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How Power Works in Washington

Hedrick Smith's The Power Game is an account of how power works in Washington. Smith's purpose is to present what he learned during his years as the New York Times' Washington bureau chief and chief Washington correspondent, then to analyze the power "game" as it was played during the Reagan years showing "how it could work better" (xxii). Smith's goal is "to take you inside each part of the political process in Washington and to show you how it works" and his "premise" is that power games in Washington "have unwritten rules, rituals, and patterns that explain why things so often happen the way they do" (xv). All these maneuvers and strategies are, however, as old as the Greeks (and probably older). Even if there are some new twists, such as television's influence or the rise of female players in the front lines, Smith clearly thinks that his readers will be overcome by the surprise of it all. What is surprising is that while Smith's book turns out to be lively, engrossing, and filled with entertaining (but repetitive) examples (stressing the 'insider's' point of view), his analysis is naive and uninteresting.

Part of the problem is that Smith's approach is journalistic gossip. It is informative and the stories can be illuminating, but they carry the burden of his argument and he is not at all systematic in his approach. He writes well and every episode connects with the reader, but he does very little with the ramifications of the stories--simply setting them up as links in a chain that purports to support analysis but does not. The second part of the problem is that Smith does not really attend to "each part of the political process in Washington" since he neglects both the Supreme Court and the immense, permanent, vastly influential bureaucracy that has become an unofficial fourth arm of the government (xv). While, strictly speaking, neither the Court nor the bureaucracy is part of the "political process" in the sense ...

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How Power Works in Washington. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:53, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1712851.html