The wise man.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist - Brent Scowcroft

In 1961, Richard Rovere, a correspondent for the New Yorker, wrote an essay in the American Scholar called "Notes on the Establishment In America." In it he described, with extensive footnotes, a northeastern mandarin class, composed of everyone from John McCloy to John Kenneth Galbraith, that was manipulating the levers of power at the highest levels of government and industry. Rovere wrote:

The Establishment, as I see it, is not at any-level a membership organization, and in the lower reaches it is not organized at all. In the upper reaches, some divisions have achieved a high degree of organization and centralization and, consequently, of exclusiveness and power. The directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, make up a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that seeks to control our destiny as a nation. Rovere's spoof occasioned a good deal of comment--one credulous legislator and member of the John Birch Society even entered it into the Congressional Record as a profound indictment of the establishment's reach and sway--but perhaps no riposte was more telling than William F. Buckley Jr.'s. It appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1962 and was titled "The Genteel Nightmare of Richard Rovere."

Buckley, who had devoted much of his early career to attacking the Eisenhower administration and mainstream liberals alike, pounced upon Rovere's study. He said that for all his mock sobriety, Rovere was likely revealing more than he had intended. "The fact of the matter," wrote Buckley, "is that Mr. Rovere's disavowals notwithstanding, there is a thing which, properly understood, might well be called an American Establishment; and the success of Mr. Rovere's essay wholly depends on a sort of nervous apprehension of the correctness of the essential insight."

Indeed it did. For much of its history, the establishment has operated quietly in the corridors of power. The very idea of an establishment, after all, can seem antithetical to American democracy, a sentiment that was vividly expressed in Senator Joseph McCarthy's description of Secretary of State Dean Acheson as "this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent." The Vietnam War further discredited the establishment in the eyes of the Left and the Right, the former blaming it for being too hawkish and the latter for not being hawkish enough. As the militant rollback doctrines championed by Buckley and his crowd, which had been expressed but never acted upon by the Reagan administration, were put into operation by the neoconservatives during the George W. Bush administration's war in Iraq, the establishment seemed as...