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string of donkeys for just such work. They were alone sometimes for three or four weeks at a time. You can't apply the rules of the daily report and the estimate of values, and so forth. They go off on wild goose chases. Ther's no way they can know it's a wild goose chase until they've gone on it.

But getting back to Harold Smith, I really don't believe there was any plot to make himself powerful. This is what he had, and I discussed this with him over and over again, saying that this couldn't possibly work in a free society and that it was better to let a good many mistakes be made, that there was nothing so terrible about a mistake in an operation. You could correct it and you did correct it, by George, if sensible people operated it. The ones close to it were the ones who saw the mistake, not the people in the Bureau of the Budget, who were way off and never got into the operating end at all, except in theory.

But Smith's theory was that the Bureau of the Budget was in a position to control through the control of money and that the President had no way of controlling, and no way of knowing, what was going on, except by what his heads of departments, his commissioners and his secretaries of departments choose to tell him. They might or might not choose to tell him the things that were really critical in administrative problems. Some with the best intentions in the world wouldn't even see the administrative tangle, wouldn't ever think of it as anything important enough to mention to the President. So he believed that the President had no control