With both major political parties set to anoint the finalists in this year’s Presidential odyssey there still remains substantial disaffection with the choices. It is, of course, not the first time that a nation appears challenged to settle upon what it considers to be ideal leader.
Recall, for example, that upon the death of Israel’s first President Chaim Weizmann in 1952 when Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his cabinet decided to offer the position to Albert Einstein. A detailed telegram was composed in an attempt to prevail upon the renowned physicist to accept the position.
The Israeli leadership was following the pattern common to other infant republics – including our own post-colonial regime – in considering that high office should seek the person rather than the other way around. Unlike our own first president, who accepted the call of his countrymen, Einstein declined.
“I am deeply moved by the offer from our state of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.”
Though Einstein was a supporter of the concept of a Zionist state and for several decades had lent his name to pacifist causes, he nevertheless turned down the offer.
The Einstein story brings to mind an important question that all governments should confront more frequently than they have, namely, are citizens as actively engaged in the pursuit of excellence in its political leadership as they should be?More fundamentally, could our choices be better?
Einstein’s reply to Israel also raised another question. For Einstein expressed a lack of confidence in his ability to “deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.” Translation: I’ve been dealing with inanimate objects and scientific abstractions for so long that the subjective swirl of politics is not something that’s going to suit me at all.
Though Einstein had the humility to acknowledge that even persons who excel in scientific matters might not have the aptitude to thrive in more worldly domains, the episode illustrates a desire to draw leadership from a source outside the political system and the need to encourage persons of unquestioned integrity and intellectual dexterity to assume political power.
The days when a supposedly reluctant candidate had to be coaxed out of the sanctuary of private life, off the front porch into seeking office, are certainly more unusual than they once were. The movement to draft Eisenhower to run in the same year that Einstein rejected the Israeli presidency comes to mind — even as we forget Larry King’s more fleeting exhortations to the once seemingly-timid Texas billionaire, Ross Perot in 1992. The open — no incumbent running —American presidential election that is now upon us does serve as an occasion to re-examine some of the assumptions on which the selection of the world’s most powerful leader is based.
Few, indeed, would contend that straight-A students should always be running the country and, after all, Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and even Einstein had been known for academic blemishes as unconventional adolescents. And need we be reminded that two of the presidents with the least formal education, Washington and Lincoln, have been the most inspirational leaders of all? Nor should we overlook an Independence, Mo., haberdasher who never got past high school. It was he who wound up succeeding where an uncompromising one-time Princeton president, Woodrow Wilson failed in leading America into a world peacekeeping organization.
Nor at the same time as President Truman was leading us during the pioneering years of the United Nations did lack of a college degree deprive Maine’s own Margaret Chase Smith of international acclaim as a leading crusader against extremism.
Elections are not measures of orthodox academic intelligence and for the most part probably should not be. If they were, we’d have had the legal luminary Thomas Dewey over Truman — Adlai Stevenson instead of Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter a second term in lieu of Ronald Reagan.
In Maine, it would have been the Bates summa cum laude alum Frank Coffin for governor over John Reed; maybe even Charlie Cragin just a bit ahead of Joe Brennan. And perhaps Eliot Cutler over Michael Michaud or Paul LePage in the last gubernatorial contest.
The triumph of academia would have seen Professor John Frary upsetting Michaud. It would have witnessed Rhodes Scholar Tom Allen sitting in the U.S. Senate instead of Susan Collins in the 2008 election.
But Einstein himself recognized there is more to leadership than being the class valedictorian. Are we, however, doing enough as a society? Is our media working as hard as it could be to summon us to the heights to which we need to aspire in this complex, occasionally dangerous and challenging world?
Though the outcome of the deliberations in both Cleveland and Philadelphia later this month appear to be a foregone conclusion, the results will among many, provoke a renewed consideration of just what it is that we want both for and from our presidential candidates.
Paul Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail at pmills@myfairpoint.net
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