“…for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings.”
—Anthony Bourdain, from Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
I’ve been listening to this week’s Vicious Circle; I’m not all the way through it yet, but fairly early on, the gang was suggesting that Woodrow Wilson may have been America’s most intelligent president.
My reaction to that is: what about Herbert Hoover? If anyone thinks about Hoover today, it’s mostly as a figure of fun (“Hoobert Heever“, anyone?). But consider Hoover’s resume. He was a professional mining engineer, who graduated from Stanford with a geology degree. After marrying his wife, Lou, and having two kids, he moved the family to China and worked as a mining engineer there; in the process, Lou and Herbert learned Mandarin Chinese. (According to the Wikipedia entry on Hoover, Lou and Herbert spoke Chinese in the White House when they wanted to avoid eavesdropping.)
Later on, Herbert and Lou (as I understand it, Lou herself had an extensive classical background; I did not know she was a classmate of Herbert’s in the Stanford geology program when they met) did the first English translation of Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica. Agricola’s book was a massive tome about mining techniques in the 16th century: it was originally written in Latin, but contained a lot of obsolete technical mining terms of the time. The translation of Agricola’s book frustrated a lot of smart people, but Herbert and Lou pulled it off. (And you can still get Hoover’s translation
The Depression colors many people’s view of Hoover, perhaps unfairly. But compare Hoover to Wilson; Wilson had doctoral degrees in history and law, and earned those as part of his master plan to go into “public service”. Hoover didn’t earn a doctorate, as far as I can tell (he may have been awarded honorary doctorates later in life), but he did important and pioneering work in a somewhat esoteric technical field before making a career for himself in politics (and that, it seems, mostly by accident).
And while I’m not a big fan of Jimmy Carter, I have to give him credit; the man served on nuclear submarines under Admiral Rickover. From what I’ve heard, stupid people didn’t last long in Rickover’s Navy.
(This is similar to my argument about George W. Bush. I’m not a blind fan of the man, or of a lot of things his administration did, but when you want to talk about him being stupid…he flew F-102s with the National Guard. Stupid people generally don’t fly fighter jets very long; they usually end up evenly distributing themselves and the airframe over a small patch of land somewhere.)
