252
DAVID RIESMAN
ministration is itself primarily one of intellectuals. But I think it
im–
portant to distinguish between the extremely intelligent professional
and academic men recruited by Kennedy and the intellectuals, that is,
those men who, whatever their field, take part in and contribute to gen–
eral ideas and speculative thought. (There are certainly members of the
latter group in the new Administration, but they are few and mainly
located abroad or otherwise out of harm's way.) The academic men
of the Administration possess the style and dash of well-educated,
lucid and restive cosmopolitans; they are at home in Europe and many
see a global mission for America, sometimes a stabilizing and sometimes
an expanding and policing one. Their revival of an earlier belief
that the country, like an individual, needs a purpose, that America
is too affluent and indolent, and that we are in a race with Communism
that can only be won by tireless and resourceful assertiveness-all this
is in many respects a new morality, quite out of keeping with Abilene
or even with the traditional service academies, even though, as I have in–
dicated, one can find cruder precursors of it in the first Roosevelt and
also, despite his more exigent moralism, in Woodrow Wilson.
In general it would seem that the center of gravity of discontent
has shifted upwards in the status system. True, hidden beneath the
bulging middle of our middle-class society are millions of disinherited
citizens, the aged and infirm and unskilled, the Negroes and Puerto
Ricans and Southern poor whites; but save for the increasingly vigorous
Negro protest movements, most of these millions are isolated and un–
organized, as yet unavailable as constituencies for radical political lead–
ership. In Senator McCarthy's movement, as others have pointed out,
there were elements of a soured obscurantist Populism; in many parts
of the country McCarthy, the fighter, the good Joe, the exposer of
Establishment shams, had a working-class and 10wer-middle-c1ass fol–
lowing which responded not to his program, for ' he had none, but to
his methods, his tone and targets. Today's radical Right Wing in con–
trast appears to draw much of its membership as well as its financial
and polemical backing from far more well-to-do strata. It would seem
that the small businessmen who belong to the John Birch Society are
on the whole, like the Texas oil rich who backed McCarthy, small
businessmen in the sense of having limited educations and little experi–
ence as managers in a complex world-but they are not poor: one can
own a small trucking or real estate firm or candy company and still
amass millions-and be encouraged to believe that one did it all by
oneself. Even more menacing are the indications that a few large
corporations have found that anti-Communism is no longer "contro-
