ABSTRACT
The psychic power inherent in the president's office derives directly from the people. The landscape and the laws of America's symbolic life are so little defined that practical politicians usually discover them the hard way and by accident. Italo-Americans born in Brooklyn distinguish themselves sharply from those thousands of Italian-Americans who continue to immigrate to Brooklyn each year, and who come as literate persons, secure in their cultural and political identity. Politicians with long experience on the national scene learn how to work with the civil religion and its variants. Thus, Ray Price, an experienced adviser to Richard Nixon, wrote a revealing memorandum for the Nixon staff in 1967. To look at the matter as Price does is to be embarrassed that humans have moral needs, that the feeling of commitment and dedication is as necessary as air, that humans require a sense of purpose.
