Kennedy Institute: Who Gains?

The Kennedy Library's Institute of Politics is supposed to bring together politicians and academics, to the betterment of both. At the moment, however, it is difficult to see how the academics are going to profit very much, and how the politicians are going to profit at all.

Scholars personally involved in the Institute will have one questionable advantage: they will be able to tap a mine of source material that would otherwise not be available in Cambridge. Richard E. Neustadt, professor of Government and the Institute's director, uses the example of Lawrence O'Brien, who has been responsible for executive-congressional relations under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Nothing on the subject has been written down, but the changes have been vast; only O'Brien can explain them. To bring men like him to the Institute would make it an attractive place for scholars, Neustadt argues.

This may be true (although O'Brien, who is said to be thinking of entering Massachusetts politics, would probably be available to anyone who could scrape up the subway fare into Boston), and it would certainly benefit Harvard and the other Boston-area universities participating in the Institute to have O'Brien accessible to professors and students. But there would be no gain for the scholarly community as a whole; someone would be certain to extract the information from O'Brien whether there was an Institute or not.

Garnering facts from worn-out administrators would not, of course, be the only facet of the Institute's program, as Neustadt has sketched it. A core of scholars from Boston's universities would be brought to the Institute to meet with resident and visiting "fellows." There would, presumably, be seminar discussions of political issues, books written by senior public officials, and sets of memoirs produced by collaboration between an experienced politician and a younger man.

All this might persuade college government departments that there is something to be gained from an emphasis on practical political problems as well as theory, from studying the electoral process as well as the governmental one (Neustadt wants to study both: "Elections aren't all of politics by any means," he says. "What you do after you're elected is what counts.").

Drop in the Bucket

Undergraduates as well as Faculty members would be invited to take advantage of the Institute, to meet the residents and offer them their own ideas. But the program is not designed with the idea of enticing students to go into politics, since any such plan would be merely a drop in the bucket. Contact with residents and visitors would strengthen the political aspirations of those who aspire already. But Neustadt might wonder whether any of the programs he now has in mind would have induced John F. Kenedy '40, varsity swimmer and club man, to come over to the Institute.

If the scholars may have new fields and new sources opened to them, what about the politicians? The Institute will be in Cambridge, not Washington, and Neustadt admits that no practicing politician will be willing to spend any length of time away from his job.

He hopes to bring senators and cabinet members here for short visits, perhaps modeled on Yale's Chubb Fellowship program, and to add two groups of permanent residents: a set of older men, including retired or defeated politicians, career public officials between jobs, or those who have books to turn out; and younger men, in their late twenties or early thirties, on the verge of entering politics. A few political journalists might be included.

But which young men are likely to take advantage of the offer of a year of academic work at the Kennedy Institute? Scarcely the young Everett Dirksens and Lyndon Johnsons, who make their way through elections on their close ties with the home folks. Scarcely, too, the men from parts of the country where the Harvard, and even the Kennedy, name may be a handicap. The most likely "junior fellows" are the budding Joseph Clarks, Fulbrights, Douglases, McGees, and Kuchels--in other words, precisely those who already take advantage of academic study in their work and would profit least from the simple exposure to professors.

Seminars Useless

A simple seminar-research program in the operations of government would do little for these people. Granted that they will be the predominant type among the junior fellows, what can the Institute do for them?

The question can be answered by an attempt at redefining a politician. The people who drew up the plans for the Institute tended to think of him in opposition to the academic, as a practical man in the midst of life, far from any ivory towers. Yet this is becoming less true. Is a Washington-bound politician any less isolated from life than a professor? The politician's day is full of desk work, as much of it as he cares to tend to. Legislative sessions get longer, and the vacations, the time spent at home, shorter each year. Inevitably, the politician's knowledge of his people suffers.

Two Cultures

At the time of the Birmingham bombings in 1963, Robert Kennedy went to New York and met with James Baldwin and a group of Negro intellectuals. Both groups came away disturbed. Kennedy had cited statistics about schools being desegregated in the South, about increased registration of Negro voters, about voluntary desegregation of hotels and restaurants, and could not understand why the Negroes didn't care, why they were dissatisfied.

Kennedy had lost touch, as politicians can do. As attorney-general he had to work long days and long nights, to stay in Washington, and to be a celebrity when he left. For all the hours he devoted to working on the civil rights struggle, he had lost contact with its participants.

This is a kind of illiteracy the Institute can hope to remedy more easily than the simple absence among politicians of academic study. With his $10 million endowment, Neustadt would have no trouble in bringing to Harvard people whom his young politicians would not normally meet in the course of their political lives.

He could expose his junior brood to Baldwin, to Norman Mailer, to Paul Goodman and Ayn Rand--not because the Institute should attempt to convert its residents into radicals and reactionaries, but because a good politician understands his community, not only the majority that elects him, but also the minorities on the fringes, where political creativity often has its roots.

In other words, this mixture of politics and academics should begin with the loosest possible conception of academics. The men Neustadt brings to Cambridge should not all be members of someone's faculty.

On another level, perhaps the greatest contribution the Institute could make to politics would be to produce a group of young men fired up about specific issues. Harvard and M.I.T. now have the resources to pin down the issues that will be important 20 years from now and to equip the "junior fellows" to be specialists in one of them.

Thirty years ago, the great American legislators had their specialties: TVA was the brainchild of George Norris, labor reform of Robert Wagner, before the New Deal adopted them. Today, legislation comes from the White House, armed with expert testimony to ward off any amendments. None of today's Congressman will leave a legislative monument as almost all the great New Deal senators did.

Perhaps by instructing the politicians in water and air conservation, in population control, in the conversion of military industries to peacetime uses, the Institute could restore creativity to the legislative branch, assuming its graduates advance in that direction.

But this would call for a redefinition of the role of the professor in the Institute. Neustadt has spoken of a "core" faculty of government professors, economists, historians perhaps who would study the politicians and be studied by them. A more issueoriented program would demand fuller participation by the University's Faculties--of the scientific departments, the Medical Faculty of Public Health, the Law Faculty, and so on.

The young men who are trained at the Kennedy Institute will have every chance to become successful politicians. They will be picked because they seem especially promising; if they prove talented, the professors who teach them will soon know about it, and then so will the campaign contributors who support candidates of one ideological stamp or another. The young politicians can go back to their states in an unusually good position to run for office.

If Neustadt wants merely to oversee a trade school for politicians, he can run a very successful one. But the Kennedy Institute has the prestige, staff, and the money to do a great deal more. In their strictest senses, politics and academics are isolated professions; at some time Neustadt will have to ask himself whether it was John Kennedy's job to unite the two, or to understand them, and to understand that they are not all of America