Thoughts on a career in politics
While still in high school, I read a book by Pete Carril, who for 29 years coached a series of exceptionally disciplined basketball teams at Princeton University, in which he recounted a lesson from his childhood. “In this life,” Carril’s father would tell him and his sister every morning, “the big, strong guys are taking from the smaller, weaker guys but … the smart take from the strong.” I hoped to succeed in politics, and when I arrived at Harvard I planned to do so by heeding Carril’s lesson and educating myself. I enrolled in courses in history and political science, attended talks on public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and wrote book reviews for the HPR.
But I soon learned that I had misdirected my focus. The core skill of government work, I discovered, is not the ability to craft a winning argument, whether in the classroom or on the op-ed page, but the ability to master the process that decides who wins. This is why skilled lobbyists command such high salaries. It is also how individuals with limited knowledge of public policy, from movie stars to sports greats, can succeed in elected office by commanding public support. It explains why Oliver Wendell Holmes’ description of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a “second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” is a toast to Roosevelt’s penchant for using the political system to his advantage, rather than a cheap shot.
Having revised my sense of how to succeed in politics, however, I found myself uncomfortable with the thought of becoming a politician. In college, we are encouraged to search for truth. Finding the best policy seemed fun, as did building reasoned arguments for why it was the best; pushing the levers and making the compromises necessary for enacting the policy seemed less so. I found that others had similar thoughts, including the subject of my senior history thesis, Elliot Richardson. When Richardson first considered the possibility of government service, he asked former Sen. Leverett Saltonstall (R-Mass.) if he could work on policy rather than politics. “It’s all politics,” Saltonstall responded.
But in Richardson’s life, I learned, the same insight on the nature of politics proved liberating, for it opened up new challenges, those of “managing, reconciling, mollifying, neutralizing, fending off, and avoiding a host of competing and conflicting interests.… No other occupation subjects its practitioners to such a constant flow of difficult, demanding, and sometimes painful choices.” This is what Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) means when he refers to the Senate as a “chemical place.” Mastering that chemistry, the intricate balance among process, principle, and personality, without sacrificing one’s sense of self is a task that, Richardson wrote near the end of his life, “more than fully engage[s] the highest level of ability.”
That ability, which Isaiah Berlin called the ability to “understand a particular situation in its full uniqueness,” may make a difference not only in the back-and-forth of crafting legislation but also in a crisis. Certainly the qualities that we associate with scholarly intelligence — asking questions, probing presumptions, grasping nuance — can make a key difference, as they did in John F. Kennedy’s performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But so did Kennedy’s skill in prodding members of his team to contemplate alternatives and his willingness to empathize with Khrushchev’s position as he pondered his next move. In a pivotal moment, temperament mattered as much as intellect.
My adjustment to the fact that politics tends not to be an arena for the concentrated thought that I have learned to prize took some time. But while I still wonder whether a career in politics is right for me, I no longer doubt that it can provide a fascination of its own, as invigorating as it is important. And there is something inspiring about the fact that Barack Obama won office not only because his ideas were persuasive but because millions of Americans, inspired by his example of grassroots change, hit the road and knocked on doors. “There’s nothing wrong with ‘politics,’” former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill would say, “and [people] should be proud to say it.”