Here's an excerpt from Rich's column:
In his 20th-anniversary reflections, Halberstam wrote that his favorite passage in his book was the one where Johnson, after his first Kennedy cabinet meeting, raved to his mentor, the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, about all the president’s brilliant men. “You may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn responded, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”Of course, it is not only those with rural pedigrees who have common sense and practical experience -- who may have "run for sheriff once." Nevertheless, there is a great deal to say for a little diversity across the rural-urban axis when you're running a country where rural residents represent a substantial minority of almost one-fifth of the population.
Halberstam loved that story because it underlined the weakness of the Kennedy team: “the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.”
No comments:
Post a Comment