Gnomish Gnostics meet Skull & Bones: what happens when top White House advisors think they're smarter than everyone else? - why Bush administration insider Richard Darman failed and Bill Kristol succeeded in advancing conservative policies

National Review, Nov 29, 1993 by John Podhoretz

What happens when top White House advisors think they're smarter than everyone else? November 1992.

WASHINGTON is a city that produces nothing but information. And information is treated as though it were a rare and precious jewel because there is never enough of it to go around. The key to a culture based on information is that the act of hoarding it becomes second nature. Not only second nature: it has become the basis of a bureaucratic religion. And the acknowledged high priest of that religion in the Bush years was Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Darman cut a fascinating figure. His greying hair was always disheveled, as befit a man who was his own barber--a fact he never failed to mention to reporters who wrote profiles of him, since it made him seem without vanity. But on an afternoon one week before he and everybody else were to be sent packing from the White House for good, what was most interesting was his trousers, which were easily two inches too tight around the waist. He wore his pants without a belt, and they folded in on themselves at his midsection. The last four years had not done wonders for his figure.

He was complaining about the industry that was cropping up in the wake of the Bush defeat, an industry whose sole purpose was the assassination of his character. The two White House aides with whom he had feuded most publicly, Deputy Assistants to the President Charles Kolb and James Pinkerton, were both writing books, he had heard, and he knew they were going to make it sound as though he were personally responsible for the presidential defeat.

But what, he wondered aloud, could two relatively lowly members of the senior staff have to say about the Administration that could possibly be of any interest? "They didn't know anything. They weren't one of the five people in the meetings. They weren't even one of the twenty-five. They have no idea what went on." He paused. "Which, I guess, is part of their point, that they were kept out of the loop. But still, they just have no clue."

What Darman was saying was this: Only Administration insiders would ever really know the truth the reasons things happened the way they happened. Which meant that anyone not "in the loop" was not competent to judge the decisions that emanated from inside "the loop."

Darman's dismissal of his critics was holy writ from the altar of his, and Bush-era Washington's, true religion: Gnomish Gnosticism.

The Covert Government

THE ORIGINAL Gnostics were early Christians who believed there was a hidden meaning to the words of Jesus only they could decipher by mystical knowledge with which only they had been endowed by God. That particular band of Gnostics was branded heretical and died out, but the intellectual perversity they represented has survived well into the twentieth century and flourishes in Washington today.

The Gnonaish Gnostics are gnoraish both physically (for some reason Gnomish Gnostics tend to be stout and often short) and intellectually (since they affect a worldly wit that is at once seductive and condescending). The gospel of the Gnomish Gnostics holds that the public statements, public decisions, and public actions of politicians are at best meaningless and at worst deliberately misleading. The truth is known only to those who know the secret codes and are in possession of the truth that is kept veiled by those with the power.

The ultimate triumph of the Gnoraish Gnostics was the 1990 budget deal, reached with Congress after five months of secret negotiations at Andrews Air Force Base. The budget deal was set before a stunned political world by its designers with the simple presumption that the nation would have no choice but to accept the purification ritual of higher taxes and fewer services the Gnostics had, in all their wisdom, devised.

It was the budget deal that focused the wrath of Republican Washington on Richard Darman. Its details were a matter of public knowledge; its passage either had no positive effect on the nascent recession or in fact caused the economy to remain in the doldrums for two years; and everybody in America knew that Bush had broken his no-new-taxes pledge to sign it. And still, two years later, Darman was completely convinced that Kolb and Pinkerton could have nothing intelligent to say about it because they weren't in the loop.

Darman was right; his critics weren't in the loop. They were not privy to the private discussions of the White House brain trust--a group that never numbered more than ten people. That means ten people were doing and deciding and managing everything in the White House's purview. Especially in the two and a half years of John Sununu's stewardship as chief of staff, and Jim Baker's five months, White House staffers merely carried out policies made without their participation and often in contradiction to the publicly stated goals of the Administration as delineated in the campaign many of them had worked on. When aides like Pinkerton and Kolb made uncertain attempts to insert themselves into the policy-making process, they were told in no uncertain terms to get out.