Tribute to Paul ApplebyAuthor(s): Stephen K. BaileySource: Public Administration Review, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1963), pp. 267-268Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/973906 .

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COMMENT AND CRITIQUE 267

In his memoirs he declared the faith he sought, the faith he found, and the faith he held in the following lines from Tennyson's "In Memoriam:"

That God, which ever lives and loves One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

Tribute to Paul Appleby Towards the end of his life, William James

commented that he was "done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success," and was rather "for those tiny, in- visible, molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many soft root- lets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of men's pride."

Paul Appleby knew great institutions and big success-as Under Secretary of Agricul- ture, as a Presidential Adviser and interna- tional negotiator, as Director of the Budget in Washington and in Albany, as a distinguished University administrator, as a world-famous public servant and consultant. But Paul's im- mortality rests not with his official honors and titles. He saw titles and status as necessary and useful instruments of organization, but he could not have cared less for pomp for pomp's sake. He was at heart an educator. His passion was the spreading of wisdom-and especially of moral wisdom. He spread wisdom through journalism, through administrative question- ing, through formal teaching, through infor- mal discussion, and above all, through his books. I have never known a man more con- sistently concerned with the meaning of the public interest. I have never known a man who asked more searching questions about so- cial institutions-or who came up with more thoughtful and relevant answers.

The titles of his major books are indications of his intellectual and moral concerns: Big Democracy, Policy and Administration, Mo- rality and Administration, and finally, Citizens as Sovereigns.

In each title there is both a question and an affirmation. Is Big Democracy a contradiction in terms and an enemy of human freedom? The answer Big Democracy is a modern neces- sity and a vital instrument of human freedom.

Are Policy and Administration separable concepts? The answer: Policy and Administra- tion are the same phenomenon, and neither can nor should be divorced from the other.

Are Morality and Administration function- ally relatable, or is administration a value-free science of power and morality a series of non- operational shibboleths? The answer (and I quote): "The measure of 'good' in government is possible-the very conception of govern- ment becomes meaningful-only as it emerges in action and there is an interchange between acting government and acting citizens."

In a world of managers, experts, computers and rockets, can the citizen be sovereign? The answer: the citizen is sovereign in his choice of leadership. And to quote once again from this gentle and wise friend: "As Americans mature it is their sovereign responsibility to exact higher types of leadership and to give that leadership better structures in which lo- cal egoisms yield more readily to a patriotism which, while deeper than ever, has attained a new breadth. Realization of self-interest can no longer have less than planetary perspective and implementation. But the instruments of the ablest leaders must be basically institu- tional. Our new professions at the world level will not in fact be reassuring except as we demonstrate that we have learned to conduct our own institutional affairs in sufficiently whole-nation terms."

Paul's was both a Socratic and a prophetic voice. He was impatient with nonsense- whether in budget estimates or in academic discourse. He was the enemy of small ideas. During my first meeting with him in Syracuse shortly after he became the second Dean of the Maxwell School, he admonished me to do research on important and only on important questions. "It is so comfortable," he said, "to fiddle and dawdle with irrelevancies." The searchlight of his mind probed the great abysses of man's social ignorance. And when he had probed, his instinct was not only to re- port but to interpret; and not only to inter- pret but to set his interpretation within a broad matrix of philosophy. In a short piece which he once wrote on "Education for Public Administration, " he quoted John Gaus's defi- nition of administration as "the essential con- stituent to any social theory that has purposes other than decorative." And Paul added, char- acteristically: "There we have Public Admin-

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268 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW

istration neatly and appropriately tied to just about all life, all learning, and all wisdom."

What better epitaph than this? For Paul's genius was that he did tie Public Administra- tion to all life, all learning, and all wisdom.

But to leave Paul's contribution at the level of intelligence and wisdom is to distort the meaning of a life. His personal attributes of understanding, wit, courage, and unfailing kindness were precious to all who knew him. He bore grievous infirmity with an heroic but unpretentious stoicism. The beauty of his love for his wife, Ruth, and for his children was not for display, but it communicated itself to all who came within the magnetic field of his personal life.

But his kindness only began with his family -it never ended there. His final words were of thanks to his physician. His request to his friends who wish to do him tribute was to contribute to the cause of race relations-a gesture which epitomized his never ending struggle to rid the world of dignity-denying poverty, inequality and ignorance.

It is perhaps a strange thing for one man to say of another man: but Paul's was a beauti- ful face. In the last years of physical disability

and labored breathing, his inner light shone with particular brilliance and intensity. His eyes and his smile communicated an infinite love for people as well as ideas, and one was always left with the sense that some great cos- mic magnificence had decided to use Paul as a transmitter of ineffable cheer and benevolent rationality.

Ruth and the children and all of his myriad friends are, I am sure, left with a momentary sense of void and bewilderment, but surely this can only be a passing sorrow. For Paul is forever within us-urging us to face terror without fear, to place the specific in terms of the general, to push beyond complexities to the great simplicities of honor, wisdom, humor, responsibility, and good will.

Paul knew tempests in his life, but there are non-tempestuous words from Shakespeare's Tempest which define the meaning of Paul's life with exquisite precision: "O! wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! 0 brave new world, That has such people in't!"

Stephen K. Bailey Syracuse University

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