The Prince and his courtiers: at the White House, the Kremlin, and the Reichschancellery.

• Author: Baker, Russell
• Position: The Culture of Institutions

* The Twilight of the Presidency, George E. Reedy--World. Inside the third Reich, Albert Speer--Macmillian. Krushchev Remembers, translated and edited by Strobe Talbott--Little, Brown.

When The Washington Monthly instituted a new column in 1969, "The Culture of Bureaucracy," most people thought it was about concerts at Constitution Hall or exhibits at the National Gallery. But we meant culture in another sense. We wanted to look at the institutions that govern our lives in the way an anthropologist looked at a south sea island. Bad decisions and bad policies were usually caused by a combination of the character of the individuals and of the bureaucratic pressures in the organization they, work for The latter had hardly been examined by the press at all.

The press is doing a better job today, especially in covering business, but culture is still an underused key, to understanding everything from why the Pentagon buys wrong weapons to why you can't fathom your tax forms--even to why the press wastes time talking to big shots who don't know what's going on, instead of to the people at the working level who could tell the reporter that o rocket won't hold.

This artical first appeared in 1971.

The analogy between the modern presidency and the royal European court, bewigged, bejeweled, and beset with intrigue, is not original with George Reedy, Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, but he is the first to alarm us with notice that court government is undergoing a twcntieth-century rebirth in the White House. This renaissance of the princely court, Reedy insists, is breeding immense danger for American government, for much the same reason that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century courts of Western Europe contributed to the development of violent revolutions.

In sheer body density alone, the insulation around the presidency has thickened rapidly. Herbert Hoover had a staff of only 42 persons. A generation later, General Eisenhower, who prided himself on taut administration, had more than 2,000.

The trappings of court began, simultaneously, to multiply. The custom-built carriages, magnificently engineered automobiles built expressly for the White House. Great ocean-spanning jets kept constantly at the ready. Presidential appearances were preceded and surrounded by the inevitable, ineffectual showing of the private presidential bodyguard. Security at the White House thickened.

By an extraordinary publishing coincidence, Reedy's memoir appears in the same year that Albert Speer and Nikita Khrushchev have given us their memoirs of life at the top in Germany and Russia.* Neither the Speer nor Khrushchev book concerns itself consciously with court life under Hitler and 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.

At each court, for example, we 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 states) to assume they possess a superiority bordering on divinity. Princes, whether monarchist, fascist, communist, or democratic, become accustomed to feeling like very special people.

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. The life of the White House is...