Two other thoughts inspired by this week’s remarkable burst of
Reaganolatry in the media are (1) how fickle the media are, like
the mob in Shakespeare — as someone once said of the Arabs, they
are either at your throat or at your feet — and (2) how little
intelligence counts, at least as our highly prestigious
psychometricians measure intelligence, when it comes to leadership.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes is supposed to have said of FDR, Reagan
didn’t have a first class mind but he did have a first class
temperament. I thought of this too as I read the obituary in the
Daily Telegraph yesterday of the Earl of Romney, who died
on the same day and at the same age as Ronald Reagan and who sat in
the House of Lords for a quarter of a century without ever speaking
a word. When asked about this, he replied: “Yes, that’s right. The
bright ones are supposed to speak, and the others are supposed to
support them. That’s how it works here.”
That’s how it works everywhere, more or less, though not
everyone knows it. To many even of the most intelligent it is not
given to see the profound truth that there is a real art to
followership as well as to leadership, that those arts are akin and
that they are by no means commonplace, either the one or the other.
Indeed, I would guess that we have not only many fewer leaders but
many fewer decent followers than we have university professors.
It’s a rare élite to belong to, which suggests that the Earl
was also like Reagan in being too self-effacing. Moreover, it is
precisely because the highly intelligent members of the media —
that “herd of independent minds” as Harold Rosenberg said of the
New York intelligentsia — are slender reeds, waving with each
intellectual wind that blows and have no understanding of the kind
of mental and emotional discipline required for real politics that
they go on as they do about the bogey of “intelligence.”
*****
The news last week, later denied, that the Church of England was
prepared to offer its sanction to a marriage between the Prince of
Wales and his mistress, the divorcée Lady Camilla
Parker-Bowles, was reported in the Times of London along
with the following quotation from the Venerable Michael Lawson, who
sits on the Church’s Evangelical Council: “From a Christian point
of view, everyone should be allowed a new start in life.” This
sudden discovery after 2,000 years of a missing commandment — Thou
shalt allow everyone a new start in life — is the more remarkable
for having come from an Englishman. In America, of course, we are
all quite certain that the law allowing us a do-over, a new
beginning, and a fresh start when we screw up is somewhere in the
Constitution, or perhaps the Declaration of Independence, right
next to the bit about The American Dream. But I had not thought
that this hopeful certainty had also found its way into the 39
Articles and (probably) the European Declaration of Human
Rights.
“Most Anglican leaders,” the Times went on to say,
“would accept a marriage more readily if there were repentance.” Ah
yes, the Bill Clinton technique of phony contrition. Even the
regicide and fratricide Claudius in Hamlet knew better
than that when he said that he couldn’t repent because “I am still
possessed/Of those effects for which I did the murder.” It all just
goes to show you the extent to which the official religion of
Europe is now no longer Christianity but the secular Americanism of
the late 20th century. No wonder they all hate us so!
*****
Last week’s resignation of George Tenet as Director of Central
Intelligence reminded me of an extended profile of him recently by
NPR’s “All Things Considered” which concluded with the reporter’s
saying that Tenet was “that rarest of things in Washington, a
survivor.” What a laugh! Washington is a town full to
bursting with such “survivors” — men and women who hang around on
the fringes of power long after they have risen to their level of
incompetence. Nobody is ever ruined or disgraced in Washington
anymore, at least not so badly that he can’t get a job somewhere as
a lobbyist. My old boss Ferdinand Mount said not long ago that the
British Labour Party was exactly the opposite of the public school
system, according to Grimes in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and
Fall. “They may throw you out, but they never let you down,”
said Grimes. By contrast, if like Tony Blair you lead a Labour
government, you may expect never to be thrown out but always to be
let down by those who have put you in power.
It’s yet another consequence of the disappearance of honor from
politics, which may have taken its final departure with the
resignation of Lord Carrington as foreign secretary in Mrs.
Thatcher’s government in 1982 after the Argentine invasion of the
Falkland Islands. “There has been a British humiliation,” he said.
“I ought to take responsibility for it.” If anyone can think of a
more recent example than that, I would be eager to hear of it.
