Remarks on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Brookings Institution.

Mr. Calkins, Mr. Blade, Mr. Gordon:

Half a century ago nine men--from business, law, and banking--met to chart a course for an "Institute for Government Research" here in Washington, D.C.

Their goals were beyond reproach, but also unlikely to propel other men to the barricades. They sought, in their words, "knowledge of the best methods of administrative organization to be obtained by means of thorough scientific study, so that it may be possible to conduct governmental activities with maximum effectiveness and minimum waste."

This must have seemed a rather colorless ideal, however worthy. Yet two decades later--in the late thirties--a newspaper had this to say about what had become the Brookings Institution:

"Brookings' publications cause something of a stir in the world. Newspapers print summaries of them on their front pages. Economists, editorial writers, and some politicians cite them much as fundamentalist preachers draw upon Holy Writ. Although the emotional appeal of these books is nil, their statements have caused many highly placed or otherwise prominent persons to yell bloody murder."

So the men who studied the Federal system from Brookings' window had already stimulated, if not torchlight parades, a great deal of soul-searching by the administrators of that system.

They did not accomplish this by calling for the overthrow of the Government. That is certainly one way to get people's attention, but it is not the best way to bring about desirable change.

The men of Brookings did it by analysis, by painstaking research, by objective writing, by an imagination that questioned the "going" way of doing things, and then they proposed alternatives.

Because their subject was public policy-the transportation system, the economy, election law, the civil service, labor-management practices--they touched the concerns of every citizen in the land. Sometimes they prescribed an unpopular medicine for Government officials, and the patient rejected it with a cry of outrage. Brookings reported that the NRA was badly administered and could only surely fail. Then General Johnson, who ran the agency--General Hugh Johnson-said:

"Before anybody asks that crowd for a prescription he must write his own diagnosis. It is one of the most sanctimonious and pontifical rackets in the country." I am quoting General Hugh Johnson!

Yet in field after field, reports and studies that emerged from Brookings did bring about substantial changes in law and in practice. It was often a case of concentrated brainpower applied to national problems where ignorance, confusion, vested interests, or apathy had ruled before. Sometimes the Brookings study won the day; sometimes it only opened the way for other ideas and policies; but always it changed the temperature in the cosmos of Washington.

Now, in 1966, after 50 years of telling the Government what to do, you are more than a private institution on Massachusetts Avenue. You are a national institution, so important to at least the executive branch, and, I think, the Congress, and the country, that if you did not exist we would have to ask someone to create you.

Of course you are not alone now. Other institutions, many of them specialized, have come into being since the Second War. Some of them are supported by the Government itself, in an effort to find better answers to problems of national security in the nuclear age. More--many more--have appeared on university campuses, sponsoring research in such subjects as mental health, African affairs, urban renewal, in a hundred or more fields where scholars had heretofore never ventured.

This has not happened just because wealthy benefactors needed monuments to their generosity. It has happened because the enormous complexity of modern life demanded something better than a visceral, emotional response. And as one who has examined a thousand new ideas from the universities and research centers of America in the last 34 months, I can testify that in fact we got something better.

There is hardly an aspect of the Great Society's program that has not been molded, or remolded, or in some way influenced by the community of scholars and thinkers. The flow of ideas continues--because the problems continue. Some ideas are good enough to stimulate whole departments of Government into fresh appraisals of their programs. Some are ingenious; some are impractical; some are both. But without the tide of new proposals that periodically sweeps into this city, the climate of our Government would be very arid indeed.

There has been another--and equally welcome-development during the past few years. A number of those who helped to create the new programs decided, after they had been created, to follow their children down here to Washington. So men like John Gardner and Bob Wood and Charlie Haar came on down here to look after their education program, and what we hope next week may be the demonstration cities program. If the old bromide still had currency-that intellectuals are absentminded, unable to cope with the harsh practicalities of administration--these men, and many like them, should have dispelled it.

So we have seen, in our time, two aspects of intellectual power brought to bear on our Nation's problems: the power to create, to discover and propose new remedies for what ails us; and the power then to administer complex programs in a rational way.

But there is a third aspect of intellectual power that our country urgently needs tonight, and in my judgment it is being supplied sparingly. It is less glamorous than the power to create new ideas; it is less visible and less publicized than the power to administer new programs. But it is not a bit less critical to the success or to the failure that we may make in the years that are ahead of us.

This is the power to evaluate. It is the power to find the marrow of the problem, the power to define it as acutely as it can be defined. It is the power to say, about public policies or private choices, "This works. But this does not. This costs more than we can afford, or this costs more than it is worth. This is worth more than it costs. This will probably give us an acceptable result. But this will complicate the problem and make it impossible for us to solve."

Of all these powers, that of the critical faculty, I think, is most deeply associated with the intellectual. All his training, all his intelligence, all his experience, tells him to beware of easy answers--to shun the merely clever, as he does the emotional generality. He does not accept, in his laboratory or seminar, the notion that the best way to solve a problem is to walk away from it, or to flood it with a sea of dollars, or to smother it with an emotional slogan. Should he adopt a different set of critical standards when the problem is city slums or foreign policy than when it is a question of biology or historical research?

I think obviously not. The methods which have worked so well in advancing man's knowledge of himself and his universe are exactly the methods which can show us the way toward better public policies--a distrust of simple answers to very complex problems, and always healthy respect for the facts, a conscientious effort to submerge bias and prejudice, and a refusal to stretch the conclusions beyond the evidence.

What I am saying is that the critical faculty ought constantly to challenge the accepted wisdom--whether liberal or conservative wisdom, whether private or governmental wisdom, the wisdom of the street or the newspaper office or the lecture hall. It ought to be concerned at least as much with analyzing the terrific complexity and the hard realities of modern problems as it is with devising sweeping new strategies for social advances. It ought to be as dissatisfied with what is known about the critical problems of today as it is with the bureaucrats and politicians who try to solve them. The critical faculty, in short, ought to be critical--to be precise, to be sharp, and to be piercing.

If this seems less exhilarating to some than striking out for new horizons, I can only say that to me it does not. I can, for instance, imagine no more exciting breakthrough in human knowledge than one that still eludes us: understanding the real dynamics of urban life.

This is such a mixture of physical, financial, and psychological questions as to confound the best minds in this Nation. Overcrowded streets and housing, unemployment, inadequate schools, transportation systems that compound problems instead of relieving them, air and water pollution, blight and ugliness, rising crime and delinquency, tax structures that impose the heaviest burdens on the governments that are least able to bear those burdens, racial riots and tensions, and so on down a list that is already too familiar to all of you.

What impact are we having on these problems with our education program? What is our new poverty program doing about it? Is our manpower redevelopment and training program serving its proper function? How much can we expect rent supplements to achieve in really producing more and better low-cost housing for our poor? What is our highway program doing to alleviate the snarl of traffic, and what are its effects on the city and on its people?

Well, all of these are part of a much larger question: What do we want our cities to be, and then, how can we achieve what we want?

We need not delay action in the cities until Brookings, and its sister institutions, have given us a definitive answer to that question. In fact, I have not delayed. We have put into being many programs of assistance to the cities, programs that only 3 years ago were but theories and propositions. When governments are faced with great public dilemmas, they must shape their programs with the greatest wisdom that they possess, but governments must act. They cannot wait to act until all that is tentative and hypothetical can be established as firmly as a law of mathematics.

But how well are these programs faring? How great is the gap between their promise and the city's reality? How should they be changed, and how can the gap be narrowed?

These answers are vital--because the needs of the city demand that all the resources we can devote to them must find their mark. Our aim must be good--and for that we need guidance and discriminate judgment, as well as exhortation.

That judgment is exactly what those to whom God has given a good mind, and to whom circumstance has given a good education, are called upon to provide.

Their judgment may be wrong, and they must live with that knowledge--as other men do, who have been chosen by their fellow citizens to exercise the powers of government.

Their judgment may be right, and still not be accepted in the political arena or the editorial room. That is a risk that they all take--along with everyone else.

But they must provide it; it is an obligation of responsible intellect, no less than the obligation to produce fresh ideas or to serve the Nation faithfully and diligently in its time of need.

It was two centuries ago that Burke wrote: "To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind."

If I may interpolate, the polls reflect that condition still exists, I think.

"Such complaints and humors have existed in all times; yet as all times have not been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself in distinguishing that complaint which only characterizes the general infirmity of human nature, from those which are symptoms of the particular distempers of our own air and season."

He might have added that once the distinction is made, intellectual responsibility requires a man to suggest how those distempers might be remedied; if called upon, to practice the remedy himself; and always to observe--with a candid and critical eye-the results that flow from that judgment.

I think you have sought to fulfill this responsibility here at Brookings. In doing so, you have contributed immeasurably to prudent government and consequently I think to the well-being of your fellow citizens in America.

But please do not rest on 50 years of public service well done. I have observed the operations for 35 years. Since Dr. Spurgeon Bell was associated here for a brief time, one of my mother's early sweethearts, and since one of my later friends, Mr. Kermit Gordon, came over here, I have tried to follow your work.

As one whose understanding you have enriched throughout my entire public life, I should like to call on you tonight to help us light America's way in the turbulence of tomorrow, as you have done with such great integrity in the turbulent and trying days of the past. I do not think that Brookings will fail us either.

Thank you for letting me come and be with you.