The Power Elite at 50: C. Wright Mills's Political Sociology in Midlife Crisis

In 2000, Oxford University Press gave C. Wright Mills' classic statement in political sociology, The Power Elite (1956), a face-lift. Gone from its cover were the somber black-&-white colors and clichéd Davy Crocket-like floating hats of yesteryear. The New Edition's fresh look is given by a cover wallpapered with photographs of The White House, Pentagon, and Wall Street, the hyper-ascendancy and anti-democratic integration of each sphere of national power therein symbolized described by Mills fifty years ago as having formed an emergent mid-century institution, a now-hidden, now-visible, American power elite. In a Wobbly lexicon that would become characteristically his own, Mills not only described a sociology of power in an increasingly bureaucratized United States, he also proceeded to identify the baleful, sobering consequences of this development, including particularly a world-historical irrationality of bureaucratic rationality that he believed stood back of the rapid, unchecked movement of the United States—together with its partner in nuclear brinkmanship, the Soviet Union—toward a perverse socio-political convergence and, quite possibly, finally, to each another's mutually assured destruction. The sympathetic reader might simply note that, in 1956, it was understandably difficult for the then-forty year-old Mills to see through the shadows cast back and forth between Max Weber and the coming Cuban Missile Crisis.

Or, one could go farther. In his 7 December 2005 Noble Lecture, British playwright Harold Pinter argues that, unlike the crimes of the Soviet Union, the postwar crimes of the United States "have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all." Mr. Pinter is outraged and apoplectic since, as he sees things, "the crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them" (Pinter 2005). While Pinter never, of course, makes mention of C. Wright Mills, his characterization of the United States as every bit as undemocratic and menacing as the former Soviet Union is a bold statement perfectly consequent with both the spirit and the letter of Mills' now-fifty year-old political sociology. Since there is scarcely a prominent sociologist—nay, a leading social scientist of any stripe—who embodies these Millsian qualities, let the 75 year-old Harold Pinter stand-in for what C. Wright Mills might sound like were Mills celebrating his 90th birthday in August of 2006.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one does not find an updating of the sort called for by Pinter between the covers of Oxford's New Edition. Rather, the book's truly significant new addition is an Afterword by Alan Wolfe, most certainly among sociology's leading contemporary practitioners but also no particular fan of C. Wright Mills. Trained originally in political science and perhaps invited to provide his assessment partly for that reason, Wolfe's Afterword is aimed, as he writes, primarily at "[s]orting out what is helpful in Mills' book from what has become obsolete…" (2000: 366). It should be emphasized that Wolfe's reading of the book is not without appreciation for Mills' sociology, nor is his aim to discourage contemporary re-readings and continued critical appraisal of the work. Yet, it is too much to regard his as a sympathetic critique. As discussed at greater length below, Wolfe wishes to bisect Mills' descriptive sociology, which he regards as in some important respects skillfully elucidating the period with respect to which The Power Elite was written, from Mills' social criticism and proscriptions for political change, which Wolfe rejects as generally misguided and often mean-spirited, whether with respect to the situation fifty years ago or presently. [1]

For Wolfe, the world has changed. Capitalism that today operates on a global scale needs less its alliances with merely national elites, and long before the U.S. military lost its especially useful Cold War raison d'etre, its decline as a center of power was most prominently evident in its decreasing share of the national economic pie. Playing on the divergences between the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, Wolfe (himself a veteran of political involvement in the higher circles of the Democratic Party), also argues that the electoral politics that Mills imagined as a sideshow have in fact increased, not decreased, in political importance since Mills wrote in the mid-1950's. Given that he regards Mills' descriptive sociology of the period as the only aspect of the book meriting continued respect—and this, only if gutted of its reliance on a theory of "mass society," which is central to Mills' argument but anathema to Wolfe—it is not surprising that Wolfe ultimately concludes that The Power Elite at fifty is effectively over-the-hill.

So, which is it? Has The Power Elite so aged that it is safe for use even in undergraduate courses as an example of a sociologically and politically "extreme" political sociology? Is it little more than a "classic," perhaps worth re-reading if for no other reason than to pay heed to how mistaken a once-promising sociologist can be when, ignoring liberal-democratic American freedoms and the agency wielded even by everyday people (what Mills' ridicules as "The Great American Public"), theoretical arrogance led him to issue yet another failed attempts to predict the future? (1959: 298). Or, is The Power Elite at fifty a work as rarely understood as the "crimes of the United States," a prescient analysis that marks a breaking point in Mills' sociological oeuvre that divides his prior work from The Causes of World War Three (1958), Listen, Yankee! and a "Letter to the New Left" (1960a), and The Marxists (1962), that captures the significance of the political drama from Khrushchev's performance in the 20th Party Congress in 1956 to Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation in 1961, that anticipates the onset of a long and as yet ending era of off-the-shelf politico-military criminal behavior (often termed "scandal"), from The Bay of Pigs, Dallas, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and on to the election of 1968, the general conduct of the Nixon Administrations and, of course, Watergate in particular, the election of 1980, the conduct of the Reagan Administrations and the Iran-Contra Affair in particular, the first Bush Administration and the war in Panama as well as the dubious entry of the United States into the first Gulf War in particular, the election of 2000, the response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the instigation of the military occupation of Afghanistan and a second Gulf War leading to the occupation of Iraq; all this as well as what is very probably not known about each and the events, one may reasonably presume, that exist in the in-between spaces of this fast-paced timeline? Does The Power Elite explain the very origin of these many postwar criminal acts and as yet verified criminal acts that Mr. Pinter believes have been wrought against numerous peoples (millions dead in Southeast Asia alone, among them), by the United States of America?

Since Wolfe's sympathetic unsympathetic assessment has the advantage not only of appearing perfectly reasonable but also of traveling with The Power Elite where ever it goes, this essay stresses a sympathetic, but also, as with Pinter's hypothesis, a stark-eyed and seemingly outlandish appraisal of the work. The Power Elite may be fifty, well-known and seemingly exhausted, but it bears to keep in mind that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, its especially famed cousin across the pond, is an even more advanced 58 and arguably just as obscure as I suggest The Power Elite is from the point of view of today's dominant ideology.

Traditional interpretation locates The Power Elite as the third in a trilogy on the mid-century structure of power in the United States and in advanced industrial society generally. The best and most obvious reason for so doing is that Mills himself described the book this way. In a 1951 letter to Philip Vaudrin, editor at Knopf, Mills writes the following postscript:

There is no question that Mills' sociology and his self-understanding as a sociologist were in this period both greatly influenced by the looming figure of Max Weber. As Mills notes even in the passage just quoted, at the time he first began to plan The Power Elite he had been working with Hans Gerth on Weber "since god knows when," which is to say, since roughly 1939, when Mills arrived at the University of Wisconsin to pursue doctoral work in sociology and soon thereafter began a productive if also notorious collaboration with Gerth, the brilliant German émigré widely acknowledged for his considerable knowledge of Weber as well as, even more impressively, that to which Weber addressed himself (see Oakes and Vidich 1999). Indeed, the analysis in The Power Elite most certainly owes more to Weber than any other social thinker, for Mills' study of the "command posts" of power stands or falls with a Weberian understanding of modern bureaucratization. This is the case even though, ironically, Weber's name never appears in the text and even though Weber's monumental oeuvre is cited only once, this, tangentially and via reference to From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), translated and edited by Gerth and Mills.

But it is not the presence or absence of Weber's acknowledged or unacknowledged influence that is presently at issue. Mills had already, in White Collar, for example, explicitly acknowledged Weber's paramount, and Marx's near-equal, importance for Mills' own "general perspective" (1951: 357). Rather, the more pointed question concerns of which aspect of Weber's multifaceted sociology predominates in the text, and of the increasing relative influence of Marx, various Marxian theorists, and Frankfurt School theorists in particular, evident in its pages. For in The Power Elite, we see Mills doing something much more than merely rounding-out his trilogy on power with a value-neutral analysis of increasingly hierarchal bureaucratic organizations that concentrate and integrate power at their apexes, something akin to an application of Roberto Michels' "iron law of oligarchy" to the mid-century American national political scene (see Michels 1996). [2] Instead, we see Mills much more closely following the example of the Max Weber who was riveted by immediate political concerns, often personally engaged in Weimar politics, and more than willing to issue damning judgments on the hypocrisy and irresponsibility of governing elites and the culture, or lack thereof, they countenanced, encouraged, and very often fed off. As Weber was to the Kaiser, so was Mills to Eisenhower and, later, Kennedy (see Diggins 1999).

But it goes beyond style and bravado. More than at any time prior in his career, The Power Elite finds Mills wedding historical and political concerns—a focus on the process of history-making generally and the prospects for democratic history-making and the making of modern democracy in particular—to structural analyses. This is where Wolfe especially wants off the Good Ship Mills. As noted above, for Wolfe, The Power Elite "is really two books," one that is sociological analysis written in a "somewhat clinical language" and "driven by data" and "extensive original research," the other written using a "language of outrage" in which Mills presents himself as though as a "biblical prophet" predicting "doom" and "harshly denouncing 'the second rate mind' and the 'ponderously spoken platitude'" (2000: 377-78). But this two-books reading begs the integrity of Mills' argument. What if Mills' structural analysis and his historicizing and, indeed, radical social criticism cannot be separated from one another without violating the work's raison d'etre? What if accepting Mills' structural analysis of the concentration and integration of power leads quite logically and necessarily to an analysis of those who wield that power and the historically specific projects to which they apply its use? Weber did this, as did Marx. So, too, beginning most clearly with The Power Elite, did C. Wright Mills.

This is why it is curious and unfortunate that Wolfe's assessment makes no mention of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for that such a thing was not only possible, but probable, is arguably the great animating force running throughout The Power Elite and spilling out into all, or very nearly all, of Mills' subsequent publications. It is this fact that interpreters of Mills generally either miss or under play. Perhaps it is that they give Mills' own "trilogy" self-assessment too much weight. Having established himself as a tenured member of the discipline's leading faculty, the mid-1950's saw Mills set his aim on what for him would be a higher ambition, not higher for personal rewards (although Oakes and Vidich would disagree), but higher in the sense of being historically relevant, that is to say, influential on a scale that shaped history-making, which meant, as an American, simply on a national scale. International respectability and alliances were edifying and useful and, alas, nonessential. Due to the specifics of modern historical social development, influencing the American course of history was tantamount to influencing the total course of human history.

Thus, The Power Elite not only addresses the concentration of power, it is itself an attempt to exercise a form of power. In it, Mills moves from being an excellent sociologist to being an excellent sociologist who is also a skilled political writer. [3] He hoped to be so skilled, in fact, that his interventions directly into public life—as he called them, in an act of self-deprecation, his "preachings"—would bypass the academy and be accepted to some meaningful degree by publics. Only through their democratic actions would there result tangible, meaningful historical difference in the direction of social change. Not so much hubris as the result of dismay and alarm (or perhaps a mixture of all three), Mills sought to engage what he called the mindless "main drift" of a bureaucratically determined history-making set-up, which he saw (and not him alone, of course) as tending toward the worldwide spread of bureaucratic unfreedom and permanent war among competing undemocratic national elites. This historical situation was, as it were, historically unprecedented and grave. The first-half of the twentieth century featured two world wars and the use of atomic bombs followed by the advent and deployment of thermonuclear weapon systems. The threat of continued worldwide military conflict and large-scale nuclear war was real. To avert an apocalyptic war by restoring the realistic hope of reason and freedom playing a predominant role in the conduct of human affairs, this is what motivated The Power Elite and its author.

Understood as such, we can see that The Power Elite has little to do with perpetually answering the question, "Who Rules America?" (Domhoff 2005 [1967]), nor does it make sense that in its wake there were inspired innumerable studies of the increasing integration of corporate and government power and various and sundry subsequent insults this has caused to "the public interest" (for a review of the "corporate liberalism" literature in political sociology, see Cornoy 1984). Indeed, the emergence generally of a so-called "critical sociology" that is manifestly inspired by Mills is largely out of sync, not only with a basic grasp of the factual situation that Mills addresses in The Power Elite, but also with all of his "preachings" following thereafter. Mills was not interested in establishing a Millsian branch of sociology that set up its own self-marginalizing journals and professional societies and that used Paul Lazarfeld's preferred methods of research to study topics of interest to left-liberal social critics. Not only The Power Elite, but The Sociological Imagination (1959), Images of Man (1960b), and other more clearly "sociological" subsequent works make this point abundantly clear, or so one might have imagined.

Mills' interest, which he shared with sociology's founders, was the totality of modern and, increasingly, postmodern society. The Power Elite announces an interest in direct participation in the making of human history in the hope of directly affecting its outcome. This is the only reasonable understanding of his self-described "plain Marxism" and the only interpretive framework that makes sense of his dedication to helping to form a "new left." Horowitz therefore exaggerates only slightly when he notes that:

This sort of descriptive rhetoric drives critics like Alan Wolfe crazy. As Wolfe writes:

In Mills' defense, however, he does in fact write that "the United States is not altogether a mass society"; indeed, his overriding point is succinctly and clearly rendered as follows: "The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless: at the bottom there is emerging a mass society" (1956: 324, emphasis added). As a critical theorist, Mills aimed to counteract what he saw as a rapidly developing tendency toward corruption of democratic life by clearly identifying the emerging, alarming threat to its vitality: in a word, bureaucratization. Mills wrote The Power Elite so that it would be accessible to what ever remained of a reading public (not unlike much of the best of Wolfe's sociology), in the hope that his clarion call might contribute to efforts to forestall and reverse what he regarded as an obviously perverse and, needless to say, anti-American social tendency. This is hardly the behavior of a social critic who is rejecting communication with the world around him, his own society included. For this charge to stick to the wall, it would be necessary to explain why Mills poured his heart into The Causes of World War Three (1958), which sold over 100,000 copies, Listen, Yankee! (1960), which sold over 400,000, and such overtly political tracts as "Letter to the New Left" (1960a), which rejects political complacency among even the disheartened and marginal defenders of the ideals of social equality and participatory self-government. Horowtiz seems much closer to the mark: Mills was "An American Utopian," the subtitle of his biography, although certainly a more radical critic than Emerson, Whitman, or Wolfe. Perhaps it is that the critic of "the American Celebration" doesn't play as well as assigned reading in the canon of The PBS-sanctioned American Experience. Given, however, Mills' increasing use as the stuff of 50's nostalgia (see Halberstam 1994), no one in today's postmodern society should be surprised if Mills were required reading Peoria Central High School. Politically speaking, it wouldn't matter.

When not ensnared in nostalgia for "New York in the 50's" (see Wakefield 1999), Mills is sometimes appears as the figment of Port Huron and the 60's student movement collective (mass) memory. Whereas Mills was more concerned with what Comrade Khrushchev was saying about Comrade Stalin's crimes to the 20th Party Congress than with what Jack Kerouac was writing as he drove across America, Mills' insistent reach for the big picture, what Dan Wakefield remembers him as calling the act of "taking it big" (see 2000; Dandaneau 2001), endeared him to many among an emerging, generationally construed New Left. Primarily via the influence of Tom Hayden, who wrote an M.A. Thesis on Mills and who was principal author of "The Port Huron Statement" (2005 [1962]), Mills, and in particular, the Mills of The Power Elite, is understood as a seminal influence on student activism in the U.S. in the 1960's (see also Gitlin 2005). Even though deceased prematurely in 1962 at only age 46, Mills' writings lived on whether as part of American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition (1970), or, in the title of Jamison and Eyerman's oft-cited retrospective, simply as Seeds of the Sixties (1994).

So, the kids were reading Mills and, later, Marcuse, who himself went out of his way in the preface to One-Dimensional Man (1964) to acknowledge Mills' importance. [6] But what of the power elite themselves? Did they read Mills?

Other than with respect to Fidel Castro, who is said to have held discussions on The Power Elite whilst hold-up in Sierra Maestra, we may never know how far Mills' analysis of power elites penetrated their elite, guarded inner sanctums. There is no evidence, for example, that President Eisenhower or his speech writers drew even indirectly from Mills in composing Eisenhower's nonetheless pointed farewell critique of "the military-industrial complex." And even though Mills traveled to the Soviet Union and Poland, there is no evidence that his often-confrontational engagements with communist officials in either country led them, much less their superiors and their superiors still further up, to any sort of intellectual or political engagement with his ideas. And while Mills is likely to have been on President Kennedy's mind in the passage quoted above in interaction with French journalist, Jean Daniel, there is no evidence that Kennedy actually read Listen, Yankee!, such as he later claimed, famously, with respect to Michael Harrington's The Other America.

But it is not therefore irrelevant that Eisenhower would issue an analysis so clearly consonant with Mills'. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a figure more clearly embodying the characteristics of Mills' prototypical member of the power elite than Dwight David Eisenhower himself, former Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, President of Columbia University, and two-term President of the United States. That Ike sat down to tell The Great American People to beware "the total influence—economic, political, even spiritual" of "the military-industrial complex" ought to weigh, it seems, rather heavily in our appraisal of The Power Elite. That he did so firm in the conviction that "[t]he potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist," should be counted among the most ringing endorsements any thesis has ever, anywhere, received.

It is one thing to discuss particular responses to the work, quite another to come full-face with the workings of what the book is about. That is, academics[7] can spill ink all day and night on the text, The Power Elite, but the far more important subject is that which the book addresses: actually existing power elites.

Here, social science—positivist or critical or what have you—quickly runs up against an especially delicate and confounding conundrum: a social science thesis that, if correct, cannot be sufficiently supported by evidence. If Mills' analysis were essentially if not entirely accurate, then the very power elite he had identified would, by definition, enjoy sufficient power to more or less prevent exposure of its most undemocratic acts. In other words, if Mills is right that the United States is governed by an unelected, unaccountable, increasingly integrated and, not unimportantly, increasingly self-conscious power elite, then these self-same individuals would presumably recognize the danger to the legitimacy of the system of power in which they occupy the top positions posed by exposure to social science and, from there, to a reading public. Some, like Eisenhower, might go public with their concerns. But the majority of such an elite would no doubt equate "national security" and the security of the power elite in toto, thus establishing safeguards and methods designed to buffer elite decision-makers from public scrutiny and subsequent accountability.

A social science of political power—in this society, at this point in its historical development—would then, presumably, be left looking for what ever skimpy evidence of such machinations is available. Not an exactly quixotic endeavor, however. After all, history is replete with cases-in-point of the fact that even the exceedingly powerful make mistakes. And as human beings who are operating in human institutions, even the so-called power elite must necessarily leave traces, and perhaps a great deal more than that, of its workings. Finally, it bears to recall that power—especially a claim to total power—is never simply given; elite structure, like all social structure, is in constant need of reproduction.

The empirically minded social scientist might thus query: Are new legal and administrative institutions of government being created as substitutes for existing democratic seats of power? Are ideological justifications for politically expedient uses of authority being created and propounded as necessary and just? Are undemocratic methods for the control of information, election of leaders, repression of dissent, and support of vested interests being devised? Social science might also, of course, benefit from occasional or not-so-occasional slip-ups in the prosecution of various elite-directed projects. The blanket term "scandal" describes these, but it also obfuscates their significance. The sociologist is interested in scandals rooted in structural arrangements, that is, systematically produced scandal, not those resulting from idiosyncratic or merely personal failings. Reasonable inferences might follow from the latter concerning the institutional structure of power as such, whereas the former distract attraction form the latter and potentially confuse the would-be citizen-analyst.

Mills notes that the growth of the power elite, with respect to which "the military ascendancy" is essential, dates from "Pearl Harbor" (see 1956: 198). The fear aroused by a military attack against the United States and the immediate national resolve to enter wholesale into the second world war of the century was wedded to an already vastly enlarged New Deal state bureaucracy, the result being a "greatly speeded up" increase in the concentration and integration of national power (1956: 274). Less often discussed is the fact that numerous observers at the time and, presently, on the basis of historical documents newly available to researchers, many more, are left incredulous by the fact that the U.S. Navy broke the Japanese military code only some 100-odd days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. This code-breaking achievement is celebrated because it was essential to the decisive U.S. naval victory in the Battle of Midway in June, 1942, a mere seven months after Pearl Harbor. And while school children are taught that Pearl Harbor was a horrible defeat of U.S. forces, the truth is that the fleet attacked that day was less its only strategically valuable vessels, three aircraft carriers (each on separate missions), and that therefore the result of the attack, which led to the U.S. entry into the war in both theatres of conflict, was a disaster for Imperial Japan's long-term war aims. [8]

Fast-forward from December, 1941, to the first days of the Truman Administration. The three-term president is dead. Just as the fourth-term commences, the now-former Vice President must be informed by the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff not only of the existence of the Manhattan Project, but of the need to use its fruits vis-à-vis as fresh targets in Japan. This same Harry S. Truman, never really an insider to the power elite even during his presidency, would sign into law the National Security Act of 1948, creating institutions whose very purpose was to provide the executive and the military-intelligence branch of government freedom from democratic constraint and accountability. He would also engage the United States in what was effectively a spatially and technologically contained version of World War III with China (Eastasia) and the Soviet Union (Eurasia) on the Korean Peninsula, and find it necessary a short time later to remove a glaringly insubordinate general from command of what amounted to U.S. protectorates, colonies, and Legions in Asia. For this, Truman, Mrs. Roosevelt, and a good many of their fellow Democrats were denounced by the hysterical anticommunist right wing—followers of MacArthur and McCarthy—as highly suspect if not thoroughly un-American. In this world, Eisenhower and the Administration most directly analyzed by Mills between the pages of The Power Elite thus came to power.

Under Eisenhower (and, when he was ill, Vice President Nixon as acting president), the United States developed, deployed, and continuously expanded a capacity to exterminate human life worldwide via thermonuclear weapons (a fact both so common and so profound that it is worth pausing for a moment to ponder). Against the backdrop of atomic and hydrogen bomb tests and non-stop construction of missile silos, nuclear submarines, and intercontinental bombers, the simultaneous on-going covert political and military intervention in myriad ostensibly sovereign nation-states' internal political affairs, including use of violence against heads of state, must have seemed minor. Where subversion was not possible, the Eisenhower Administration did not hesitate to use espionage, such as regular U-2 flyovers of the Soviet Union, including, for example, on May Day, 1960.

Here we arrive at the onset of what T.V. historian Michael Beschloss (1991) calls "the crisis years," 1960-1963. Given its position as following The Power Elite but not so distant as to allow for intervening structural change, this brief but highly eventful historical period may provide the best evidence for Mills' thesis in The Power Elite. The furor that erupted upon the downing of Francis Gary Power's U-2 spy plane ended years of calculated rapprochement pursued by Eisenhower. There would be no trip by the Eisenhower family to the Soviet Union mirroring Khrushchev's early tour of the United States. Less than one year later, a new President would refuse to risk world war by authorizing full-scale military support for what became known as "the Bay of Pigs" invasion, a CIA-led effort by Cuban exiles to overthrow the revolutionary government of Cuba. During this period, President Kennedy, a former Navy Ensign, further undermined his never-good credibility with the military-industrial establishment by threatening action against U.S. Steel (using a national television broadcast, no less), and by pursuing policies that threatened the favorable extra-normal profits that accrued regularly to other key oligopolistic industries, oil among them. From the point of view of the elite members of the committed anticommunist right wing, President Kennedy's womanizing and risky self-medication, the suspect electioneering in Illinois and elsewhere in 1960, not to mention his tentative support for the Civil Rights Movement, must have been viewed as relatively less grievous than his support for a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, his inaction during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, and his pointed and, seemingly, growing hesitancy concerning the prospect of full-scale U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. The American University Commencement Address, the so-called Peace Speech, of June, 1963, would have been nothing but the coup de grace in a fundamentally disturbing trend.

But before conciliatory, even philosophical, speeches about peaceful coexistence between elites Soviet and American, there would first be a nuclear standoff the likes of which the world has never seen before or since. If 1960 gave us the U-2 incident and 1961 the Bay of Pigs, 1962 featured the crisis par excellence, the Cuban Missile Crisis. As historians have now shown, the U.S. military chiefs wanted nothing but war with Cuba, and, by extension, war with the Soviet Union. They also wanted nothing but full-scale war in Vietnam and its immediate environs. While these facts are now well known, it is cause for extra pause and reflection. Mills' thesis pointed to an increasingly integrated elite composed primarily of the national political directorate (namely, the president and his inner circle, particular in matters of national security), the military elite (namely, the joint chiefs and their immediate subordinates), and the corporate elite (namely, the CEO's and Board Chairs and their immediate lieutenants among the top 50 or 100 multinational corporations). President Kennedy showed that merely the scion of a rich and politically involved New England family, using personal wealth and the power of celebrity to his advantage, could obtain the nation's highest elected office. Still, he did not mesh comfortably with the existing elites, especially those exercising power outside the direct reach of his authority. Imagine the gulf in sensibility between Kennedy and his Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis LeMay of Columbus, Ohio, who cut his teeth overseeing the firebombing of Tokyo while JFK was merely commanding PT-109. No disinterested military bureaucrat, LeMay, it is often overlooked, would serve as George Wallace's Vice Presidential running mate in 1968. But neither MacArthur nor, later, LeMay, crossed the Rubicon (at least not openly), and Kennedy's personal stand against many of his many senior advisors, including military advisors, LeMay prominent among them, meant that war with Cuba would be relegated to a costly and ultimately ridiculous Operation Mongoose and a still-on-going merciless trade embargo.

In these same years, Mills himself, as did other sociologists, acquired FBI surveillance (see Keen 1999, Dandaneau 2001). The internal civil liberties of American citizens had long been violated on a scale so massive as even today to defy comprehension by most people. Intelligence agencies spied on American citizens and harassed legitimate political organizations. Unsuspecting soldiers, whole cities and communities as well as specific minority groups, such as African-Americans and disabled children, were subjected to life-threatening radiation testing, sterilization, and other forms of heinous, Nazi-like biomedical experimentation (see Department of Energy c. 1994). Intelligence agencies engaged in proactive counterintelligence operations against groups identified secretly as threats to the vaguely understood "national security," including the FBI's now-infamous COINTELLPRO's that began in 1956 and continued until 1971, when they were exposed.

Mills' FBI files are comparatively pedestrian to that which would be, for example, eventually amassed in response to Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of the 200-odd pages are of little historical interest. The files do reveal, however, that Mills received a death threat and that he was moved to purchase a pistol for self-protection. Unfortunately, significant passages of these files are redacted, and we still do not know today the identity of the half-a-dozen or so informants who reported on Mills' whereabouts and activities. Likewise, the CIA, for its part, claims to have no substantive files on Mills, which is typical of CIA responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests. One might expect Central Intelligence Agency to have monitored an American citizen who traveled more than once to the Soviet Union, to Poland, and who worked with Fidel Castro and his government, not to mention who lectured widely as a severe critic, not just of U.S. foreign policy generally, but with respect to the most sensitive point in the pressure vice known as the Cold War: Cuba.

Mills died in March of 1962. He suffered a second major heart attack. The first occurred in 1960 just prior to a scheduled national television debate on NBC on the subject of U.S. policy toward Cuba. While Mills was left in a coma for days, the American people were left with Congressman Charles O. Porter of Oregon filling Mills' shoes vis-à-vis Adolf A. Berle. Mills' death was marked by a Washington Post and Times Herald obituary and Castro sent a wreath to adorn Mills' grave. Seven months later, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted.

One can only speculate how Mills would have approached that crisis. Likewise, one can only speculate as to how the native Texan and 1934 Dallas Technical High School graduate might have analyzed the events of November, 1963. Surely, though, Mills' view of President Kennedy, which was very dim from the outset of his Administration, might have improved considerably as a result of Kennedy's June, 1963, Commencement Address at American University, which Kennedy delivered six months before his assassination and which is perhaps second only to Eisenhower's Farewell as free copy for the veracity of The Power Elite. Kennedy told the graduates that day:

I have…chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace….

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces….

Today the expenditures of billons of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles—which can only destroy and never create—is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace….

IV. Is Mills Winston Smith or Emmanuel Goldstein?

Endnotes

References

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