"Of Roosevelt's cultivation of bureaucratic disorder too much has probably been said. The observation was once made that it undeniably had a negative impact, in that succeeding generations of Washington power-managers were so shaken by exposure to it that they studiously tried to inculcate the opposite as soon as they had the chance, tried to eliminate the very possibility of a President with such debonair disregard for the organizational niceties. A standard of tidiness was later set against which Roosevelt is measured and found wanting. But we are permitted to inquire whether in terms of national policy-making the replacements for Roosevelt's "poor" administration have been all that satisfactory. The years since have witnessed catastrophic failures of coordination between politics and the military that his years in office did not. Perhaps there was more method to his maneuverings than appeared. Yet a price was paid. His determination to go his own way, his insistence on informing himself through his own idiosyncratic avenues of communication, his deliberate short-circuiting of the proper channels of responsibility- all these had defects of their virtues that now and then led him and the country astray. His two great failures were France and China. These historic civilizations of depth and pungent flavor, to which he was instinctively and without reluctance attracted, defeated his best efforts to incorporate them in an all-embracing view of the postwar world. In each instance he was badly advised, and there is no great artfulness needed to see where the bad advice came from and why he listened to it. But evidence was also available to him that de Gaulle was a far more powerful personage than he had imagined and Chiang Kai-shek was a far weaker one: he chose not to act on it. He wanted a revived but malleable France that would be willing to give up its empire and a united but nationalist China that would be a "great nation," able to fill the vacuum left by Japanese defeat. He got neither."