Oh if only the problems we faced were merely that capable courtiers were diverted by their royal chamberpot duties, and that the untitled bourgeoisie were renting swords at the gate of Versailles, so that they might be allowed to walk into the grounds and observe a royal picnic.

The problem with a huge mass of courtiers at court is that getting disconnected from reality is inevitable. The disconnection invites not just personal failures, but national tragedy.

George Reedy (1917-1999) was President Johnson's press secretary from 1964 to 1965, during the escalation of the Vietnam War, just before Bill Moyers took over as press secretary in 1965.

Reedy had been a member of LBJ's staff in the U.S. Senate, and then a member of the inner circle at the White House, and his experiences led him to write a book,
The Twilight of the Presidency: An Examination of Power and Isolation in the White House (1970, rev. 1987) about the culture (in the anthropological sense, not the piano recital sense) at the White House.

Another former White House staffer, John Dean, wrote, four years ago:

http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/dean/20030314.html
The Best Book On the Presidency:

. . . If a president read no other book on the modern presidency, this should be the one.

. . . Reedy's general concern is quite simple. He believed darkness was falling on the office of the president because the modern presidency had become an institution that, by its nature, kept a president out of touch with the country he must lead and the real problems he must solve. The modern president, Reedy explained, is cut off from those who will tell him the truth, and surrounded instead by "yes men" who tell him only what he wants to hear.

As a one-time insider, Reedy found that the presidency had become a uniquely American monarchy, an institution never contemplated by our founders. There are few checks on the man (or perhaps in the future, woman) elected to this office, other than his (or her) own character. The office is, in effect, a stage - a focal place that magnifies a president's weaknesses, and often ignores his strengths.

With good reason, Reedy is not at all certain that the checks and balances of the Constitution, along with the powers of the media, are sufficient to assure that the executive branch is really properly serving the American people.

Back in 1971, the "Washington Monthly" looked at Reedy's book and compared it to Albert Speer's memoirs and to Krushchev's memoirs.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_n1_v21/ai_7371397

. . . The analogy between the modern presidency and the royal European court, bewigged, bejeweled, and beset with intrigue, is not original with George Reedy, Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, but he is the first to alarm us with notice that court government is undergoing a twcntieth-century rebirth in the White House. This renaissance of the princely court, Reedy insists, is breeding immense danger for American government, for much the same reason that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century courts of Western Europe contributed to the development of violent revolutions.

. . . By an extraordinary publishing coincidence, Reedy's memoir appears in the same year that Albert Speer and Nikita Khrushchev have given us their memoirs of life at the top in Germany and Russia.* Neither the Speer nor Khrushchev book concerns itself consciously with court life under Hitler and Stalin; yet, when they are read in context with Reedy, we are startled to discover that the styles of government being described by all three are remarkably alike.

At each court, for example, we find the leader, or prince, treated with a deference approaching reverence, which must inevitably tempt all but the humblest souls (who are rarely to be found running large states) to assume they possess a superiority bordering on divinity. Princes, whether monarchist, fascist, communist, or democratic, become accustomed to feeling like very special people.

. . . Reedy, Khrushchev, and Speer give us comparable pictures of the advancing corruption created in the courtiers by their impulse to establish and protect their intimacy with the leader . . .

- - The Washington Monthly, 1971

As Desert Son says, No Kings!