Books: Lowest Uncommon Delineator

THE McLANDRESS DIMENSION by Mark Epernay. 126 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $3.75.

The big third-dimension departure on the sociometric circuit this winter is going to be the Inverse Insecurity Factor and its effect, if any, on the potato syllogism. For this undoubted fillip to martini talk, Americans will owe a limited debt of gratitude to the pseudonymous Mark Epernay, of Bogota, N.J., whose straightforward guide to the heady behavioral theories of Dr. Herschel McLandress seems destined to give the Bostonian psychometricist the popular acceptance accorded Kinsey and Havelock Ellis.

McLandress’ unique contribution to science is the McLandress Coefficient, or McL-C (pronounced Mack-el-see), as it is known in professional circles. In plain language, a McL-C represents the average span of time for which an individual’s thoughts remain centered on any subject other than himself. It is reached, according to its inventor, by “various depth perception techniques,” including the frequency with which the subject invokes the first person singular in the course of an interview, a book, a speech or an article.

Long Thoughts. Predictably, people prominent in politics and show business tend to have the lowest coefficients, indicating “a close and diligent concern by the individual for matters pertaining to his own personality.” Richard Nixon, Dr. McLandress finds, has a McL-C of three seconds, probably the lowest in U.S. politics. No member of the U.S. Senate has a rating of more than 15 minutes, with the exception of Everett Dirksen, whose coefficient of three hours and 25 minutes Dr. McLandress attributes to his “almost unique inability to divert his thoughts from the public interest.” Lowest ratings in the Senate are held by Oregon Democrat Wayne Morse and New York Republican Jacob Javits, who both score four minutes.

Liberals generally rate fairly low: Pundit Norman Cousins has a three-minute McL-C, Dean Acheson a coefficient of ten minutes, but McLandress gives President Kennedy a rating of 29 minutes. Elizabeth Taylor, Nikita Khrushchev and David Susskind all have the same coefficient: three minutes.

On the theory that social position should be subject to simple mathematical determination, McLandress has also devised a “multidimensional” formula that establishes a man’s status in the American “sociometric peerage” on the basis of his calling, professional standing and prestigious activities, such as philanthropy (membership in the Kiwanis counts for little). Obviously, one way to ascend in the sociometric peerage is to establish a reputation as an authority on world affairs, and the “McLandress Solution,” as he calls it, was devised to meet this need. Its secret, long treasured by professional pundits, is the “third-dimension departure,” by which the McLandress client is trained in the art of ducking controversial solutions to any problem while emphasizing “responsible,” if utterly impractical, long-term goals.

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.