., p. 241. 46 Flash, Edward S., Jr, Economic Advice and Presidential Leadership: The Council o f

Economic Advisers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 17.


Thus was formed the most prominent and long-lived body explicitly designed to utilise the knowledge of social science for presidential purposes.

During its early years, the council's survival was uncertain. After passage of the Employment Act, it took five months for President T ruman to nominate the first three members. The first chairman of the council was Edwin Nourse, who, more than any of his successors, sought to act as a detached scholar abstaining from politics in the office of the~chief political officer of the government. Vice-president of the Brookings Institution, and former president of the American Economic Association and chairman of the Social Science Research Council, Nourse was hesitant about accepting the appointment: "I was challenged by the possibility of helping to make objective analysis the basis of government policy-making but questioned whether by temperament or background I was fitted for the rough-and- tumble of public life." To ease his predicament, he wrote Truman a letter setting forth his view of the council as "a scientific agency" that should engage in "fact-finding" and "diagnosis", not "advocacy". How much help could such a council be to a president who must not only advocate policies but execute those which Congress enacts and assume responsibility for the consequences? Truman thanked Nourse for his letter and issued a statement that the council's function was both "fact-finding" and "to formulate and recommend national economic policies . . . , , . 4 7 Politics is the process of replacing careful distinctions with carefree generalities and embracing contradictions the logical mind abhors.

Nourse recognised the significance of location, rank, and direct access to the President-- the formal emblems of status in Washington. He insisted on offices in the Old State Building adjoining the White House, refusing better space a block away. He contended that council and Cabinet members should have the same rank and salary--Truman disagreed. 4s When necessary, he dealt with the President directly and not with a presidential assistant. Nonetheless, he missed a sense of influence, of being heeded as well as heard. During three meetings to discuss Truman's Economic Report of January 1947, there

was no th ing . . , which in any way suggested that the President was interested in the content of the work our staff had been doing or in the conclusions toward which we were moving . . . . [Truman] indicated. . , that he had stated a consistent policy in some four or five documents . . . . He apparently entertained the view without question that the Economic Report would be brought into line with those recommendations rather than they would be held in abeyance pending study of the materials we submitted . . . .

Right up to the time that I left the Council, the President continued to make protestations as to the value of the agency. But it seemed to me that he valued it only as a dignified "front" for his policies. As soon as we ventured to challenge any of them, he retreated behind his Presidential prerogative and "put us in our place". 49

47 Nourse, Edwin G., Economics in the Public Service (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), pp. 105-108.

48 Ibid., pp. 358, 379. 49 1bid., pp. 137-138, 370.

186 Harold Orlans

Nourse saw the council as the government 's principal agency for analysing, but not making, economic policy; it should analyse department policies, criticise them when they served special interests, and attempt to develop consistent national policies. Yet he refrained from explicit recommendations of policy, evidently believing that these would emerge implicitly from the meticulous analysis and synthesis of data. He welcomed disagreements by council members and wanted them reported to the President, since a clarification of divergent viewpoints, advancing understanding, was preferable to the ambiguous language necessary to accommodate disagreements. In his diary he once wrote: "I think differences should be made explicit, with the reasons therefor rather than devising slippery ambiguities which obfuscate the issues and can later be interpreted by any [council] member according to his own liking.'5~

Inevitably, the suspension of belief in a scholarly search for the truth clashed with the suspension of doubt in the government 's need to act. Nourse was a model of the "on the one hand--on the other hand" scholar. On one occasion, the exasperated Truman cried out, "Can ' t somebody bring me a one-handed economist? ''51 Once, Nourse gave Truman a majority and minority report. Truman said, "Thank you . . . . I'll study it with great care." The next morning, he told his aide Clark Clifford: "Well , I asked these guys for a report , and they gave me two reports. You take them and see if you can make anything of them. ''52

Nourse considered the council "an intellectual staff arm of the Presidency devoid of any responsibilities or privileges of sharing in the official enunciation or implementation of executive policy". 53 He regretted that Truman "had neither formal intellectual training nor a contemplative mind" and that "a Cabinet meeting is not a good intellectual forum". 54 He preferred to deal with Cabinet members and the President privately; yet his sessions with Truman were frustrating:

�9 . . the President was always very gracious, friendly and nice--too nice, in fact. He wasn't business-like enough. He'd tell me what happened on his walk that morning, or tell me chit-chat about his family--wasting minutes of this precious appointment . . . . I think I never had a real intellectual exchange with the President, that I was opening my mind to analysis with him, that he was following me. 55

Leon Keyserling, the council member who became chairman after Nourse's resignation in 1949, remarked:

5o Diary entry, 2 September, 1949, quoted in ibid., p. 284. 51 Heller, Walter, in "Edwin Nourse, 90, Dies; Truman's Economic Aide," New York

Times, 10 April, 1974. 52 Interview with Edwin Nourse, July 1958, in Silverman, Corinne The President's Economic

Advisers (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press for the Inter-University Case Program, 1959), p. 14.

53 Nourse, E. G., op. cit., p. 410. 54 Ibid., pp. 375,385. 55 Silverman, C., op. cit., pp. 13-14.

A c a d e m i c Social Scientists and the Presidency 187

Dr Nourse was simply unable to adjust himself to the nature and the problems of the Presidency. He could never understand that the President of the United States has too many things to do to engage in long bull sessions on economics of the kind that take place at The Brookings Institution. He could never understand that the President must delegate, must have confidence in his principal officers, and that these officers have no just cause for complaint when the President not only remains accessible to them but also accepts practically everything that they recommend to him. 56

That "accepts practically everything" was a marked exaggeration. T ruman gave the council 's draft of his first Economic Repor t to his

assistant John Steelman, who passed it to three members of his staff. Two weeks later, it was returned to the council:

substantially shortened, drastically changed in order of presentation, and considerably "jazzed up" in style. After this text had been examined by the Council and top staff members, it was the unanimous feeling that many things that were essential to a consistent and workmanlike analysis had been o m i t t e d . . , and that the rearrangement obscured the essential outline of our analysis.

Af te r two meetings with the council and several Cabinet members , a new draft was produced with which the council remained dissatisfied. A final revision incorporating many changes proposed by the council "was in the main satisfactory to US". 57

In July 1949, Nourse received a draft of a radio talk Truman was to give that evening:

Some f igu res . . , were palpably distorted, and I promptly called this to the attention of the White House aides. I was so much concerned that I followed the matter up during the afternoon and was finally assured that changes were being made. That evening I listened to the radio address and was amazed to find the passage used exactly as first written.

T ruman had said that, over the last 40 years, national income "has increased more than ten times as fast as the popula t ion" , instead of three t imes- - the correction, allowing for price inflation, that Nourse had sought to make. When Nourse pointed out the "serious er ror" , Truman replied, " I appreciated your l e t t e r . . , and I think you are unduly alarmed over the s ta tement . . . . The figure really looks to me like ten and, I think, it looks that way to anybody e l s e . . . , . 5 8

"The re is no occasion for the Council to become involved in any way in the advocacy of particular measures ," Nourse told Truman before his appointment . 59 Such "measures" included, above all, the President 's own policy positions. An upright, conscientious, s tubborn professional man, Nourse could be honest and comfortable in the role of a scholar, educator or confidential adviser. Not given to proselytising, half-truths, or

56 Ibid., p. 5. 57 Nourse, E. G. op. cit., pp. 141-142. 58 1bid., pp. 376-377. 59 Ibid., p. 107.

188 Harold Orlans

manoeuvring, he shrank from either intellectual or political advocacy. Council members should, he felt, "make intellectually uncommitted analyses of pending economic issues" for the private consideration of the President and Cabinet, not act as an "economic at torney" or "mouth-piece" for an interest group, a cause, or " the President's policies whatever they are" .60

The Employment Act required council members to be confirmed by the Senate and established a Joint Economic Committee to hold hearings and "file a r e p o r t . . , containing its findings and recommendations with respect to each of the main recommendations made by the President in the Economic R e p o r t . . . " . Nevertheless, Nourse opposed the appearance of council members before congressional committees, fearing that they might have to reveal internal disputes, dissemble, endorse policies with which they disagreed, or, implicitly or explicitly, by silence or speech, criticise administration policies: that is, do things which are normal and customary in testimony by administration representatives.

What happens when a policy comes up which you don't think is good economics-- and they're bound to come because the President can't be expected always to follow the advice of the Council when he takes into account all factors in the political decision-making process . . . . Suppose the President took a position for, say, selective price or wage controls . . . . Then some smart s ena to r . . , says, "That's a very interesting case you make for this policy, Dr Nourse. Now I notice that on page 486 of your book, America's Capacity to Produce, you deplore government controls in these words. Now, do you think the situation has changed?" What am I going to do? Someone else might make a forty-minute speech showing how conditions had

, 61 changed. I couldn t operate on that basis.

"I wished all my previous writings could have been obliterated at the moment I was sworn i n . . . ," Nourse told a group of economists. "Not that I wished to repudiate them, but I did not want it thought . . . that views previously expressed would commit me to any particular line of doctrine or impair my o b j e c t i v i t y . . . , . 6 2

Nourse declined or forestalled several invitations to testify before congressional committees, including a request in November 1947 to testify on the domestic economic effects of the Marshall plan, which the council had studied for the President. Initially, the two other council members, Keyserling and John D. Clark, acceded to Nourse's position, though disagreeing with it. James Webb, the director of the budget, advised that the council "can properly refuse to testify in appropriate circumstances. However , it cannot make a practice of refusing . . . without provoking Congressional i rr i tat ion"--and, the other council members feared, cuts in council appropriations. 63

The issue came to a head in mid-1948 when administration spokesmen

60 1bid., p. 417. 61 Silverman, C., op. cit., p. 13. 62 Nourse, E. G., op. cit., p. 394. 63 Ibid., pp. 207-208, 210.


were rallied to defend its economic policies before a special session of the Republican-controlled Congress which Truman had called as part of his strategy to win the election of November. When Nourse again refused to testify--this time, at the direct request of the President 's legislative assistant--Truman and his aides discussed the matter repeatedly. Finally, Truman excused Nourse but authorised Keyserling and Clark to testify, which they frequently did thereafter.

Nourse spoke often at professional and public meetings, sometimes criticising administration policy. To the charge of inconsistency, he replied that such "educat ional" talks were under his control, whereas an appearance before a congressional committee was "subject to political exploitation". 64 That attests to a naivety in assuming that a presidential adviser's criticism at a professional meeting has no political significance, and to a lamb's fear of being devoured by the congressional wolves.

The political economists: As a Harvard-trained lawyer, former congressional aide and government official who had "his fingers in almost every pie baking in the New Deal oven", Nourse's successor Keyserling was glad to testify before Congress to promote presidential programmes, and to gain public attention. 65 "Nourse didn't like the limelight. �9 . . . . . 66 Keyserhng lovea it. He was not an academic social scientist by profession or by ethos. He considered Nourse's stance to be inappropriate for a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate; he should defend administration policies so long as he was in basic agreement with them and resign when he was not. Although he had studied economics at Columbia after his training at Harvard Law School, Keyserling was one of the few members of the council without a Ph.D.-- l ike Kermit Gordon on the council under President Kennedy, and Alan Greenspan, chairman under President Ford; with his political activism, this hurt his standing among academic economists. Keyserling wrote caustically about:

the attitude of so many of the so-called professional economists toward me, and their state of shock when I was made Vice-Chairman of the original Council in 1946, and Chairman later on . . . . From 1933 to 1946, I had been more creatively and actively engaged in the forging and administration of important national economic policies and programmes than any other economist, in addition to speaking and writing very widely on these subjects. Despite all this, the general viewpoint among the so-called professional economists was that I was unqualified for CEA membership because I had not completed the essay requirements for a Ph.D.! If, instead of coming to Washington in 1933, I had completed these requirements, taught a course or two . . . . and written a few of the entirely useless (for practical purposes) types of econometric articles which usually appear in the American Economic Review, the so-called professionals would have deemed me entirely qualified. 67

64 Ibid., pp. 402--403. 65 Silverman, C., op. cit., p. 4. 66 Ibid., p. 10. 67 Letter of 10 June, 1971, quoted in Norton, Hugh S., The Employment Act and the Council

of Economic Advisers, 1946-1976 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), p. 115.

190 Harold Orlans

The council was at a low ebb when Arthur Burns became chairman in March 1953. 68 This was a return to academic economics. A disciple and successor of Wesley Mitchell at both Columbia and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Burns moved promptly to strengthen the council chairman and thereby to inhibit minority reports. He reviewed the nomination of other members and induced Eisenhower to reorganise the council so as to eliminate the post of vice-chairman and make the chairman responsible for managing the staff and reporting to the President. Though inexperienced at bureaucratic politics, Burns "caught on fast and became a shrewd and first-rate operator". 69 He handled council contacts with the White House, the President, and the Congress, holding his cards close to his chest so that council staff might not know what position he would take.

Above all, Burns had the support of Eisenhower, who had also been his president at Columbia, and the economist Gabriel Hauge, Eisenhower's assistant. Eisenhower met Burns weekly and "repeatedly told his Cabinet members that he wished them to consult the CEA Chairman on all important economic matters and policies". 7~ Burns attended Cabinet meetings, was involved in much legislative planning, and led the government's successful efforts to combat the recession of 1953-54.

Altogether, Burns was far more influential than his predecessors in shaping administration policy. He was not always successful, especially when he disagreed with the Treasury Secretary, George Humphrey, and his successes reflected his advocacy of modest rather than major policy changes. 71 Yet he held the President's confidence.

Unlike Keyserling, Burns avoided openly political addresses; unlike Nourse, he testified before congressional committees, preferring to do so in executive session--an alternative Nourse dismissed as spurious. 72 Liking Eisenhower and loyal to him, Burns did not, of course, criticise him in public:

�9 . . in some cases the President had to adopt policies that he didn't like and that I didn't like. He had to do it for reasons of overall political policy, but his heart was bleeding over it. What should I do before a committee of Congress in such a case? Should I criticise the President when I happen to know that he shares my views? Would that be fair? In any case, how could I criticise the President publicly and still remain a useful member of his administration? On the other hand, how could I say to

973 a congressional committee that something is sound when I believed otherwise.

How indeed? Can prudence, which requires silence, be reconciled with honest speech? Can political realism be reconciled with professional

68 Technically, it did not exist for a brief period, when its appropriation expired, and Burns served initially as a presidential adviser.

69 Flash, E. S., op. cit., p. 168. 70 Silverman, C., op. cit., p. 15. 71 Flash, E. S., op. cit., p. 162. 72 Nourse, E. , op. cit., pp. 412-413. 73 Silverman C., op. cit., p. 16.


integrity? Conscientious men in Washington would answer: Tell some but not all of the truth. The economic adviser "can and should maintain personal integrity by refusing to say publicly anything that he does not believe even though he cannot say publicly everything he does believe". TM The whole truth may be embarrassing and immobilising; it interests only God and ponderous scholars--presidents and politicians, men of action and decision have little time for it.

Professor Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was President-elect John Kennedy's first choice as chairman of the council; he declined and recommended Professor Walter Heller, head of the University of Minnesota's department of economics.

Heller "approached his assignment . . . with demonstrated economic expertise that was charged with ideology and practicality". 75 Taking office with a new, rather than established, administration, Heller, like Burns, was immediately caught up in the preparation of presidential messages and proposals to reverse a rising tide of recession and unemployment. At his first appearance before the Joint Economic Committee, in March 1961, he addressed the issue of public testimony: " . . . the Council must protect its advisory relationship to the President. We assume that the Committee does not expect the Council to indicate in what respects its advice has or has not been taken by the President . . . , , .76 Heller's advice to stimulate the economy by cutting taxes, which Treasury Secretary Dillon had opposed, had not been taken.

In July, when additional military expenditures prompted by Soviet moves against Berlin threatened to aggravate budget deficits, the issue became a possible tax increase. Published accounts afford glimpses, frozen like stroboscopic photographs of hummingbird wings, of the hectic realities of presidential decision-making. On 19 July, Kennedy states that a tax increase is being considered; on 21 and 22 July, the press reports that Dillon and Budget Director David Bell favour it; on 22 July, they join Heller in opposing it. Kennedy flies to Hyannis with Seymour Harris on the 22 July and returns with Paul Samuelson two days later; both economists urge him to reject the increase. However, it is said, none of the foregoing knew Kennedy's decision until he announced, in a national address on 25 July, that a tax increase was not needed--but would later be requested, if conditions changed.

Again in 1962, Heller lost his campaign for a cut in taxation which Dillon and Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, opposed. The next year, he won it, with their concurrence, and received much credit for the victory: "the C o u n c i l . . . persuaded, cooperated and competed with tact and effectiveness . . . . It is quite a turnabout for a

74 Okun, Arthur, The Political Economy of Prosperity (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1970), pp. 26-27.

75 Flash, E. S., op. cit., p. 177. 76 Ibid., p. 189.

192 Harold Orlans

President to commit himself to a balanced budget one year and defend a voluntarily incurred deficit the next."77

In New Dimensions of Political Economy, published in 1966, Heller attributed "the unbroken U.S. expansion since early 1961" to the willingness of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson "to use, for the first time, the full range of modern economic tools". He declared that the "scope and reliability of economic analysis and forecasting" had grown and that "modern economics can, after all, deliver the goods . . .,.78 Four years later, Heller removed this book from the reading list of his introductory economics course at Minnesota, because its "optimistic tone does not hold up well in the light of what has happened to the country since" 79

Reviewing the record of the council from 1946 to 1963, Flash concludes that it has become "the government's economic ideologist". Its advice to successive presidents has not been "objective . . . detached . . . and unprejudiced", but set "within the framework of governing economic and policy v a l u e s . . . " . s ~ Nourse's idea of scholarly detachment has yielded to the council's active involvement in formulating and justifying administration policies. As Arthur Okun, council chairman under President Lyndon Johnson, observed, in what may be taken as a final verdict on the aspiration of his retired Brookings colleague Edwin Nourse--who then, at 86, still occasionally came in to his office on the library floor--to install an outpost of economic scholarship in the frenetic Executive Office Building:

members of the Council of Economic Advisers are clearly recognized as the President's men. If they speak publicly, they will be identified as spokesmen for administration positions . . . . No CEA member has ever claimed to be the spokesman for a purely professional view . . . . Neither presidents nor their advisers can hope ever to convince their audiences that their pronouncements on partisan issues are professional and nonpolitical . . . . when the President's economists decide to go on public record, they cannot serve two masters. They cannot speak for the profession publicly and still maintain confidence and rapport internally with the President . . . . the Council.. . simply cannot and should never be expected to fulfill the nonpolitical, purely professional function, sl

Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, economists and "systems analysts" and "policy analysts" came to the fore. The "worst fears of those who dread the Age of the Economist are confirmed by the list of professional economists currently or recently serving in high places", Walter Heller wrote in March 1966, citing "directors of the Budget Bureau and the Agency for International Development; ambassadors; key policy makers in the White House and the Pentagon; under secretaries of State, Treasury, and

77 Ibid., p. 271. 7s Heller, Walter W., New Dimensions of Political Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1966), pp. 1, 4, 3. 79 "Economists go for the Money--and get it", Business Week (29 January, 1970), p. 62. 80 Flash, E. S., op. cit., pp. 276, 290. sl Okun, A., op. cit., pp. 27-29.


Agriculture", and, of course, such agencies as the Federal Reserve Board and the Council of Economic Advisers. 82 One analysis showed that almost half of Kennedy's first 200 senior appointments had a background in government and 18 per cent came from universities and foundations, whereas 42 per cent of those appointed by Eisenhower came from business, and 6 per cent from universities and foundations, s3

The Planning-Programming-Budgeting System

One of the consequences, and even more one of the motives, of the introduction of academic social scientists into government is the belief that they can make the workings of government more rational, more efficient and more effective.

A high point of this effort was made in President Johnson's extension throughout the government, in August 1965, of the cost-benefit methods of programme-choice and budgeting that the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, a graduate of Harvard Business School, and his comptroller, the economist Charles Hitch, from the Rand Corporation and Queen's College, Oxford, had introduced into the Department of Defense in 1961. This "very revolutionary system" developed by "our top management experts" aimed, the President said, "to make our decision-making process as up-to-date as our space-exploring equipment". Carried through by "a very special staff of experts" to be set up in every department and agency, it would enable the administration to:

(1) Identify our national goals with precision and on a continuing basis (2) Choose among those goals the ones that are most urgent (3) Search for alternative means of reaching those goals most effectively at the least cost (4) Inform ourselves not merely on next year's costs, but on the second, and third, and subsequent year's costs of our programs (5) Measure the performance of our programs to insure a dollar's worth of service for each dollar spent s4

This embarrassing hyperbole--not "revolutionary" but "very revolutionary" and "very s p e c i a l . . , experts"--should not be blamed on the hapless economists upon whom the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) was thrust by Johnson in another of the interminable efforts of presidents to gain control of the bureaucracy. The Budget Director Charles Schultze, an experienced, incisive economist--not a "top management expert' '--who was directed to launch the system suddenly, had wanted to introduce it gradually, because of the obvious difficulties of

s2 Heller, W. W., op. cit., p. 2. s3 Seymour Harris, cited in Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr, A Thousand Days (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 211. 84 The quotations on PPBS are drawn from two statements by the President announcing the

new system on 25 August, 1965. Planning-Programming-Budgeting: Official Documents, Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations of the Committee on Government Operations, US Senate, 90th Congress, 1st Session, 1967, pp. 1-2.

194 Harold Orlans

identifying many goals honestly and finding data to measure their attainment accurately. Who would dare to acknowledge that an agency's goal was to grow in size and influence and to provide more funds and services to constituents? "I f the Department of A g r i c u l t u r e . . . is trying to shift a lot of people out of farming, will it be wise to advertise this objective? If the State Department values a program that induces . . . a healthy respect for US power, should it say so in a public analysis? ''85

In their writings and public testimony, cost-benefit experts like Charles Hitch, Charles Schultze, Alain Enthoven and James Schlesinger were far more cautious than the President about the benefits of systems- and programme-analysis. Nonetheless, they claimed benefits; they could hardly do otherwise without renouncing their profession. Certainly, the profession benefited: one Washington economist called the Planning-Programming- Budgeting System, "a full employment program for economists".

"Much of the literature of PPBS", Frederick Mosher noted, "resembles that of the technocrats of the thirties; its aim seems to be to eliminate politics from decisionmaking.'86 This was an astute observation applicable to much of the history of the relationships of American academic social scientists to politics and government. Civil service reform, the merit system, the city-manager plan, the use of the expert and the scientific method, were all efforts to reduce the part of politicians and politics in public life.

Fe~irs were expressed about the mathematics of "whizz-kids" replacing the judgement of seasoned generals and political appointees. Of course, politics were not eliminated; they simply reappeared in another form. The ideal of rationalisation of government by the techniques and modes of thought of the social sciences was once more frustrated. The frustration was not primarily the achievement of politicians; the experts themselves had their hands in it.

Especially in private appraisals analysis has been justified with increasing frequency and frankness as part of an adversary proceeding . . . . the emphasis tends to shift to a search for the winning argument as opposed to the correct conclusion . . . . One senior official has observed, only half facetiously, that experience in debate is the most valuable training for analytical w o r k . . . Analysis is, in the end, a method of investigating rather than solving problems. The highest strategic objectives, the statement of preferences or utility, must in large part be imposed from outside . . . . Studies are driven by the underlying assumptions, and these may be imposed directly or indirectly from above . . . . Since judgment and analysis are thoroughly intertwined in all but a few studies, the attempt of decisionmakers to shift roles by referring to fundamental analyses should be treated with some skepticism. 87

85 Held, Virginia, "PPBS Comes to Washington", in Cronin, T. E. and Greenberg, S. D. (eds), op. cit., p. 79.

S6Mosher, Frederick C., in Planning-Programming-Budgeting, Selected Comment, Prepared by the Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations of the Committee on Government Operations, US Senate, 90th Congress, 1st Session, 1967, p. 26.

87 Schlesinger, James R., Uses and Abuses of Analysis, Memorandum Prepared at the Request of the Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations of the Committee on Government Operations, US Senate, 90th Congress, 2nd Session, Committee Print, 1968, pp. 2-3, 11.


In 1967, Schultze reported that the realisation of the Planning- Programming-Budgeting System "has been spotty, with great disparities between agencies a n d . . , constituent parts of agencies". Implementation had not even started in 15 of the 36 agencies to be covered; requisite staff and data were in short supply; "thousands of issues" had to be analysed; the analyses, "crowding together" with budget plans, could not receive adequate attention from agencies and the staff of the Bureau of the Budget; the analysis of programmes with state and local government participation posed special difficulties, as did those involving foreign activities--it was difficult "determining U.S. policy goals in a rapidly changing world a n d . . . defining them in terms of programs"; "harrassed and skeptical agency officials" were unconvinced of the usefulness of the system. Concluding this mournful recital, Schultze states "We have not yet by any means achieved my expectations for the system. That is partly because I have such high expectations for it. '88

In 1968, the Bureau of the Budget found "at least some tangible effort" in three agencies, little impact in others, and "outright defiance" elsewhere, s9 In 1971, the system was abandoned.

The Obligation o f Intellectuals

In the years 1964 and 1965, the Johnson administration advanced and the Congress enacted a volume of social legislation unprecedented since the New Deal. Speaking in September 1966 at the fiftieth anniversary dinner of the Brookings Institution, Johnson remarked on the part intellectuals had played in the formulation and implementation of this legislation:

There is hardly an aspect of the Great Society's program that has not been molded, or re-molded, or in some way influenced by the communities of scholars and thinkers. The flow of ideas continues . . . . Some are ingenious; some are impractical; some are both. But without the tide of new proposals that periodically sweeps into this city, the climate of our government would be very arid indeed . . . . we have s e e n . . , two aspects of intellectual power brought to bear on our nation's problems: the power to create, to discover and propose new remedies for what ails us; and the power to administer complex programs in a rational way.

The President called on intellectuals to help in a third way, by evaluating the effectiveness of government programmes; in succeeding years, many such evaluations were conducted by social scientists at universities and independent research institutes.

Whereas Arthur Schlesinger allowed that it was as legitimate for intellectuals to stand apart from as to participate in government, Johnson held it their responsibility, when asked, to advise the government:

88 Planning-Programming-Budgeting, Hearings before the Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations of the Committee on Government Operations, US Senate, 90th Congress, 1st Session, Part 1, 23 August, 1967, pp. 25-26.

89 Schultze, Charles L., The Politics and Economics of Public Spending (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1968), p. 80.

196 Harold Orlans

Our aim must be good, and for that we need guidance and discriminate judgment as well as exhortation.

That judgment is exactly what those to whom God has given a good mind, and to whom circumstances have given a good education, are called upon to provide.

Their judgment may be wrong, and they must live with that knowledge as other men do who have been chosen by their fellow citizens to exercise the powers of government.

Their judgment may be right and still not be accepted in the political arena or the editorial room. That is a risk that they take all along with everyone else.

But they must provide it; it is an obligation of responsible intellect . . . . 90

That was to say: the academics who were exhorting the President to leave Vietnam should rejoin the Republic: they Should advise the President, if asked, but not necessarily expect their advice to be taken.

A Torrent o f Commissions

President Johnson, and still more frequently President Richard Nixon during his first term, created many ad hoc presidential commissions composed of leading private citizens. 91 As most commissions are chosen to represent major interest groups involved in the area of inquiry, social scientists were not prominent among their members; they were however active as staff-members and consultants to commissions examining economic and social issues.

Presidential commissions have sometimes been effective. They have also often been assigned tasks which are impossible to fulfil. For example, commissions have been requested to find the means of preventing assassinations, violence, crime and civil disorder. 92

Countless impossible questions are addressed to, and asked by, the White House--entreat ies about the fate and condition of our people, questions which seek to undo or forestall calamities, to ease suffering and anxiety, to reduce uncertainty, to fathom the part and foresee the future, to enlarge hope and confidence. Such are among the tasks now given to commissions. Unfortunately, a commission is a means to negotiate consensus, not to speak with the tongues of angels, and the social sciences are a means to provide commissions with empirical evidence of observable facts, not wisdom, deep insight, or inspiration.

The Nixon Administration

Richard M. Nixon came to the presidency without the blessing of most social scientists and to the marked apprehension of many. Those who had

90 Johnson, Lyndon B., Government and the Critical Intelligence (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 29 September, 1966), p. 16.

91 Truman appointed 17 commissions, Eisenhower nine, Kennedy 12, Johnson 28, and Nixon 33 from 1969 to 1972. Wolanin, T. R., op. cit., p. 124.

92 "Transcript of Johnson Speech Naming Panel on US Violence", New York Times, 6 June, 1968.


expected him to cut expenditures for social research were wrong--they were increased; he proposed a new educational research agency, and appointed two social scientists to the President's Science Advisory Committee. (In January 1973, angered by the opposition of some members to administration proposals such as the supersonic transport, he abolished the committee.) In 1969, Nixon urged the development of a national urban policy, sent Congress the first presidential message on population, and proposed a radical reform of the welfare system. One enthusiast for national planning declares that "in the end he presided over a more rapid evolution toward Planning than any other president since FDR". 93

Among the prominent academic social scientists whom Nixon appointed to important positions in domestic policy-making were George Schultz as Secretary of Labor and Arthur Burns and Daniel Moynihan as senior White House advisers.

"Unlike so many liberal academics, Moynihan was free of professional jargon and ideological cant", Nixon later wrote. "He had helped design the Great Society poverty programs, but he was not afraid to acknowledge that many of them had failed, and he was ready to apply the lessons learned from that failure to devising new programs that might work."94 To balance Moynihan's appointment as head of a newly created Urban Affairs Council, Nixon created the post of counsellor to the President with the status of a member of the Cabinet for "my old friend and adviser Arthur Burns":

I thought that his conservatism would be a useful and creative counterweight to Moynihan's liberalism . . . . I always gave great weight to Burns's opinions because of my respect for his superior intelligence and because he always followed the practice he once described to me of "telling the President what he needs to hear, not just what he wants to hear.'95

Nixon gave more weight to Moynihan's opinion than might have been expected of a conservative President. He backed Moynihan's family assistance plan, the message on population he suggested, his efforts to develop a national policy for growth. If these ventures came to little, it was not, or not solely, the President's fault or attributable to Moynihan's return to Harvard late in 1970.

The mixed outcome of Moynihan's efforts can be gauged from two projects he initiated: a presidential message on education and yet another attempt by the White House to formulate national goals.

In May 1969, the preparation of the proposals for education was assigned to a subcommittee of Moynihan's Urban Affairs Council under the chairmanship of the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Robert

93 Graham, Otis L., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 256.

94 Nixon, Richard, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), p. 342.

95 Ibid., pp. 342, 519-520.

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Finch. On 3 October , the staff of this subcommittee began its labour. On 14 October , Finch and Education Commissioner James Allen had to tell a Senate subcommit tee why the President did not want the extra billion dollars for education that the House had appropriated. They and Moynihan agreed that the best strategy was for the President to announce, before that date, a positive administration education p rogramme--which did not then exist. Each advanced his own favourite idea: community colleges, black colleges, and educational financing; Moynihan 's idea was " to make educational research and development more scientific". 96

Lewis Butler, assistant secretary of the Depar tment of Health, Education, and Welfare, rewrote a 30-page draft of the report for the Urban Affairs Subcommittee. Many delays ensued, but by March 1970 two "educational messages" came from the White House.

The first dealt with educational reform. Several modest measures were proposed and subsequently adopted, such as the establishment of a commission on school finance, a "right to read" p rogramme, and a national institute of education to sponsor educational research. But the main emphasis of the message was on the ineffectiveness of schools throughout the country and a call for measurement of achievement of students. Drawing on findings of Professor James Coleman 's Equal Educational Opportunity Survey, published in 1966 (which Moynihan, Thomas Pettigrew, and Harvard colleagues had closely re-examined in a seminar in 1966-67), it noted that the level of learning was not related to the pupi l - teacher ratio or the quality of a school 's plant and equipment- - i .e . , to the level of school expenditures. Most of the billion dollars spent on compensatory education were ineffective; education was less affected by what went on inside than outside school-- in the family and the local community. In short, we did not know why education succeeded or failed. The answer was to be found through research.

Mankind has witnessed a few great ages when understanding of a social or scientific process has expanded and changed so quickly as to revolutionise the process itself. The time has come for such an era in education.

There comes a time . . . for new directions in our methods of teaching, new understanding of our ways of learning, for a fresh emphasis on our basic research, so as to bring behavioral science and advanced technology to bear on problems that only appear to be insuperable. 97

The second message, on higher education, was notably more conciliatory than the first. With the universities in a state of turmoil and siege, President Nixon, castigated as the leader of the war in Vietnam by students and teachers, spoke soothingly of the importance of higher education to the nation: "No element of our national life is more worthy of our attention, our

96 Finn, Chester E., Jr, Education and the Presidency (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1977), pp. 25-26.

97 Nixon, Richard, "Special Message to Congress on Education Reform", 3 March, 1970, in ibid., p. 131.


support and our concern than higher education." Nixon proposed an enlarged programme of grants and loans to help all qualified students, regardless of income, to attend college. On 3 March, he had stated that money was unrelated to the quality of elementary and secondary education; on 9 March, he stated that it was essential to the quality of higher education�9 "The most serious threat posed by the present fiscal plight of higher education is the possible loss of that excellence" (of "leading institutions"). He proposed a National Foundation for Higher Education, modelled on the National Science Foundation, to award grants "for the support of excellence, new ideas and reform" at colleges and universities.

Dr Chester Finn attributed the sympathetic tone of the message on higher education to the academic background of several members of the task force, 98 and to Moynihan's concern with "the threat to scholarly excellence in the prestigious research universities that were running out of money, besieged by their own students, and seemingly less esteemed by the society".99 (The message on the need for governmental financial assistance and non-interference in university affairs did not prevent President Nixon from subsequently " o r d e r i n g . . . that MIT's federal contracts be cut back �9 . . to punish Jerome Wiesner's opposition to his policies."1~176

In a paper written in 1966 for the Commission on the Year 2000 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Moynihan forecast "the most powerful development of the last third of the century: the emergence of a social science coupled with and based upon a system of social accounting that will give government an enlarged capacity to comprehend, predict, and direct social events". 101 Moynihan was also a member of the Panel on Social Indicators established in 1966 to advise John Gardner, then Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, on the preparation of a "social report". 1~ The two objectives of assessing recent and projecting future trends were both assigned to the National Goals Research Staff which, at Moynihan's prompting, President Nixon established in the White House in July 1969.

According to the President's announcement of July 1969, the staff's functions included: "forecasting future developments . . . . measuring the probable future impact of alternative courses of action . . . . [and] developing and monitoring social indicators that can reflect the present and future quality of American l i f e . . . ; . . . virtually all the critical national problems of today could have been anticipated well in advance of their reaching critical proportions . . . . Our need now is to seize on the future as the key dimension in our decisions, and to chart that future as consciously as

98 Ibid. , p. 95. 99 Ibid., p. 50. loo Ibid. , p. 94. lOl Moynihan, Daniel P., "The Relationship of Federal to Local Authorities", in "Toward

the Year 2000: Work in Progress", Daedalus (Summer 1967), pp. 805-806. lOZ Panel members are listed in Toward a Social Report (Washington, DC: Department o *

Health, Education, and Welfare, 1969), pp. vii-viii.

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we are accustomed to charting the past. ''1~ A short time earlier, while he was still teaching at Harvard, Moynihan had said: "I t was not possible to know [the future]: it is not possible. Wisdom surely bespeaks moderat ion in projections of the f u t u r e . . . , . 1 0 4 Does translation to the highest realms of power cause sobriety of judgement to yield before exaggerated expectations?

In his remarks to a gathering of the staff of the Cabinet and White House to bid him farewell on 21 December, 1970, Moynihan heaped praise and sympathy on Nixon and dismissed the naysayers. "Depressing, even frightening things are being said about the administration. They are not true. This has been a company of honorable and able men led by a President of singular courage and compassion . . . . the President is the hope of America. Serve him well. Pray for his success. ''a~

Concluding Reflections on Academic Social Scientists in the White House

"The White House has many of the attributes of a royal court" , George Shultz and Kenneth Dam once observed. "Access to the President can easily become an end in itself. ''1~ Nonetheless, they contended: "White House officials are relatively free of the compulsion to advocate the interests of particular government institutions and can thus devote themselves more singlemindedly to the substance of policy problems. In our experience, logic, substantive argument, and reason, as instruments of making policy and gaining its acceptance have their greatest value at the center of the executive branch . . . . ,,107 Lodged above the departments with their special interests, the President is, in principle, better placed than the secretary of a department to represent the national interest. Yet reason and politics function on behalf of every interest; politics does not cease at the boundaries of the White House and reason does not enjoy exclusive rule inside the White House. Quite the contrary: the White House and the inner chambers of hell must be among the worst places imaginable for detached intellectual activity. Reason is the instrument and politics the motive; reason can be warped and politics ignoble in any office of government. Montaigne is here a bet ter guide than Mr George Schultz:

reason always walks crooked, lame and broken-hipped, and in the company of falsehood as well as of the truth . . . . I always call by the name of Reason that semblance of it which every man imagines himself to possess. This kind of reason,

1o3 "Statement by the President Upon Announcing the Establishment of the [National Goals Research] Staff Within the White House", 13 July, 1969, in Toward Balanced Growth: Quantity with Quality, Report of the National Goals Research Staff (Washington, DC: The White House, 4 July 1970), pp. 221-223.

lo4 Moynihan, Daniel P., Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 202.

to5 Quoted in Price, Raymond, With Nixon (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 214. lo6 Shultz, George P., and Dam, Kenneth W., Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines (New

York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 16. ao7 Ibid.


which may have a hundred counterparts around one and the same subject, all opposed to each other, is an implement of lead and wax, that may be bent and stretched and adapted to any bias and any measure; it needs but the skill to mould it. lo8

Reason is bent and adapted in every presidential pronouncement. The President's men, expert social scientists and laymen alike, are appointed to advance his interests and good repute, not to chasten him when he is wrong or to praise a rival who is right. Though their work may have more factual substance, they are appointed to help the President and to promote his cause.

To the question why the presence of social scientists in the environs of the President has grown, several answers can be given. For one thing, their numbers have grown in the half-century under review, the prestige of some social scientists has risen; it has become common to cite their knowledge and to defer to their intellectual authority. Academic social scientists have also become more ambitious; they regard themselves as counsellors of princes, as of right. The mixing of scholars and politicians is not new--there have always been scholars who preferred the company of the powerful to the attention of their colleagues. Ideas and data on economic, social and political trends, problems, conflicts, needs and opinions, have become grist for the mills of public information and discussion and for the machinery of the formation of public policy, the administration of programmes. Social scientists who think that their disciplines are relevant to current national affairs have become participants in the debates about public policies. They now hold or share the place in public discourse once held by clergymen, philosophers, historians, writers and men with a liberal education. Their language has entered the national universe of discourse, including that of Congress and the President. Thus, the President nowadays will have in his entourage economists and political scientists but not necessarily sociologists and psychologists, as he has advisers on politics, law, business, science and national security, as well as cryptographers, translators, speech-writers, and experts in dealing with the media of mass communication. The President's estate now has as many specialists as Jefferson's had craftsmen.

As presidential aides, academic social scientists share several practical advantages with lawyers. They are readily detachable from their regular position for at least a two-year period and can usually return to it, or a new post, with enhanced standing. (Despite the difficulty or discomfort some academic social scientists, stained by their association with the war in Vietnam, experienced on returning to their universities, those who wished to do so found good appointments at other institutions.) Traditionally, social scientists, claiming to be scientists, have established in their own minds, and in the minds of others, a reputation for dispassionateness and

lo8 The Essays of Montaigne, translated by E. J. Trechmann (New York: Oxford University Press, n.d.), Vol. II, p. 9.

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objectivity. It is the lawyer's obligation to advocate his client's cause, regardless of the client's guilt or innocence. The scholar, the academic social scientist, has a greater obligation to present all the relevant evidence fairly; but, as his career advances, he may become attached to a particular theory and to a political position which is linked with that theory.

Neither in a court nor in the White House are experts chosen solely for their expertise. In court, one array of experts testifies for the prosecution and another for the.defence, because if they had not given the right answers beforehand, they would not have been invited to testify at all. The situation is much the same in the choice of White House social scientists and may be simplified by the open political identification of many prominent scholars. Thus, liberal economists like Robert Nathan, Paul Samuelson and Charles Schultze have advised a succession of Democratic presidential candidates; conservative economists like Arthur Burns, Milton Friedman and George Shultz have done the same for Republican candidates.

Although an apolitical attitude still characterises some of the leading academic social science departments in the United States and contract research organisations, partisan politics is the life of Washington, and few presidential appointments will be made without scrutiny of the appointee's political views and connections.

The progressivistic liberal views of a marked majority and the radical inclinations of a significant minority of academic social scientists doubtless fed the reservations of conservative Republican administrations about their counsel. In the six presidential elections from 1948 to 1968, 66 to 90 per cent of academic social scientists voted for the Democratic candidate. 1~ On 16 March, 1970, at a dinner for some 120 members and guests of the behavioural science division of the National Research Council, presidential counsellor Daniel Moynihan asked the Republicans present to raise their hands; some three or four hands went up. Moynihan urged those present to broaden the "ideological and sociological base" of the social sciences.

A conservative president can, of course, find conservative academic social scientist advisers, if he wants them. The relatively smaller role played by intellectuals in the Republican administrations of the 1920s and 1950s is attributable to the preference of these presidents for men with practical business and administrative experience; the conservative's image of the intellectual as impractical and politically simple-minded is often true. Nevertheless, a breed of political realists and, indeed, artful operators-- Arthur Burns, McGeorge Bundy, George Shultz, Charles Schultze, Daniel Moynihan, Henry Kissinger--has evolved in both parties; all of them are former academics with extensive governmental experience and can hold their own with--some have become--business men and politicians.

lo9 The voting preferences of anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists and sociologists in at least four presidential elections are summarised in Orlans, Harold, Contracting for Knowledge (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973), p. 3.


Men who scorn Congress and the bureaucracy, who exercise power without accountability, who judge ideas more by their political acceptability than their contribution to the common good, whose self-confidence does not save them or the country from grievous error, may be found advising presidents--but seldom men who are politically naive, who would transform the laws and institutions of a society for a grand principle. The naive Diderot instructing the bemused Catherine II how to transform Russia is at home in a university, no t in the White House. 110

In 1773, Diderot spent two months in St Petersburg discoursing at length with the Empress, who later recalled:

I frequently had long conversations with him, but with more curiosity than profit. Had I placed faith in him, every institution in my empire would have been overturned; legislation, administration, politics and finances, would all have been changed for the purpose of substituting some impracticable theories.

However, as I listened more than I talked, any one, on being present, would have supposed him to be the commanding pedagogue and myself the humble scholar. Probably he was of that opinion himself, for, after some time, finding that he had not wrought in my government any of the great innovations which he had advised, he exhibited his surprise by a sort of haughty discontent.

Then speaking to him freely, I said: "Monsieur Diderot, I have listened with the greatest pleasure to all that your brilliant genius has inspired you with; but all your grand principles, which I understand very well, though they will make fine books, would make sad work in actual practice. You forget, in all your plans for reformation, the difference between our two positions: you work only upon paper, which submits to every thing; it is altogether obedient and supple, and opposes no obstacles, either to your imagination or to your pen; whereas I, a poor Empress, I work upon human nature, which is, on the contrary, irritable and easily offended. 111

There are degrees of political naivety and sophistication among presidential advisers. Some simply lack the necessary experience; that was why Raymond Moley sought to compensate for the inexperience of the brains trust with the advice of Senator James Byrnes and other Democratic party elders. Nourse lacked the desire or talent for political manoeuvres which Keyserling had and Burns quickly acquired.

If political instinct is necessary to successful advising, how can one separate the political and scientific elements of advice on policy issues? "Many economists are . . . so confident in their ability to outguess the political process", George Shultz has observed, " that they behave in government less as professional economists than as political officials."112 As Warner Schilling has remarked, the "problem common to all experts who

�9 participate in the American policy p r o c e s s . . , is how to engage in politics

110 Wilson, Arthur M., Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 640. 111 Ibid., p. 640. 112 Shultz, G. P. and Dam, K. W., op. cit., p. 17.

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without debasing the coinage of his own expertise". 113 The Council of Economic Advisers has become so politicised, so identified with administration politics, that the creation of an independent body of economists, an economic "supreme court", has occasionally been proposed to adjudicate and pronounce on the naked facts of economic life.

Again and again, presidents have sought in private bodies the detached authority which governmentally financed agencies, responsible to the administration and Congress, lack. Hoover's Research Committee on Social Trends and Eisenhower's Commission on National Goals are prominent examples; the status of private citizen, which Charles Merriam and Wesley Mitchell maintained during their service on the National Resources Planning Board, attests to the same consideration, as does the use many presidents have made of commissions of private citizens.

The technical--' 'scientific' '--advice of social scientists can be no sounder than the knowledge on which it is based. Immodesty about that knowledge has been the besetting sin of social scientists active in public affairs and of the presidents who retain them. The lexicon of presidents and their advisers has little place for modesty; by careful selection, it gives a rosy hue to mottled facts; it pushes constantly beyond the bounds of knowledge to the horizons of hope and aspiration.

The ignorance, uncertainty, and ambiguity that plague our lives have no place on high. In private, political leaders may be anxious, ambivalent, or gloomy; often, they are frustrated and overburdened. Yet in public pronouncements they must appear even-tempered, confident, and reassuring. They can be as ignorant and ill-informed as anyone else about what they would like to know--their opponents' intentions, what citizens really think, why an unexpected calamity occurred, what will happen tomorrow and next year. Presidents are as mortal as anyone; yet they must appear to be more confident than a strict accounting of the status of their knowledge would warrant; and their advisers must abet that appearance.

In the White House, academic social scientists can learn much about government and politics, about history, appearance, and reality. But if they want to conduct searching and honest studies of government or politics, history, the economy or society, they had best return to their universities.

113 Schilling, Warner R., "Scientists, Foreign Policy, and Politics", in Gilpin, Robert, and Wright, Christopher (eds), Scientists and National Policy-Making, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 149.