The intermittent role of the White House intellectual
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Arthur Schlesinger’s place in Kennedy’s White House was something new. Officially designated special assistant to the president, he had, after campaigning for Kennedy, suggested to the president-elect that he could use ‘someone in the White House concerned with long-term projects, definition and presentation of programs and policy, independent program review, and the like.’ Schlesinger got himself the gig. There he is, the one wearing the bow tie, watching alongside John and Jackie Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as Alan Shepard becomes the first American to travel into space in 1961.
On the website U.S. Intellectual History, Ben Alpers, a professor at the University of Oklahoma’s Honors College, reviews the on-again, off-again relationships between White House intellectuals and the presidents they served:
By this time [1964] the press had begun to talk explicitly about the role of the White House ‘intellectual in residence’ that Schlesinger had invented and [Eric] Goldman was now embodying. Unlike Schlesinger who was close to the Kennedys at the time he joined the White House staff, Goldman was never close to LBJ and the relationship became dysfunctional well before Goldman’s eventual, stormy departure in mid-1966.... What distinguished these four presidencies [Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford] was not, then, a shared, positive attitude toward intellectuals. The phenomenon of the White House intellectual-in-residence may have, instead, been a kind of apotheosis of the celebration of expertise in post-war American political culture. White House intellectuals could burnish the court of the imperial presidency. But as both that vision of the presidency and the status of intellectuals -- and social scientific experts in general -- began to wane, the logic of this never-entirely-logical post faded as well.
Could there be a place in the Obama White House for an intellectual? Obama himself has been called an intellectual, both derisively and admiringly. Read what eminent thinker Lawrence Tribe said about his former student after the jump.
Lawrence Tribe told the BBC World Service about the Barack Obama he knew:
His mind was extraordinary, and its character was somewhat apparent to me from the very first meeting. I met him for the first time when he was a first-year law student, before he had begun to study constitutional law. He came to my office and expressed interest in some of my ideas, some of my writings, and at the end of that meeting I was so impressed by his inquisitiveness, his curiosity, how well-read he was, how thoughtful he was, that I asked him then and there to be my research assistant.
During the campaign, some asked if being labeled an intellectual would hurt Barack Obama. It didn’t. So perhaps he’ll feel energized to revive the ‘never-entirely-logical’ post of White House intellectual in residence.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
