ABSTRACT
By examining the role of one of the nation’s most elite networks, the White House Fellowship, I test the effect of social contact on elite attitudes toward the U.S. military, an institution that has long been powerful but has been increasingly excluded from the rarefied world of social, cultural, and intellectual elites. Using qualitative and quantitative data from the first study conducted with White House Fellows in the program’s forty-five-year history, I show how peer contact within classes of Fellows between military and civilian participants significantly increases the odds of having a great deal of confidence in the U.S. military.
