The Professors in Washington
Gass, Oscar
I fear I may be writing even these fragmentary observations under false pretenses. In "A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion," I am writing about Professors. But I am not a Socialist, and I am not...
...After all, were you elected or was the President...
...These Senators and Representatives are hobbled by every prejudice and serve every vested interest...
...Everybody else is to blame: the people will not...
...Policies are not hammered out in wide discussions within a national party organization...
...Character makes a clear gain...
...How many Eichmanns then in the Washington civil service...
...And I have, on some matters, learned from them —though I do not know any such study that contributes importantly to the understanding of the operation of government in the Executive Branch or the Legislative Branch in Washington today...
...They are...
...How else should one treat the Bad Guy...
...But the conception is tricky...
...For present purposes, the present political machine suffices...
...The Congress is the Bad Guy...
...His is the attitude of partisan counsel, concerned to prevail in the case at the bar and careful only not to play any tricks for which he can be nailed...
...Indeed it is true...
...In the New Frontier, the prevalence of dead center is acknowledged haltingly and with regret...
...In his relations with the Congress, the federal career officer rarely creates an atmosphere of shared problems and shared decisions—because no such thought is in his head...
...Seymour E. Harris, has contributed to The New Republic of June 1, 1963...
...Yet my limited experience is so consistent that I will state it: the military career officer in Washington representatively has decidedly more character than the civilian...
...Among the distinctive Professors' causes in Washington, in recent years, were The Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and the U.S...
...And yet, and yet—would Washington, in this respect, not be worse without them...
...I hope the Professors will continue to some to Washington—particularly as sojourners and transients...
...It was comforting to find, on my first day in the Treasury, that my Chief was a former Professor, even if only a Professor of Economics...
...Under the Great Crusade, the ideology of dead center was overt public policy...
...No, the professors cannot be counted upon regularly to contribute perspective...
...I fear I may be writing even these fragmentary observations under false pretenses...
...No one in government service has chosen to be poor or powerless...
...Is there a detectable difference...
...Themes may be drawn from St...
...Just so, I do not qualify as an academic by having, years ago, taught two little, narrowly specialized courses in economics...
...You already have hundreds...
...But I hate such things...
...The federal government does not recruit the Professor for his judgment, his perspective, or his character...
...But it could be denominated great only by a standard for which greatness is the inevitable concomitant of the exercise of high authority in a major power...
...All else is nuance and minor qualification...
...Shall I say, in the phrase loaded at once with self-defense and other-denigration, "Some of my best friends are Socialists...
...And Thoreau was quite aware that climbing for power can blind the eyes as badly as climbing for wealth...
...Of course, they have sentiments, preferences, and aversions—dispersed along our conventional conservative-liberal or liberal-conservative spectrum...
...the same people would have been different...
...I have never known an informed and sincere person to give but one answer: if the coming to power was as smooth as Hitler's, at least 99.9% of all civil servants would probably report to work—and continue to work—as if nothing had happened...
...And objectivity is decisive...
...I came to know Harry White well—though not always pleasantly...
...For my sins, I have even some times condemned myself to read the products of specialists in Public Administration who employed such methods...
...On the contrary, it is deliberately narrowed to a few points: internal moral standards...
...They give us back our own stuff...
...I take it for a convenient fable...
...How much worse it will be if we have our own college...
...To overcome this separateness, to secure more effective and speedy participation by the Congress in the government process, may require a much larger—and differently conceived— effort than has previously been made in the United States...
...No, in the representative case, with respect to those who have transferred their career aspirations to Washington permanently—after having attained an academic Professorship...
...Because he is politically objective (i.e., has a mind and personality almost devoid of structured content regarding the fundamentals of politics) , the Professor characteristically is of little use in any activity that requires either understanding the politics of Washington or understanding the larger politics of the United States...
...A rather unusual former Professor— Harry Dexter White...
...No use having people around who are not objective...
...would have had to be drawn in...
...independence...
...Perhaps, having stopped competing, he would give to everyone something of the consideration previously reserved for the young and for the circle of intimacy...
...And, if he is a Professor of Government, he may in later years teach this High Doctrine as the ultimate wisdom of American politics...
...Shall I say, "Some of my best friends are Professors...
...He gave us a car load of propaganda...
...I think the federal government would be the loser if that justification came to be believed unsound...
...And it does not reflect a unique performance by a federal Professor...
...The Professor, in temporary high authority, has had lunch with the Senators and Representatives...
...the Congress will not...
...When there are militants in the national politics of the time, the Professors are among them...
...Even when our Professors come from various universities, on a question like European integration we almost never get anything from them but our own house doctrine...
...V11 A young man in the federal service told me about a year ago, perhaps vaingloriously, that he had played an important part in drafting a speech for a high political officer...
...Ask a dozen administrative assistants to Democratic Senators and Congressmen when they last met a militant from the Executive Branch—a militant on any question under the sun...
...We must hope he was wrong, for who among us has opted for poverty...
...the times are out of joint for great actions...
...But can the ordinary historian then borrow these perspectives—as externally as one borrows a pair of field glasses...
...Had intentions been greater, politics would have had to be quite different...
...It is fair game...
...But those of my closer friends who call themselves Socialists are, for the most part, not Americans...
...A frequent experience of the Professors in Washington—and not only of the Professors...
...That is, no doubt, an innocent and even commendable occupation for a learned man...
...Though Harry White had little good to say of academic economists—especially if they were actual or potential competitors— his senior assistants were all former academics, mostly ex-Professors...
...In my case, the recommendation of an economics Professor from Reed College (who knew me) to an economics Professor from Lawrence College (who did not...
...How far can a Civil Servant rightly go in repeatedly advising the boss that he is fundamentally on the wrong track...
...I asked, "Why do you need more...
...a personality not easily bent or broken...
...Why don't they give the President (and me in the background) the authority and let us get on with the job, without constantly badgering us...
...The career civilian official in the federal government lacks the respected social standing of a professional, and he also lacks the internal self-possession...
...On these matters, they merely share the unreasoning vanities and frustrations that proliferate in the federal career service...
...The President—Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, every President—is the Good Guy...
...In my happy experience, looks not in vain...
...I have dealt with these matters substantively in "Crusade for Trade" (in The New Republic of March 19 and 26, 1962) and in "Europe Renewed and Transformed" (in Commentary of May 1963...
...He sparred with us...
...It has only two points...
...I think an historian of great intellectual capacity—a Frederic Maitland, a Lucien Febvremay have valuable perspectives on remote matters, in which he has steeped himself...
...Where then was this perspective of theirs...
...I have decided to let them stand as they were before the assassination.—O...
...I do not wish to compete with Aristotle in defining...
...Or is it the tendentious product of a captive public relations man...
...The role of the federal Professor is to sing a mild lament, bearing the title "The Limits of the Political Process...
...Risks would have had to be taken...
...Pursuant to the High Doctrine, the federal career officer, in his dealings with the Congress, is sometimes deft but almost always evasive and not infrequently disingenuous...
...Not different people...
...About the same time, one of the largest research corporations serving the Department of Defense constellation inquired of me regarding new consultants...
...I have longer views...
...The New Frontier presses on few new frontiers...
...They are harder in the United States than in some other representative systems because we have no strong national parties...
...Indeed it is only a little more than those aspects of a man that might be formed in accordance with the Biblical injunction, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil...
...Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—perhaps one day Lyndon Johnson—come to the same bar...
...Much clearer is the distinction of the temporary federal Professors...
...Almost all are climbing...
...I know the job better...
...11 I came to Washington to work first in June 1938—exactly as thousands of others have—because of the recommendation of one Professor to another...
...human dignity...
...But both our Professors and our non-academic consultants are now so completely brain-washed that they are of no use...
...V Perspective is one of the things for which one looks to the Professors, in Washington as elsewhere...
...The Professor who wishes to serve in Washington will be indulged a great variety of interests...
...I do not wish to defend the dead—with one notable exception—or to praise or condemn the living...
...Well, then, perhaps I shall at least betray confidences or tell anecdotes...
...Generally, the federal Professors are not modest and retiring out, on the contrary, rather assertive and self-important...
...Each of our Senators and Congressmen is still, in major part, an ambassador whose political strength is rooted in his own State and who maintains only less important relationships with other legislators who have separate roots...
...It has no considerable intentions beyond those conventional in American government during a period in which politics flutters around dead center.* (Will the future historian of American tax policy, for example, even have to pause to mention the change of Administration when he goes from George Humphrey's Revenue Act of 1954 to what seems likely to be Douglas Dillon's Revenue Act of 1964...
...What would happen, in the civil service in Washington, if a nativestyle American drctatorship were to come to power—perhaps after the shattering blow of America's defeat in war...
...Hannah Arendt has made it easier to play this game by giving us a little Eichmann, smaller than the historical one but correspondingly better for this exercise...
...Do I grant the Professors in Washington an unmixed contribution of perspective...
...The Professors do, I believe, contribute something in other perspectives, something of character, most as technicians...
...He tried a snow job on us...
...Do the federal Professors make a difference...
...If a study of the academics in Washington is to be taken seriously, the student should, I suppose, get a Foundation grant, should design questionnaires, solicit objective responses, and assemble statistics...
...The New Frontier wished to be great...
...Those would be judged a barrier to objectivity...
...I have listened, even more recently, to another federal Professor discoursing about British politics, with every presumption of expertise but in terms which suggested rather less acquaintance than would be common among knowledgeable newspapermen who had, at some time, been stationed in the British Isles...
...But I think Washington profits from having a considerable number of Professors around, at all times, even when their technical expertise is not of a high order...
...Is this the work of an intellectual...
...He has published it...
...I do not know the military well...
...In "A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion," I am writing about Professors...
...I shall try to avoid names...
...It is therefore possible that I have mistaken them...
...IV Had the New Frontier been different, its Professors would have been different too...
...And they were manifestly just average stupid...
...In success, the unwilling would have felt the hot breath of the militants on their necks...
...To be intellectually purse-proud is their most common mark...
...Everything else is personal vagary and subjectivity...
...No use asking about Professors separately...
...One does not seek instruments for non-existent purposes...
...This was the big speech," he said, "and my draft ran, 'The problems of government are moral and political, not merely technical and managerial.' They changed that slightly," he said, with laughter in his eyes, "to make it read, 'The problems of government are not moral and political but technical and managerial...
...Thoreau has said, "None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty...
...The Fair Deal of Harry Truman and the Great Crusade of Dwight Eisenhower also had their Professors...
...I mean structured or systematic political views of any kind—not merely, I hope, views that coincide with my own judgments or rela rA tionship or value...
...In the eyes of the political high command, the Professors serving in Washington justify themselves as technicians and managers...
...Thousands of others have had similar experiences...
...But this difference is marginal...
...But some with far greater destruction of character than others...
...Neither the education nor the previous life-style of a Professor seems to make for any character gain...
...But all this is fantasy...
...Professionalism, colleagueship, public esteem, and security seem the decisive differences—all operating in favor of the military...
...His resources of personality were always greater than the normal ones...
...Each memory might contribute something of illustration or anecdote...
...An initial distinction in Washington is between military and civilian...
...I number by the dozens the Professors and lesser academics I have observed on their official duties in the federal government in * These observations were sent to the editors on October 18th...
...During all that period, I have lived in Washington most months of each year...
...Thousands upon thousands...
...But I am not a Socialist, and I am not a Professor...
...It employs him as a technician or manager, esteeming his technical and managerial ability— real or imaginary...
...But, you see, they preserved my skeleton...
...I was then a year out of the Oxford school of Philosophy, Politics and Economics and four years from a degree in History at Reed College...
...There he quickly absorbs the High Doctrine of the federal career service...
...My first attendance at a Congress of professional historians was then correspondingly disturbing...
...With all this, there is, on the part of the typical career officer, and his associated Professor, in relations with the Congress, a bland assumption of moral and intellectual superiority, an ill-concealed condescension (though, it may be, combined with fright) which the Congressman finds maddening...
...And, for the greater part, I cannot imagine them working here...
...The Professors do not set the style...
...Treasury, Mr...
...It is a word much favored by historians...
...I think no candid and informed person can doubt that it would be worse...
...In any case, I can have no present ambition to compete in that league...
...No man can give what he does not have...
...Is this the perspective of a Professor...
...The Senators and Congressmen feel left out and resentful...
...The accredited federal Professors sang its song...
...Augustine, Edmund Burke, or Reinhold Niebuhr, according to taste...
...To be objective, in the federal bureaucracy, is to take one's first principles of public policy from the front office...
...Evidently, historical investigation proposes itself as a way of knowing...
...In these matters, in my judgment, the federal Professors contributed not sound perspectives but conventional thinking, inadequate information, and slovenly tactics—together with their own uniquely oppressive selfrighteousness.* After Nassau, when the whole mess became apparent, a senior career officer in the State Department said to me, "Frankly, we all thought British entry was a 'shoo-in.' We haven't had a new idea on European integration in five years...
...They would, I suspect, be almost as ill at ease—would feel themselves almost as constricted in a pointless round of "business as usual"—in the New Frontier of President Kennedy as in the Great Crusade of President Eisenhower...
...These problems of Congressional participation are not easily resolved...
...And they responded, "Yes, numbers we have...
...Though initially I was to be only the most junior professional member of a small staff in one Division of the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury, I approached the job with some trepidation...
...Quite consequently, from these Professors who are determined to stay in government work only a year or two, the federal service makes a decisive profit...
...involvement in pushing Britain toward the Common Market...
...The willing professional political personnel (Senators, Representatives, Governors, Mayors, etc., etc...
...The colonel will also conduct himself more consistently with dignity in his relations with the general than will the civilian division chief in dealing with his superior...
...All this is much less than a whole man...
...Characteristically the Professor works in the Executive Branch...
...If the spice of personality is diminished, the quality of judgment may gain...
...What a handsome adornment a Professor can be...
...How much real and how much imaginary, it would be vain to estimate...
...In the years of the Fair Deal, world affairs dominated, even to a greater extent than subsequently...
...Today, in October 1963, and for some time now, the New Frontier has no militants of any kind...
...I think that, in this, the interchange between academic and government work is a good thing...
...Everything turns on the justice of selection...
...It would have been necessary to try to create a new Democratic party...
...Perspective: large views: j.1st proportions: balance in relating today's events to the whole...
...I have listened to a Professor in the New Frontier boldly declare himself an expert in petroleum economics, about which, I suspect, he had little more than an intelligent amateur's knowledge...
...The President would have had to seek out, indoctrinate, and lead new militants of his New Frontier in every State—in every likely Senatorial and Congressional • I have given some further indication of my thinking on these matters in two essays in Commentary of April and December 1961 and in an essay in The New Republic of February 9, 1963, district...
...111 What I have found most consistent in the Professors whom I have observed in Washington is their freedom from structured political views...
...The federal Professors do not, I think, contribute anything to Washington in structured views of the great problems of American politics...
...Try it today...
...Yes...
...And, if the professional historian has no extraordinary understanding of his own time, on which he has an abundance of evidence, why is he to be trusted to have surer perspective on other times, for which he has much less evidence...
...But those of my friends who are Professors only very infrequently work in Washington nowadays...
...I confess to years of concern over what it means to them...
...The itinerant academics show great aptitude in acquiring these attitudes and practices...
...He was among the most capable, decent and honorable of the Professors and Civil Servants I have known—in all that I knew of him and all that I know to this day...
...In them, by the circumstances of their non-commitment, there is far greater independence...
...Few—Professors or others—recognized that domestic politics were on dead center...
...Look—I beg of you, look again—at the paper which a Harvard Professor, who sits some times at the U.S...
...In my experience, these ex-Professors are perhaps even, as a group, slightly more ambitious and slightly more sycophantic than the average career civil servant of the same rank...
...And now he leaves them on Capitol Hill, full of his good work, and they speak to one another: "No need to invite that one again...
...How often they withhold trust from the spokesmen of the Executive who do not share problems and ideas with them but come tardily to solicit their votes...
...VI Character is the most difficult issue...
...A colonel will handle himself with more consistent self-respect, in dealing with a Senator, than will a civilian career division chief...
...In the last years, after his defeat, when we worked together again, White appeared to me mellowed...
...The story is almost too pat to be true...
...They accommodate themselves to it...
...Nor is my present interest comprehensive...
...And the sharpness of anecdote adds nothing to the weight of argument...
...Only intellectually structured and firmly held political views are seriously disqualifying...
...And they show it...
...And here were people who had spent their working lives at it...
...For me, the profusion of academics eased the unfamiliarity...
...For at least twenty years now, I have—at long intervals—repeated the same question game with people who know the federal civil service well...
...Worse...
...But whatever the task, whatever the solution, it is vain to look to the Professors in Washington for any help...
...One betrays no confidence...
...He thinks he has influenced them...
...Yet, for several years (1942-45) , we were not on speaking terms, and I thought him then terribly twisted and diminished by the struggle for personal power and self-assertion...
...Then he spoke bitterly of the President's idea of establishing a State Department staff college...
...Militants would be an irrelevancy—in bad taste, heroes without a cause...
...G. the past quarter century...
...I wish there were more of them...
...No and yes...
...Their vanities clash with the vanities of the career officers, and such abrasion is, I think, a good thing...
...So the selection runs—among both academic and non-academic Civil Servants...
...In 1963, this problem has become exceptionally acute because there is no effective Congressional or Executive leadership, and the processes of the federal government have slowed almost to a halt...
...It is not enough, I think, that I do hold that what were historically Socialist doctrines have something important to contribute to that better polity for which Socialist is not an adequate name...
...You will get twelve horse laughs...
Vol. 11 • January 1964 • No. 1
