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