THE INTERLOCKING OVERLAPPERS
Rovere, Richard H.
The Interlocking Overlappers By RICHARD H. ROVERE CWRIGHT MILLS is a sociologist • who finds American society as presently organized a most inferior piece of work. In fact, it disgusts him. In The...
...Dienbienphu: Here is perhaps the oddest case of all...
...Although, to his credit, Mills offers not an explanation of all reality but merely of the present reality in the United States, he nevertheless provides a key to the mysteries, a plot to the story, a social villain...
...American education...
...Regardless of what the documents in the case say, the reality is quite different from what Mills believes it to be...
...Mills is certain he knows who does the manipulating and how and why...
...But is it reasonable to say that "the warlords, the corporation chieftains, [and] the political directorate" determined the American response...
...most of us feel that in one degree or another—including, we may be sure, many members of the power elite...
...Within a week or ten days, it was almost impossible to find a Congressman who favored getting into the war...
...We know that the President and the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, and again all but one of the Joint Chiefs favored this course of action...
...If there ever was a "struggle," it is all over now...
...Mills may best be thought of as a reviser of Marxism...
...They may be generally humanistic in outlook—as Mills unquestionably is—but they make a rigid distinction between life and history...
...He pours contempt on those who "believe that history goes on behind men's backs" and who profess to see "the power situation...
...American culture is inane...
...Mills is a radical, and the radical view of life and society, not always but as a general rule, has had the advantage of stimulating the mind and stirring the will—sometimes, to be sure, doing the latter in the most undesirable ways...
...It is an "interlocking directorate" drawn from among the ranking figures in three spheres: the corporate, the political, and the military...
...In the nature of the case, it was quite impossible for any "intricate set of overlapping cliques" to have had much to do with this huge decision...
...I think, it demonstrably unreasonable—except, just possibly, in the case of our entry into World War II...
...His observations are often rewarding...
...Then Dulles went off to Europe to see what kind of deal he could make with the British and the French...
...The other instances reveal, I think, the essential wrong-headed-ness of the theory...
...Truth is truth, regardless of the effect it has on us...
...It was as much news to these interlocking overlappers as it was to you and to Mills and to me...
...To still the clamor on Formosa and in Senator Knowland's conscience, the President agreed to a treaty and a Congressional resolution which authorized an American commitment and which at the same time gave him a number of excuses for not fulfilling it...
...It is not only the followers of Senator McCarthy and General MacArthur who adhere to this view...
...American democracy is form without substance...
...Within the space of a few years, James Burnham has fashioned several of his own...
...The American public has degenerated into a jellied American "mass...
...It is "an intricate set of overlapping cliques [who] share decisions having at least national consequences...
...What happened, it seems to me, was that President Eisenhower, with whose advice and consent we do not altogether know, decided that it would in most circumstances be folly to defend those vulnerable outposts...
...Earlier, the same men had determined that the national interest did not call for the defense of Korea...
...Rational criticism that impairs our reasons for living is not on that ground alone invalid...
...A racket to train, or condition, people for industry and commerce at public expense...
...as a romantic confusion...
...Indeed, the very use of such a term as "decisions" is in my view an oversimplification...
...Any view is objectionable to the degree that it immobilizes the mind or paralyzes the will...
...It has sometimes been as unfashionable not to talk like a liberal—in praise of civil liberties, social welfare, and internationalism—as it has been to act like one, and it is this, as Mills notes, that lends color to the argument of people like William F. Buckley, Jr., that the country is under a liberal tyranny...
...He does less well with politicians and military men, but generally this is superior journalism and social history...
...Unlike Marx, Mills perceives no great amount of social tension...
...As Taine said, in speaking of Dean Swift, rational criticism approaches irrationality when it "menaces and impairs the very reasons for living...
...hardly any publicly opposed it...
...rarely understanding the processes of my own mind and will, I am skeptical of the possibility of understanding very much about those of society...
...As the circle of those who decide is narrowed, as the means of decision are centralized, and the consequences of decisions become enormous, then the course of great events often rests upon the decisions of determinable circles . . . [The] pivotal moment does arrive, and at that moment, small circles do decide or fail to decide...
...But I am trying to suggest that there are many things, in fact a great multitude of them, that are not dreamed of in Mills' philosophy...
...The people exist only to be manipulated...
...Korea: This decision was made in the course of a few hours by a few men...
...The theory has many religious and political variants and many that have had a powerful appeal to intellectuals and to liberals...
...During this time, something that for the purposes of the moment can be described as public opinion began to form...
...And now Mills has come along with what may be the most elaborate and is certainly the most dispiriting of them all...
...The more or less official doctrine of contemporary liberalism, the ADA view of life, partakes in many ways of the conspiracy theory...
...What he offers us, though he explicitly denies it, is a variant of the conspiracy theory of history...
...Conservatism, again not always but generally, has lacked these advantages...
...It is^worth noting that his decision could become effective only through a circumstance over which no American had much control—the providential boycott by the Russians of the United Nations Security Council...
...Harry Truman takes full responsibility for the order he gave...
...I am not sure what this means, or whether it means anything except that the voters enjoy their right to vote for President Eisenhower, but it is plain that for Mills the outlook is bleak—unreliev-edly bleak...
...It would lose the advantage thus gained if it got the country into another war...
...If the key really worked, one could not reject it on the ground that the prospect afforded by its use was so unattractive...
...Also, Winston Churchill ratified the decision in advance...
...His world, like Marx's, is riven: it consists of the shearers and the shorn, the exploiters and the exploited...
...Mills is most impatient with this sort of skepticism...
...Quemoy and Matsu: In another passage, Mills makes it clear that he has in mind the commitments to the Chinese Nationalists made by Congress, at the President's request, early last year...
...He thinks the Marxist notion of a "ruling class" won't do for our time...
...But I think it clear that Mills' key does not work...
...This conclusion, however, did not alter the conviction of the Administration leaders that intervention was in the national interest...
...Some of those involved in both decisions could be regarded as important agents of the power elite...
...423 pp...
...It is not simply a matter of alienation or of feeling themselves impotent as individuals...
...He can be a most resourceful polemicist...
...The tragic view of life is barred to them...
...However, their counsels were divided both before and after the event...
...His studies of the components of the "power elite" are in general very good...
...In dealing, as I do above, with the simplifications of Millsism, I have myself oversimplified the story of these decisions...
...physicists as technicians are mere servants of the corporations and the military establishment...
...From bottom to top, as Mills sees it, American life is pretty much of a fraud...
...the confusion about Quemoy and Matsu, as well as before Dienbienphu were such moments...
...Admiral Radford was as much in favor of it as he had ever been, but now not even Senator Knowland could be induced to declare flatly in favor of it...
...President Truman again exercised a good deal of independent judgment...
...Feeling no personal responsibility— I do not mean accountability in the social and political sense but rather involvement in the tragic and comic senses_their view is almost certain to be irresponsible...
...Mills devotes little space to this, but it is a central matter and when he does talk of it he is explicit...
...in this book, he frequently notes the victory of liberal rhetoric that has so often in recent years accompanied the defeat of liberal principles...
...Many members of the power elite, including all but one of the joint chiefs of staff, tried to argue the President into a more militant position...
...When Mills is not choked with indignation and disgust, he is the master of a bright satirical style...
...What these men do, at home and abroad, is crazy...
...His view is summed up and illustrated in the following sentences: "The course of events in our time depends more on a series of human decisions than on any inevitable fate...
...In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them...
...At the start of the crisis, the Congress seemed agreeable to the Administration view...
...The bottom of this society is politically fragmented and . . -increasingly powerless . . . [The] masses, in their full development, are sovereign only in some plebisicitarian moment of adulation to an elite as authoritative celebrity...
...It seemed to be hostile to intervention...
...at all odds, he is not able to show that it does...
...Almost nothing about our civilization, a term he would find unwarranted, seems admirable to him...
...Among influential people generally, only a few were opposed...
...He will not even praise our technology—he says they make much better things in England and Germany...
...To those of us who tried to understand the decisions and indecisions at the time, it appeared that public opinion and sentiment were of crucial importance...
...The slaves are the same, but the masters are different, or at least more numerous and more varied in origin and function...
...What Mills describes as the "atomized and submissive masses" were not well disposed to the idea of a war in Indo-China...
...The dropping of the A-bombs over Japan was such a moment...
...It is not in revolt...
...the sequence of maneuvers which involved the United States in World War II" [he does not mean the maneuvers of other nations but those of President Roosevelt and the pre-war interventionist circles] "was such a 'moment.' Is it not true that much of the history of our times is composed of such moments...
...In either case, they are an elite of power...
...The fears of de Tocqueville and y Gasset were unfounded...
...Marxists, Millsists, and the rest have a sense of alienation peculiarly their own—one that excludes them from any role in the human comedy...
...A number of former liberals and radical intellectuals, Burnham among them, now adhere to the conspiracy theory which holds that the country is held in the malign grip of liberal and radical intellectuals...
...I also believe it is symptomatic and important...
...But this is really a quibble: the men Mills is talking about are "commanders of power unequalled in human history...
...they see it, in fact, as part of the hoax, just another opiate...
...No one that I know of has written more perceptively of the character and life of the very rich and the executive classes in the present period...
...They failed...
...He thinks that the mass is intuitively and quite cynically aware of the power situation, but it is not troubled by its awareness...
...They may feel themselves a part of the community, but community and society exist in their minds as entirely separate things: society invariably being a contrivance for the hornswoggling of the community...
...According to Mills, physicists as intellectuals are powerless in our society...
...Some men hunger for theory as for salt, and those who do and who yet see the inadequacies of Marxism will find in Millsism a doctrine that satisfies many of their yearnings...
...It has some solid merits, and these must be acknowledged...
...Some Congressmen publicly supported it...
...The top dogs today do not constitute a "class" in the Marxist sense nor do they "rule" so much as they manipulate...
...What seems to me absurd and destructive about this book is not its judgment of where power rests in this country but its assumptions and conclusions about what power is and how it is wielded...
...Let us take them up seriatim: Hiroshima: In the first place, very few members of the power elite knew there was any atomic bomb to drop...
...the decision on Korea was such a moment...
...The danger of regarding social processes as lying beyond comprehension is that we will disparage any effort to comprehend them and perhaps abandon any effort to control them...
...6), he says that our political life is managed by "crackpot realists" who have "constructed a paranoid reality all their own...
...Though his decision must have been about as solitary as any political one ever made, we can acknowledge that no man ever acts wholly on his own—wholly unaffected, that is, by environment...
...There is not much doubt that the power elite wished the United States to enter the Indo-China war at the time of this battle...
...I believe that Mills' book is at its core mistaken...
...In The Power Elite (Oxford...
...In any case, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the responsibility of one man who was the beneficiary of very sketchy advice from a handful of other men...
...These were indeed large and pivotal events...
...It provides a radical key to the mysteries, but it leaves one with nowhere to go...
...His point is that the power elite determined these islands should be defended by the United States...
...In this case, Truman received a certain amount of advice from an ad hoc committee led by Henry L. Stimson, a certifiable member of the power elite...
...This puts a crude construction on a complicated affair...
...The "power elite" runs the country...
...It was recalled by Republican politicians that the Administration's one great triumph had been in negotiating an end to the war in Korea...
...He regards this as obscurantism, and it must, I think, be admitted that he has a point...
...The characteristic thing about Mills and all the other molders of conspiracy theories is that they see themselves standing outside the society they look upon as a swindle...
...Millsism, unless I am gravely mistaken, makes the worst of both outlooks...
...Truman, however, reports that he was less influenced by these men than by what he was told by the few nuclear physicists he consulted...
...The affair took on some new dimensions as a result of the difficulties Dulles met with in London and Paris, but it is doubtful if these much affected the outcome...
...Yet the decision that really counted was the decision, taken against the better judgment of the power elite, to stay out of the war...
...He nourishes the sense of victimization...
...But the masses were on this occasion sovereign...
...It is reasonable to suppose that among the factors that encouraged this view were the reluctance of our allies to become involved in that area and the reluctance of the public, or the "mass," to get into another Asian war...
...I do not profess to know how great decisions are reached...
...Mills has a lively, well-stocked mind...
Vol. 20 • June 1956 • No. 6
