The Last Patrician (17 page)

He had developed a horror of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, he would write in his book
To Seek a Newer World,
amounted to a “denial of individualism,” a denial that “human beings matter,” a “suppression of individuality,” a trivialization of human action.
20
There is not, he declared,

a problem for which there is not a program. There is not a problem for which money is not being spent. There is not a problem or a program on which dozens or hundreds or thousands of bureaucrats are not earnestly at work. But does this represent a solution to our problems? Manifestly it does not. We have spent ever-increasing amounts on our schools. Yet far too many children still graduate totally unequipped to contribute to themselves, their families, or the communities in which they live.… We have spent unprecedented sums on buildings of all kinds. Yet our communities seem less beautiful and sensible every year.
21

Bobby, among the greatest managers of his time, had developed a horror of the very bureaucracy he himself was so adept at managing. His revulsion was partly the product of his own experience; his career as an administrator had made him conscious of the limits of such vast administrative wastelands as the Justice Department, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. But his revulsion was a product, too, of the preoccupations of the age, of the criticisms of the modern bureaucratic mentality that men like C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Paul Goodman, Sloan Wilson, and W. H. Whyte had put forward in the fifties, criticisms of managerial (as opposed to entrepreneurial) capitalism, organization men, and a bureaucratic approach to human life that stifled the imagination and poisoned the soul.
22

Bobby's reservations about the nature and direction of the bureaucratic state found expression in a series of explicit criticisms of the welfare regime that had grown up under its aegis. The last thing the nation needed, he asserted in the second of his January speeches, was “a massive extension of welfare services.”
23
The welfare state had “largely failed as an anti-poverty weapon.”
24
It had “destroyed family life.”
25
The welfare state had not only failed to make things better, it had in a number of instances actually made things worse:

Opponents of welfare have always said that welfare is degrading, both to the giver and the recipient. They have said that it destroys self-respect, that it lowers incentive, that it is contrary to American ideals. Most of us deprecated and disregarded these criticisms.… [But] the criticisms of welfare
do
have a center of truth, and they are confirmed by the evidence. Recent studies have shown, for example, that higher welfare payments often encourage students to drop out of school, that they often encourage families to disintegrate, and that they often lead to lifelong dependency. [It has been] said that welfare was the worst thing that could have happened to the Negro. Even for such an extreme position, there is factual support. [But because] most of us were committed to doing something we
thought
was good, we ignored the criticisms.
26

If they were to prosper, the inhabitants of the ghetto would have to dig themselves out of despair; they would have to rebuild, with their own hands, the fallen cities in which they lived.
27
Every instance of genuine individual success was, Bobby believed, the result of individual effort. Only through their own hard work—“work which is dignified,” work “which is hard and exacting”—could people make a better place for themselves in the world.
28
Change would not come about “by fiat from Washington,” or by order of the President, or as the result of a law passed in Congress; it could come about only through “the work and effort” of individuals.
29
In “the last analysis,” Adam Walinsky said, Bobby believed that “people had to do whatever they did for themselves.… He did not believe in the government just taking large sums of money and handing it out to people.”
30
The “rebuilding” efforts that Bobby proposed in the January speeches were to be the work of individuals and communities, not of government bureaus; Bobby called upon individual citizens themselves to “take the first steps” toward a restoration of their blighted neighborhoods.
31
“Concessions wrung from an unwilling bureaucrat or absentee owner,” he later declared, would “never equal, in quality or permanence,” the achievements “of a self-reliant community.”
32
One of the things he found most inspiring about Cesar Chavez's effort to organize migrant farmworkers was the fact that Chavez and his followers were doing it themselves: with little assistance from the government they had seized the initiative and with their own hands were working to improve the quality of their lives. “You are winning a special kind of citizenship,” Bobby told Chavez's people in Delano, California “no one is doing it for you—you are winning it yourselves—and therefore no one can ever take it away.”
33

But could Chavez's success be replicated in the ghetto? Chavez, after all, confronted, in the valleys of California, conditions just as terrible as those in the slums of the cities, but he had nevertheless succeeded, against every expectation, in inspiring his people to act, in giving them a sense that there was more to life than the misery their broken bodies had long since learned to accept. Could one apply the lessons of Delano to the human problem at the heart of the ghetto? Like the migrant workers before Chavez, the children of the cities exhibited all the signs of people who had never been given any sense of their value, their potential, their unique human worth. “A lot of those looters are just kids in trouble,” Bobby said at the time of the riots in Watts. “
I
got in trouble when I was that age.”
34
The apathy, the dejection, the sullenness that characterized so many of these men and women resulted in an atrophy of nerve, a paralysis of will, a listlessness that the unsympathetic outsider was likely to confuse with laziness or stupidity. A bureaucratized system of handouts could only perpetuate the problem, could only humiliate those whom it was intended to help:

In our generosity [Bobby declared] we have created a system of hand-outs, a second-rate set of social services which damages and demeans its recipients, and destroys any semblance of human dignity that they have managed to retain through their adversity.… In the long run, welfare payments solve nothing, for the giver or the recipients; free Americans deserve the chance to be fully self-supporting.
35

So far from improving the self-esteem of the individual, the welfare state undermined it even more. Impersonal, sterile, and gray, the welfare bureaus reinforced in those who had become dependent upon them their already marked sense of powerlessness and hopelessness, and contributed to the “sense of helplessness and futility” that overwhelmed so many of those who were in the grip of its power.
36
The welfare bureaucracy did nothing to instill in its beneficiaries those feelings of self-confidence and self-respect that might have made it possible for them to seize the initiative and take control of their lives.
37
The welfare state “destroy[ed] self-respect,” it “lower[ed] incentive,” and it led to “lifelong dependency.”
38
The time had come to reform it.

10

The problem of the underconfident soul is a relatively new one in human history. It seems not to have existed, on a large scale, before the eighteenth century. Men and women who, had they lived a few centuries earlier, would have occupied a definite place in life—however dismal that place might have been—found themselves, in the modern age, forced to make their own way in the world, a world that was bigger, more complicated, and more impersonal than it had been in the past. To succeed in finding places for themselves in the modern world, men and women needed to possess far greater reserves of self-confidence than was the case in the past.

In the past self-confidence had been a problem of the few and not the many; it was a problem only for those who were supposed to make something of themselves in the world. Machiavelli's prince, for example,
needed
self-confidence, for only a highly self-confident man could succeed in conquering Fortune.
1
Princes needed to possess self-confidence; much of the rest of the world did not. And yet Machiavelli's slender handbook for princes is itself an indication of how rapidly the world was changing; the very fact that a commoner like Machiavelli should have been so intrigued by the connection between self-confidence and success, the very fact that he should have been so fascinated by the impact the self-confident man (Cesare Borgia, for example) can have on history, is an indication that the problem of self-confidence had come, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, to have a wider significance than ever before. Self-confidence was no longer a problem for princes and generals alone, a problem for those who by tradition were supposed to possess what Machiavelli calls
virtù
(strength, self-confidence, audacity); self-confidence was—or was becoming—a problem for everyone, from civil servants like Machiavelli to strongmen like Borgia himself. Sainte-Beuve informs us that, in seventeenth-century France, it was thought exceedingly “strange” that La Rochefoucauld should have been “so embarrassed in public that if he had to speak on official matters before six or seven persons his courage failed him.”
2
That a French nobleman should have been as unself-confident as La Rochefoucauld was thought unpleasantly queer; at the same time, none of his contemporaries would have been in the least surprised to learn that La Rochefoucauld's valet de chambre was equally incapable of expressing himself confidently in a crowd. “Why ever should a valet need to express himself confidently in a crowd?” they would have wondered. Today, however, everyone is expected to be able to act confidently in a crowd, to make something of himself in the world, and thus the problem of self-confidence has become, for the first time in history, a mass problem.

Some natures, of course, adjusted quite readily to the changed conditions of the modern world; others did not. The intellectual-priest type was one victim of the new age; there was less need of such a type in the demystified world that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment brought into being. The decline of the intellectual-priest was not, perhaps, a great loss: intellectual-priests never accounted for more than a small percentage of society, and those few who are still to be found today have by and large found a decent refuge, not indeed in the Church, but in the university. Other groups, however, present a more serious problem. There are in every American city young men and women who lack the resources, intellectual or material, to carve out satisfactory places for themselves in the world. One sees them hanging out on streetcorners and in shopping malls, idle, bored, cynical, a refutation in themselves of the faith of the
philosophes,
a testament to the naïveté of the Enlightened belief that progress in the arts and sciences would inevitably work a fundamental change in human character. We know less about their fears and anxieties than we do about those of the priestly intellectuals and the neurasthenic “sick” souls of the upper and upper-middle classes, whose depressions and eating disorders are the object of so much scrupulous study. But this much we do know: the neurasthenic “sick” soul of the upper and upper-middle classes and the “depraved” or “fallen” soul of the lower and lower-middle classes are alike in being unself-confident souls.

That underconfident souls should constitute so large a proportion of our population is troubling. But are those who occupy the other end of the confidence spectrum any less a matter for concern? Are our society's supremely self-confident men and women any less disturbing? Do we care—should we care—whether they are admirable figures? Have they anything at all to do with the humane and liberal traditions of the West? Or are they merely the possessors of certain narrow technical competence, magicians with money, possessed of an uncanny ability to manipulate capital or technological know-how? For there can be little doubt that, if the Machiavellian prince was the archetypically self-confident figure of four or five centuries ago, today it is the modern entrepreneurial hero who, more than any one else, embodies the idea of self-confident action in the world. But should our underconfident youth really
want
to be like the entrepreneurial hero? Should they really want to be like Rockefeller, or Gates, or Gatsby, or Reginald Lewis, or Joseph Kennedy? The great-souled men of the past, the supermen whom Machiavelli and Nietzsche and Stendhal celebrated in their writings, the godlike beings whom Aristotle described in the
Politics,
had their shortcomings, to be sure. But does the modern entrepreneurial hero—the hero whom we are taught today to admire and envy—really represent an
improvement
on the heroic idea? Did Morgan, Rockefeller, and Ford advance beyond the point that Alexander, Borgia, and Bonaparte reached? Caesar might have been a bad man, as Cato said, but still he was undeniably a great man; he set the standard against which we continue to judge great men. When admirers of Jack Kennedy celebrated their hero's coolness under pressure, his heroism in battle, his literary achievements, his attractiveness to women, they invoked an ideal that is recognizably Caesarian in its derivation: Caesar, the brilliant warrior, the master of literary form, the seducer of women, the charmer of Catullus. In
The Making of the President 1960,
Teddy White very explicitly compared Jack Kennedy with Julius Caesar.
3
When, however, we come to the modern entrepreneurial hero—when we come to Gatsby—we are disappointed to find him a duller creature than either Caesar or Kennedy. Here is Gatsby on his (make-believe) youthful adventures: