The Prince and His Courtiers: at the White House, the Kremlin, and the Reichschancellery
Peters, Russell Baker and Charles
The Prince and His Courtiers: at the White House, the Kremlin, and the Reichschancellery Russell Baker and Charles Peters The analogy between the modern presidency and the royal...
...find the leader, or prince, treated with a deference approaching reverence, which must inevitably tempt all but the humblest souls (who are rarely to be found running large, aggressive states) to assume they possess a superiority bordering on divinity...
...It can't happen here...
...The courtier's need to please his leader often has disastrous consequences for the people on the other end of royal decisions...
...The court imbues the prince with both religious and nationalistic characteristics that make him a figure of awe...
...Members are permitted to work out personal rivalries behind the arras, but on issues of substance every man must shape up, and work with the team...
...I herewith give you an official order that they weren't there...
...In him is the very epitome of the "managerial revolution...
...Great ocean-spanning jets kept constantly at the ready...
...Speer is not one of the flamboyant and picturesque Nazis...
...The powerful men under Hitler were already jealously watching one another like so many pretenders to the throne...
...The president, needing "access to Russell Baker writes the "Observer" column in The New York Times...
...Yes, Mr...
...Yes, Mr...
...I don't know where these people were sent...
...In his memoirs published in 1970 in Life, O'Donnell stated that Kennedy planned in 1963 to end the Vietnam war in 1965, after his reelection had been assured...
...And a prince who has been conditioned to consider himself a quasi-divine blend of flag, cause, and country is most unlikely to be pleased at being exposed too frequently to reality...
...The sycophantic Buckingham repeatedly signed his notes to the king, "your faithful slave and dog," and James seems never to have told him that a friend's groveling was embarrassing to the king...
...The life of a courtier," Reedy comments, "is to be Sammy Glick or to fight Sammy Glick...
...Goering snapped to attention and declared solemnly: "My leader...
...The courtier's instinct, however, overwhelmed him at the critical moment, as Speer recounts: But at the situation conference, when Hitler once again stressed the necessity of holding out in Stalingrad, Keitel strode emotionally toward him, pointed to the map, where a small remnant of the city was surrounded by thick red rings, and declared: "Mein Fuehrer, we will hold that...
...And yet...
...As all this suggests, the courtier-prince relationship is almost inevitably corrupting to both parties...
...Hitler often explained the elimination of important men on grounds that they were in ill health...
...This renaissance of the princely court, Reedy insists, is breeding immense danger for American government, for much the same reason that the 17th and 1 8th-century courts of Western Europe contributed to the development of violent revolutions...
...and apparently deals with it just as fascists and democrats do...
...Here we see working most of the same principles which animate life at the great political courts...
...The universities, for example, are still puzzled about "what the kids really want...
...It had picked up corpses all the way from Poltava to Kiev...
...But money is far from the whole story...
...When a movie ended, Stalin would suggest, "Well, let's go get something to eat, why don't we...
...Speer himself was not without skill at the struggle...
...seems to be the condition of the last half of the twentieth century...
...When Reedy's book was first published, its importance as a work of political science was discounted by some reviewers on grounds that Reedy, as a member of the Johnson staff, had based his treatise on a singularly peculiar presidency, one in which parallels to the Sun King were ludicrously easy to draw...
...Not a muscle moved in Galland's face...
...It is enough to make one sympathize with a tyrant, for the determination of his courtiers to deceive him for their own personal ends-if he is aware of it-confronts him with problems as baffling as those posed by an enemy state's diplomacy...
...No one interrupts presidential contemplation for anything less than a major catastrophe somewhere on the globe...
...Quite early there were struggles for position among Goebbels, Goering, Rosenberg, Ley, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Hess...
...Old scores are settled...
...I think somebody had better inform Stalin about this situation...
...Rather than disturb the prince by becoming the delivery agent for bad news, and thus perhaps lose favor, the courtier elects to withhold from him information essential to realistic policy decisions...
...Little, Brown, $10...
...And so they are, the new courtiers, rising at their most efficient to heights where they seem very close to becoming the organization, but never quite...
...Finally, a group of generals persuaded Chief of Staff Keitel to recommend to Hitler an evacuation of the Army's helpless survivors...
...Likewise, Albert Speer was able to blur away Hitler's final solution for the Jews as he focused on his own job performance...
...Security at the White House thickened...
...The courtiers tend to identify the prince with the state...
...Glided to the east, sir...
...Uncomfortable Truths The prince, having become accustomed through the assurances of the courtiers to the sensation of being an extraordinary human being, becomes more difficult to deal with at certain times...
...The basic method, Reedy reports, was "to be present either personally or by a proxy piece of paper when 'good news' arrives and to be certain that someone else is present when the news is bad...
...Speer recalls, he felt "as if a medal had been conferred upon me...
...Mr...
...The most notoriously inept of the courtiers whimsically given power by kings was perhaps the Duke of Buckingham, who seems to have bewitched King James I with his male beauty and skills at flattery and royal companionship...
...For them: There is only one fixed goal in life...
...Under Kennedy and Johnson, foreign-policy management groups were moved into the White House, and institutional divisions between domestic- and foreignpolicy barons began to develop...
...Hitler would reply with, "Heil, Speer...
...World, $6.95...
...Reedy writes of the White House: There is built into the presidency a series of devices that tend to remove the occupant of the Oval Room from all of the forces which require most men to rub up against the hard facts of life on a daily basis...
...About to board his train to leave Berlin, Goering was visited by General Adolf Galland...
...There were signs, not altogether superficial, that the development of something remarkably like court life had been rapidly accelerating at the White House since the arrival of Franklin Roosevelt...
...Galland said American fighters had already been shot down at Aachen...
...Imagine, then, the difficulty of having to confront a prince, conditioned to believe in his peculiarly excellent superiority, with the fact that his policy is failing...
...First, there were the gates through which ordinary mortals might not step...
...1 mean, if they were very high when they were shot down they could have glided quite a distance farther before they crashed...
...How many of us have writhed in secret agony while "dedicated" mediocrities have responded with the organization man's version of Alleluia: "That grabs me...
...The Prince and His Courtiers: at the White House, the Kremlin, and the Reichschancellery Russell Baker and Charles Peters The analogy between the modern presidency and the royal European court, bewigged, bejeweled, and beset with intrigue, is not original with George Reedy, but he is the first to alarm us with notice that court government is undergoing a 20th-century rebirth in the White House...
...No one ever invites him to "go soak your head" when his demands become petulant and unreasonable...
...And yet, Galland insisted, the downed planes were at Aachen...
...Note that Speer did not say "my position as architect," but rather, "my position as Hitler's architect" (our emphasis...
...Thus, we had those repeated assertions from Lyndon Johnson that only the President had all the facts on which to base decisions about Vietnam, when in truth he lacked the first fact that was most essential of all for a leader and easiest to learn outside the White House court: to wit, that his people were not behind him as he waded deeper and deeper into the quagmire...
...I was ready to follow him anywhere...
...A failure...
...The unions are irritated because blacks excluded from jobs by union policy accuse them of racism...
...Or, to put it more bluntly, his own interests are placed above the interests of the prince and the state he professes to serve...
...There is the satisfaction of public recognition, of being written about with awe in the press, and other small chaff...
...These fears survived from memories of the abuses of the 17th and 18th centuries, at which people and Parliament were frequently dealt with according to the advice of some royal favorite, whose grasp of statecraft ended with a mastery of sycophancy...
...The Trappings of the Court In sheer body density alone, the insulation around the presidency has thickened rapidly...
...At such moments...
...The man with the hedge clippers," Speer calls Bormann...
...But I was removed from my trance when I heard the President's voice saying, "Mr...
...I was in accord with the system so long as it permitted me to function effectively...
...After the Sontay raid failed to discover a single American prisoner of war, much less rescue one, Secretary of Defense Laird went to the White House...
...Bormann, Speer recalls, avoided long business trips and vacations for fear another would insinuate himself during the absence into Bormann's place...
...This isolation from reality kept Johnson, and has since kept Richard Nixon, obsessed with Southeast Asia as a prime problem of government at a time when very few people could sustain more than a flickering interest in it, and then only when aroused by White House theatrics...
...Italian artists, for example, were given liberal use of church walls and domes to turn their talents to issues of ethereal importance in return for ignoring the rapacity and the decadence of the princes who gave them their chance...
...When the Russians surrounded Hitler's Sixth Army at Stalingrad, at a critical moment in World War 11, a black reality began to threaten the Fuehrer's notion that the Wehrmacht could not be defeated...
...It is a structure designed for one purpose and one purpose only-to serve the material needs and the desires of a single man...
...To be close to Stalin," Khruschev remembers, "this seemed to be the crowning moment of my career...
...Goering took the occasion to reprimand Galland for having told Hitler that American fighter planes had penetrated German territory...
...to the fortunate...
...Whether he has any other than conventional political opinions at all is unknown...
...The American fighters were not there...
...Fantasies...
...With court struggle fought out along petty personal lines, the courtiers are inevitably reduced to demeaning little maneuvers to protect their backs, while working into good knife position vis-a-vis their immediate opponents...
...Albert Speer...
...Open dissent ends one's chance to exercise his benign influence within the government, and creates job openings to be filled by less high-minded men...
...What is good for Josef Stalin is good for the Soviet Union," to paraphrase the young Khruschev in American...
...the Hitlers and Himmlers we may get rid of, but the Speers, whatever happens to this particular special man, will long be with us...
...Herbert Hoover had a staff of only 42 persons...
...At each court, for example, we *The Twilight of the Presidency by George E. Reedy...
...Speer found a similar condition under Hitler...
...Consequently, the President's psychology is studied minutely, and a working day in the White House is marked by innumerable probes to determine which routes to the Oval Room are open and which end in a blind alley...
...This is a process which resembles nothing else known in the world except possibly the Japanese game of go, a contest in which there are very few fixed rules and the playing consists of laying down alternating counters in patterns that permit flexibility but seek to deny that flexibility to the opponent...
...The elite might have entree to the Oval Room, equivalent to the Royal Bedchamber...
...And yet...
...At this point Goering's self-control gave way...
...They all have, in a way, become the mere auxiliaries of the man who actually directs the giant power machine-charged with drawing from it the maximum effort under maximum strain...
...Experienced courtsmen may find it naive that anyone should expect them to behave otherwise...
...Rarely is combat among the courtiers pursued to much political purpose in these 20th-century courts...
...The answer was . . . my position as Hitler's architect had become indispensable...
...His favor is so desirable to his subordinates that they will sue for it by every means possible...
...If my plane were shot up...
...Get that...
...Reedy's discussion of courtiers insulating the President against reality was taken by many readers as sour grapes, a subtle intellectual's way of taking his vengeance upon the cleverer players of the court game who had eased him into retirement...
...Reedy, in fact, gives us a full-length portrait of the courtier's life at the modern presidential court...
...The trappings of court began, simultaneously, to multiply...
...Years later, in Spandau," he writes, "I read Ernst Cassirer's comment on the men who of their own accord threw away man's highest privilege: to be an autonomous person...
...At the end of a brutally exhausting day, Khruschev recalls: We would meet either in his study at the Kremlin or, more often, "in the Kremlin movie theater...
...The rationale has been finely worked out...
...President, gentlemen, I most definitely do not agree...
...American fears of monarchy at the head of government are familiar to schoolboys-the debate at the beginning about how the leader of the new country should be styled, the fears of the more republican founders that the President might develop into a king and that the seat of government might develop into a court...
...For the sub-elite there were certain Presence Chambers where the Presidential Magnificence might be seen in the flesh, might indeed grant the boon of a smile, of a casual "Hi, there...
...Special helicopters...
...At the timid suggestion of a general, he was even considering an effort to save the Army by breaking out into a retreat until Reichsmarshal Goering entered the room: Depressed, with a beseeching note in his voice, Hitler asked him: "What about supplying Stalingrad by air...
...Another factor is the need to function, the opportunity the courtier gets to use his talents, to prove his mastery of special skills...
...it has been articulated many times by men explaining why they chose not to voice their dissent from the Johnson war policy...
...AT&T is still trying to figure out why it didn't anticipate a rising demand for phone service in New York...
...The empty-headed thrills which the younger Khruschev and Speer derived from the notice of their leaders may be dismissed as the natural response of innocence in the presence of a celebrity...
...Khruschev Remembers...
...But what are we to make of the account of a National Security Council meeting under Lyndon Johnson, as recounted by Chester Cooper in The Lost Crusade...
...Presidential appearances were preceded and surrounded by the inevitable, ineffectual showing of the private presidential bodyguard...
...The result is a dangerous presidential isolation, which may be compounded in its peril because court life works to persuade the President that he is more closely in touch with reality than anyone else in the realm...
...Do you understand...
...Demchenko, a member of the Ukranian Politburo, called on Mikoyan in MosHere's what Demchenko said: "Anastas Ivanovich, does Comrade Stalin-for that matter, does anyone in the Politburo-know what's happening in the Ukraine...
...Why, surprising to tell, not terribly different from court life at the Reichschancellery in the reign of Adolf Hitler, where a courtier's life was surprisingly like life in the Kremlin, at the court of Josef Stalin...
...Khruschev tells a story that had been told to him by Mikoyan...
...In a thousand conference rooms, where the smell of moral sterility is as strong as ether in a hospital corridor, the new courtiers do their minuet each day and the organizations slip further and further from reality...
...Writing of Martin Bormann, his bete noire, he states: Bormann followed the simple principle of always remaining in closest proximity to the source of all grace and favor...
...John Roche, who stayed with President Johnson's staff to the end, refers with mild contempt to the notion that presidential staff aides can seriously be likened to royal courtiers...
...It is the lack of psychological and spiritual ballast and the ease with which he handles the terrifying technical and organizational machinery of our age, which makes this slight type go extremely far nowadays . . . . This is their age...
...The custom-built carriages, magnificently engineered automobiles built expressly for the White House...
...The organization man has already become the characteristic man of our time, the man who shapes our destiny after the princes have finished reciting their ghost-written (by organization men) speeches...
...If our destruction comes, it will be because we placed our faith-our unquestioning faith-in institutions that were only brick and wood and in men who were only flesh and blood and this...
...Modern institutions remind us in other ways of the courts-the elevation of the organization to suprahuman importance, the minuet of the courtiers, the increasing difficulty of perceiving reality...
...In brief, he who runs away shall live to run away another day...
...Now I was completely under Hitler's spell, unreservedly and unthinkingly held by him...
...He writes: There is a special trap for every holder of power...
...I support the President," Americans will say, on most issues in which they have no immediate financial or blood interest...
...President, I agree...
...Jack Valenti, who knew his man as well as anyone in Washington, knew that Lyndon Johnson would not bridle if Valenti told the world he slept better for knowing Johnson was in the White House...
...O'Donnell, with his courtier's tendency to identify prince with state and place the welfare of ruler above all, saw nothing morally wrong, and to this day apparently fails to see anything out of order, with Kennedy's willingness to let men continue dying through 1963 and 1964 because it was politically awkward to end the war before assuring his own reelection...
...What motivates the courtier...
...Impossible...
...One day, we are surprised that the organization has sloughed off one brilliant young man and found another immediately to replace him...
...And in Moscow, at about the same time Speer and colleagues were competing to persuade the Fuehrer of his surpassing excellence...
...You can see what an abnormal state of affairs had developed when someone like Demchenko was afraid to go see Stalin himself...
...And elsewhere, "I believed that everything Stalin said in the name of the party was inspired by genius, and that I had only to apply it to my own life...
...Actually, according to the evidence of our three memoirists, it wasn't abnormal at all...
...In both France and England, our immediate political forebears, kings lost their heads because they had become unable to sense or hear the intent and passion of their peoples through the barriers of courts erected to glorify and, ironically, to protect them...
...What was this...
...The Keys to the Kingdom Reedy, Khruschev, and Speer give us comparable' pictures of the advancing corruption created in the courtiers by their impulse to establish and protect their intimacy with the leader...
...To help the state, the courtier must reach a position of intimacy with the prince, and to do this he must block or eliminate other courtiers moving toward the same goal...
...Macmillan, $12.50...
...Politicians, therefore, "pricked up their ears" when they heard of Hitler's associates being "sick...
...There must be many of Lyndon Johnson's dukes and earls who, remembering the Vietnam years, would find it possible to sympathize with Hermann Goering's lines in an anecdote related by Speer...
...Not at all, Laird explained...
...One such time is the moment when an uncomfortable truth is delivered at the palace door...
...I never asked...
...Hence, the distaste for courts...
...Men wielding the pen or the brush naturally gravitate to the castle...
...As this comment suggests, the courtier may, at some early stage in the relationship, develop such a psychological identity with his particular prince that he will abandon his own judgment and, like a lover, submerge his identity in that of the prince...
...This world sounds remarkably like the court of King James I, at which the Catholic faction, finding the King between favorites and knowing his weakness for handsome young men, kept thrusting a lovely young man of their choosing across the King's path, in hopes of obtaining the keys to the kingdom...
...And so on, and on, and on...
...It had been a triumph for American intelligence...
...The other seals off the President from the country he thinks lie is governing...
...We would all get into our cars and drive to the dacha...
...Speer's personal lament may already apply to thousands who have never dreamed of Nazism and serve as epitaph for generations to come...
...If you weren't told something, that meant it didn't concern you...
...A prophetic article in The Observer of London, written about Speer in 1944, is worth recalling, for what it says about our own time...
...Cooper, do you agree...
...It vexes the average citizen, fully aware of his own incompetence, to be forced to dwell upon the fact that in life, things frequently don't work out...
...For me to speak with the idol of a nation, " writes Speer, "to discuss building plans with him, sit beside him in the theater, or eat ravioli with him in the Osteria" was simply "overwhelming...
...This lie was like a reflex...
...And there was the White House Mess, where the etiquette of who might eat at what table was of an intricacy that would surely have bemused Louis XIV...
...A train recently pulled into Kiev loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death...
...In the Nixon White House, an expanding foreign-policy dukedom has been established under Henry Kissinger with a staff of his own moving in independent orbit around Kissinger, who simultaneously maintains a great-lord's orbit around the President in the larger White House universe...
...On occasion, when Speer would greet Hitler with, "Heil, Mein Fuehrer...
...Members of the Kennedy circle that strange, apparently indissoluble court in search of a king-contend that Johnson was, of course, susceptible to royal isolation by slick courtiers...
...During the process I would frequently fall into a Walter Mitty-like fantasy: When my turn came I would rise to my feet slowly, look around the room and then directly at the President, and say very quietly and emphatically, "Mr...
...And out would come a "Yes, Mr...
...Communism occasionally has the bad news problem, too...
...I often ask myself what I would have done if I had recognized Hitler's real face and the true nature of the regime he had established," Speer said...
...Reedy's thesis holds that the time the Founders feared may have arrived at last, unnoted under all the mock-serious political uproar about kings, tyrants, and courtiers that has been part of the currency of political campaigning throughout American history...
...Consider the relationship of John Kennedy and one of his finest courtiers, Kenneth O'Donnell...
...One may win prerogatives that can be gloated upon...
...I agree, Mr...
...Cooper writes: The President, in due course, would announce his decision and then poll everyone in the room-Council members, their assistants, and members of the White House and NSC staffs...
...All the intrigues and struggles for power were directed toward eliciting such a word, or what it stood for...
...The danger becomes obvious, and Reedy has stated it...
...Our leaders, whatever their ideology, may very possibly be out of touch with the world that the rest of us live in...
...The success of the player depends upon the whim of the President...
...The White House assistants, writes Reedy, constitute "the greatest of all barriers to presidential access to reality...
...You can rely on that...
...Inside, the lobbies swarmed with hangers-on, most especially the press, waiting for some emanation to filter out from the ruler burrowed deep behind offices occupied by gentlemen of ascending importance...
...His delusion of invincibility thus restored, Hitler would hear no more talk of retreat...
...It was time to go to bed...
...Stalin used to select the movies himself...
...No one speaks to him unless spoken to first...
...Goering said...
...Goering finally declared: "What must have happened is that they were shot down much farther to the west...
...Charles Peters is editor of The Washington Monthly...
...It is closely akin to saying, "I support the flag...
...Penn Central executives are still amazed that there was no one around the office who knew how to run a railroad...
...The sweet delirium of ecstasy is produced when the prince returns the worship with some small gesture of recognition...
...In Johnson's White House, the technique at least must have been rather duller...
...These obscenities have become the condition of life in the modern world-in business, in labor, in liberal and conservative organizations, in publishing, in education, and even in our churches...
...It is somehow to gain and maintain access to the President...
...Speer is, in a sense, more important for Germany today than Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, or the generals...
...There had been strong presidents before, but now we were embarked on the time of the strong presidency, a time which is still with us...
...By now it was usually one or two o'clock in the morning...
...That hostile grille fence which keeps us away from the White House has two sides...
...With Roosevelt, the presidency-for reasons not too difficult to understand in an era that was dotting the rest of the earth with strutting Caesars-entered a period of apotheosis...
...In time, the man treated with such distinction begins to expect it as his due...
...The General ventured a last statement...
...Buckingham survived James to continue incompetent government into the reign of King Charles I. When Buckingham was eventually murdered, all England lit bonfires to honor his murderer...
...Translated and edited by Strobe Talbott...
...President...
...The Prince-Substitute Of course, most of us do not have a real prince to have faith in...
...Speer found precisely the same principle at work around Hitler...
...Reedy suggests that the presidency may be confronted, if not with the headsman or guillotinist, with an institutional arteriosclerosis no less fatal at a time when the interests of government seem increasingly alien to the interests of the governed...
...This is finally what is most depressing of all: the compulsion of men to seek their identities in the gaudier identity of someone they perceive to be greater than they, It is the religious impulse perverted so that one's allegiance is to LBJ rather than to an idea of what the President should be...
...A courtier's first instinct is to protect the prince, and there are rationalizations for doing so in the unwritten court protocols, as Reedy notes: It is felt that this man is grappling with problems of such tremendous consequence that every effort must be made to relieve him of the irritations that vex the average citizen...
...Above all, he must please the prince...
...Servility Become Endemic By an extraordinary publishing coincidence, Reedy's memoir appeared in the same year that Albert Speer and Nikita Khruschev gave us their memoirs of life at the top in Germany and Russia.:': Neither the Speer nor Khruschev book concerns itself consciously with court life under Hitler or Stalin, yet, when they are read in context with Reedy, we are startled to discover that the styles of government being described by all three are remarkably alike...
...Somehow we must learn to govern our people from an office that is secular and not from a court that is sanctified...
...President...
...On great issues, however, the court is rarely a court in the Elizabethan sense, but rather more like that self-applauding cheering section which modern American politicians like to call a "team...
...Inside the Third Reich...
...Secretary, do you agree with the decision...
...Run it up the flagpole and I'll salute it...
...I intend to report that to the Fuehrer...
...He accompanied Hitler to the Berghof and on trips, and in the Chancellery never left his side until Hitler went to bed in the early morning hours...
...But not their man, not Jack...
...A generation later, General Eisenhower, who prided himself on taut administration, had more than 2,000...
...Reedy suggests that the presidency is in somewhat the same danger, and for essentially the same reasons...
...Now then, Herr Galland," Goering fulminated, trying to put an end to the debate, "I officially assert that the American fighter planes did not reach Aachen...
...The experience of such government, repeated in differing degrees in the reigns of Charles I1 and James I1 and later under the Hanovers, was part of the intellectual heritage of the men who founded the Republic...
...The life of the White House is the life of a court...
...Galland said they would soon be flying even deeper into Germany...
...I personally guarantee the supplying of Stalingrad by air...
...But, sir, they were there...
...The court analogy had no validity when applied to a President of superior competence...
...Now I was one of them...
...And when they reach government, where decisions are life and death for hundreds of millions of people, they reach the ultimate of the intolerable...
...He was forever using all his energy, cunning and brutality to prevent anyone from rising above a certain level...
...There is intrigue, jealousy...
...And so, to keep his profile discreetly low, Speer, even when he became "really sick," deemed it "advisable to remain as active as possible...
...Somehow this thing must be made human again...
...He ordered the Sixth Army to stay and fight it out in Stalingrad, where it slowly faced extinction when Goering's promise proved totally fabricated-as everyone on the General Staff knew it would...
...And what is a courtier's life like at the White House...
...President, I Agree...
...Khruschev, referring to personal competition for favor in the Kremlin, describes Stalin's men as "tearing at each other's throats...
...Money has something to do with it...
...He] symbolizes a type which is becoming increasingly important in all belligerent countries: the pure technician, the classless bright young man without background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world and no other means than his technical and managerial ability...
...It was the only sane thing to do, and Keitel promised that he would...
...But everyone would say, yes, he was hungry, too...
...He is treated with all the reverence due a monarch...
...This exercises a sway over the ruler who becomes corrupted in turn...
...We have evolved something like a prince-substitute, however, in the governmental and corporate bureaucracies, the universities, organized labor, foundations, with which so many of us are so unhappily familiar...
...How many of us [Reedy asks] have sat without protest through meetings where glorified nonentities expounded profound platitudes in the non-thought and the "innovative" non-proposal...
...And although these examples are perhaps more dramatic, the attitudes are identical to those of today's corporate specialist-say the advertising men at General Motors, who didn't feel responsible for the unsafe cars produced by their company...
...He had succeeded in representing himself as insignificant while imperceptibly building up his bastions...
...Servility becomes endemic among his entourage, who compete among themselves in their show of devotion...
...But none of them recognized a threat in the shape of trusty Bormann...
...Speer's willingness to overlook Hitler's mass murders as irrelevant to his specialty is similar to Khrushchev's position on Stalin's purges, as Khrushchev recalls: A list was put together of the people who should be exiled from the city...
...Indeed, as his version of the Beria story reveals, Khruschev himself, by the time of Stalin's death, had become superbly adept at tearing throats...
...Receiving the recognition and approval of the leader becomes a pleasure so powerful that the strongest of courtiers find it difficult to deny themselves...
...Princes, whether monarchist, fascist, communist, or democratic, become accustomed to feeling like very special people...
...But the need to function is not the whole story, either...
...X, do you agree...
...Kennedy and O'Donnell This composite portrait of the new courts which seem to flourish around great political power in our century explains a great deal about why things go wrong in modern governments...
...He is very much the successful aver-middle class in his style of life, with a wife and six children...
...reality'' in order to govern effectively, too often has access, instead, only to a self-serving court of flunkeys, knights, earls, and dukes in business suits, whose best chances of advancing their separate fortunes usually lie in diverting reality before it can reach the President...
...Throughout history, the non-rich have tended to seek the patronage and protection of the rich...
...Khruschev and comrades in Moscow were busily laboring to show Stalin that there was no duty more vital for them than humoring his whims...
...He might have joined any other political party which gave him a job and a career...
...said Goering...
Vol. 4 • February 1973 • No. 12
