Preparing for Power
Cookson, Peter W. Jr. & Persell, Caroline Hodges
satellite is that it simply had other, higher defense priorities. McDougall does point out, correctly, that a worldwide reconnaissance system has been a high priority of every administration since...
...Order before March 1, 1986 and take advantage of our reduced price of $35 (orders postmarked after this date will be charged $40 per bound volume...
...And if you didn't like this set, why, there was always more where they came from...
...The findings of a survey buried somewhere in the midst of Cookson and Persell's book do not allay this suspicion...
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...His list sums up all this talk of best and brightest: its sweeping summation of the American elite takes us from a towering nineteenth-century intellectual, to a brilliant poet, to one of Garry Wills's second generation millionaires who graciously gave of himself when we may have been just as well off without him...
...In that tight circle there seemed to be great promise...
...Daniel Bell is quoted: "That discipline is necessary for the mobilization of psychic and physical energies for tasks outside the self, for the con-quest and subordination of the self in order to conquer others...
...Or for fastest service from any part of the country call 1-800-824-9988 for Boat Dept...
...And it took more than three years of persuasion to get the Reagan Administration to adopt the Space Station program...
...He calls the latter a failure because it applied the "technocratic" method to the solution of the nation's social problems...
...I wish McDougall had looked more carefully at some of these earlier large-scale programs...
...Cookson and Persell do not, in the course of their book, ever answer the question of whether being socialized for power and being groomed to be tomorrow's elite is, either for the rest of society or the people involved, a good thing...
...This was not a random collection of talent...
...Each Boat Lot No...
...Further-more, the alleged love affair with technology did not last long...
...The Heavens and the Earth is organized around the notion that the space effort transformed the United States into a "technocracy" and led directly to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society...
...The Panama Canal, begun in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt,- was clearly a major technical initiative...
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...It is also possible for two New York sociologists to write a book and call it, without a trace of irony, Preparing for Power: America's Elite...
...Rayburn was, to his great credit, quite right...
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...Not all of the book waxes so sycophantic, and certainly it never matches the drooling that went on over the preppies who peopled Kennedy's Camelot...
...McGeorge Bundy from Harvard...
...Leagued: Kennedy of Choate approached Robert Lovett of the Hill School to recruit Groton's McGeorge Bundy...
...Please print your name and address below—providing your street ad-dress for UPS delivery...
...and Caroline Hodges Persell Basic Books/$19.95 Malcolm Gladwell THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 41 tive anti-elitism and be wrong...
...Ahead of those goals are "Being successful in my line of work," "Having leisure time to enjoy my own interests," "Having children," and "Having lots of money," among others...
...The same could be said of Preparing for Power...
...Each bound edition contains an index to aid you while searching for that "special" article or book review...
...This is probably a more accurate picture of the new prep school product—no worse than any another group, perhaps, but certainly no better, and certainly unworthy of moral con-gratulation on the basis of breeding alone...
...Enclosed is my check for $ made payable to The American Spectator...
...Box 10448, Arlington, VA 22210 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986...
...The United States may have flirted with "technocracy" in the Kennedy Johnson years, but after that we beat a hasty retreat...
...624-B (Calif...
...They emphasize discipline and asceticism...
...Most of the senior people in the Carter Administration, for instance, were skeptical of any technical solutions to the nation's problems (views generally shared by a President who was a trained engineer...
...Any letter post-marked after 30 days will be returned...
...These examples hardly support the author's proposition that our government has become a prisoner of the technocrats...
...Today in America it is possible to make and to succeed with a television show called "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous...
...McDougall does point out, correctly, that a worldwide reconnaissance system has been a high priority of every administration since 1945, what with the Soviet penchant for extreme secrecy...
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...First of all, it is not clear that all the Great Society pro-grams were failures...
...Boarding Schools...
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...Nor was it simply that suddenly there seemed to be so many of them, because talent, in various forms, had been flocking to Washington since the New Deal...
...Twenty-five years ago Joseph Kraft was so moved by the public spirit of McGeorge Bundy that only Milton seemed appropriate"A Pillar of State...
...The problem, I believe, is that McDougall confuses the trend toward what he calls "technocracy" with the activist, pro-government political approach of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson...
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...The Grand Coulee Dam, begun by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, cost $5 billion in to-day's dollars, about half of what the Manhattan project, initiated ten years later, would cost...
...Perhaps the strongest technical initiatives taken during the Carter years were in the military space program...
...If all that flash, that polish, could fool Lyndon Johnson, who couldn't it fool...
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...Do the interpersonal relationships of preppies become interorganizational and interinstitutional, linking corporate boards, banks, industries, government cabinets, and philanthropic organizations...
...These are dubious propositions at best...
...And so the best and the brightest never really did catch the full brunt of the criticism, and when it came time to do penance they did so by doing the "proper" and the easy establishment thing: steering the Ford Foundation to the left, heading the World Bank, writing measured denunciations of the Reagan Administration in the pages of Foreign Affairs...
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...this was a phenomenon...
...Garry Wills sarcastically wrote that "first generation millionaires give us libraries, second generation millionaires give us themselves...
...Ultimately, he said, all the values and education and breeding in the world were not as effective a preparation for power as, say, running for sheriff might have been...
...Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell are determined to prove the importance of America's sixteen or so elite prep schools—Groton, the Hill School, Andover, Exeter, Choate, among others...
...Don't delay . . . reserve your copy today and save $5...
...It was not easy to say, in 1960 or 1961 when the glitz was on, that you had doubts about Bundy and Rusk and McNamara...
...If so, then they have the potential to shape issues and events on a national canvas...
...residents call collect 213-735-9363), before midnight seven days a week...
...they were using variations on the old striped-pantseastern-intellectuals theme to attack the Vietnam war, and the real anti-elitists in America would never go for that...
...Robert McNamara from Ford...
...Orders for 1985 bound editions of The American Spectator (volume 18) are now being accepted...
...On the subject of Vietnam, then, the American right decided that it would rather back the Kennedy intellectuals and be right than go with its instincIn spite of the generally high level of scholarship McDougall displays, I have some trouble with the central theme of his book...
...We have had activist Presidents in the past: Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, probably Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman...
...This is an excellent reference work for anyone interested in the year's past events and personalities—covering everything from Lee Iacocca to Mikhail Gorbachev...
...They softened the meaning of the Vietnam experience, so that their mistakes in the sixties came to be seen not, as Halberstam said, as a reflection of their status and background but somehow as a betrayal of it—which means that today in America there is once again a quiet reverence for all that the wealthy and the well-connected are said to bring to public service...
...Daring, initiative, and excellence . . . are admired in the prep world," the book says at- one point, "especially if it cleverly tweaks the nose of authority...
...This was not, however, as effective a critique as it might have been because, by the usual standards, Halberstam and Riesman and Wills were anti-elitist for all the wrong reasons...
...The Vietnam war, at least for a time, put an end to all this talk...
...only the strong intervention of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown kept the pro-gram alive...
...It was 'perfectly all right in conservative America to denounce the kids who were chanting and demonstrating and burning their draft cards as the children of privilege, but not the men who were running the battles from Washington...
...Prep schools are preparing their students for power much, we are told, "as Aristotle sought to civilize and educate the young Alexander the Great for his role as world conqueror...
...The difference was that these were men all of the same class, cut from the same Eastern cloth, pedigreed, prep schooled, and Ivymajor changes in policy (or "saltations" as the author likes to call them...
...More than this, Cookson and Persell are convinced that the values and attitudes imparted by the prep school experience are fraught with social significance...
...they ask rhetorically...
...I want to order i 1985 bound editions of The American Spectator at $35 each (before March 1st...
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...Look at the three preppies on the top rung of the Reagan Administration ladder: George Bush, James Baker, and Malcolm Baldridge—distinguished public servants all, but nothing to hang a book on...
...behind public service on the prep school wish list is only "Living close to my parents and relatives," and "Getting away from this area of the country...
...This is the first time—although, one imagines, not the last—George Bush's CIA will be identified with daring, initiative, and excellence...
...Cookson and Persell do not go that far, but, in their own way, they do approach Kraft's vision of a preppie Paradise Lost...
...President Nix-on had clear misgivings about the Space Shuttle and ordered the program cut substantially from the original NASA proposal before approving it in Malcolm Gladwell is a frequent con-1972...
...David Halberstam, of course, said it was a bad thing, and Vietnam proved this to be true...
...The Groton motto is "to serve is to rule," which refers of course to God, but it is possible that in this day and age God has been replaced by man and that all the civilizing and preparation is only to civilize and prepare young men and women to rule by serving themselves...
...The administrations after 1968 were not generally friendly to the nation's civilian space program...
...Well Lyndon," said Rayburn, "you may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff...
...Thank you...
...In an increasingly hedonistic world, prep schools "are still trying to put some fiber into children...
...The Apollo program was indeed larger than the Panama Canal by about a factor of four, but it was not unprecedented in our nation's history, as McDougall seems to imply...
...There was something very seductive about "the best and the brightest" in those days...
...Indeed, the policies of the current Administration have probably locked most of the pro-grams into place for all time...
...deep on his/front engraven/Deliberation sat, and publick care;/And princely counsel on his face...
...Thus the destruction of Gary Powers's U-2 in 1960 did not create a large "intelligence gap," thanks to the foresight exercised by some dedicated people during the Eisenhower years...
...These handsome volumes are library bound, with gold lettering on a dark green vinyl cover...
...In 1979, when the Space Shuttle tributor to The American Spectator...
...will send any of above size boats to anyone who reads and responds to this test before the next 30 days...
...I suspect he would have found the space program entirely within American traditions...
...David Halberstam painted a devastating portrait of them all in The Best and the Brightest, men who embodied the liberal contradictions of the era between "good intentions and the desire to use and hold power...
...The third component, national prestige, was introduced later, by President Kennedy.program was in financial trouble, President Carter almost canceled it...
...It wasn't just that they were so smart and so young, because the smart and the young have always been attracted to politics...
...Each boat will be accompanied with a LIFETIME guarantee that it must per-form 100% or it will be replaced free...
...And more than a few preps have ended up in the Central Intelligence Agency, including Andover graduate George Bush...
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...Even as the remarkable U-2 reconnaissance aircraft took shape in Kelly Johnson's "skunk works," other people were already thinking about how to do the job from space...
...Most of these Presidents initiated In the early days of the Kennedy Ad-ministration, when Lyndon Johnson first met all the brilliant men of Camelot, he is said to have run to his friend Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, in awe...
...There, on the ranking of "Life Goals Among Boarding School Students," down in the ninth and tenth positions, are "Working to correct social and economic inequalities" and "Being a leader in my community...
...PREPARING FOR POWER: AMERICA'S ELITE BOARDING SCHOOLS Peter W. Cookson, Jr...
...David Riesman called them "brilliant Atlantic provincials...
...Should you wish to return your boat you may do so for a refund...
...Two of the three components of our space program, scientific research and worldwide reconnaissance, were therefore in place by the time the Russians launched Sputnik I in October 1957...
...The project cost $16 billion, in today's dollars, and took ten years to complete...
...Dean Rusk from Rockefeller...
...When it came to Vietnam, the same people, the same middle Americans, who used to make funny little noises whenever Dean Acheson was mentioned, now were the best and brightest's biggest supporters (which is, in a way, Vietnam's final irony: how a war started by the preppies came to be defended by the nerds...
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...In fact, there are times when Halberstam seems to say that all the selflessness and the public service and the sense of duty that Groton and Exeter and Choate gave their graduates was really just a sham...
...However, these were driven not by some technological imperative or concern over national prestige, but by the President's strong desire to persuade the Senate that the provisions of SALT II could be adequately verified...
...Poisoned Ivy, Ben Hart's anguished letter to his alma mater, testified to the greatness of Dartmouth College by pointing to three of its most illustrious graduates—Daniel Webster, Robert Frost, and Nelson Rockefeller...
...The Harvard men, with their new ideas and slide rules, proved they did not understand life outside Washington, New York, and Cambridge...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
