Ward Just’s Echo House: Implementing Policy/Accepting Others

Abstract

In this chapter I show how Just’s self-consciousness about his own upper-middle-class status, his reportorial neutrality, and his mainstream liberalism in the tradition of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson influenced his portrayal of the consultants and fixers who implement policy among the political elite. I focus on how Echo House “sums up” its predecessors, illustrating how the evolution of lobbying and the rise of new media—in this case, television—evolved over the last decades of the twentieth century, giving the upper classes even greater power in the political directorate, and how the ruling elite dealt with the tensions in being open to new members, in this case, women and African Americans.