Foxes, hedgehogs and small-town America
A C-SPAN conversation on perspective and leadership with renowned Yale historian and Cold War scholar
C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb interviewed Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis on May 28. This is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for clarity:
BRIAN LAMB: John Lewis Gaddis, you grew up in a small town in Texas.
JOHN LEWIS GADDIS: That’s right. LAMB: Is it Cotulla or Cotulla? GADDIS: It’s Cotulla. LAMB: Some famous people are from there besides you. GADDIS: Yes. LAMB: ... Lyndon Johnson taught school.
GADDIS: Lyndon Johnson taught school there, right.
• LAMB: How do you learn? GADDIS: I like to think it is both by reading and teaching, and then reading more and teaching more. I don’t think you really know what you’ve read well until you try to teach it to a group of young people, and then I think as you teach to a group of young people, you realize there are things you still don’t know enough about how to teach credibly, to teach fully, and so on.
So I learn at the intersection of
reading and teaching. But then, for me, the act of writing something down is a working out of ideas, which is another approach to thinking. I really didn’t know what I think about some issues until I write them down. Then I can go back and see what I think.
And so I think it’s a creative interconnection of all three of these things — reading, teaching, and writing.
• LAMB: Why are so many professors in love with Isaiah Berlin?
He was quite a character. I got to know him slightly when I was at Oxford in the early 1990s. He is best known for his distinction between foxes and hedgehogs which goes back to the ancient Greeks. But it was Berlin who popularized that distinction in the early 1950s, the idea being that the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing. That became iconic and Berlin is associated with that.
But some of his other ideas are even more relevant, I think. One is this idea that politics is a matter, not so much of good and evil, but of competing good things. One good thing may well have to be sacrificed to achieve some other good thing. Maybe you give it up altogether. Maybe you postpone it. But these are the more natural and frequent political choices that have to be made.
The idea that you can go into politics and remain morally consistent or morally pure, Berlin says, is perfectly unrealistic. That
says, is perfectly unrealistic. That is the nature of politics ...
You imagine that professor Berlin modernized the hedgehog and foxes. Lyndon Johnson, was he a hedgehog or was he a fox?
GADDIS: Oh, I think he was mostly a fox because he was a manipulator. He was a skillful operator. He could pull all the buttons and do all the maneuvers and what not, but I think that in another sense this is another issue that is raised by Robert Caro in his biography of Johnson.
Johnson was, deep inside, a hedgehog, which is an idea Caro would argue, I think. Johnson said this actually came from teaching in my hometown back in 1928. He was teaching in a segregated Mexican school and was very much moved by these kids who didn’t get very many resources there.
He was there only one year but the experience stuck with him, and I really think what he was saying is that I want to get to a point in life where I can do something for kids like that, but then the question is how do you get to that point?
Well you get to it by stealing elections, you get to it by manipulating legislators — the wheeling and dealing and what not. But I think all that comes full circle with the “we shall overcome” speech where he actually goes back and talks about my hometown, Cotulla, and explains what those experiences meant before the Congress of the United States.
LAMB: Define once again a hedgehog and a fox as they are used in this…
GADDIS: A hedgehog knows one big thing so has one big objective and may well have a single framework for looking at the world, a single lens for looking at the world.
A fox will know many things, it will be aware of many competing priorities. They may have many different strategies for achieving things, but a fox can lose a sense of direction because there is no one big central idea. So an unfocused fox is just spinning wheels and operating off in a bunch of different areas. The obvious solution is to find ways to be both.
• LAMB: Donald Trump? GADDIS: Too hard to say at this point, I think there may be some interesting grand strategies that are im-plicitin what he’s doing, he is a destroyer, or he believes in the destruction in a positive sense, he thinks for sure that you have to break things up before you can fix them.
How much of this is a sense of the capacity to build anything new and how much of it is just destructive it seems to me remains to be seen, but anyone who could come in as he did in 2015 and 2016 and run circles around everybody else in those primaries and campaigns has some kind of political genius going.
Maybe it’s a malevolent genius, maybe it isn’t, but this is someone who is picking up on something in the American character that was out there that nobody else was picking up on, and so I think that if it doesn’t deserve respect, it certainly deserves analysis ...
LAMB: What’s it like inside of Yale talking about Donald Trump?
GADDIS: It can really be done on a rational basis most of the time because within a university like Yale, the feelings are so visceral, and I mean among the faculty, that it’s hard to have any kind of conversation doesn’t just say predictable things.
... Anybody who tries to say something less than predictable is to be disregarded, so people don’t try all that much.
It’s almost that way with the students but not quite as much, for sure. I think we are in a kind of bubble, like many places on the coast are.
One of the things that I have tried to do, we have tried to in the summer, with our grand-strategy students — we have always built in what we call a summer odyssey somewhere ... The exotic climes that we have been now pushing with our students are simply America. How many students have taken a road trip across America? Surprisingly few.
And so we’re financing roadtrips across America for Yale students with the encouragement to stop in small towns and just stay there — a couple have been to Cotulla, believe it or not. Some have stayed for as long as two weeks, just talking to the locals and writing up their experiences.It’s very simple, we just ask them to write about what they saw and what they heard, and they then can draw their own con-clusionsfrom this.
It’s just our small effort to tryto break down some of the isolation that the elite universities have locked themselves into, the bubbles into which they placed themselves.