Toward a planned society : from roosevelt to nixon .

Is America becoming a planned society? For most Americans today, "a planned society" evokes ideas of socialist nations or theoretical utopias. But Otis L. Graham points out that planning has an American tradition reaching back at least to the Great Depression, and that the contemporary momentum toward planning will probably produce a planning society here within the decade. In Toward a Planned Soci ety, Graham defines what constitutes national planning, reviews its history in the United States, and speculates about its future.

Planning was given a brief trial during the New Deal and again during World War II. After the War, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower were disinclined to continue comprehensive planning both because they believed that domestic progress would take care of itself under the unplanned interventions of the Broker State system, and because under Cold War con ditions, planning was considered incompatible with democracy. However, the planning idea revived in the 1960s, as the liberal presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were buffeted in an intensifying domestic crisis. Drawing upon extensive research as well as conversations with such administration insiders as John Ehrlichman, Graham finds that planning received a great impetus during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Under the prodding espe cially of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who cap tured the essence of the planning idea in his phrase "everything relates to everything," the Nixon administration accelerated the evolution toward comprehensive planning, often using the more acceptable phrase "National Growth Policy."

Graham argues that a wide range of options now exists within a planning framework, and recognizes an emerging consensus from both the left and right over the necessity for long range social planning. The unresolved question Graham presents is, what kind of planning? He believes that two models are available to Americans one is liberal planning, as ex plored by FDR in the thirties and to some extent by his successors in the sixties; and a conservative form of planning proposed by the Nixon administration, which was second only to the Roosevelt administration in its search for fundamental reforms of the modern American political economy..

Toward a Planned Society chronicles the in tricate behind-the-scenes workings of the United States government over the past half century and intelligently sets forth America's most important choices for the next decade.