Memoirs [antikvár]

FOREJVORDNEXT to the excellence and wide distribution of American plumbing and orthodontal skills, the people of this nation are disposed to boast that theirs is a "government of laws, not of men." Ideally and theoretically this is true of the constitutional system established at Philadelphia in 1787 and ratified in 1789. But as I have observed-the operations of the system over six decades, most of them in Washington at first hand, the government of the United States, no less than othersdemocratic or autocraticis primarily and practically a government of men.The purpose of this book is to portray some of these men as I have known them in the context of great eventsby watching them at work from a close point of vantage, and through intimate association. These experiences I promptly recorded in the detailed memoranda from which the following narrative is derived. It is in broad outline the story of the revolutionary transformation of the American system of government in my time, an account of certain activities by the principal shakers and movers of this transformation, and a set of profiles of these personages.There are, I hope, as many lights as shadows in this composite. For dealing as the book principally does with the human factors that largely effected this transformation, the innate hu-rixl