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The Executive Office of the President of the United States was established in the summer of 1939 through the associated, if not wholly harmonious, endeavors of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Seventy-sixth Congress. The Reorganization Act of April 3, Reorganization Plans No. 1 of April 25 and No. 2 of May 9, and the Joint Resolution of June 7, were the principal stages in a labyrinthine course of policy-formulation that culminated September 8, 1939, in the issuance of the celebrated Executive Order 8248. Today, ten years later, it is virtually impossible to conceive of the Presidency without the Executive Office, so essential has this nexus of administrative machinery become to its proper functioning. The end of a decade of unparalleled presidential activity would seem a proper season to take stock of the Executive Office of the President: to recall the reasons for its creation, total up the many additions and subtractions that have followed in bewildering and not always purposeful profusion, sketch its present composition, and, most important, call attention to its waxing significance as a key institution in the American system of government.

How shall we be governed in an atomic war? Who will make the decisions for defense and survival, and what compulsions will support their peremptory execution? What will be the measure of our cherished liberties? In all the vast literature of atomic energy and the atomic bomb there appear no clear answers to these distressing questions.Several authorities have meditated wisely upon the particular problems of domestic government in the atomic age. Robert E. Cushman has pictured the challenge of atomic energy to our traditional concepts of civil liberty; Arthur Bromage has admonished state and local public administrators to decentralize or die, and Senator Wiley has done the same for the national government; Bernard Brodie and Hanson Baldwin have warned of the inadequacy for atomic warfare of our present defense and mobilization plans. Yet no one seems to have outlined the over-all pattern that the American government would assume in the event of atomic war or indicated the workable adjustments that we might undertake now to prepare our constitutional system for this dreadful contingency. This neglect may well be just another symptom of our apparent decision (arrived at through indecision) to ignore the bomb and, like Mr. Lincoln, "confess plainly" that events control us. Since we refuse to contemplate the horrors of atomic war, we likewise refuse to imagine the sort of government that such a war would force us to adopt.

The flood of Roosevelt books sweeps on, bursting the dikes of literary convention. There is nothing to compare with it in all our intellectual history. Frances Perkins, Mike Reilly, Jay Franklin, Louis Adamic, Merriman Smith, Elliott Roosevelt, Henrietta Nesbitt, Robert E. Sherwood (vice Harry Hopkins), and Admiral Mclntire are some of the celebrated members of the inner and outer Roosevelt circle unable to resist the pleas of their consciences or agents to "write a book, just a little book" about the old master. Morgenthau, Byrnes, Farley, Hull, Garner, Ickes, and Stimson have likewise succumbed; the only authentic attraction of most of their Confessions is the author's version of "Life with Roosevelt." Charles A. Beard, George Morgenstern, John T. Flynn, and others have filed their dissenting opinions. And still the high-water mark is not in sight. The day must surely come, if our forests hold out, when Roosevelt will have a, bibliography as long and detailed as Lincoln's, probably even longer, since the sources will be so much more plentiful and nearer to the surface. Fifty years from now our libraries will be choked with one, two, four, six, and twelve volume "definitive" biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and with countless bright little books bearing transcribed Lincoln titles—The Hidden Roosevelt, The Real Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Man of Letters, The Personal Finances of Franklin D. Roosevelt, They Knew Roosevelt, and The Women in Roosevelt's Life—all contributed by home-grown Roosevelt scholars. We may even have a Franklin D. Roosevelt Quarterly.

The departments of political science in America's colleges and universities are now numbered in the hundreds, their students in the tens of thousands. The variety of these departments is bewildering, differing as they do in size, curriculum, teaching methods, political complexion, aspirations, and even in name. It is no easy matter to discover what the fifty-man faculty in political science at Columbia and the one-man department of government at a California junior college have in common; yet one thing in common they certainly do have: the introductory course, and the complex problem which it presents.That the introductory course does present a major problem to departments of political science everywhere was clearly acknowledged by the program committee of the 1947 meeting of the American Political Science Association, when it scheduled a panel entitled "The Beginning Course in Political Science." The problem was further acknowledged by the panel itself; hardly a person of the many who took part in its proceedings, whether seated at the round-table or holding forth extemporaneously from the audience, failed to show some degree of candid dissatisfaction with the introductory course as presently conducted at his institution. Rare indeed is the department of political science which is willing to let its introductory course ride along through 1948 in the exact shape it assumed through 1947. The urge for improvement is nation-wide, and several prominent departments have gone so far as to relieve instructors of part of their normal teaching burden and commission them to work out definite programs of radical revision.