Democratic Statesmanship and Morality

...While a majority of the voters made an error in judgment by not appreciating the virtues of George McGovern sufficiently to elect him to the Presidency, neither this error nor the overall corruption of the Nixon Administration, in Galbraith's view, were truly the fault of the people...

...Responsiveness" is no more a sufficient criterion for judging the civil service than it is an adequate measure of Presidential performance...

...The best source for such an education is not textbooks of "administrative behavior" or "organization theory" that treat private and public administration as essentially identical, but the study of public law, of American political thought, and of political biographies and autobiographical writings of great statesmen...

...The mass of the voters gave Mr...

...Still, one must wonder: is Galbraith's explanation of governmental corruption really sufficient...

...Moreover, in a nation founded on the principle of the consent of the governed, to contend that the character of the people themselves was a contributory cause of such scandals as Watergate may seem downright disloyal...

...Galbraith's pronouncements on that occasion, hastily as they may have been composed, are worthy of being reconsidered, for they illustrate and embody in a frank manner the premises which underlie the analyses that many liberal commentators' have presented of l'affaire Nixon and the lessons to be learned from it...

...expense account padding and the misuse of "influence" at lower as well as upper levels of government, business, and the educational and "nonprofit" institutions...

...Nixon's own disregard for the law...

...If that doubt is justified, is it not hypocritical to condemn the President for behaving like a large number of his countrymen, while one does not dare to criticize the latter...

...Consider the blameworthy practices generally accepted as inevitable in all walks of American life: cheating by students as well as businessmen...

...Even though the American regime was designed, in accordance with the teachings of Locke and Montesquieu, to reduce the demands on the citizen as compared with the directly self-governing republics of antiquity, it cannot survive as a free government if its citizens are concerned only with their immediate wants, and if its elected leaders conceive of their duty as merely one of "responsiveness...

...Professor Galbraith's one-sided analysis of the Nixon scandals is symptomatic of a curious double standard that infects much contemporary social criticism in this country...

...and, consequently, the true test of a Supreme Court Justice is the attractiveness of his ideological principles, rather than the intellectual rigor and reflectiveness of his Constitutional interpretation...

...The lack of serious attention to the Constitution and its ends was, in fact, one of the most notable characteristics of contemporary political science until Nixon's near-impeachment...

...Perhaps the Hoover Commission's recommendation of a Senior Civil Service (a form of which was proposed by Mr...

...Such teachings strengthen in Presidents the very attitude against which Hamilton warned: a concern with immediate popularity, rather than with the long-range well-being of the country...

...If our recent Presidential crisis should be an occasion for a moral self-examination by the American people, it ought equally to give rise to an intellectual re-examination by American social scientists and social critics of the premises of their political analyses, and particularly to a serious reconsideration of the thought and statesmanship of men like Lincoln and Hamilton...

...There will now be a drawing of morals until healthy stomachs retch...

...In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reminds his countrymen that free government is a rare and fragile human creation, the success of which depends on their character and their devotion to their country...

...the reasoning embodied in such opinions is merely a rationalization of prejudices...

...Instead of concentrating on the learning of pseudoscientific "techniques of management," which supposedly work equally well in any organization (but which, studies have shown, really are perceived by civil servants to be of little use in their work), the future public administrator needs to engage in studies that will prepare him to exercise political responsibility...

...If the last sentence were to be taken literally, it would imply that Galbraith holds a large proportion of the American electorate responsible for the Nixon debacle...

...Nixon, despite his noted anti-intellectualism, followed in many of his actions and policies the teachings of the very social scientists and intellectualswho are now most vehement in condemning him...

...But it does cause one to doubt whether the average American, placed in the same situation and given the same opportunities as were Mr...

...Great as their work had been, Lincoln suggested, the Founding Fathers had not sufficiently provided for the inculcation of these qualities in the citizenry...

...but the way they have been taught to view their duties has encouraged them to become complaisant servants either of the President or of the particular interest groups with which they deal...

...welfare fraud by the poor and the not-so-poor, and dishonest Medicaid billing by physicians...

...It is in fact remarkable to observe in retrospect how the deservedly maligned Mr...

...While Mr...

...By teaching that the test of good government is its responsiveness to the majority will, and by encouraging citizens to think of their rights but not of their duties, these thinkers undermine our awareness of the problematic character of democracy, and hence undermine our ability to preserve this regime...

...No wonder that Galbraith, the ardent exponent of a fashionable egalitarianism, finds the self-questioning elements of America's literary tradition to be "loathsome...

...But whence are such qualities to be derived...

...Unfortunately, their understanding of statesmanship and of the preconditions of free government is often a far cry from Lincoln's...

...They were no more entitled to criticize such appointments than the previous advocates of "civil disobedience" could with any consistency object to Mr...

...Long before the Civil War, but at a time when a thoughtful man could already foresee the danger that the United States would be torn apart by the fanatical self-righteousness of opposing political factions, Lincoln warned in his Springfield address of 1837 that the preservation of the country required not only a "general intelligence" but a "sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws...

...But this is not quite what he means...

...By his teaching as well as his example, Lincoln demonstrated that the leader of a democracy must be something more than a man of the people...

...That is because his departure will bring out all that is loathsome in our literary tradition...

...According to this school of thought, judicial opinions can never be more than expressions of the judges' arbitrary "preferences...

...Should any of these events occur, Watergate will not, after all, have been bugged in vain...

...In his constant efforts to increase his power, and in his obsessive concern with achieving a place in "history" (as exemplified by the fantastic notion of recording every word of conversation in the Oval Office), Mr...

...In this respect, we may learn from the example of the much admired British civil service...

...On what grounds, then, could scholars who had set forth this doctrine when more "liberal" Justices sat on the Court object when Mr...

...Nixon's going is good and a definite boost to the Republic," Galbraith lamented, "we will suffer for it in the days ahead...

...Lincoln's Foresight Of all American statesmen, the one who reflected most profoundly on the moral preconditions of free government was Abraham Lincoln...

...Someone, I promise you, will say that the fault lies deeply within ourselves...

...To doubt its adequacy, one need only reflect on the standards of behavior common today among persons other than the "privileged" few at whom Galbraith points an accusing finger...

...The Founders had concerned themselves primarily with the right construction of institutions, and had relied on men's self-interests to tie them to the government...

...Many of the diagnoses that have been offered of the affair, like Galbraith's, reflect an extreme narrowness of perspective, and most of the remedies that have been proposed would at best be inefficacious and at worst would exacerbate the causes that contributed to it...

...While adapting to the policy mandates of changing governments, higher British administrative officials have also been viewed as rightly participating in the making of policy, and even as educating their political superiors...

...Serious issues of public policy, transcending the recent Presidential crisis, hinge on whether these premises are correct...

...The power of government to teach and mold public opinions and attitudes is one that is now shared in our society, to a degree unparalleled in history, by intellectuals: the journalists, television commentators, authors, and university professors who speak and write about public affairs without having the responsibility for the conduct of those affairs...

...The sum and nature of these crimes and malpractices is surely not yet of a sort to make America one of the world's great hotbeds of sin...

...Nixon's unremitting solicitude for his public "image," as measured by opinion polls, and for demonstrating that he had a popular "mandate" by achieving the largest possible margin of victory in the 1972 election, were surely encouraged by the mass media, which attach such importance to polls, and by intellectuals who view responsiveness to the expressed popular "will" as the primary criterion of Presidential performance...

...But a more obvious and fundamental way to improve the character of the civil service would be to revise the teaching of public administration in this country...

...It is Neustadt who urges Presidents to engage in "an unremitting search for personal power," and suggests that the only objective criterion for judging the uses to which a President puts this power is, not the extent to which his policies advance the ends of the Constitution, but merely their agreement with the ever-shifting "grain of history...

...Well, the hell it does...

...To doubt the inherent virtue and wisdom of the common man is simply to fall victimto antiquated prejudices that should long ago have been discarded...

...But the preservation of the regime they had created would require something more: it needed statesmen who, like Lincoln, would serve as teachers of the citizenry, and would institute and perpetuate among them a "political religion" of reverence for law and Constitution that could overarch the bands of interest with those of duty...

...The Nixon affair can be understood only in relation to the broader problems of the character of the American people and of the defective understanding of democratic government that has been propagated by our most prominent contemporary social critics and political scientists...

...American civil servants also share in the policymaking process, of course...

...Immediately after Richard Nixon's resignation from the Presidency, the editors of Newsweek solicited the reactions of several prominent citizens to the event, including those of Harvard's best-known social-critic-in-residence, John Kenneth Galbraith...

...These causes include the diminishing sense of responsibility and respect for law on the part of the populace as well as some members of the government, the obscuring of the difference between Constitutional democracy and simple majoritarianism, and the misapprehension of the nature of democratic statesmanship...

...The scandals of Watergate, I.T.T., the Ellsburgle, etc., are rather theresult of the particular viciousness of a single leader and his cohorts, supported by those Galbraith calls "the privileged of the Republic," who helped install into office a man they knew to be corrupt rather than vote for his democratic opponent, whose policies, they perceived to represent "a threat to their personal wealth and comfort...

...Men always find troubles easier to bear when the blame for them can be fixed on a discrete group of individuals other than themselves (hence, the recurrent popularity in this century of "devil" theories as explanations of wars and depressions...

...Consider the growing crime rate, including the widespread practice and expectation of "petty" crimes like shoplifting...

...It lies with Richard Nixon and the people who voted him into office...

...featherbedding" and minor theft by both blue- and white-collar workers...

...if they are to be criticized for anything, it is for allowing themselves to be taken in by others...

...Many of the same observers who most heatedly denounce the Nixon Federal civil service is to be expected to display qualities of dedication, morality, and public concern, it must rather be infused with a spirit of sharing in the President's responsibility for securing the national well-being...

...Nixon sought to appoint judges like Harold Carswell, whose prejudices were more to his liking, despite Carswell's intellectual deficiencies...

...The deficiencies of the contemporary study of public administration in this country reflect the more general defectiveness of the understanding of free government that is set forth by our most prominent social scientists and social critics...

...Nixon may well have been inspired by a reading of such works as Richard Neustadt's influential classic, Presidential Power...

...A Curious Double Standard To the man in the street, and to those intellectuals who hold, with John Dewey, that "the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy," Galbraith's analysis may be a comforting one...

...As we learn from political thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Rousseau, and the Antifederalists, the perpetuation of a popular form of government depends not only on the ability of its leaders, but also on the maintenance of a spirit of morality, dedication to the common good, and a willingness to bear the duties of citizenship—even in a time of hardship much greater than any that we now face—on the part of the people themselves...

...Nixon and his associates, could be counted on to act much more morally or lawfully than they did...

...Nixon, but rejected by Congress) would, if adopted, contribute to the development of a greater permanence, esprit de corps, and sense of responsibility for the public interest on the part of the American bureaucracy...

...The character of the people is not to be questioned...

...Even with respect to the Supreme Court, when our recent President asserted as the primary criterion for his judicial appointments the extent of a potential nominee's agreement with his political views, his thinking was fully in accordance with the teachings of the legal "realist" movement that has dominated law schools and political science departments in recent decades...

...Nixon his landslide victory in 1972 because they were deceived by the wealthy and insufficiently warned by the "mealymouthed" news media...

...He needs to learn both the principles of free government and the difficulties it entails...

...In other respects, too, Nixon followed the precepts of recent political science...