With Smoot-Hawley, I'd Have Had Less Success

Preaching to the St. John's middle school this morning, I asked the students a question and said, "Anyone?... Anyone?...Anyone?" Then I announced a digression (their favorite part of any preachment) and said, "Who knows what movie that's from?"

About a dozen raised their hands. "'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'," a boy said.

And who says it? Eight raised their hands. "The teacher," a girl said.

And who plays the teacher? A teacher raised her hand. "Ben Stein," she said.

And what president did Ben Stein and I both used to work for? That, they all deduced. Then I came home and spotted this Stein post about his White House years.

La Casa Pacifica

The lovely peroration of Ben Stein's 100th anniversary Nixon library talk about Pat Nixon:

Richard Nixon said in his autobiography, "I was born in a house my father built." The whole Western world now lives in a house of peace -- moment by moment -- that Richard and Pat Nixon -- the woman in the "respectable Republican cloth coat" -- built.

"In my father's house there are many mansions," says the carpenter. The most beautiful is the house of peace. God bless Richard and Pat Nixon.

Hat tip to Nick Thimmesch

You Can Always Count On The Nixon Guy

Ben Stein sticks up for Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Put Not All Your China In Cabinets

Ben Stein, who wrote speeches for Presidents Nixon and Ford, reflects on the Cabinet meetings he attended early in 38's term:

The Ford cabinet experience was educational. The men and women in the room, high-ranking White House officials and secretaries of cabinet departments, were pleasant and well briefed. But they struck me as similar to small-town Rotary Club members or Junior Chamber of Commerce officials — polite and cordial, but far from rocket scientists. They were just high-average to B+ status, with the exception of some supersmart types like Henry Kissinger....

The Obama people could be wonderful, smart people, an order of magnitude above what I saw at the Ford cabinet meetings. Obviously, many people believe that they are.

But they are just human beings, albeit in some cases human beings with glowing résumés. I do not see the supermen and superwomen. They do not have the gift of foresight. They have never been in a situation like this, at least not exactly. There is simply no good reason to believe they will get it right except by trial and error, turning the tumblers until the safe eventually opens. The problems we face now are so large that they humble the average and the above average and even the very much above average.

High-level bureaucrats, like high-level professors or doctors or investment bankers or baseball pitchers, are just people, whether serving with Bush 43 or Barack Obama or anyone else. I can vividly recall leaving those long-ago cabinet meetings and saying to myself as I walked across West Executive Avenue, “Put not your trust in princes.” It’s a proverb for a good reason — then, now, and always.