Word: bagehot
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...controversy over whether Schlesinger should have published it has yet to subside. He was accused of "the height of historical irresponsibility," of cashing in on confidences from a dead man, of writing "peephole history," of endangering the national interest. In his defense, he quoted British Philosopher Walter Bagehot: "When a historian withholds important facts likely to influence the judgment of his readers, he commits a fraud." (But Schlesinger himself ignored that injunction when, according to a friend, he decided to omit a similar account of how Kennedy had been planning to dump FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover...
Historian Walter Bagehot a century ago defined the English system as "government by discussion," and since his day, the teething ring of its rulers has been Oxford's debating society, the Oxford Union. In its hall, which is arranged along lines of the House of Commons, future Prime Ministers from William Ewart Gladstone to Harold Macmillan have honed their skills by debating everything from socialism to "Resolved: That in the opinion of this House, Columbus went too far." So respected is the Oxford Union that when in 1933 it resolved "That this House would not fight for King...
...Communist aggression (the Korean war proved him right). He did his best to slice up the budget among the services, but the service secretaries sabotaged his efforts by going over his head to Congress and the press. Better-read than any other Cabinet member and able to quote from Bagehot, Marx and Kant, Forrestal irritated Truman by constantly giving him advice and recommending appointments. "He was a Cabinet Francis Bacon who took the whole political world for his province," writes Rogow. He especially angered Truman by arguing long and hard against the creation of the state of Israel because...
Consummate Actress. Their own dear Queen, with forbidding beneficence, hovered over it all, notably regal, notably bourgeois, and - as Author Petrie remarks - a consummate actress. The power of royalty was in one sense so limited that, as Bagehot declared in the 1860s, the monarch "must sign his own death warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it up to him." But the prestige of Victoria grew and grew, nor were her prerogatives trifling: she could disband the army, unman the navy, set free all prisoners, make every British citizen a peer...
...Says Co-Editor Irving Kristol of Encounter: "The Americans don't respect the intellectual the way he is respected in Britain. But then, they don't respect anyone, not even Charlie Wilson. The English, on the other hand, are a deferential society, as Bagehot said. They'll defer to dukes or earls or anyone with the right tie round his neck. So they defer to the intellectual because he has generally got the right tie round his neck...