Bush, Obama and the Intellectuals

Insight Bush, Obama and the Intellectuals MARCH 16, 2010 From National Affairs, Issue 3, Spring 2010 America’s intellectual class seems to adore President Barack Obama nearly as much as it reviled his predecessor. While George W. Bush was routinely derided for his purported lack of intelligence and learning, Obama has been embraced by the intellectuals as one of their own — to a degree unmatched by any president since perhaps Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof spoke for many when he argued after the 2008 election that “American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the- closet, practicing intellectual.” Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker even sought to make it official, calling Obama a “certified intellectual.” This difference in attitudes says as much about the state of American intellectuals as it does about Bush and Obama. It also highlights the complicated relationship between intellectuals and the modern American presidency. That relationship has been of great interest to recent presidents; most chief executives since John Kennedy have tended, in some overt way, to their links with the nation’s intellectual elite. They have sought to use these intellectuals to their own advantage, whether as expert advisors, cultural ornaments, or political cover. The story of those efforts, and of the assumptions underlying them, illustrates the changing role of intellectuals in our culture — from esteemed and establishmentarian, to countercultural and oppositional, to highly politicized and partisan. This narrative can also help us better understand the interplay of elitism and populism in our recent political history. Above all, it is a cautionary tale for President Obama. THE RISE OF THE INTELLECTUALS The term “intellectual” took the place of the old-fashioned “man of letters” sometime near the end of the 19th century — first among the French, and then the English and Americans. This difference in terms also reflects a difference in kind. A man of letters — while not necessarily a professor in a university — was a learned observer of the times, but tended to offer insights rooted in more timeless truths and principles. Drawing from a broad knowledge of the canon — of history, philosophy, science, literature, or art — he informed the views of other educated people about various social, political, or cultural issues of the day. Modern intellectuals, too, are learned commentators on contemporary events. But they tend to be less concerned with a knowledge of the canon, and more fixated on these issues of the day, and often seek a mass audience in our mass democracy. We even have a subset of intellectuals who are particularly involved in public affairs, either inside or outside of government. Historian Russell Jacoby labeled them “public intellectuals,” usually well-known, well-educated generalists who can speak or write about most subjects, injecting their own overarching worldviews into their pronouncements. These public intellectuals are, in many ways, the opinion-shapers of the growing educated class. Some are academics; others are writers, critics, or journalists; most have gone through a few elite universities, at least as AMERICANACTIONFORUM.ORG undergraduates; all try to contend with social and political reality at the conceptual level, so as to offer a perspective that provides some coherence to politics and current events. Of course, the reality of their existence is not always so high-minded: They also form a community of intellectuals, with its own, often low-minded, politics and culture, and its own complex connections to the popular culture and the rough-and-tumble of American politics. Intellectuals have in fact played a conspicuous role in our national politics, and especially presidential politics, since at least the 1930s. To contend with the Great Depression, and to assure the country that he was putting the best minds in America to work on the crisis, Franklin Roosevelt famously gathered a “Brain Trust” of prominent academics and policy experts around him. These men, drawn from elite universities (particularly the faculties of Harvard and Columbia), helped both to design the programmatic substance of the New Deal and to shape the administration’s early case for it. The prominence of the Brain Trust coincided with a broader improvement in the standing of intellectuals in American life. Since the days of Andrew Jackson, if not earlier, Americans had been suspicious of the sophisticated expert claiming to know it all. But the Roosevelt era marked the start of a 60-year period of almost constant crisis — from the Great Depression through World War II and the Cold War — and of increasingly complex governing challenges at home and abroad. This period raised the stakes of American politics, and created a need for expert advice. Although intellectuals do not inherently make for superior policy advisors, presidents throughout this era were eager to reassure the public that the country’s brightest minds were on the job; the constant state of emergency also motivated many intellectuals to donate their services to the nation. The traditional American suspicion of the arrogant and over-educated expert began to subside, and in its place emerged a palpable desire — if not admiration — for responsible expertise and learned opinion. This trend intensified after the Soviet Union beat the United States into space with the launch of Sputnik in 1957. As historian Richard Hofstadter put it, after Sputnik, “the national distaste for intellect appeared to be not just a disgrace but a hazard to survival.” Washington issued a call for experts, and an assortment of specialists answered. The initial pursuit of scientific and technical expertise quickly grew into an appreciation for experts and academics of all sorts — including intellectuals. By the 1960s, Hofstadter found the nation’s capital decidedly “hospitable to Harvard professors and ex-Rhodes Scholars.” Changing educational patterns also played a role in this evolving attitude. In the years following World War II, as a result of higher living standards and the G.I. Bill of Rights, many more Americans were attending college. By 1956, the final year of the original G.I. Bill, American institutions of higher learning granted almost 240,000 more degrees and employed almost 150,000 more faculty members than they had at the time of the bill’s enactment 12 years earlier. This influx of students and faculty not only provided more jobs for the intellectually inclined, but also changed the attitudes of a vast swath of the country about the significance of academic training and the value of those who possessed it. AMERICANACTIONFORUM.ORG The elite intellectuals’ rise to prominence was especially noticeable in Democratic Party politics, and demonstrated best by Adlai Stevenson — the party’s presidential standard-bearer in 1952 and ’56 — who both embodied and made use of the Democrats’ growing reputation as the party of the brainy avant garde. As Stevenson eventually learned, being an “egghead” — a term famously used to describe him — was not always a good thing in electoral politics. But being associated with the educated and sophisticated set did have its political advantages: It lent the Democrats a certain cultural cachet as the party that governed with expertise. And Stevenson’s successor to the Democratic presidential nomination would do a far better job of accentuating those advantages. INTELLECTUALS AND THE MODERN PRESIDENCY John Kennedy understood the glamour and mystique that intellectuals could bring to a White House. The only president to win a Pulitzer Prize (in 1957 for Profiles in Courage), Kennedy worked to secure intellectual support for his presidential campaign through the Academic Advising Committee — a group of professors from elite universities, brought together by Ted Sorensen, who coordinated policy proposals and academic endorsements. As a result of the AAC’s efforts, Washington Post reporter Thomas Winship concluded in late 1959 that Kennedy stood “on the verge of ‘owning’ a remarkable segment of New England’s university and industrial brain power — lock, stock, and speechwriting pad.” Kennedy saw intellectuals as opinion-shapers of the liberal establishment, and thought that by being identified with them, he could reinforce his own elite establishment credentials. According to Sorensen, Kennedy even saw himself as “something of an ivory tower president.” So while building his own image as a cool and debonair leader, Kennedy consciously cultivated the sense that his administration was composed of serious, earnest thinkers — the best and brightest America had to offer. In addition to tapping prominent academics to serve in cabinet posts and as White House advisors, Kennedy even created a role for an administration “in- house intellectual” — a job specifically designed for and filled by historian Arthur Schlesinger. Schlesinger laid out his vision of the job in a memo to Kennedy written during the post-election transition. The historian saw himself as part cultural advisor, part liaison to the academy and the world of ideas, and part one- man liberal idea factory. He also knew that his role would incorporate a political purpose: to make the left feel better about Kennedy. “I should add that it might also be of use to have someone in the White House in whom labor and liberals would find what you once called ‘visual reassurance’ and whom they could trust as a channel for communications,” Schlesinger wrote to the president-elect. By shunning any particular policy responsibility, Schlesinger excluded himself from Kennedy’s inner circle, and his activities suggest that he was kept at a distance from key policy decisions and debates. In his time at the White House, Schlesinger wrote articles and film reviews for various publications, corresponded with the nation’s intellectual and cultural elites, advised Kennedy on assorted cultural matters, worked with Americans for Democratic Action to promote the liberal agenda, and accumulated research for the book he eventually wrote about the Kennedy White House.

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