From Angelo Codevilla’s posthumous book, America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams:

The role of U.S. intelligence agencies is a prime example of how foreign policy has succumbed to the ways of the administrative state. Prior to World War II, American statesmen made decisions on the basis of their own understanding of foreign situations, augmented by reports from diplomats and from a press that actually reported facts. But the wartime Office of Strategic Services and the CIA that succeeded it, composed as they were and are of academics, promoted the novel notion that statecraft had to be informed by deep research leavened by spying’s secret tidbits—that is, by specialized “intelligence” (by which they meant their own opinions), not intelligence of the ordinary kind. This is part and parcel of Progressivism’s core proposition that the correct path and human affairs is to be discovered through specialized knowledge rather than by politically responsible common sense.