PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

others make the decisions is quite contrary to experience. The more
subtle the elements that enter into the decision, the more
irresponsible power the expert wields. He is certain, moreover, to
exercise more power in the future than ever he did before, because
increasingly the relevant facts will elude the voter and the
administrator. All governing agencies will tend to organize bodies of
research and information, which will throw out tentacles and expand,
as have the intelligence departments of all the armies in the world.
But the experts will remain human beings. They will enjoy power, and
their temptation will be to appoint themselves censors, and so absorb
the real function of decision. Unless their function is correctly
defined they will tend to pass on the facts they think appropriate,
and to pass down the decisions they approve. They will tend, in short,
to become a bureaucracy.
The only institutional safeguard is to separate as absolutely as it is
possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which
investigates. The two should be parallel but quite distinct bodies of
men, recruited differently, paid if possible from separate funds,
responsible to different heads, intrinsically uninterested in each
other's personal success. In industry, the auditors, accountants, and
inspectors should be independent of the manager, the superintendents,
foremen, and in time, I believe, we shall come to see that in order to
bring industry under social control the machinery of record will have
to be independent of the boards of directors and the shareholders.
3
But in building the intelligence sections of industry and politics, we
do not start on cleared ground. And, apart from insisting on this
basic separation of function, it would be cumbersome to insist too
precisely on the form which in any particular instance the principle
shall take. There are men who believe in intelligence work, and will
adopt it; there are men who do not understand it, but cannot do their
work without it; there are men who will resist. But provided the
principle has a foothold somewhere in every social agency it will make
progress, and the way to begin is to begin. In the federal government,
for example, it is not necessary to straighten out the administrative
tangle and the illogical duplications of a century's growth in order
to find a neat place for the intelligence bureaus which Washington so
badly needs. Before election you can promise to rush bravely into the
breach. But when you arrive there all out of breath, you find that
each absurdity is invested with habits, strong interests, and chummy
Congressmen. Attack all along the line and you engage every force of
reaction. You go forth to battle, as the poet said, and you always
fall. You can lop off an antiquated bureau here, a covey of clerks
there, you can combine two bureaus. And by that time you are busy with
the tariff and the railroads, and the era of reform is over. Besides,