The First Presidential Paper

...The war decided, the organ subsides, different in size, stronger or weaker, it returns to its part of the body's function...

...But with an heroic leader it would prosper, it would deserve to prosper...

...The FBI has been a political idea...

...One has hopes the advisors to the President can read, can read well enough to pass this book along...

...If its leader was not heroic as a man, the FBI would proceed to exist less, it would lose existence because it would be in open competition for existence with other organs of the government...

...The cause of secret policeness advances like a plague...

...That particular anemia visits leaders surrounded by advisors who do not tell the truth...

...His information is predigested—his mind is allowed as much stimulation as the second stomach of a cow...

...With his fall went the threat that his ideas would dominate America...

...With the exception of Cuba his actions have been predictable...

...the number of Communists in the American Communist Party, the number of FBI men in the American Communist Party...

...It is true that we have a President with a face...

...ident in the twentieth century...

...So here is a book of Presidential papers about all the topics a President ought to consider and rarely does, and some of the topics he considers every day, but rarely in a fashion which is fresh...

...I suppose it would rest in the notion that the disease of the state is intensified when large historic ideas come to power without men to personify them or dramatize their qualities...

...They keep America up...

...To keep America up...

...Everything but a good book...

...He can recite government incomes and expenses, budgets, taxes, reserves...

...He sprouts a mind like a financial see-saw: on the one side percentages of overkill declared adequate for balancing Russian overkill, on the other budgetary calculations...

...One does well not to sneer at them: the sort of Harvard men who got into the bridge games in the House Common Rooms after dinner seem now to be the archetype of the kind of men who run the world: what they lack in imagination is filled with strategic estimate...

...lie can read six hundred words a minute and count on retaining 84% of what he reads...

...Politics is the art of the possible, and what is always possible is to reduce the amount of real suffering in a bad time, and to enrich the quality of life in a good time...

...So a President suffers intellectual horrors...

...But return to the President with his virtues and vices...

...No one suggests improving the flour—the ovens which are used to bake the pie...

...Acute diseases are like political forces personified by heroes...

...One cannot point to any move in foreign affairs or labor or military spending or housing or education or race relations or popular culture which is radically different from the work of Truman or Eisenhower, different from the intellectual inspiration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

...Acute disease is cure...

...In the run of its pages exists the seed of the idea...

...Now this is not the only qualification of the President...

...And slack diseases, featureless, symptomless diseases like virus and colds and the ubiquitous cancer are the appropriate metaphor of all those political forces like the FBI, or like the liberalism of the Democratic Party, which are historically faceless...

...One can point to the Peace Corps perhaps, but there is something unctuous about its face in public relations...

...Its grasp of the machinery of government is comparable at best to the sort of talented amateur mechanic who knows how to change a tire...

...The President has programs...

...The expression lives in all the dull avenues of precedent...

...All heroes are leaders—even if, like Don Quixote, they have but one man to follow them—but not all leaders are heroes...

...They are papers written to the President, for him, they are his private sources of information...

...He becomes able to think not of the mystery in the atom bomb but of its engineering...

...So this book has been put together for him...

...Politics is like a body of organs...

...In fact we have built so many different airplanes since the Second World War that soon there ought to be enough to give one to each high school class in the land...

...He is given not nuances but facts...

...Rather he manipulates the best single elements in the old solutions, and applies his political craft to composing a package with new consumer interest...

...he can give you an estimate by denomination of the number of churches in America, the number of synagogues, orthodox, conservative, and reformed, he can probably make an informed guess on the number of clergymen in each state...

...the projected farm surplus surpluses...

...If the question is now asked what can possibly be meant by "an existential grasp of the nature of reality" or "existential styles of political thought" the answer which is not without facetiousness can nonetheless only be that one must read this book...

...We have been living in the curious but prosperous hollow of planned military obsolescence...

...what they do not know about moral depth is replaced by forthrightness and point-by-point program...

...It has done it for a variety of reasons, some wellintentioned, some delivered from pits of mendacity, but the FBI has chilled the potentiality of America to enrich the private lives of its people...

...And because it is faceless it is insidious, plague-like, an evil force...

...It has features, symptoms, results...

...the number of United States Marshals in Southern cities who can be concentrated at a trouble point when a school is integrated, the number of schools which have been integrated, the number which have not...

...There is a total and depressing lack of attention for that vast heart of political matter which is utterly resistant to categorization, calculation, or statistic...

...Now with the exception of his single large defeat in the Bay of Pigs and his single large victory after Khrushchev sent missiles to Castro, a victory and defeat which are linked umbilically to the island of Cuba, the President has done nothing new...

...he can give you the critical numbers and index factors on foreign trade, new investment in heavy industry, rate of failure against rates of incorporation for small business...

...The idea is fearful enough, but when no personality embodies it, no other personality may contest it...

...Instead, somebody suggests putting vitamins into the flour, the President agrees, and we get new enriched apple pie which tastes like old apple pie but causes .01 of 1% more people to throw up because of the added vitamins...

...But he embodies nothing, he personifies nothing, he is power, rather a quizzical power, without light or principle...

...I suppose the kind of man who goes to bed and worries even once a year, "My God, what if, when all is said, the Russians are right...

...It has long been the thesis of this special self-appointed Presidential advisor that the FBI has done more damage to America than the American Communist Party...

...This is precisely what is not being done in America...

...its essence could be stated: America is in need of a secret police whose devotion, dedication, untiring effort, professional competence and political purity entitle it to scrutinize every aspect of American life it deems worthy to scrutinize...

...is more effective than the old cover for selling apple pie...

...The time he loses one night a year is enough to put him out of the race...

...indeed he is given facts not in whole, but facts masticated, their backs broken into lists, categories, and statistical tables...

...Existential politics is rooted in the concept of the hero, it would argue that the hero is the one kind of man who never develops by accident, that a hero is a consecutive set of brave and witty selfcreations, enrichments drawn out of his imagination which give a real turn to life, or strength extracted from a sense of timing deep and natural in its relation to the corner of the world where he finds himself...

...Ambitious young men, ready to become President in twenty or thirty years, will do worse than to read my book, for its studies are appropriate to the education of a Commander-in-Chief...

...It is all hard tough clear strategic thinking, the sort of thinking that the less literary seniors at Harvard used to do over the bridge table years ago...

...The liberals pump up their blimps, the conservatives flush out bile and bilge, but a real issue is never found...

...He is like the son of a famous man...

...We are in a good time in America, a prosperous time, a time of relative wealth and relative lack of poverty which was created not by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, nor by Kennedy, but by the economic mathematics of finding an ever-expanding market whose ultimate consumer is the enemy soldier...

...So it is faceless in history...

...Advisors are dishonest because they are professional...

...What has made it even more deadening has been the personality in its director...

...His liberalism is acquired at second hand...

...So we have a President who is brave but politically - neuter, adept at obtaining power and a miser at spending it, an intellectual with a mind like a newspaper's yearbook, and a blank somewhat stricken expression about the eyes, a numbed mind seems to speak behind them...

...He has a sense of the tradition of the Presidency and a sense of history—he wishes to be a great man...

...He was a hero, a most distressing kind of hero, but because he was a hero he encountered opponents as well as attracted followers, and he was finally defeated...

...For his passion: 40...

...It has been an evil force...

...How fortunate for the Left that a hero arose on the Right at that moment...

...No, there's no feeling of a new political atmosphere in the country...

...But we've done nothing to approach the center of the problem which is that life in America becomes more economically prosperous and more psychically impoverished each year...

...His own dimensions will develop only when he is separated from the shadow of his father...

...For his arithmetic the President gets a mark of 98...

...It is imperfect, incomplete, and somewhat deficient in its arithmetic...

...he can give you percentiles and/or profile curves on shifts in political party sentiment over twentyfive years in key political counties of America...

...He does not have the kind of mind which can see a new solution to an old problem...

...Virility is the unspoken salesman in American political programs today: the politician slaps his facts and figures on the table like a shillalagh: curious are the vitamins implicit in a massive collection of facts and figures—it is as if a man who can keep that much information in his head might be able to maintain that much erection in his will...

...When the body is sick, it is usually because one or another organ has become too weak or too powerful in its function...

...The real life of America is not being enriched...

...By the developed habits of his craft, a professional automatically suppresses as much information as he divulges...

...In effect it is the old apple pie still tasting of soggy cardboard and cheap flour, but the container is new—it has a picture on its cellophane cover which motivation research has discovered 25...

...have electronic super drafts which deaden the differences between good and bad flour...

...Roosevelt was a hero, Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover were leaders, nominal leaders...

...The President has commissions and commissars and bureaus and agents and computer machines to calculate the amount of schooling needed to keep America healthy, safe, vigorous, proof against the Russians...

...There will be little of oceanic profundity here, but a few, streams of possibility...

...or even worse, "My God, what if, when all is said, the Russians are half right...

...cannot ever become Pres * From the introduction to The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer, to be published by Putnam this September...

...For his imagination: zero...

...This book has an existential grasp of the nature of reality, and it is the unspoken thesis of these pages that no President can save America from a descent into totalitarianism without shifting the mind of the American politician to existential styles of political thought...

...It is narcotized away from the true problems of a President's task...

...the literacy rate...

...He has no imagination...

...He happens also to have a personality which is agreeable to most (in a way that Thomas E. Dewey's was not, nor Richard Nixon's) and he is also a man of personal bravery, a fact one does well not to ignore...

...The President suffers from one intellectual malady—intellectual malnutrition...

...A President is supposed to enrich the real life of his people—the mind which looks out from this President's eyes has lost the way...

...So an existential President would look for a man with a salient personality to put as head of the FBI...

...The President studies the new statistic, but it is not conclusive, so -the vitamins stay in...

...They calculate floor space and cubic feet of breathing space...

...If the disproportion is acute, a war goes on in the body, an inflammatory sickness, a fever, a crisis...

...No one suggests the apple pie should not be marketed—that if people have not the wit to bake for themselves, they are better off with no apple pie at all...

...A twentyfive per cent overkill will demand a disbursement of X billions which has Y probability of passing Z committee in Congress...

...He is neither religious nor irreligious, he is not provocative nor predictably dull, he is not entertaining, he is always potentially of interest...

...One is of course not throwing any disqualified devil's wishes into the ring for oneself, no, no, these are the Presidential papers of a court wit, an amateur advisor...

...figures for the gainfully employed and the locally unemployed over the last individual ten years, and by ten-year periods...

...Indeed he has every qualification for a great President—a sense of politics, a sense of mass response, a nose for propaganda, the ability to acquire information, the ability to keep cool when the world is on the edge of great heat, the wit to stop the legislative and administrative parts of the government from warring on one another, the perhaps excessive ability to avoid making needless enemies,—yes, he has every qualification but one...

...They pick pastel colors for toilets and study rooms, they pipe public address systems from auditoriums to class rooms, they have aerials for classroom television, side rooms for PTA functions, they do everything, they have everything...

...figures for armament in category, in gross...

...It has put a sense of inhibition into the popular arts and the popular mind...

...Politics is arithmetic, but politics is also rhetoric, passion, and an occasional idea to fire the imagination of millions...

...But still there is something in this book, something useful to the President...

...Under such a man, the fortunes of the FBI would prosper or falter, but its activities would be dramatized, its victories would come from open struggle, and its success would cease to resemble the chilling certainty of the house percentage in a gambling casino...

...So submits this devil...

...For a man with opinion is less free to move with the turn of power...

...McCarthy was such an embodiment...

...The FBI would exist rather than proliferate...

...The FBI has at present a leader, but not a hero...

...It is suffering from political monotony, intellectual debility and psychological despond...

...If the FBI had a hero for a leader and its fortunes prospered on open political market, then even if its ideas seemed odious, one would have to accept its prosperity as an historic event, a force with precise features...

...For if not, the leaders of the Right might have strangled the liberties of America somewhat further by remaining a faceless force...

...Power without a face is the disease of the state...

...It must be certain he has enough facts in his head filed under enough separate departments to make a fair extempore competitor for the World Almanac...

...nor is this to speak of the various kinds of information a professional is incapable of receiving because the language necessary for the inquiry does not belong to his vocational jargon...

...He studied for his occupation, he had the money to find it, and the family to help him find it...

...The natural work of the modern Presidency destroys a man's ability for abstract thought...

...Now the stakes are higher and they're still doing it...

...It is the war which initiates a restoration of balance...

...The Peace Corps seems to have inherited the political timidity of the CCC without its air of a barracks democracy...

...But can one at least give a clue...

...He learned too much and too early that victory goes to the discreet, that one does not speak one's opinion, that ideally one does not even develop one's opinion...

...he came to it the way a general comes to an army of mercenaries—he cannot win his war without them...

...And it is the face of a potential hero...

...He is presumably an expert on political matters which can be translated into arithmetic...

...So was Eisenhower...

...And the argument must be obeyed...

...in two minutes he can look up the figure for additional square feet of housing built in 1962 against calculated need for new housing in Plan A, Plan B, Plan G; he can tell you the number of words in a speech by glancing at the pages...

...Its statistical studies are absent...

...These short pieces* were chosen because their subject matter is fit concern for a President...

...An unheroic leader is a man who embodies his time but is not superior to it—he is historically faceless...