THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Elies, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust.

• Author: Gitlin, Todd
• Position: Review

THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Elies, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust by John B. Judis Pantheon, $26.00

AS JOHN B. JUDIS TELLS THE story, six months before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy told a conference of businessmen at the Brookings Institution that "most of the problems ... that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems."

"Most of us," Kennedy acknowledged, "are conditioned ... to have a political viewpoint," but in the reform spirit that has animated Progressives all century long, Kennedy went on to reckon that this regrettable truth about fallen politics would soon be overcome. Selfish group interests would surely be dissolved in a warm bath of reason and good will, where the tub was in the protective hands of a far-sighted establishment--or rather, Establishment. In the tradition of Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, the New Dealers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Brookings Institution itself, organized and honorable gentlemen armed with disinterested knowledge would overcome narrow self-interest as a matter of course.

A world where a president of the United States could proclaim such an expectation with a straight face seems to belong to a bygone era, when the term "public servants" did not occasion smirks and Walter Lippmann rather than Maureen Dowd set the breakfast table agenda.

In that vanished world, the Progressive faith in disinterested knowledge on behalf of overarching ends was tended not only by a right-minded public and constructive groups of laborers and consumers, but also, crucially, by elites who were capable of rising above narrow self-interest. In that world, giants strode the Earth: the likes of Dean Acheson, John J. McCloy, and C. Douglas Dillon, organizations like the Committee on Economic Development, and the Twentieth Century Fund. In particular, there were business people (business men, actually) who thought their way beyond their company's--even their industry's, and mirabile dictu, even their country club's--well-being.

"I think there was a period when there were businessmen outside the government who had some authority and who were respected, and who had a genuine national patriotic concern with the problems of the country," said the late Republican economic adviser Herbert Stein to Judis. "I can't think of a single name now of such a person."

It will not come as a revelation to readers of this journal that questions of public policy on...