PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

2
It is no accident that the best diplomatic service in the world is the
one in which the divorce between the assembling of knowledge and the
control of policy is most perfect. During the war in many British
Embassies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always
men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite
successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the
rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and
pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left
that to the political chiefs. But in an American Embassy I once heard
an ambassador say that he never reported anything to Washington which
would not cheer up the folks at home. He charmed all those who met
him, helped many a stranded war worker, and was superb when he
unveiled a monument.
He did not understand that the power of the expert depends upon
separating himself from those who make the decisions, upon not caring,
in his expert self, what decision is made. The man who, like the
ambassador, takes a line, and meddles with the decision, is soon
discounted. There he is, just one more on that side of the question.
For when he begins to care too much, he begins to see what he wishes
to see, and by that fact ceases to see what he is there to see. He is
there to represent the unseen. He represents people who are not
voters, functions of voters that are not evident, events that are out
of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and
people. He has a constituency of intangibles. And intangibles cannot
be used to form a political majority, because voting is in the last
analysis a test of strength, a sublimated battle, and the expert
represents no strength available in the immediate. But he can exercise
force by disturbing the line up of the forces. By making the invisible
visible, he confronts the people who exercise material force with a
new environment, sets ideas and feelings at work in them, throws them
out of position, and so, in the profoundest way, affects the decision.
Men cannot long act in a way that they know is a contradiction of the
environment as they conceive it. If they are bent on acting in a
certain way they have to reconceive the environment, they have to
censor out, to rationalize. But if in their presence, there is an
insistent fact which is so obtrusive that they cannot explain it away,
one of three courses is open. They can perversely ignore it, though
they will cripple themselves in the process, will overact their part
and come to grief. They can take it into account but refuse to act.
They pay in internal discomfort and frustration. Or, and I believe
this to be the most frequent case, they adjust their whole behavior to
the enlarged environment.
The idea that the expert is an ineffectual person because he lets