Hello G-Lers,
Forwarded for the reading interest of some Gambia-L members.
Cheers,
OB.
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BALLOT BOX
Do Dim Bulbs Make Better Presidents?
Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 1999, at 9:50 a.m.
This week's New Yorker reproduces a document that George W.
Bush wasn't eager to have published: his Yale transcript,
which includes his SAT scores (566 verbal, 640 math) and
college grades (C average). One doesn't want to read too much
into someone's 35-year-old academic records, which in this
case are mainly interesting as a reminder of how powerful the
Ivy League's affirmative-action program for alumni brats used
to be. But the data do tend to substantiate what many have
gleaned from listening to the Republican front-runner abuse
the English language: The sharpest tool in the shed he ain't.
The two authors of the New Yorker article, Jane Mayer and
Alexandra Robbins, buttress their insult to the governor's
privacy with a backhanded compliment. "Historically, there is
no correlation between academic achievement and success in
the Oval Office," they note. Many of Bush's highbrow
conservative supporters, such as George Will, go even
farther, arguing that thick-headedness is a positive
advantage. In a recent column lauding Bush, Will recalls the
contest between three book-writers for president in
1912--Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and William Howard
Taft--noting that "such intellect in politics is rare, and
perhaps should be." The conservative writer Richard
Brookhiser recently made a version of the same case in
American Heritage. "Perhaps the wise leader should strive to
have intellectuals on tap and not be one himself," Brookhiser
writes.
The case against intellect in the White House is brilliantly
counterintuitive. If only Dan Quayle had been able to grasp
it, he might have used it to great advantage in this year's
presidential race. But is it correct? The argument rests
mainly on some fairly compelling anecdotal evidence. The list
of less-than-brilliant men judged great by those making this
argument usually begins with Ronald Reagan and often includes
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman as well. The list
of intellectually gifted but ineffectual presidents has Jimmy
Carter, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson.
Objection: The sample here is too small to be statistically
meaningful. It could just be a coincidence that Carter
happened to be both bright and inept, and that Reagan was
both disconnected and lovable. Another problem: The names on
the list are subject to extensive quibbling. Was Reagan
really a great president? Was Wilson a failure, just because
Congress rejected the Versailles treaty? Someday, someone
will demolish the myth of Carter's alleged brilliance. And
was FDR, who took gentleman Cs at Harvard, truly less than
highly intelligent? This supposition relies heavily on Oliver
Wendell Holmes' oft-quoted observation that Roosevelt was a
"second-class intellect but a first class temperament." There
is a great deal of evidence to suggest that Holmes was wrong
about this and that FDR, unserious in college, had the
supplest of political wits about him.
I can also provide some equally tendentious counterexamples.
Highly capable 20th-century presidents who were sharp as
tacks include John F. Kennedy and--bring on the hate
mail!--William Jefferson Clinton. A list of relative dimwits
who were lousy chief executives might include Warren G.
Harding (who described himself, accurately, as too dumb to be
president) and Gerald R. Ford (who played one too many games
without a helmet, in the memorable phrase of Lyndon B.
Johnson).
Given that stupidity is not an advantage in any other
profession, why would it help a president? I think the theory
derives from the familiar prejudice against intelligence,
which holds that people who are too smart must be limited in
other ways. There's a popular notion that people who think
too much can't act--Hamlet is not the guy you want to run
your company. And there's a conservative, political version
of this idea, which holds that intellectuals are bound to be
impractical, immoral, and too eager to impose their
rationalist, radical schemes on the rest of us. William F.
Buckley expressed this view for the ages when he made his
famous observation that he'd rather be ruled by the first
hundred names in the Cambridge phone book than by the faculty
of Harvard University.
But the dumb-is-better argument falls apart when you look more
closely at the personal qualities and corresponding successes
and failures of just about any president. The ones who were
dim but successful successfully compensated for their dimness
with other qualities. But the lack of intelligence still
harmed them. Take Ronald Reagan--please. I don't dispute that
Reagan deserves copious credit for bringing an early and
glorious end to the Cold War. One of the ways he did this was
by taking an unambiguous moral stand against Communism, which
gave powerful encouragement to the opposition in Eastern-bloc
countries. But the moral certainty that caused Reagan to
behave in this way wasn't a tribute to his thickness. Vaclav
Havel acted just as single-mindedly. But an American
president also needs to grasp more complex realities--and
Reagan often couldn't. When it came to understanding
something mildly technical, such as the federal budget, he
was baffled. As described by David Stockman, he simply
couldn't process the information that his contradictory goals
would produce a vast deficit, despite repeated attempts to
spell it out for him in words and pictures.
Or look at Richard Nixon. Nixon's strong intelligence is the
reason that there is something on the plus side of his
presidential ledger. Most scholars agree that Nixon's most
significant accomplishment--the opening of relations with
China--was the product of his own shrewd analysis of foreign
policy, not Henry Kissinger's. Nixon himself wrote an article
on the subject in Foreign Affairs in 1967 laying out the case
for what he subsequently did. Nixon was undone as president
not because he was too shrewd but because of something
shrewdness didn't help him with: personal bitterness and lack
of scruples. Likewise with Bill Clinton. Where Clinton has
deployed his own formidable brain, primarily in economic and
some areas of domestic policy, he has largely succeeded.
Where he does his thinking with other organs, he has
undermined himself.
In fact, I think the conservative case for presidential
stupidity has it exactly backwards. Presidents get into the
most trouble not when they behave like intellectuals but when
they delegate crucial brainwork to "intellectuals on tap," as
Brookhiser calls them. A history of this sort of folly might
start with some of the failed schemes of the New Deal
economists before describing the way that the "whiz kids" led
LBJ astray on both the Vietnam War and the war on poverty. It
would touch on the bad advice Pat Moynihan gave Richard Nixon
on welfare and that Ira Magaziner gave Bill Clinton on health
care. There is probably no modern president, smart or dumb,
who hasn't landed himself in hot water by hiring
intellectuals and then failing to second-guess them.
To be sure, intelligence of the kind that might manifest
itself in high SAT scores isn't the most important quality in
a chief executive. Leadership, integrity, and determination
are all more critical qualities. Dumb luck helps. Dumbness
doesn't.
----------------------------------------------------------------
TODAY IN SLATE
The Dumb Presidents Club
[http://www.slate.com/code/BallotBox/BallotBox.asp?Show=11/3/99&idMessage=3943]
The End of the Underclass?
[http://www.slate.com/code/kausfiles/kausfiles.asp?Show=11/2/99&idMessage=3938]
Paul Krugman on Why Only the Megalomaniacs Survive
[http://www.slate.com/Dismal/99-11-03/Dismal.asp]
Office 2000: Comedy, Cartoons, and Commentary
[http://www.slate.com/Office2K/99-08-24/Office2K.asp]
[]
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