INTELLECTUALS AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians?

INTELLECTUALS AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians?

By Tevi Troy. Rowman & Littlefield. 255 pp. $27.95

Troy declares himself early and clearly: "As the stories of the past eight administrations show, the interrelation of intellectuals and presidents has developed into a crucial factor in determining presidential success." Beginning with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., President John F. Kennedy’s "ambassador" to the intellectual community, Troy attempts to support that premise. It proves, in my view, a bit too heavy a burden.

A former Labor Department official who is now on President George W. Bush’s domestic policy staff, Troy draws on journalism, White House memoirs, and presidential archives for this portrait of how intellectuals and presidents have used, misused, and abused each other. He is especially valuable in underscoring the role of Martin Anderson of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, one of Ronald Reagan’s earliest, most consistent, and most valuable supporters, who worked to ensure that the White House and federal agencies were staffed with men and women who believed in Reagan’s ideas.

Other tales are engaging if familiar, such as Princeton University historian Eric F. Goldman’s labors as President Lyndon Johnson’s liaison to a wary world of intellectuals. The high—or low—point of Goldman’s tenure was the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965. Declining to attend the festival, poet Robert Lowell denounced the administration’s Vietnam policy. Another 20 writers, organized by Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, publicly endorsed Lowell’s position. Plunged into the kind of public controversy any White House abhors, the festival underscored the steady souring of relations between Johnson and the intellectual community.

The book’s virtues, alas, do not compensate for its shortcomings. Troy ignores Henry Kissinger because, unlike Schlesinger under JFK and Daniel Patrick Moynihan under President Richard M. Nixon, he was chosen "exclusively as his foreign-policy adviser, not as a broadbased intellectual adviser." In overlooking Kissinger, the author brushes aside some of the most intriguing questions about the interplay between intellectual thought and public policy: Did Kissinger’s worldview help shape Nixon’s strategic vision? How much did it persuade Nixon to open the door to China, or shape his conduct in Vietnam? A look at Kissinger might also demonstrate, as Richard Reeves does in his masterly book President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001), that intellectuals yield to no class of political insiders in their empire building, paranoia, and duplicity. All those tenure fights must pay off.

The most serious flaw in this work is the premise itself: that the relationship between presidents and intellectuals is "crucial." Indeed, Troy himself provides some of the best refutations of that notion. He argues that the first President Bush was doomed because he lacked the sort of "single, unifying vision" that an intellectual adviser might have supplied. Yet, as Troy also notes, Bush proclaimed that "I’m not much for the airy and abstract—I like what works." No intellectual ambassador could have made a difference. Bush, by personality and character, was the kind of custodial president destined to be reelected in good times and defeated in gloomy times. Similarly, the mutual contempt between Johnson and the intellectual community had nowhere near the political import of a divisive war in Vietnam and racial and generational upheaval at home.

Troy’s book ends with a crisp, two-page "guidebook" on how to deal with intellectuals. Some samples: "Don’t ignore intellectuals." "Don’t be an intellectual." I commend this section to time-pressed presidents. They can probably skim the rest of the book while awaiting the latest poll data from Illinois.

—Jeff Greenfield