Books in Brief: Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest

Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest, by Hadley Arkes (Princeton, 395 pp., $12.50). The eventual results of policies and programs are less dependent on the quality of the rhetoric of statement than on the content of the routines of bureaucrats. Arkes illustrates this in his account of the origins and operations of the Marshall Plan. The very substantial congressional influence over the substance of operations, for example, is traced to early and careful attention paid by congressional leaders to the details of organization and procedure. Students of politics too often shun the details of bureaucracy because they seem dull, but those who would dictate the outcomes of policy must endure the tedium of regulations, organization plans, and procedural directives. And those who would understand this process must also tolerate a degree of boredom. The reader should not then expect much excitement in this account, although there is enlightenment. Arkes’s discussion of the national-interest concept is informed and reasoned, providing a background to consider his own positive evaluation of the results which were produced by the bureaucratic processes of the Marshall Plan. The principal strength of this book, however, is the account of that bureaucratic process, leaving a better informed reader to make his own evaluation both of the purposes and of the results of that and other policies of government.