. . . the advantage, even the necessity, of having somewhere in the state a person beyond the competition for office, who is entitled to be heard in any matter on which he may think it his duty to speak; who has the right to warn, to encourage, and therefore, to be consulted by, the agents of authority.
G. M. Young,
Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
The Problem
It should be clear, even from what little was said above about our national problems, that there are a number of these problems with which the political system of the country has not been coping successfully, and where there is little reason to hope, as things stand today, that it will cope more successfully in the future. There is no need to attempt to draw up at this point an exhaustive list of these problems. They include social, educational, financial, technological, cultural, and, in a sense, even spiritual ones. And if one looks for a single characteristic that explains the difficulty the country’s political establishment has in confronting them, one will find it, I believe, in the fact that they are all long-term problems rather that short-term ones.
That the elected officials and legislative bodies of the country have difficulty in confronting such problems is neither surprising nor really discreditable. The legislators are all beholden, and rightly so, to the constituencies that have elected them. These constituencies normally have limited and highly parochial interests which the legislator is asked to reflect; and they have a right to see these interests represented by the one they have elected. Actually, the latter has normally been obliged to cater to these aspirations anyway, in his appeal for electoral support, and is thus extensively committed to them before he even takes office.
These same reflections apply no less, of course, to those occupants of executive authority who, like presidents and governors, owe their positions to electoral decision. But for all major participants in the governing establishment, elected or appointed, there is one great and immediate hindrance to participation in a careful and systematic study of national problems in their long-term aspects; and this is the fact that these persons are simply too busy. Anyone who has ever been responsibly involved in government at a senior level (or in business, either, for that matter) knows that both of the devices commonly employed to reduce the burdens on the senior executive or legislator—the increase of the supporting bureaucracy and the development of high-speed electronic communication—have the ironic effect of increasing those burdens rather than reducing them. The result is that both the member of Congress and the executive official now finds his in-basket filling up daily with demands on his attention far beyond his ability to cope with personally. The last thing he could think of would be to stand aside and devote days and weeks to the study of any of the major pressing, and unsolved long-term national problems, and, above all, to give to this effort the peace of mind and the undisturbed concentration necessary to its success.
If, then, the active political establishment remains thus limited in its capacities for making the sort of contribution I have just been discussing, is there no place where we can look for this sort of help? There is indeed such a place; for the country is by no means poor in human resources that are not subject to these limitations. There are numbers of men and women in private life whose situations and capacities would permit them to make such a contribution if the will to call upon them were there, and if the necessary institutional facilities were available.
These persons fall, roughly speaking, into two categories. The first consists of those who in the past have rendered services of a high order in public life but are now in official retirement. They normally bear with them all the experience and knowledge acquired in their earlier official service, but seldom—in many instances, never—are they called upon, at least not from the government’s side, to make use of it. Whatever else there might be to question in the argumentation of this volume, one fact stands out in the mind of its writer as incontrovertible: namely, that there could be no country that makes less use of the accumulated experience of those who have served it—none that is more frivolously neglectful and improvident of these assets—than the United States of America. The principle by which our government appears to have been guided for many years and decades in the past is that among the qualifications for public office, experience counts for precisely nothing—that for the great majority of executive positions anyone whose qualifications meet the political requirements of the moment will obviously be preferable to anyone else who may have had rich experience in the respective field but whose political qualifications fail to meet that test. The result is that the country is replete with people—ex-presidents, ex-cabinet members, ex-governors, former distinguished legislators or jurists, retired diplomats, and many others—whose entire treasure of accumulated experience is simply allowed to rot away, unused.
The second category embraces those many persons who have never served in governmental office at all but who, often in places far removed from Washington and the other great urban centers, have won the admiration and high respect of their fellow citizens for contributions to our national life in other capacities: as business leaders, scholars, academic administrators, scientists, publicists, journalists, and media personalities, or in other ways. Among people of this sort will be found a fund of experience, of integrity, of judgment, of insight, and of devotion to the public interest that could well be made use of at the national level but is simply not so used. Many of these people, owing often to their own modesty, are well known only locally, but have qualities that deserve wider recognition. They represent in their entirety a national asset we have no excuse for failing to tap.
It will no doubt be argued that members of both these categories are today not lacking in opportunities for making available to the public and to the government whatever fruits of experience they have to offer: that they are at liberty, whenever they can and desire, to write articles or give speeches that command one degree or another of public attention. It will also be argued that presidents and governors have many times made use of ad hoc commissions, manned entirely or primarily by private citizens of this sort, for the study of specific problems of governmental policy, in the hope or assumption that their conclusions might serve as guidance for those who have the governmental responsibility.
All this is true; but it is far from being fully responsive to the need at hand. For obvious reasons, articles and speeches by the common citizen, no matter how eminent, seldom reach more than a very limited spectrum of listeners or readers. The press and the media seldom cite them in their news columns or programs, and, when they do, then only in miniscule fragments, usually taken out of context. And as for the ad hoc commissions: of these there have indeed been a very considerable number. Some of them have done distinguished and highly valuable work. But their effect on public opinion and governmental policy has seldom been commensurate with the value of the contribution. The reason for their appointment, in the first place, has too often been the desire of a president or a governor to deflect from himself responsibility for a decision demanded of him which he finds it politically awkward to make. The appointment of a commission buys time, permits him to take advantage of the brevity of memory that marks both the media and the public, and commits him to very little. The customary course of events is that the commission assembles, studies the problem in good faith, and renders its report. It is then duly thanked. The report is made available to the press, which devotes at best a single, little-read column to its conclusions. It is then consigned to the secretarial service of the legislative body most directly involved, which prints the text of it in the Congressional Record or some other suitable publication; after which, failing the vigorous protest of some legislator, it is reverently laid to rest in the archives and passes from human memory. The members of the commission that produced it, meanwhile, have long since gone apart, never—in many instances—to meet again. There is thus no follow-up. The greatest positive result of the exercise is that the respective president or governor who originally ordered the report is at least partially relieved, as he hoped he would be, of the charge that he “did nothing about it.”
To have any serious effect on governmental policy and action, a commission or other body giving this sort of outside advisory assistance to government would have to have a number of characteristics that the ad hoc commission simply does not have: among them, greater permanency, a wider spectrum of responsibility, an ability to relate recommendations in one field to those in another, and, above all, a general prestige that would lend to its findings and conclusions weight and endurance in the public eye and would compel serious attention to them on the part of governmental policymakers, executive and legislative.
The Answer, in Principle
It is these considerations that lead to my belief that the federal government requires, for the fulfillment of the responsibilities that now rest upon it, the presence at its side of a permanent, nonpolitical advisory body—one that permits the tapping of the greatest sources of wisdom and experience that the private citizenry of the country can provide. It also seems evident that the meeting of this need would require an institutional innovation of a wholly unusual nature, quite devoid of precedent in the national experience. In the inquiry as to what such a body might look like, how it could be selected, and how it would operate, it will be best to start by identifying some of the basic requirement to which, as conceived here, it would have to respond. The following would seem essential:
-
Membership would have to be drawn exclusively from persons outside the active government establishment, devoid not only of any existing official position but of any current political connections or ambitions that could influence their independence of judgment.
-
The body would have to be purely advisory to the constitutionally established governmental institutions, executive and legislative. In no way should it preempt, infringe upon, or attempt to substitute for any of the constitutional powers and responsibilities of those bodies.
-
The body would require, on the other hand, governmental sanction. It would have to be established by governmental initiative, as a response to a governmental decision having both executive and legislative approval. There is no apparent reason why this decision should require a constitutional amendment. An act of Congress, with presidential approval, should suffice.
-
Membership in this body would have to be by presidential appointment. Nothing less than this would give to the body the solidity, authority, and prestige necessary to the function it would be asked to fulfill. Procedures would have to be devised, however, to assure that such appointments were strictly nonpolitical and were exclusively from among persons responding to the requirements mentioned in paragraph 1, above.
-
The body would have to have, as an institution, a permanent financial basis of an endowment nature—a basis that would relieve it of any and all dependence on annual governmental appropriations. Otherwise it would be drawn into the regular federal budgetary process and become just one more football on the field of American politics.
-
It would have to be understood, finally, that this institution would, unless otherwise requested by the president, occupy itself only with long-term questions of public policy, avoiding matters of current contention, restricting itself to the identification of the preferable principles and directions of action, and refraining from involvement, either by prior suggestion or by ex post facto comment, with the implementation of the judgments it might offer.
These requirements seem, to this writer, to be fundamental to the implementation of the general idea that this discussion is intended to bring forward. Were any of them to be ignored, the entire reasoning of what is suggested here would no longer stand.
With these essentials in mind, let us see what an entity designed to serve these purposes might look like in greater detail. But may I, before approaching this task, be allowed a word or two of explanation.
It would be silly and presumptuous to suppose that any one person, working in isolation and not in interaction with others, could just toss off the design for an institution of this nature and expect it to be accepted in its entirety as a serious and finished proposal. Anything of this novelty and importance would have to be the product of many minds, not of a single one, and would have to be refined by long consideration, prolonged public discussion, and extensive political compromise.
Yet I know of no other way of bringing out the full spectrum of considerations and requirements that would have to be faced, if the need for such a body were to be conceded, than by setting up something in the nature of a model for this purpose, as I now propose to do. Let me emphasize that this is only one model out of many others that could, I am sure, be suggested. That it represents my own best suggestion by no means precludes the possibility, or even probability, that there might be a number of better ones, or improvements upon this one. But this will, if it serves no other purpose, stand as an example, at least, of the problems one would meet if one were to proceed along this path.
A Council of State
The entity in question would have to have, first of all, a name. Just what that name would be is perhaps not important; but a name must be given, at this point, if only as a handle for discussion. Others who have struggled with the same question have suggested a “Council of Elders.” This is, of course, a possibility. It would certainly be desirable, if not essential, that the members of such a body have the dignity of ripe age and experience. On the other hand, the use of the term “elders” might appear to reflect the assumptions that youth precludes wisdom and that age assures it, neither of which assumptions could be farther from the truth. To avoid confusion on this point, I would prefer to see this imagined body called the “State Council” or, better still, the “Council of State.” This latter designation will have to serve, in any case, for purposes of illustration in the remainder of this discussion.
The Council of State, in the model I am creating, would be a permanent body. It would have its seat in Washington—not, preferably, in a regular governmental building, but not far from Capitol Hill. Its members—persons of high distinction, the desirable qualities of whom will be discussed shortly—might number the same as those of the present Supreme Court—namely, nine. Anything larger than that would invite fragmentation of effort: overspecialization, division into committees and subcommittees, formalization of internal discussions—bureaucracy, in short. And that would be fatal.
Staff there would, of course, have to be for each of the members; but these staffs, too, should be small, making up in quality of personnel for severe restrictions on their numbers. Bureaucracy, after all, may develop among staff as well as among principals; and it is essential, in the case at hand, that bureaucracy be avoided.
The Council would have full freedom of choice as to the subjects to which it would address itself. These might be ones flowing from its own initiative, or they might be ones accepted for examination in response to requests from the president or from one or both of the houses of Congress. The only restrictions here would be that these problems should be ones national in their scope and of major long-term importance for the fortunes of the nation. The perspective from which they would then be examined would have to be that of the national interest in its entirety, not the interests of any particular geographical or social segment of the nation. Short-term problems, particularly controversial ones under current political scrutiny and debate, should be ruled out from the start.
It would also have to be understood that in examining such subjects as it chose for consideration, and in reaching its conclusions, the Council would not attempt to address itself to such domestic-political complications as any particular solution might present. The Council’s task would be confined to telling the country, including the politicians, what ought to be done in the long-term interests of American society. It would then be the responsibility of the politicians, as practitioners of what has been called “the art of the possible,” to see what might be politically possible in the way of the implementation of these judgments, assuming that they wanted to implement them at all.
It would have to be assumed that the subjects thus taken under advisement by the Council would be ones demanding careful and deliberate study before judgments could be arrived at. This process, with relation to any single subject, might be a matter of some weeks, or months, or even years. Presumably, if only for this reason, it would be advisable that no more than two or three subjects, and preferably only one, be held under advisement at one time.
Members of the Council would be entitled to draw, for informational and research purposes, on the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress and perhaps on the facilities of other departments and agencies of the government as well. They would also have the privilege of inviting and hearing, but not of subpoenaing, or of placing under oath, witnesses, official or otherwise. They would be not only entitled but indeed expected to preserve complete privacy of internal discussion before arriving at a given judgment; but their findings, once completed, would, in addition to being formally laid before the president and Congress, be made public in their entirety. These findings, as noted above, would not have mandatory quality for either branch of the government; they would be considered as advisory to both. Their value, if accepted, would be to serve as guidelines for governmental action, not as recommendations for specific measures. And there is no reason why these opinions should not serve similarly as guidance for state and local authorities as well as for private public-interest bodies across the country, to the extent all these latter were prepared to accept them as such.
It would be essential, I think, that the Council neither solicit, nor hold in its files, nor take official cognizance of classified information of any sort. If its findings were to be made public, the evidence on the basis of which those findings were arrived at should be ones to which the public also had unrestricted access. But it might be hoped that the Council’s judgments, given the prestige they ought to command, would come to take a prominent place in the national literature on the subjects in questions, and would thus, regardless of their immediate significance for governmental action, come to have a certain pedagogical value for American opinion at large.
Membership on the Council
The most difficult problem to be faced in the establishment of such a body would be that of the manner in which its members should be selected and appointed. That it should be the president who makes the final appointment seems, as already noted, an inescapable conclusion. Only this could give to its members the personal prestige and moral authority they would need if their efforts were to be useful. If that prestige and authority could not be assured, it would be better to drop the whole idea and to have no such council at all.
But that the president should have the sole power to appoint to membership on the Council of State does not mean that the circle of persons from which such appointments might be drawn should be unlimited. It is essential, actually, that it not be; for were the president at liberty to appoint just anyone at all, his choices could not fail to be influenced by his own political considerations or obligations. Some means would have to be found, therefore, of defining and establishing a limited category of persons—a panel, in other words—from among the members of which, and from them alone, the presidential appointments might be made. And it is essential that the composition of this panel be of such a nature that appointments from it not lend themselves to political exploitation.
This situation is, of course, not without precedent. There are other instances, as well, where eligibility for appointment is limited by common sense or by tradition, if not by statute. A president, for example, could scarcely appoint to the Supreme Court a person wholly devoid of training or experience in the law. But since, in the case of a Council of State, there would be no single professional background to serve as the criterion for eligibility, a different set of criteria would presumably have to be laid down.
It might be useful, before confronting the question as to how this could be done, to ask ourselves what personal qualities would be required for useful service on such a body.
The candidate would have to be, first of all, a person of high distinction, sectionally if not nationally, who had earned that distinction by an outstanding career in any of the major professions. He could, for example, be a physician, a jurist, a scholar, an educator, a clergyman, a high military figure, or a diplomat in retirement. Even a distinguished earlier political career would be no disqualification (it might, in fact, be exceptionally useful); but it would have to be a career that was clearly and finally terminated, and well in the past. It would have to be a primary and inalterable rule that no one could be considered eligible for this panel who at the time held any political or other governmental office, who was actively involved in the national or state political process, or who was prominently engaged in the leadership or management of any political party. Had there been any such involvement at an earlier date, there would have to be a plausible presumption that there was now no intention to resume it, and no apparent likelihood that it would be resumed.
Beyond these qualifications of experience, a likely candidate would have to be widely known and respected, at least in the section of the country where he or she resides, for the highest qualities of personal integrity and character, for common sense and maturity of judgment, and for a wide spectrum of interests, cultural as well as social. Beyond which a strong measure of modesty and the absence of any fondness for deliberate popularity seeking should weigh heavily in his or her favor.
That people of these qualities can be found scattered across this country, and found in an abundance at least sufficient to the purpose at hand, few would deny. One of the greatest deficiencies of American public life is surely, as was noted above, the failure of the political process to tap and to bring to the surface the formidable resources of human excellence that the country actually harbors. The problem before us here would be to devise suitable ways of finding such people and of creating for them a framework of identification and formal status that would permit them to constitute a panel from which, and from which alone, a president could make appointments to the Council of State.
The establishment of such a panel would admittedly be a novel undertaking, outside the American tradition. Were it not so, something of this nature would presumably long since have been created. There may be good reasons why it was not created in the past. But it is hard to see how the creation of something of this sort can now be avoided if the country wishes to cope, in a bolder and more imaginative way than the regular political process appears to permit, with the long-term problems that are beginning to confront it.
The Panel
What is involved, then, in the case of the proposed panel, is not an organization but merely a formally composed list of persons of a certain level and quality of distinction. One might hope that selection to this panel would come to be considered the highest form of distinction that could be conferred on any ordinary American citizen not serving in elected or other governmental office. The bearers of it would have, as among themselves, no organizational cohesion. They would not normally meet or take decision as a body. They would have no chairman or collective spokesman. Indeed, they would have no collective identity. They would comprise, in their collective capacity, nothing more than a list—but a very exceptional list—of names: names of great distinction, from which alone a president could make appointments to a Council of State.
A second question to be thought of, before one turns to the question as to how such a list is to be composed, is that of the number of persons of which it should consist. Too small a list would be unduly confining for a president. Too large a one would water down the importance of the distinction and would frustrate a president by confronting him with too many names with which he was unfamiliar. A manageable and serviceable number would seem to be something around one hundred: a number, that is, that could accommodate people drawn from all parts of the country but small enough to preserve the quality of the distinction conferred.
With all this in mind, and assuming that the above be accepted as generally reasonable suppositions, we still have before us the central problem (and it is the most delicate and difficult one of all) of how and by whom are people to be selected and appointed to the status in question? Here again, it is not the part of a single, isolated individual to dream up an answer to this question and to put it forward as a serious and responsible proposal. But here, once more, there would seem to be no more effective way of bringing out the elements of the problem than by constructing some sort of a model and revealing, through this example, something of the challenges to which, in the drawing up of such a panel, one would have to respond. The following should be thought of in that way: as only one of what, I am sure, would be many alternatives, but as the one that would seem to this writer to have the fewest disadvantages.
Before going ahead to outline this proposal, I wish to point out certain of the dangers to be avoided. If appointments to this panel were to be made without geographical distinction, simply from among persons whose eminence and suitability for such designation were considered to be nationally recognized, this would leave unconsidered many others who might well have deserved the appointment but lacked national recognition. And since a preponderance of the nationally recognized ones would presumably be found to be residing in one or another of the major urban regions of the country, this would leave unscanned and untapped the resources of other regions. To avoid this, it would be important that any procedure for selection take account both of nationally recognized eminence and of a reasonable geographical distribution. The following suggestion is made with this in mind.
Let us suppose that Congress (from whose action, after all, this entire project of a Council of State would have to flow) were to invite each of the state governors to form a very small ad hoc committee, to consist of the governor himself as chairman, together with the state’s highest judicial figure, and one layman to be chosen by the two of them. The task of this committee would be to identify the most distinguished of those of the state’s citizens who could satisfy the criteria for eligibility, and appoint him or her to membership on the national panel. This would yield the number of fifty—half that of the present national Senate.
It may be asked at this point, Why duplicate in this way the existing Senate? Were its members not supposed, in the minds of the founding fathers, to be the most distinguished citizens of their respective states—men of wisdom, protected by their longer term of office from any of the sordid details of financial legislation, and thus well suited (as I am suggesting that the members of the Council of State should be) to look at the nation’s problems from a more lofty and detached position than that enjoyed by their fellow legislators of the House of Representatives? And if so, why create a separate, nonofficial body for this purpose? This question is all the more natural because the Constitution originally envisaged that the appointment to the senatorial office should be by the action of the state legislatures rather than by popular election.
The answers are not hard to find. The senators, whatever they were in earlier times, are now elected officials and not barred from reelection. This places them in the very thick of that welter of considerations, hesitations, compromises, unavowable motives, special interests, and short-term electoral necessities that go with the elected office. This welter of pressures has been intensified over the years, in ways the founding fathers could scarcely have anticipated, by the growth in size and complexity of the federal government as well as by the latter-day revolution in communication. These factors have increased manyfold the burden and tempo of daily business for all men in public office, senators included. Persons in this situation, as already noted, are not likely to have the time, the detachment, or the reserves of energy that could permit them to stand off and look at things in the manner here envisaged. They are charged with an important share in the day-to-day governing of the country, with all the responsibilities this implies. Beyond that, they stand in the thick of politics. The members of a Council of State, as here proposed, would be, on the other hand, advisers rather than lawmakers. This would not only free their time and energies; it would also unburden their vision, for this last would not be affected by the concerns and distractions of either electoral status or legislative office.
But to get back to the method of selection: these three-man gubernatorial committees would be ad hoc bodies. After the initial selection, they would be appointed and come into action only when a vacancy arose; and their function would then be only to name a replacement for a vacancy from their state’s spot on the panel.
The appointment by this means of fifty out of the one hundred members of the panel would assure a reasonable geographical distribution of its membership. This would obviously be not only desirable but necessary if the public were to feel that the membership was adequately representative of all parts of the country. In the case of the nationally known persons, there would probably be, as mentioned above, a greater concentration of suitable candidates in some of the great urban areas than in other parts of the country. To take account of this factor, I would suggest that the remaining fifty be selected by a small national committee, which might be suitably composed of the Librarian of Congress, who would act as chairman, together with delegates from at least two of the great national cultural institutions (the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences might serve as examples) of the country. (These last might rotate among other such institutions of this nature.) In the appointments by this last committee, geography would not be a factor—only national distinction. It might be provided that certain categories of persons—presumably, all ex-presidents and, possibly, retired members of the Supreme Court—would be considered as ex officio members of this section of the panel, unless they declined the honor.
It would be, then, out of the members of this panel of one hundred names that the president would, as and when vacancies presented themselves, make appointments to the nine-member Council. There might well be an age limit for this membership, and perhaps other arrangements for assuring the existence at all times of a vigorous and fully engaged membership; but otherwise, to assure continuity and soundness of judgment, the appointments should be, at the least, long-term ones.
Such, then, would be the nature and the composition of the proposed Council of State. Its judgments would normally be, like those of the Supreme Court (but without the binding quality of the latter), rare, deliberate, and (in the better sense) sententious ones. They would normally be self-inspired; but this would not preclude the possibility that they might, at the pleasure of the Council, be responses to requests by the president or Congress for an opinion.
It will be argued, of course, that elected governmental officials or bodies, not being bound by the judgments of the Council, would pay little or no attention to them. Perhaps so, initially at least; but if these judgments came to be surrounded with the dignity and prestige they ought to possess, they should make a deep impression on public opinion, and should come with time to constitute a factor which, in the long run, the president and the legislators would feel a certain pressure to treat with some consideration and respect.
For three years, from 1947 to 1950, this writer served as the first director of the Policy Planning Staff that was set up within the State Department by General George Marshall in early 1947. This staff, having no operational responsibilities, was purely advisory to the secretary of state. In the course of those three years, we submitted over half a hundred papers to the secretary of state, a large number of them containing advisory recommendations. It was inherent in the concept of this staff that it should endeavor, in confronting the various questions with which it occupied itself, to look at these questions in their long-term aspects, rather than in the short-term aspects that pressed themselves most heavily on the operative divisions of the Department of State.
Some years later, as a matter of curiosity, I glanced over these papers with a view to ascertaining whether—and if so, when—they had had any significant impact on official policy. What I found was that most of them, if not all, seemed to have affected official policy, but primarily only after a lapse of two or three years. Initially, most of them had encountered opposition or quiet obstruction at the hands of the operative divisions. This clearly was partly a matter of ruffled feelings over the fact that anyone in another part of the State Department had ventured to intrude on their particular domains. But in another aspect I derived a certain satisfaction from this opposition, because I thought it showed that we had generally done our job in looking at the long-term connotations of the questions at issue. And I take comfort in these observations when it comes to the probable effects of the advisory opinions of a body such as the Council of State that I have suggested. I can imagine that in many instances its opinions would, immediately upon publication, encounter a wide area of rejection in both the executive and the legislative branches of the government. But it would not, I think, be too much to hope that over a longer span of time they would begin to affect official as well as public opinion, and would eventually find some reflection in actions at the governmental level.
The Gravity of the Subject
The above suggestions, I repeat, are meant to serve primarily as illustrative of the problem to which they relate. There are other ways, and very possibly better ways, by which this problem could be tackled. But that the problem exists, and that it must in some way be met, remains my deepest conviction.
Many of the views and ideas set forth in earlier chapters of this volume will doubtless strike some readers as frivolous or extreme and worthy only of what I hope will be a kindly dismissal. What is said in this chapter falls into a different category. There are, as has been seen, a number of serious national problems the solution of which has been shown to be beyond the capacity of our governmental establishment as it now stands. The result has been, as I see it, something close to a major crisis in the life of the nation. In the question as to whether this deficiency can be corrected, it is nothing less than the adequacy of our form of government to meet the unprecedented challenges of the modern age that is at stake.
I confess myself unable to see any way by which this problem can be hopefully approached other than by the creation of some sort of an advisory body in which deeper forms of judgment about our national problems, and ones more clearly detached from political involvement than the ones that now proceed from the governmental establishment, can be evoked and given consideration by public and official American opinion. If this cannot be accomplished, I fail to see anything before us but a continued tragic deterioration of the quality of our society and its possibilities for constructive service to itself and to the remainder of the world.
This is why I hope that however the suggestions set forth in this chapter may be viewed, the seriousness of the problem to which they are addressed will be recognized, and that even if these suggestions are rejected, others will be advanced to take their place. It is nothing less than the quality of this country, as a major object in the history of our time, that is here on the line.