Elmer's Brother

The Sound of One Hand Clapping from the Opinion Journal's Best of the Web
Our item yesterday on John Kerry*, his military records and his Yale transcript prompted this criticism from a reader:

Your failure to acknowledge that John Kerry's Navy records contained praise from (future) members of the Swift Boats outfit demonstrates your lack of integrity and your fundamental dishonesty. You are a shill. Congratulations.

"The Swift Boats outfit," of course, is the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and sure enough, yesterday's Boston Globe did say this:

The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service. . . . An earlier release of the full record might have helped his campaign because it contains a number of reports lauding his service.

OK, so we goofed. We should have noted this yesterday. The reason we didn't is that we remembered reading in the paper that the Swift Boat guys were a bunch of liars, so we assumed their praise was not to be trusted.

Now that their credibility has been re-established, let's check in on what they're saying about the release of Kerry's records. Blogger Matt Margolis has the following comment (scroll down to "Update III") from Swift Boat honcho John O'Neill:

We called for Kerry to execute a form which would permit anyone to examine his full and unexpulgated [sic] military records at the Navy Department and the National Personnel Records Center. Instead he executed a form permitting his hometown paper to obtain the records currently at the Navy Department. The Navy Department previously indicated its records did not include various materials. This is hardly what we called for.

If he did execute a complete release of all records we could then answer questions such as (1) Did he ever receive orders to Cambodia or file any report of such a mission (whether at Christmas or otherwise); (2) What was his discharge status between 1970 and 1978 (when he received a discharge) and was it affected by his meetings in 1970 and 1971 with the North Vietnamese? (3) why did he receive much later citations for medals purportedly signed by Secretary Lehman who said he did not know of them; (4) Are there Hostile Fire and Personnel Injured by Hostile Fire Reports for Kerry's Dec. 1968 Purple Heart (when the officer in charge of the boat Admiral Schacte, the treating Surgeon Louis Letson, and Kerry's Division Commander deny there was hostile fire causing a scratch) awarded three months later under unknown circumstances.

Remember, O'Neill heads a group whose members praised Kerry, so he can hardly be dismissed as an anti-Kerry partisan.

* No, actually the asterisk isn't part of his name.

When It Raines, It Pours
The revelation of John Kerry's averageness prompted several readers to remind us of an article that appeared last Aug. 27 in both the Washington Post and London's Guardian. The author was Howell Raines, the former New York Times executive editor; the topic was John Kerry's superior intelligence, and we noted it at the time. The key passage:

Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I'm sure the candidates' SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead.

Maybe Raines was being sarcastic ("Oh yeah, I'm sure!"), but we don't think so. Also, several readers took issue with our contention that Woodrow Wilson was the last egghead to win the White House. As Kevin Shapiro writes:

Arguably, the last egghead to win the White House was actually Bill Clinton, who's rumored to have taught law at the University of Arkansas between his failed congressional bid in 1974 and his election as Arkansas attorney general in 1976. At any rate, Clinton is by most accounts considered a very bright fellow--albeit one with numerous character flaws.

We didn't mean to disparage Clinton's intellect, which by all accounts is formidable. But we would not characterize him as an "egghead"--i.e., an intellectual or highbrow. Despite his brief stint as a professor, he has spent almost his entire career in politics, and there's no denying his regular-guy appeal.

A better candidate for the title of egghead president is Herbert Hoover, who before entering government worked as a mining engineer and who, according to the Hoover Presidential Library, "regarded himself as a scientifically trained professional":

Prior to his presidency and throughout his mining career, he wrote for numerous professional publications; by 1914, he had written more than 30 signed articles. His early interest was almost a "personal trademark: the subject of working costs and efficiency in mining." In 1909, Herbert Hoover published his Principles of Mining, which was based on lectures delivered earlier that year at Stanford University and the Columbia School of Mines. According to Dr. Nash, "Principles of Mining firmly solidified Hoover's reputation not just as a successful mining engineer, but as a scholar and professional as well. Recognized as a classic, it became a popular textbook for engineering students and did not go out of print until 1967."

So one way of looking at Kerry is that he aspired to be the next Herbert Hoover, but didn't quite make it. In today's Boston Globe, one pro-Kerry egghead, Robert Kuttner, offers a theory as to why: because he "came up just one state short in 2004, perhaps due to deliberately contrived long lines that held down Democratic turnout in Ohio."

This just goes to show that book learning doesn't necessarily prepare you to deal with the real world. Long lines mean high turnout. If Kerry lost a state with long lines, that would be because so many people in those lines voted against him.