AMERICA’S WORLD ROLE: DIVIDED WE STAND : The Elite : U.S. Leadership Is More Diverse, Less Influential : * Scientists, religious figures--even rock stars--now affect policy. But the public is skeptical.

Almost half a century ago, when Harry S. Truman needed help running the foreign policy of the United States at the dawn of the Cold War, the remedy was simple: “Whenever we needed a man,” one of his aides recalled, “we thumbed through the roll of Council (on Foreign Relations) members and put in a call to New York.”

No longer. The elite, private Council on Foreign Relations is still influential--the current secretary of state, Warren Christopher, is a former vice chairman--but America’s foreign policy elite has grown much larger and more diverse. Alongside the New York bankers and lawyers of the old elite, today’s foreign policy makers include academics, scientists, religious leaders and occasionally even rock stars--like singer Bob Geldof, who mobilized worldwide action to help the starving in Ethiopia.

“This is the largest foreign policy elite this country has ever enjoyed,” said Leslie H. Gelb, the council’s new president, who says he plans to expand and diversify the august organization’s membership to embrace new areas like sports and the arts.

When the Times Mirror Center for The People & The Press set out to survey America’s opinion leaders on foreign policy, it took account of that new diversity--polling not only traditional elite groups, like members of the Council on Foreign Relations and chief executives of Fortune 500 corporations, but also religious leaders, cultural figures and leading scientists.

Ironically, though, just as the elite is growing in size and diversity, it may also be diminishing in power.

Recent surveys, including the Times Mirror polls, suggest that the general public is less willing than in the past to accept the advice of the foreign policy elite--at least on issues that come close to home, like free trade with Mexico or the use of American troops in peacekeeping missions overseas.

“There’s more information going straight to the general public now,” said Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President George Bush. “That tends to reduce the influence (of the elite). It makes it more difficult to get support for a potentially unpopular policy.”

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Moreover, the elite itself is fragmented in its views, as the Times Mirror Center survey found. Business leaders want foreign policy to focus on promoting economic competitiveness; members of the Council on Foreign Relations worry about stability in Russia; religious and cultural leaders want more focus on problems like environmental protection and Third World development. Meanwhile, the public is most worried about protecting jobs, stopping drug trafficking and illegal immigration, and keeping American troops out of danger overseas.

“(The elite) is getting larger, more eclectic, less unified and harder to generalize about,” said I. M. Destler, a public opinion expert at the Institute of International Economics and the University of Maryland. “You have a lot of elite groups that are interested in issues, but they don’t necessarily come to the same position.”

Gelb agreed, and pointed to the Council’s expanding membership--from a few hundred before World War II to 2,905 today--as an example. “The old foreign policy elite was the Eastern Establishment: lawyers and businessmen, a pretty nonpartisan group,” he said. “During the Vietnam War, that elite imploded and gave way to a lot of new people, particularly professional foreign policy experts, many of whom were highly partisan . . . Now even that elite is being subsumed by a far larger group that is far more diverse and far more fragmented.”

That means the Establishment no longer speaks with a single voice on foreign policy issues. And it means government leaders must now contend with influential subgroups within the elite, depending on the issue. For example, Scowcroft noted, “Religious leaders mobilized during the 1980s” around two issues--nuclear arms control and Central America. “I don’t see them mobilized by anything now,” he added.

The questions about an American elite--Who’s in it? How powerful should it be?--have been debated since the foundation of the republic. Thomas Jefferson, himself a member of Virginia’s landowning (and slaveholding) ruling class, looked forward to a day when the United States would be led by “a natural aristocracy of men” based on “virtue and talents.” But from the days when 19th-Century robber barons like Leland Stanford bought state governments whole to the campaign-financing intrigues of our own time, the aristocracy of money has also found ways to make its influence felt.

The Times Mirror survey did not set out to devise a new definition of the elite, but its choices of whom to poll reflected scholars’ judgments of who is influential in American life today: Fortune 500 CEOs, state governors, big-city mayors, newspaper editors, television anchors and executives, university presidents, leading scientists and engineers, novelists and entertainers.

As diverse as those categories appear, Times Mirror’s sample of the American elite turned out to be 95% white and 89% male. That came as no surprise; the U.S. Senate is 99% white and 93% male, the Council on Foreign Relations 92% white and 85% male, and other elite groups look similar. (And those numbers reflect enormous increases in women and minorities over the past 20 years.)

Some scholars argue that what is most striking about America’s opinion leaders is not their diversity, but their uniformity: Almost all are wealthy, most attended elite universities and they all move in the same social and intellectual circles.

“Look at Clinton’s Cabinet,” said G. William Domhoff, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz. “It’s the most diverse in history, if your measure is the color of their skin. But they’re lawyers, politicians and corporate executives. The color of their money is the same.”

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During the 1970s and 1980s, Domhoff noted, the American elite began slowly to open to talented women, blacks, Latinos and other minorities. At the same time, the power of labor unions and civil rights groups declined. “The elite is more diverse in a demographic sense, but there’s no counterforce opposing it anymore,” he said.

(The Times Mirror study did not include labor leaders among the elite groups it surveyed. “We probably should have,” poll director Andrew Kohut said. But the unionists’ absence, even if inadvertent, reflects the fact that they have clearly lost some status as opinion-makers.)

One result, Domhoff argued, is that foreign policy “is being made the same way it always has--with the purpose of serving the interests of large corporations. . . . Public opinion doesn’t matter all that much.”

But others disagree, arguing that the public appears more independent of the elite than ever before, at least on some issues, and more influential as well.

In 1922, the journalist Walter Lippmann, in his groundbreaking “Public Opinion,” contended that the idea that citizens could master every public issue was an “intolerable and unworkable fiction.” Instead, Lippmann argued, a policy elite was a good and necessary thing--to tell the rest of the population what it ought to think. “The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class,” Lippmann wrote.

Later scholars elaborated on Lippmann’s idea and decided that public opinion actually was formed by three distinct groups: first by a small policy elite that originated and debated ideas, then by an “attentive public” that thought about ideas and finally by a general public that had opinions on only a few major issues--and rarely thought much about foreign policy at all.

Now that model is being challenged by two changes: first, the advance of Cable News Network and other instant broadcasts of world events; second, the shift of the foreign policy agenda after the Cold War toward economic issues.

“Public opinion is intensely affected by what it sees on television, and that reduces the influence of the Establishment,” said William G. Hyland, former editor of the Council on Foreign Relations’ publication Foreign Affairs. “When the networks have cameramen in Sarajevo, everybody is suddenly aware of what’s happening in Sarajevo. When the network crews left Mogadishu, it fell off the scope.”

Maxine Isaacs, a former aide to 1984 presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale who is now a scholar at the University of Maryland, has confirmed that perception with evidence from polls. In two cases where the general public received essentially the same information as the experts--the 1989 Tian An Men Square crackdown in China and the abortive 1991 coup in the Soviet Union--the public formed its own opinions and didn’t change them to conform with what experts were saying, she found.

“Lippmann may have been right for the time he wrote,” she said. “But now, in an age of instant communication, there are events where the public is paying attention, forms its own opinions, and exhibits considerable discrimination in its views.”

The second shift is less measurable. But some argue that as foreign policy is no longer dominated by arcane issues of nuclear arms control and diplomatic maneuvering, but instead by close-to-home issues like trade, jobs and troop deployments, the general public has begun to pay more attention and exert more influence.

“Increasingly . . . the public insists on being in the loop,” Daniel Yankelovich and John Immerwahr of the Public Agenda Foundation wrote in a study to be published next year. This is especially true “when the public has a real stake in the issue, such as military intervention in Bosnia or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),” they added.

Does that mean the foreign policy elite no longer matters?

Absolutely not--and the debate over NAFTA is proof.

The American elite favors NAFTA by a large margin. The general public, by contrast, doesn’t much like it--presumably because of warnings from opponents that the pact will cost U.S. jobs.

“If there wasn’t an elite, we wouldn’t be fighting for NAFTA today,” said Samuel L. Popkin, a political science professor at UC San Diego. “You can’t govern without both the elite and the masses. There is still a trickle-down effect.”

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Indeed, President Clinton has based his entire strategy for selling NAFTA on the influence of elite figures--beginning last month with former Presidents Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush, who all went to the White House to endorse the pact, and continuing with the designation of former Chrysler Corp. Chairman Lee Iacocca as national spokesman for the cause.

“It’s quite remarkable,” said Isaacs. “Clinton’s whole strategy in his campaign was to speak directly to the public and ignore the elite, including the media. Here he’s doing the opposite, trying to use elite opinion to move public opinion.

“Politically, he understands that it doesn’t work that way anymore,” she said. “But it’s an interesting test.”

Initial evidence, though, suggests that Clinton was right: The elite still has some power to move the mountain of public opinion. NAFTA still isn’t popular, but it has begun inching upward: A Wall Street Journal survey released last week found 29% in favor of the agreement and 33% opposed, compared with 25% in favor and 36% opposed a month earlier.