PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

in order to effect a truly logical reorganization of the government,
such as all candidates always promise, you would have to disturb more
passions than you have time to quell. And any new scheme, supposing
you had one ready, would require officials to man it. Say what one
will about officeholders, even Soviet Russia was glad to get many of
the old ones back; and these old officials, if they are too ruthlessly
treated, will sabotage Utopia itself.
No administrative scheme is workable without good will, and good will
about strange practices is impossible without education. The better
way is to introduce into the existing machinery, wherever you can find
an opening, agencies that will hold up a mirror week by week, month by
month. You can hope, then, to make the machine visible to those who
work it, as well as to the chiefs who are responsible, and to the
public outside. When the office-holders begin to see themselves,--or
rather when the outsiders, the chiefs, and the subordinates all begin
to see the same facts, the same damning facts if you like, the
obstruction will diminish. The reformer's opinion that a certain
bureau is inefficient is just his opinion, not so good an opinion in
the eyes of the bureau, as its own. But let the work of that bureau be
analysed and recorded, and then compared with other bureaus and with
private corporations, and the argument moves to another plane.
There are ten departments at Washington represented in the Cabinet.
Suppose, then, there was a permanent intelligence section for each.
What would be some of the conditions of effectiveness? Beyond all
others that the intelligence officials should be independent both of
the Congressional Committees dealing with that department, and of the
Secretary at the head of it; that they should not be entangled either
in decision or in action. Independence, then, would turn mainly on
three points on funds, tenure, and access to the facts. For clearly if
a particular Congress or departmental official can deprive them of
money, dismiss them, or close the files, the staff becomes its
creature.
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The question of funds is both important and difficult. No agency of
research can be really free if it depends upon annual doles from what
may be a jealous or a parsimonious congress. Yet the ultimate control
of funds cannot be removed from the legislature. The financial
arrangement should insure the staff against left-handed, joker and
rider attack, against sly destruction, and should at the same time
provide for growth. The staff should be so well entrenched that an
attack on its existence would have to be made in the open. It might,
perhaps, work behind a federal charter creating a trust fund, and a
sliding scale over a period of years based on the appropriation for
the department to which the intelligence bureau belonged. No great