Do Dim Bulbs Make Better Presidents?
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
20 th -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.
