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Sonic Support. One of the psycho-metricist's more profound discoveries is that whenever a U.S. President has attempted to reassure businessmen about the state of the economy, he has succeeded only in impairing business confidence. To counter this "Inverse Insecurity Factor," as he calls it, McLandress devised the subliminal Sonic Support Apparatus Mark II, a miniaturized tape recorder designed to reassure the businessman by playing back the speeches of some hero figure to whom he turns mentally for inspiration in moments of insecurity. Among other "Sustaining Presences," the doctor found that Barry Goldwater, the Hoovers (J. Edgar and Herbert), the late Senator Robert A. Taft and Commodore Vanderbilt proved highly effective on different businessmen.
McLandress will probably be most widely remembered for his triumphant automation of U.S. foreign policy. Noting that the number of State Department employees had increased more than sixfold in two decades, he found a ready analogy in the case of the potato farmer who doubles and redoubles his labor force as harvesting conditions become more and more difficult. The "potato syllogism," in McLandress' homely phrase, argues that the ever-increasing complexity of U.S. foreign problems leads inevitably to a proliferation of policymakers, who proportionately take more and more time to reach agreement that the present policy is correct. The need for "effective acceleration of the decision-making process" eventually becomes so urgent that McLandress is called in to implement his theory that the State Department needs only to classify the various types of foreign crisis and feed them to computers to produce the right response instantaneously. The Secretary of State gets a pension and a thank-you note.
From time to time, when he was U.S. Ambassador to India, Author (The Affluent Society) J. Kenneth Galbraith was heard to voice similar views on the subject of State Department potato picking. Curiously, Galbraith claims that he has never heard of Mark Epernay. Author Epernay has heard of Galbraith, all right. He gives him a McL-C of 1¼ minutes, lowest of any executive then attached to the Federal Government.