The opening paragraphs of LT's article are copied below for reference.
Carrol
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After serving as President Harry Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson reminisced that 1940s organizations he had supported -- the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and the Citizens' Committee for the Marshall Plan -- were "uniquely and typically American." Many groups engage in protest, Acheson noted, but "few organize privately to support Government, and fewer still to support policies and measures not directly beneficial to themselves or their group."
My research discloses that these organizations, far from being extraordinary, were just the most famous of dozens of elite, bipartisan "citizens committees" that have secretly collaborated with the administration of the day, whether Democratic or Republican. The partnerships have skirted legal restrictions on official lobbying and covert propaganda, or violated them; a dearth of enforcement makes it hard to say which.
This pattern confounds conventional articles of faith about a pluralistic system founded on offsetting forces of government, business, and civil society, including contending Republican and Democratic parties. The pattern's duration contradicts beliefs that a robust and flourishing American democracy went sour sometime from the mid-1940s, when President Franklin Roosevelt died and the Cold War started, to 2010, when Obamacare and the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling on corporate speech were decided.