Leaning In

OF THE MANY voices whispering in the executive ear today, few convey a true picture of America's current position to the oval office. Two years in the Kennedy administration convinced Richard Barnet '52, Harvard Law '54, a onetime presidential adviser, that the president received too little input from people with enough courage to present to him more accurate, if pessimistic, assessments of his policies. Two decades later, Barnet explores the methods of American leadership and the reasons they fail to cope with the "politics of scarcity," revealing the extent to which manipulation of the world's natural resources influences our lives, in his latest book, The Lean Years.

Ricard Barnet came to work in the White House on the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and his susequent eye-opening experiences in the State Department provided him with a crash course in the machinery of American foreign policy. "I was gradually made aware of the increased involvement of the U.S. in Indochina. I sensed that there was something wrong with that and that it was being presented in a way that was very different from reality," Barnet explained recently from his suite in the Ritz-Carlton overlooking the Boston Common, a way-stop on a promotion tour for his new book. He had just returned from an appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America," and had sandwiched this interview before two others that afternoon.

"I was very apolitical during my days at Harvard," said Barnet, a History and Literature major. "Students couldn't have been more conservative then." He remained unconcerned with public affairs until the day when the Luces, who lived down the corridor from him in the Law School, were arrested and tried as Communist agents for delivering The Daily Worker under students' doors during their undergraduate years at Cornell. The Luce affair "convinced me of the irrationality of McCarthyism and the Communist scare," he recalled. While working the next year at Harvard's Russian Research Center on his first book, Who Wants Disarmament?, he discovered that the State Department had misled the American people to believe it was genuinely working towards disarmament, and that blame for the failure of disarmament lay with the Russians. In fact, Barnet found, "it turned out that the Russians made proposal for disarmament in 1955, and the U.S. backed away from them."

BARNET'S EARLY disenchantment with the U.S. government followed his disillusionment with the legal profession. He describes himself at that time as a "hungry lawyer," who published his first book "out of love of learning and financial need." But, he adds, Harvard came through later, helping him to fund the Institute for Policy Studies, which he founded in 1962. Barnet started the Institute, he explains, because he perceived a need for an advisory body outside the government which could objectively study public policy. "One of the worst problems I became aware of in Kennedy's administration was the pandering for government contracts. Really great people would say almost anything they thought you wanted to hear to get a contract. I became convinced that the contract relationship to outside consultants dependent on giving advice to the government was a very bad one on which to depend for getting independent, objective advice. The reason we were going so fast down the wrong road was that no alternative voices were being heard. The outsiders, if anything, reinforced what the insiders wanted to hear."

In The Lean Years, Barnet writes that the same situation led to Carter's down-the-wire support of the deadweight Shah of Iran in 1978. In the midst of Tehran riots, the director of the National Foreign Estimate of the CIA, Robert Bowie, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to give an optimistic report.

"The intelligence services, as in Vietnam, consistently exaggerated the stability of the regime--and for the same reason. The 'customers' in Washington did not want to hear that one of the principal pillars of Nixon's 'structure of peace' and a crucial link in America's energy strategy was about to fall."

The Lean Years, subtitled Politics in the Age of Scarcity, sketches the powerful hierarchies supporting the production and distribution of five world resources: oil, energy, minerals, food, and water. Barnet finds that "the illusion of scarcity creates power," and that "the market operates almost totally on illusion. It was folk wisdom that the crisis was exaggerated, that the doubling of gasoline prices was making the companies rich, that the companies were in league with the sheiks against the consumer--and it was all true." But--he stresses--there is still a real oil crisis that Americans will not face, which has irreparably weakened the country by enmeshing it in a web of interdependency with foreign regimes like that of Saudi Arabia.

"In this decade," he writes, "the demand for oil will exceed available supply. A crisis of industrial civilization may well occur long before global supplies are exhausted or even before the day consumption overtakes production." He sees the key to the oil situation not in the supply, which he believes will last several more decades, but in the control of distribution which the "Seven Sisters" of American oil now hold.

American consumption of fully a third of the oil currently produced in the world had forced her to construct foreign policy around oil interests. Barnet asserts that the oil priority is not new and cites the Marshall plan as an early marriage of American business and political concerns. The decision to convert Europe from a coal-based energy system to an oil-consumptive one, after the decimation of World War II, is unavoidably tied to oil lobbying. The world's consumption of oil, inextricably linked with its consumption of minerals, water, food and energy, is managed by a handful of businessmen, much as it was a hundred years ago. Japan puts pressure for a continued greater supply of oil on Exxon, which puts pressure on the president to reduce its obligations to the domestic market, and he in turn pulls the necessary strings in Washington to allow the company to sell where it can reap the greatest profits. The American government, Barnet writes, is controlled by businesses to a much greater extent than the public wants to believe.

ONE SOLUTION to the nation's problems could lie in dramatic changes in the current form of American democracy. Barnet suggests that the structure of the government cannot adequately cope with democratic resource planning, and that American's perception of the impact of their participation in government must change:

"Most elections are votes of confidence or no confidence and have little discernable impact on specific decisions. For most people in the world their connection to the productive order is tenuous; they can lose their land or their job at a moment's notice. They live at the mercy of economic and political decisions over which they have no control."

Barnet believes Americans have less control over the direction of their country than they realize, and he does not think that they base or are capable of basing their decisions about natural resources on an accurate understanding of world systems.

Even management at the executive level of government may be unable to solve the resource problem within the confines of the American nation-state, much of which Barnet feels is a facade, since neither political party has what he would call a national program. "The last three elected presidents have been from the Sun Belt, but they have found the country ungovernable. None succeeded in carrying through a major domestic energy program," he says, and when asked, criticizes the Carter administration for its gross misperception of the energy situation. "Carter's inability to handle the energy situation is just one of the failures of his administration," he says.

In The Lean Years Barnet constructs a middle ground where the American public and big businesses share blame for the world resource crisis. As a member of the Institute of Policy Studies, he demonstrates the ability of an outsider from the federal government to present a more cogent and cohesive view of problems than spokesmen for Washington, who have kept the public in a muddle. His overview may be more pessimistic than most offered to the American public, but the weight of his examination of public policy should serve as a signal to the White House that Americans want, and are capable of developing, a more substantive solution to the problem of managing the world's resources.