Word: function
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...obvious lesson of the Pentagon papers is that bureaucracies do not always function as they are supposed to, especially in their primary role of advising the President. Less apparent are the reasons why. Leslie Gelb, 34, and Morton Halperin, 33, both middle-ranking officials in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara, played key roles in the preparation of the Viet Nam study, and are currently at work on books. Working separately, the two arrived at similar conclusions on bureaucratic breakdowns. Part of the answer, they suggest, lies in the "rules of the game" by which all Washington bureaucrats traditionally play. Some...
...month he flatly told a press conference that if that commission turns out to favor legalizing pot, "I will not follow that recommendation." That was only the latest example of how a President can ignore his commissions unless they agree with what he wants to do. Often their main function is only to convey the impression that the President is actively responding to a national crisis. By the time the commission completes its report, passions over the triggering events are likely to have subsided, and the recommendations can then be dutifully examined and quietly discarded...
...Crocodile tears for Walter Cronkite [May 31]. If the networks had their way, the only function of the FCC would be to ensure that the three network giants had no major competition. Does Cronkite believe that Agnew & Co. are responsible for his sinking credibility, when Cronkite has held his office longer than Nixon, Agnew and Johnson put together...
...reason, he had the respect of many who disagreed with him, and that respect surely enhanced the court's authority as well as his own. To be sure, Justices do make value choices. But in such cases, Columbia's Herbert Wechsler has said, they "are bound to function otherwise than as a naked power organ. This calls for facing how [those choices] can be asserted to have any legal quality." In short, why should anyone listen to the Justices? "The answer, I suggest, inheres primarily in that they are-or are obliged to be-entirely principled. A principled...
...IMPORTANT to distinguish the problems of form and function in Mather House. As a collection of masses, the building succeeds admirably. The tower balances with Peabody Terrace, the low-rise balances with Dunster House, and the idea of an interior space gives the whole affair a kind of lumbering cosmic equilibrium. Terra cotta was the original choice for the exterior faces, and the texture which it would have provided might have prevented the tower from looking like a rouged waffle-iron...