TO BE A POLITICIAN
Updated 1994 Edition
Foreword by David Riesman

TO BE A POLITICIAN has come to be regarded as the best work ever written on the politician's vocation. That is, what it is like to be a politician. The author, a Seattle lawyer, scholar and writer, was active in politics in earlier years.

"This brilliant and original book should become a small political classic."
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. - 1959

A stirring and sometimes soaring work of the moral imagination....he brings to the
techniques of illustration a gift for the compact and funny anecdote matched by few writers
since Montaigne....As a writer, he has the concern of the authentic poet....Mr. Bullitt is a
liberal of the most admirable sort...a man who brings to the world he observes
disenchantment, affection, skepticism, sympathy, toughness and wit....To Be A Politician is
a book about life and society that takes its quality from the author's love of both, from the
toughness and tension of his mind, and from the density and aphoristic brilliance of his
style...a splendid, civilized piece of work--human and humane, funny, hopeful, exciting,
and...ennobling, as any civilized work must be.
                Richard H. Rovere -- The New Yorker

[I]t is almost as much the proper study of man himself as of merely political man. It is a
small, unpretentious, but memorable masterpiece. It is incomparably the best book of its
kind and context that I have ever read.
                William S. White, Columnist

Monsieur Montaigne of Seattle; his wisdom, his wit, his detachment, and, what is so
seldom combined with these qualities, underlying compassion.
                David Riesman

...essays on politics that have the hard texture yet inner glow of precious stones cut and
polished by a master craftsman....offers us intellectual fare so vascular and alive that if you
cut into a single word, the text bleeds....Yet unless I have come down with a two-sided
case of paranoia-euphoria, what the rest have done when placed alongside this book, seems
on a plane with the offerngs of greeting card writers.
                Sydney Hyman -- New York Times

This brilliant little book....honest, epigrammatic, readable, stimulating, and wise...I know
of no other work which tells us so much of the peculiar character of American politics in
our day.
                Daniel Boorstin -- Saturday Review

...a superb guide to one of the most interesting and dangerous callings in America....an
unusually discerning man of empathy.
                Charles Poore -- New York Times

...the most sophisticated and sated student of politics in America or of democratic politics
anywhere will learn, profit, and be amused by this brilliant report from the field.
                Dennis W. Brogan -- Commentary

Stimson Bullitt talks sense about American politics, and his book holds out new hope for
the self-reliant individual as a force in American life.
                Adlai E. Stevenson

I cannot wait to rush out and buy this work...it contains such nuggets as this....
                Alistair Cooke

        He writes with style and a feeling for the ironical nature of political life, never taking
himself too seriously, and never taking politics in a free society for anything less than the
transcendently important thing it is....His book should stand as a small classic: a discerning
analysis of how truth in politics at once echoes and yet differs from the kind of truth men
pursue in private life.
                August Heckscher -- Book of the Month Club News

...it assays at several ounces of epigrammatic gold per paragraph...a classic like this should
help, by its very existence, to raise the status of politics as a profession.
                Christian Science Monitor
               
        An elegantly written, epigrammatic series of essays...by Stimson Bullitt,...who is very
wise.
               Newsweek

...the most refreshing, stimulating, enlightening and enjoyable book on politics and
politicians since Lincoln Steffens.
                Peter H. Odegard

Bullitt does not shrink from stating deeply held convictions, or challenging commonly held
assumptions, or forcing readers to work their way through difficult distinctions. But his
sense and his style and his authenticity are persuasive....It's a mark of Bullitt's sense of the
permanent as against the fleeting that his book has survived two tumultuous decades
without a need for significant change and with an immediacy undiminished by events.
                Staff (a Congressional staff journal)

...witty, imaginative, thoughtful, pragmatic and urbane....These essays are an oasis....He
remains...Monsieur Montaigne of Seattle.
            Samuel C. Patterson -- University of Iowa, Perspective

And in the end, the book acquires a bitter and dark power.
David Brewster