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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2009
The men of [the] Brookings [Institution] did it by analysis, by painstaking research, by objective writing, by an imagination that questioned the “going” way of doing things, and then they proposed alternatives. … After 50 years of telling the Government what to do, you are more than a private institution. … You are a national institution, so important … that if you did not exist we would have to ask someone to create you.
President Lyndon B. Johnson September 29, 1966[The Heritage Foundation] is without question the most far-reaching conservative organization in the country in the war of ideas, and one which has had a tremendous impact not just in Washington, but literally across the planet.
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich November 15, 1994These tributes by a president and a speaker of the House more than twenty-eight years apart are high praise for two organizations that are both commonly known as think tanks. Yet, in their praise, Johnson and Gingrich characterize the accomplishments of these organizations in notably different terms: Brookings for its “painstaking research” and “objective writing,” Heritage for its “far-reaching” efforts in the “war of ideas.” These characterizations evoke two quite different images and suggest quite different understandings of the role of think tanks in American politics. The first emphasizes their role as producers of credible expertise; the second highlights their contributions to polemical debates over ideas.
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