A Man of Character

Men and Decisions, by Lewis L. Strauss. Doubleday, $6.95 Amateurs have always figured in the American system of government. In contrast to the practice of all other nations, most posts in the Cabinet, the top level of the administrative hierarchy, and particularly the most important (State, Treasury, War-Navy-Defense), have gone to non-professionals: to men who have been neither elective politicians nor bureaucrats. Our ambassadors also, the chiefs of our foreign diplomatic establishment, have in the past been mostly, and are still in some measure, appointed from outside the professional lists.

In spite of the growth and solidification of the permanent Civil Service, with its inevitable imperial drive toward absorption of the entire governmental structure, thousands of the higher (“policy-making”) offices have escaped its clutches. Though most of these are allotted to faithful politicians or to bureaucrats at hand, a good many still go, as a higher percentage went in the past, to businessmen, lawyers, engineers, bankers and trade-unionists.

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James Burnham

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Men and Decisions, by Lewis L. Strauss. Doubleday, $6.95 Amateurs have always figured in the American system of government. In contrast to the practice of all other nations, most posts in the Cabinet, the top level of the administrative hierarchy, and particularly the most important (State, Treasury, War-Navy-Defense), have gone to non-professionals: to men who have been neither elective politicians nor bureaucrats. Our ambassadors also, the chiefs of our foreign diplomatic establishment, have in the past been mostly, and are still in some measure, appointed from outside the professional lists.

In spite of the growth and solidification of the permanent Civil Service, with its inevitable imperial drive toward absorption of the entire governmental structure, thousands of the higher (“policy-making”) offices have escaped its clutches. Though most of these are allotted to faithful politicians or to bureaucrats at hand, a good many still go, as a higher percentage went in the past, to businessmen, lawyers, engineers, bankers and trade-unionists.