Bureaucrats vs. Opinion Makers

James Mann's lead opinion piece in today's Washington Post is a good follow up to my previous post. Of course, this is more about Deep Throat and Mark Felt, but the distinction between the professional bureaucrats and the political front men has much broader relevance.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the bureaucratic struggles of 1972 as ancient history. Today, as in virtually every administration, one can find comparable, if lesser, battles for control of bureaucracies. Indeed, looking at this bureaucratic warfare is often the key to understanding the dynamics of how any administration works.

Our leaders don't talk about this on television, but one of the things they worry most about is whether or how they can control the bureaucracies beneath them, so that an administration's policies are carried out, or at least not subverted. Virtually every president since John Kennedy in the early 1960s has wrestled in one way or another with the CIA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, like all of her predecessors, has tried to win the loyalty of the foreign service.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it the main thing or just a necessary thing? I guess that all depends, doesn't it.