The Great Conspiracy Against Ickes

...Its value does not lie in the uncovering of any sensational data...

...The American political system, with its lack of party responsibility and its institutionalized conflict between the President and Congress, is a happy hunting-ground for the administrator who wants to go into business for himself and stake out an autonomous bureaucratic empire...

...Probably every human being takes pleasure in a compliment from his superiors, but the amazing thing about Ickes was that he could carefully catalogue the President's flattering sentiments for so many years without realizing that this was FDR's standard technique for handling him...

...Reviewed by John P. Roche Department of Political Science, Haver ford College...

...This is not the place to join in the current battle among students of public administration as to whether Roosevelt was a "good" administrator...

...Wallace, Morgenthau, et al...

...But Roosevelt had the cure for this problem: Whenever he delegated significant duties to subordinates, he made a parallel delegation...

...which eventually filled a hundred bound volumes—pouring into the archives his innermost prejudices and convictions...

...In this sense, it reveals far more than its author ever dreamed it would...

...Furthermore, while Ickes comments regularly on the dirty maneuvering of others, he has little to say about his own wellauthenticated safaris against various Cabinet colleagues...

...To summarize, Ickes's diary will prove extremely useful to the historian and to the student of Presidential politics, although it hardly seems like meat for the general reader...

...co-author, "The Dynamics of Democratic Government" Both the existence and the contents of this diary reveal clearly what many have long suspected: that Harold L. Ickes had an ego which may well have established a new American record...

...Unquestionably, official Washington has hatched its quota of conspiracies, but it is hard to believe that, in the midst of a terrible depression, the top men in the American Government had so little to do that they could devote themselves to Ickes's elimination with such wholehearted gusto...

...Although little new information emerges (if there were any juicy revelations, they have been deleted by the editor), the books are invaluable to the close student of New Deal politics, presenting as they do a week-by-week chronicle of the major problems faced by the Roosevelt regime...

...For instance, during his first administration he gave overlapping relief-andrecovery responsibilities to Ickes, Hopkins and Jesse Jones, knowing that rivalry among these three men would necessitate an appeal to Presidential authority on any really important matter...

...First as to Ickes, who emerges from this self-portrait as a bureaucratic paranoid—or, in his own terms, as an honest man among incompetents (Hopkins, Perkins, Richberg...

...here it does not, for instance, compare with The Forrestal Diaries...

...One might make a shrewd guess that Franklin D. Roosevelt realized this Achilles heel very early in his first administration, for, despite all Ickes's fulminating, his threats of resignation and his conviction that every part of the New Deal save that under his jurisdiction was a failure, the President could always bring the elderly adolescent to heel with a welltimed and superbly administered egocaress...

...or to advance their own political ambitions...

...But the weekly chronicle does highlight on issue after issue the President's dedication to what has been called "administrative pluralism...

...suffice it to say that, whatever the outcome of that controversy may be, FDR was a superb political manipulator...

...One wonders if the reason Ickes was so convinced of the ubiquity of plots against himself was that he was so perpetually occupied in planting the stiletto in others...

...Not a day passed, it would seem, without one of these bumbling bureaucrats making insinuations against Ickes, and the plot even penetrated the intimate confines of the White House, for Eleanor, too, was in on it...

...But, once this has been said, it must be added that the diary reveals far more by implication than it does by explicit statement, and the picture which the sophisticated reader can piece together, both of Ickes and of Roosevelt, is a most interesting one...

...Each week, the professional curmudgeon retired to his study and dictated his diary...

...all of whom were conspiring day and night with the President to eliminate him...

...Delegation of substantial chunks of power, however highly it may be esteemed by the prophets of "public administration," can lead to Presidential impotence and to decisionmaking by essentially irresponsible administrators...

...but rather in presenting a detailed picture of the perspective of a key New Deal administrator...

...A President with little political finesse, like Truman or Eisenhower, can easily find that many significant decisions are made by his subordinates without his having much of a say in the matter...

...A related aspect of Ickes's character which emerges as one reads between the lines of his diary was the gap between his picture of himself as a hard-boiled political realist and the apparent reality of a naive man inordinately susceptible to flattery...

...With respect to Roosevelt, the Ickes diary reveals little that has not already come out in the multitudinous autobiographies by members of his administration...

...If Harold was wronged by his contemporaries and slandered by small men within and without the Roosevelt Administration, he was going to have the last word with History...

...Honi soit qui mal y pense...

...and, at whatever cost to efficiency, the trustees of Presidential delegations of authority found it extremely difficult to set up their own independent operations...

...Ickes's memoirs give us instance after instance of this masterful conservation of authority, although once again he was apparently unaware that this was a pattern of Presidential procedure...

...Consequently, the strings of decision never escaped from Roosevelt's grasp...

...The two volumes issued to date present the reader with a mixed bag...