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In the latter part of the last century, the historian Henry Adams used to mortify himself for falling short of the power held by his forebears John and John Quincy Adams. But his meditations upon the destructive potential of modernity and the forces that shaped life in America--a place, he complained, where all become "servant[s] of the powerhouse"--became a 20th century guide for the perplexed. As for his contemporaries in the White House whose station he sometimes envied, such men as Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland, most of them look now like the mediocrities Adams knew them to be.
If you really want to appreciate the conundrum of power these days, just watch David Letterman on any night when he wincingly pronounces himself "the most powerful man in American broadcasting." Hearing the way he wraps that phrase in a cloud, its own microclimate of irony and gloom, who would be tempted to join him in the upper echelons? Whether he's the most powerful man in broadcasting is not even debatable. That title automatically goes to one of the network heads. What is certain is how badly he wishes he still held his old crown: most influential. That's what he was a few years ago, when his "stupid pet tricks" and Top 10 lists were undoing the conventions of the late-night talk show. But influence can lose its cutting edge, especially when others (see Jay Leno) begin to copy it.
Influential people are sometimes also powerful in the conventional sense. But in the organizational flow chart of American life, they are more likely to occupy some hard-to-fathom box off to the side. Dick Morris, the President's closely-attended-to political adviser, doesn't even have a formal title. And on the Supreme Court, it has been decades since the titular chief was the real power center. During the 1970s and early '80s, the years of Chief Justice Warren Burger, the court's magnetic field emanated from the direction of William Brennan, who figured out how to attract a majority of Justices to rulings that protected the liberal jurisprudence of the Earl Warren years from the conservative appointees bunching on his right.
Brennan succeeded by refining ideas. Those are the real coin of influence. The ones that rank as influential tend to be simple to grasp, endless in their implications, challenging to accomplish but still within the realm of possibility (for instance: Love thy neighbor). Perhaps one of the most influential men in American politics is the late Leo Strauss, the German emigre political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and '60s. His distrust of moral relativism, his deep skepticism about the benefits of the Enlightenment and his concern that the unchecked authority of reason would sabotage the cultural traditions that sustained civilization were absorbed by a generation of students and disciples. Some of them, including Irving Kristol and William Bennett, eventually became leading neoconservatives, the group that brought to American conservatism a measure of the intellectual legitimacy it had lacked for decades. Kristol's son William, the Weekly Standard editor and publisher and G.O.P. strategist, is another self-described Straussian.