He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hope and Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics, and reported the following:
The presence of intellectuals in American political life has elicited strong, frequently opposing reactions, including those indicated by this book’s title: hope and scorn. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—one of the most visible intellectuals of the 1960s—called forth both.Learn more about Hope and Scorn at the University of Chicago Press website.
Page 99 finds Schlesinger weeks into the role for which he was perhaps best known: special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. Schlesinger’s portfolio included Latin American affairs, and he believed the new administration could reset perceptions of United States policy in the region. While maintaining the strong anticommunism characteristic of both Kennedy and Schlesinger in the years before this moment in 1961, the administration could also signal that it was not merely the state apparatus of American business. This tack was the course of Cold War liberalism for which Schlesinger was a notable navigator. On page 99, however, he and Kennedy are headed for the shoals.
Planning for a US-supported landing in Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro had passed from the Eisenhower administration to the incoming Kennedy one. Though skeptical about the prospects for the operation’s success and its secrecy, Schlesinger was nevertheless responsible for drafting a public statement of the administration’s position on Cuba in the run-up to what would become the Bay of Pigs invasion. “Rather than using intellectual capacities to craft good policy,” page 99 reads, Schlesinger “was in the position of using those capacities to legitimate bad policy.”
Schlesinger communicated his concerns about the operation to the president. At a planning meeting after which he was assigned to draft the public statement, however, Schlesinger felt cowed. While defense officials spoke of concrete military assets, Schlesinger—a writer, historian, and college teacher—had such intangible considerations to raise as the international standing and reputation of the United States. Instead of doing so, he remained quiet.
This episode points to questions that are central to Hope and Scorn: not only what intellectuals do in public life and how people respond to their presence but also what sort of presence—in particular contexts and at specific moments—they are. The planning meeting where Schlesinger “shrank into a chair at the far end of the table,” as he later recalled, was not simply a run-in between an “egghead” intellectual and military brass; it was an encounter between two kinds of intellectual. The military planners were technical experts—they spoke a specialized and, by virtue of that, authoritative language of tides, timetables, and take-offs from secret airfields. Schlesinger, by contrast, was a generalist and a humanistic one at that. The points he had to make were less quantifiable, less practical and therefore, Schlesinger felt, less forceful. They might have sounded like a line from Joe Biden’s recent victory speech: the United States leads by the power of its example rather than the example of its power. And Schlesinger thought the Cuban operation likely to set a very bad example, squandering the diplomatic opening possible in these early days of the Kennedy presidency. In that Cold War moment, however, around that policymaking table, the intellectual-as-defense-expert was so towering a figure that the intellectual-as-generalist did not merely lose the debate; he was incapable of entering it. Given the relish and effectiveness with which Schlesinger participated in ideological battles from the presidency of the second Roosevelt to that of the second Bush, it is a noteworthy silence.
As I look upon it now, page 99 of Hope and Scorn furnishes the browser with an indication, though incomplete, of themes that appear throughout the book. It does less well, perhaps, at giving the browser a sense of why the chapter that includes page 99 is titled “The Moralist and the Mandarin.” The latter was a label applied to Schlesinger by one of his critics later in the 60s: Noam Chomsky. Schlesinger in turn called Chomsky a moralist. Each had in mind with these titles a version of intellectuals’ political role worthy of scorn or at least criticism. Each pointed beyond these labels to a vision of the intellectual that could, instead, be a source of hope or at least help in public life—and which they themselves implicitly represented.
--Marshal Zeringue
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