Are brains necessary?

It is fashionable this season among us here Reagan-watchers who are not what you’d call absolutely sold, to wonder, after we stop wondering about his age, whether he has brains enough to handle the presidency.

This requires an examination of not only what brains are, in a political sense, but whether in the long run such are necessary for the conduct of a successful presidency. We have had presidents both dumb and bright, and some of the dumb have been successful and some of the bright have failed. And v. versa, of course, as in all throwaway rules of conduct.

As an informal definition of brains I offer the ability to cope with unexpected situations. The more the unexpected situations, the more brains required.

Let us start with the man who was probably the most successful president of this century. I hate to admit that the man was a Republican. Ike. Ike could hardly speak English coherently. He never learned how to pronounce the word “nuclear.” He was not a great president but he ran this country better than it had been run by anybody in our time.

He had events on his side, of course. Apart from the blight of McCarthyism, which was petering out in this time anyhow, Ike presided over a peaceful and growing land, which was handling its new worldwide hegemony with tact and firmness.

But nobody, least of all Ike himself, would have accused him of being a brainy chap. He probably would have taken it as an insult himself. By the standards of the average college prof, he was dumb as George Babbitt, whom he resembled most compellingly. Had he not made West Point, he would probably have ended up as president of the Lions in Abilene, Kansas. Yet he indisputably presided over a fairly happy and surely prosperous post-war America.

In the brains dept. I would place Brother Reagan just about in the same bracket as Ike, though I would not grant him Ike’s great administrative skills, which in the presidency largely consisted in doing nothing because nothing really had to be done. Masterly inactivity, as the British call it.

Ike could administer if he had to, as when he was head of AEF in World War II. The presidency that ends in 1984 is going to require a hell of a lot of plain damned active administration. Reagan, on the basis of his governorship of California, either doesn’t have these skills or is too bored to use them.

The brainiest period the presidency ever had, including the term of our great Renaissance figure, Thomas Jefferson, was at the early part of this century. Three times in a row, the White House was occupied by men of extraordinary intellectual distinction.

Theodore Roosevelt, had he remained a private citizen, would have been a distinguished figure as a naturalist, an explorer, and a writing man. (Read his letters if you doubt me.) William Howard Taft was, in the testimony of many of his peers who were close to him, a lawyer’s lawyer, a man who single-handed wrote the Organic Act that governed the Philippines until we pulled out in 1946. Woodrow Wilson was a distinguished historian and president of Princeton before he cut out and went into the worldsaving business.

Our worst presidents, by general agreement, were General Grant and Warren G. Harding, both of whom had the amiable weakness of being excessively considerate to crooks. Mentally, they were distant. Grant was a right smart feller and he wrote English exceedingly well as anyone who has read his memoirs knows well. Harding was as dumb as only some small town newspaper publishers can be.

So I think we’ll have to scrub brains as a necessary for the presidency. Being a good political manipulator is the desideratum. The Actor hasn’t answered that questions. Only on-the-job training will tell. We have come to that.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 1, 1980.

Theodore Roosevelt, had he remained a private citizen, would have been a distinguished figure as a naturalist, an explorer, and a writing man.