When Francis Gary Powers was asked by the presiding judge of the Soviet military tribunal trying him for espionage whether he had not considered the possibility that his U-2 flight might provoke armed conflict, the captured pilot answered, “The people who sent me should think of these things. My job was to carry out orders. I do not think it was my responsibility to make such decisions.” This article deals with a similar problem, a predicament which to this day, fortunately, has remained hypothetical, but which may become distressingly real at some time in the future. It concerns the unenviable position of the military subordinate commanded to use nuclear weapons, who may be punished today if he disobeys and prosecuted tomorrow if he obeys. The discussion initially evolves around three issues in international law: (1) the validity of the plea of superior orders as a defense in war crimes trials; (2) the question of the legality of using nuclear weapons; and (3) the present status and future of the law of war. That these problem areas are intimately related should become clear as we proceed.

The disregard for humanitarian and moral considerations which has increasingly characterized the conduct of war in the twentieth century, and, more recently, the development of nuclear weapons—the tools of mass extermination par excellence—have led many students of international law to conclude that the laws of war are dead. Grotius' doctrine of the temperamenta belli, requiring belligerents to conduct hostilities with regard for the principles of humanity and chivalry, as well as the many conventions drawn up prior to World War I in order to regulate the use of violence, are said to have become largely obsolete.

Ever since President Eisenhower broached the “open skies” proposal in 1955, American “disarmament” policy has given prior emphasis—apart from diplomatic and propagandistic purposes—to the objective of stabilizing the military balance of power, as distinguished from the traditional objective of abolishing or reducing the arms that sustain that balance. So Secretary of State Herter on February 18, 1960, described the first goal of America's disarmament policy as creating “a more stable military environment” by reducing the risk of war resulting from a surprise attack launched by miscalculation or from the promiscuous spread of nuclear weapons production. And so on May 25 President Eisenhower took the occasion of the U-2 incident to reiterate the urgent need for an international agreement providing mutual assurance against surprise attack; and on September 22, in an address to the U.N. General Assembly, proposed a United Nations surveillance body to permit nations to prove to each other that they are not preparing to launch a surprise attack.

If stability is the objective, then arms control policy is clearly the logical complement rather than the antithesis of defense policy. Yet in the absence of an overall strategy of stability, linking arms control with military strategy, the two may work against each other. Thus in the context of recent developments in missile technology, stabilizing the military environment requires the American government to make a basic decision, not only about arms control, but about the whole strategy of deterrence, lest its concern for providing mutual assurance against surprise attack conflict with its reliance upon a nuclear response to discourage a wide range of aggressions.

“Conventional wisdom” (to purloin a phrase from Galbraith) holds that interservice competition necessarily undermines economy, efficiency, and effective central control in the military establishment. The remedy is further unification, possibly even the merger of the services into a single uniform. The conventional wisdom also holds that political action by military groups necessarily threatens civilian control. The remedy is to “keep the military out of politics.” The pattern of American military politics and interservice rivalry since World War II, however, suggests that the conventional wisdom may err in its analysis of their results and falter in its prescription of remedies.

Service political controversy between the world wars had two distinguishing characteristics. First, on most issues, a military service, supported, perhaps, by a few satellite groups, struggled against civilian isolationists, pacifists, and economizers. The Navy and the shipbuilding industry fought a lonely battle with the dominant forces in both political parties over naval disarmament. The Army lost its fight for universal service after World War I, and throughout the Twenties clashed with educational, labor, and religious groups over ROTC and with other groups over industrial mobilization preparation. In the annual budget encounters the issue usually was clearly drawn between service supporters who stressed preparedness and their opponents who decried the necessity and the legitimacy of substantial military expenditures. To the extent that the services were in politics, they were involved in conflicts with civilian groups.

Historically the character of civil-military relations in the United States has been dominated by the concept of civilian control of the military. This has largely been a response to the fear of praetorianism. As recently as 1949, for example, the first Hoover Commission asserted that one of the major reasons for strengthening the “means of exercising civilian control” over the defense establishment was to “safeguard our democratic traditions against militarism.” This same warning was raised in the report of the Rockefeller Committee on defense organization in 1953. While the overriding purpose of the committee's recommendations was to provide “the Nation with maximum security at minimum cost,” the report made it clear that this had to be achieved “without danger to our free institutions, based on the fundamental principle of civilian control of the Military Establishment.” Finally, during the debate on the reorganization proposals of 1958, senators and congressmen used the theme of a “Prussianized” military staff to attempt to slow down the trend towards centralization in the military establishment.

Despite this imposing support, the concept of civilian control of the military has little significance for contemporary problems of national security in the United States. In the first place, military leaders are divided among themselves, although their differences cannot be reduced to a crass contrast between dichomatic doctrines. Air Force leaders who are gravely concerned over the need to maintain a decisive nuclear retaliatory force are by now acknowledging the need to develop a limited war capability.

Public policy is not self-generating; it emerges from institutions. Foremost among the institutions charged with monetary and credit policy formation—an area, like fiscal policy, that has not received from political scientists the attention accorded to micro-economic regulation of particular firms or industries—is the Federal Reserve System. The purpose of this paper is to examine the “fit” of the System's formal structure to (1) the policy functions and the informal policy-forming mechanisms of the “Fed,” and (2) the pattern of interests and values affected by monetary policy. Its thesis is that a substantial gap has developed between these elements.

A brief sketch of the formal structure of authority and the historical development of System functions is needed to begin with; this is followed by analysis of the formal and the effective roles of each component of the System along with the internalized interest representation at each level. Then the linkage between the Federal Reserve System and general economic policy is explored. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the findings and suggests briefly how formal structure and policy functions might be brought into closer, more effective alignment.

The recruitment of political candidates is a basic function of political parties: a party that cannot attract and then nominate candidates surrenders its elemental opportunity for power. Two stages may conveniently be distinguished in the process of recruitment. Certification includes the social screening and political channeling that results in eligibility for candidacy, while selection includes the actual choice of candidates to represent parties in the general election. Selection is at the focus of the contest for power within parties, and is my focus here.

Considering its importance we know too little about the dynamics of the nominating process. Most of what we do know derives from the analysis of two modal institutional types of political selection: the convention system and the primary system. Experience indicates that despite their manifest purposes, these contrasting institutional types have not necessarily resulted in widely different internal party structures. A variety of party patterns in one-party states—from the tightly controlled machines in Virginia to the transient and multiple factionalism of Florida—flourish in the framework of the direct primary system. Patterns of diffusing factionalism on the one hand, and of disciplined party organizations on the other are also found in states without primaries. Perhaps a closer look at the active participants in the processes of selection, and their interrelationships, may shed some further light on significant factorsin party structure. By interviewing candidates in party primaries we hoped to disclose the steps in nomination and the precise political relationships involved.

Although universal male suffrage as the basis for a representative assembly existed in Germany half a century earlier than in Great Britain, the Reichstag never occupied as important a position in the German constitutional order as the House of Commons did in the British. Neither in its representative function of integrating the community (in Friedrich's terms), nor in its deliberative function as a lawmaking and supervisory body, did the Reichstag ever achieve the significance that would warrant describing the German system of government, either under the Second Empire or the first Republic, as a parliamentary system. The popularly elected Reichstag under Bismarck, in form so advanced for its time, existed under a constitutional system whose “artfully manufactured chaos” permitted, in reality, the exercise of authoritarian government with little parliamentary interference. When, during the latter years of the first World War, the Reichstag demonstrated an increasing ability to call governments to account, this apparent development of a parliamentary system gained a fleeting constitutional recognition during the last days of the Empire and paved the way for the provisions of the Weimar Constitution under which the Government was to be responsible to the Reichstag. Nevertheless, the republican Reichstag never actually fulfilled its constitutional functions, and in difficult times fell victim to the habits of the authoritarian past, manifesting themselves in the autonomy of the army and the bureaucracy, and the irresponsible behavior of the political parties and the President. “Surely the new constitution granted the Reichstag unquestioned leadership in the formation of policy,” a political analyst of the Weimar epoch has written.

The use of traditional symbols by leaders of newly independent states to achieve consensus in their respective political communities is not unusual these days. The professed aspiration of these leaders to modernize their societies does not keep them from manipulating traditional symbols for the maintenance of order in a period of troubled transition. Often the student of politics in these states finds that formal changes in the institutions and functions of the state and government do not necessarily reflect or imply serious structural and conceptual changes. Nor do they necessarily affect appreciably the concept, use, or allocation of power.

When members of the military establishment acceded to political power in some Middle Eastern states in the past decade, they announced their intention to “modernize” their societies. This aspiration raises a variety of questions for the student of Middle Eastern politics. What political ideology, order, and system was the new leadership proposing? The desire to “modernize” implied that their societies were still bound in a complex of traditional relationships and structures. The attitudes of the new military leaders, who claim to desire a departure from the past in national development, toward the Islamic religious-traditional background of society should be a primary factor in any analysis of the orientation of this new leadership.

The personnel of the Supreme Court remained unchanged during the 1959 Term. From the point of view of the decisions rendered in the public law field, this was an undistinguished Term. Few of the constitutional cases are likely to hold an important place among the precedents, and a considerable number of well-argued decisions turned entirely upon private law questions. But there was no dearth of writing, during the period under review, about the Court as an institution and about the Justices who sit there.

Note may be made at this point of the latest chapter in the long dispute over the so-called tidelands. In 1947 the Supreme Court had ruled that, as against the claims of California, the United States possessed paramount rights in lands underlying the Pacific Ocean seaward from the low-water mark. Similar rulings were made in 1950 as regards the claims of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. But with the enactment in 1953 of the Submerged Lands Act, the United States relinquished to the coastal states all of its rights in all lands beneath navigable waters within the three-mile limit, and in excess of that limit within state boundaries as they existed at the time a state became a member of the Union, or as theretofore approved by Congress. The limit of the grant was three leagues (about ten and one-half miles) in the Gulf of Mexico and three geographical miles in the Atlantic and Pacific. The actual extent of the claims of the coastal states involved in the question was therefore left to be settled by litigation.