Beschreibung:

GOLDWATER, Barry (1909-1998). Typed letter signed ("Barry Goldwater") to Hugh Hefner, Washington, D.C. 13 August 1971. 2 pages, 4to, United States Senate stationery . A CONSERVATIVE BEMOANS THE POWER OF BUREAUCRACY. Former presidential candidate Barry Goldwater thanks Hugh Hefner for running Robert Sample's article "Who Runs the Government," and offers his own frank reflections on the excessive power of the Beltway bureaucracy. After Richard Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969, Goldwater recalls, he told the new President that "if he didn't get control of this government by May he would never get it, and unfortunately, this has come true." With the exception of the Justice and Defense departments, "the President has nothing to say about the operation of the bureaus and the agencies that comprise the Administrative Branch of the government." To correct this situation, Goldwater thought civil servants should be rotated among different government agencies every five years or so, to prevent them from developing their own bureaucratic fiefdoms. "We must remember constantly," he says in closing, "that it was the intent of the Founding Fathers to develop a government of powers that would be so diversified and divided that they could not become concentrated in any one of the three branches of Government," but over the years Congress and the President had departed from "Constitutional intent" and "allowed the powers to be removed from their hands and the hands of the people and placed in the hands of men and women who have made government their life's work."