Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
The Great Nixon as the Great Gatsby If Mr. Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, were alive today, he would be making heavy weather of it. Whensoever he motored through the valley of ashes...
...A president can disregard the courts and The Alternative October 1973 3 hoodwink the Congress...
...Lionel Trilling saw Gatsby as "America itself...
...And they were doomed because the world will yield only so much to cleverness, audacity, and obsessive self-interest...
...Any congressman or senator with a shred of experience and decency understood...
...9 In France reformers had their day when they pressured the Superior Council of the Magistrature to relieve judge Maurice Rosseau of his curial functions...
...Even Washington demands a little prudence, a touch of forbearance, a whiff of principle...
...The point is that in our complex and technological civilization, intelligence as defined above is the most scarce and vital commodity necessary to perpetuate and improve our way of life...
...Johnson and Kennedy dabbled a bit with IRS investigations and technological wizardry, and--when one of their colleagues was caught flagrante delicto--a discrete cover-up was applied...
...9 Mr...
...and the type of job one holds--with the most talented individuals in the professions and the lowest in unskilled labor...
...Whether these particular qualities are more worthy of emphasis in some ultimate sense than any others is both irrelevant and unanswerable (although a good historical case can be made that these three qualities of intelligence have made the most significant contributions in man's efforts to deal with his environment...
...Such enormities could not be countenanced, and they should not have been...
...Indeed, without such a context, the word "intelligence" ceases to have any real meaning...
...Accordingly, I.Q...
...Richard Herrnstein and In September, 1971, The Atlantic published an article by Professor Richard Herrnstein of Harvard University, entitled "I.Q...
...in a popular rather than an academic journal...
...touched on one of the most emotional and potentially explosive issues in contemporary American public discourse...
...When I watch the parade of sobered assistant presidents filing before Senator Ervin's committee, and when I listen to their melange of lies, revelation, and gas, I am reminded of Nick Carraway's declaration to Gatsby: "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together...
...and on several occasions he was prevented from speaking at meetings where he attempted to explain his conclusions to students...
...But this increasingly popular position misses the point...
...First, he notes t h a t there is a direct correlation between the level of I.Q...
...Their scrofulous scheming did him in...
...Today, the Great Nixon sits in his vast white mansion enveloped in desolation...
...Conversely, studies of sets of foster children raised in the same homes showed only a 24 percent correlation in intelligence...
...Dale Anderson (a Democrat) has been indicted...
...tests...
...The conceptions of power, of politics, of virtue, and of majesty remain the balmy notions of the hinds who are braying at his door...
...He can hide from the media, defraud conservatives, and sucker liberals...
...While only an expert in regression analysis can comment on the validity of the 80 percent figure, it is clear from this data t h a t heredity is a very significant factor indeed...
...The controversy over the nature of human intelligence stretches from the Social Darwinists of the nineteenth century to the environmentalists and behaviorists who have held the field in our own era...
...Not when they tried to steamro}l the realities of Washington and not when their values were even blowzier than the values that presently prevail there...
...Norman and treating him roughly, they carried off the foundation's supply of novelties, sexual accoutrements, and rare books...
...Had he settled for being a competent administrator and a bourgeois gentilhomme, his future would have been assured...
...leaflets and petitions floated about demanding his dismissal and the banning of his "racist" teachings...
...Rosseau had refused to allow a trouser-clad woman to testify in his court, and on an earlier occasion he established dubious precedent by refusing a couple named "Trognon" to adopt a child because he thought their name "ridiculous...
...All for the furtherance of a dream...
...within the average set of twins...
...and second, what are the implications of that knowledge for public policy...
...They were doomed I suspect because one cannot pursue dreams that bulldoze sensible values---certainly not if those dreams are preposterous...
...Many agree with Harvard psychologist Jeremy Kagan, who argues t h a t I.Q...
...The heir to Gatsby has broken up against realities that proved too resistant even for the fires of his dream...
...Nixon could go so far and no further...
...Senator Proxmire met with writers from the Washington Post to defend that $2,758 hair transplant that he had tried to pass off as a tax deduction, and the founder and head of the militant poverty organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization, Mr...
...His service to it was slavish and fundamental...
...Second, Herrnstein treats the issue of whether heredity or environment is the most significant factor in determining I.Q...
...The first question, of course, immediately raises the issue of what one means by intelligence in the first place...
...Intelligence, they say, is undefinable, and attempting to measure it leads only to pernicious and invalid distinctions...
...It follows that the results of such tests can be very significant indeed...
...It forever provoked him to stalk advantages and opportunities...
...But, like Gatsby, Nixon was the man who dared to dream of all of it at once...
...Whensoever he motored through the valley of ashes thither into Manhattan, stones would bounce off his roadster, photographers would assault him, and the scriveners of news would jam their microphones into his face...
...And in the background, an emotional and unenlightening debate proceeded on the substance of the article itself...
...The reaction to "I.Q" was swift and predictable...
...In short, in our society economic success is highly correlated with intelligence as measured by I.Q...
...And the skulduggery that was the work of that mob of rogues and con artists that he allowed to swarm through his mansion is the kind of "tough politics" that has romped in the imaginations of the Republic's adolescent politicoes for years...
...So perhaps like Gatsby, Mr...
...It is unfortunate that any discussion of this topic must take place in such a context, because Herrnstein's article raises serious questions which deserve the most dispassionate and reflective consideration possible...
...His faith in himself and in his dream just did not provide enough puissance to overcome Washington's open jaws, subtle conventionalities of which he never seemed sufficiently aware...
...Tragedy struck in Detroit where the fifteenyear-old guru and multimillionaire, Maharaj Ji, was assaulted by a maniac wielding a cream-filled pie...
...He became intoxicated by his new position and sacrificed his judgment...
...Charles Osborne, 79, complains that though he has seen ninety-six doctors, he is still at the mercy of continued hiccups, an affliction he has suffered for fifty-one years...
...Within that context, one can safely generalize t h a t in western civilization, intelligence involves logical ability, the ability to deal with abstracts, and facility of communication...
...The Hon...
...Perhaps had he been a famous general, a father to his people, a man able to draw on emotional currents other than reverence towards Lincoln's office, he might have triumphed...
...But I,BJ and JFK never graduated to anything as extensive and as purely political as "dirty tricks" and the rest of the mysterious argot of the Nixonian Era...
...What Scott Fitzgerald said of the Great Gatsby is said today of the Great Nixon...
...Nixon should have been treated better, though he does not deserve it...
...It is known t h a t intelligence levels correlate highly between parents and their children, but this fails to separate the influences of heritability and environment...
...In time a madness settled on his house...
...The Vice-President denied any wrongdoing, and thus far no dirt has appeared, though his successor as chief executive of Baltimore County, Mr...
...Johnson's cronies were uncomplicated boodlers for the most part, and the Kennedys merely absconded with the Department of Justice...
...using serpents in their worship of the Deity, and in Dallas, Texas, an unruly mob of police stormed the apartment of Mr...
...Charles Winstead, the FBI agent who shot Mr...
...In reaching too far Nixon, like Gatsby, committed the characteristic blunder of the parvenu...
...In a certain abstract sense, this is true...
...The rootless pragmatism of Nixon was also in control of Gatsby...
...Plotting arcanely under his great roof day and night, they brought a kind of efficiency and vengefulness to national politics that had been hitherto unknown even in Gary, Indiana...
...Everything has fallen to pieces, and the dream he pursued so resolutely and energetically still dances beyond his grasp, taunting him brazenly...
...For example, a study of 122 sets of identical twins, separated from birth and raised in vastly different environments, revealed an 85 percent correlation in IQ...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Intelligence, like freedom, is not an abstract concept---it is firmly rooted in society and culture, and is no less valid or useful because of that...
...Vincenzo Malagoni, finally killed him...
...Herrnstein cited data to indicate that human intelligence depended about 80 percent on hereditary influences and about 20 percent on environmental ones, and argued t h a t as social and physical environmental factors became more equal, the influence of heredity on intelligence would become even more pronounced...
...But, alas, he never had the magic, and everything his Bright Boys did to spruce him up only left him looking ridiculous...
...Still others, especially junior faculty, thought Herrnstein deserved everything he got...
...The conception was old stuff...
...9 A mysterious contretemps involving Maryland politicoes, construction companies, and financiers reached into the office of the Vice-President, prompting him to break White House custom and hold a press conference...
...No matter how much optimism they invested in them, they were doomed...
...For Gatsby, the man who "paid a high price for living too long with a single dream," is an identical precursor to Richard M. Nixon, our own great Gatsby...
...California's Senator Tunney has announced that for one week, two dolicontinued on page 31) It is true that all of the elements of Nixon's dream did not spring full-blown from his own imagination...
...Many of Herrnstein's colleagues protested this treatment as a violation of academic freedom...
...It was eerie...
...Nixon visited wfth the heads of the governments of Japan and of Australia, and elections were held in the Philippines and in Greece...
...Perkins was a wise judge of fiction and I have no doubt were he alive today he would apply the same description to Watergate...
...Herrnstein was immediately branded a careless scholar and/or a racist by the legions who found his ideas either wrong or merely unpalata b l e At Harvard, he became for a time the special target of the leaders of the new wave: his classes were picketed and his lectures heckled...
...Others agreed in part, but criticized the professor for publishing "I.Q...
...Fainthearted mothers would call their children indoors as he drove by...
...He seems to have been a competent administrator, but that was not enough...
...Forest fires threatened in Utah, Oregon, and Montana, and the National Science Foundation awarded Harvard $75,000 to discover why water appears to put out fires...
...It has been his undoing...
...And all for what...
...It was ever meant to be...
...It demanded surrounding himself with that fabulous mob of hollow frauds...
...But Nixon's crowd captured the entire executive branch and the Republican Party, and then they began shaking down the nation's great business corporations along with a few unions and assorted lobbyists...
...Gatsby, who always held himself aloof from the congeries of slobs who swarmed through his mansion, was eventually destroyed by them, by the powers he set in motion while pursuing his dream, and by the conventionalities of his betters...
...Accordingly, he concluded, one could expect t h a t as society moved closer to becoming a meritocracy, social stratification would become more, not less, rigid---or in short, t h a t "greater wealth, health, freedom, fairness and educational opportunity are not going to give us the egalitarian society of our philosophical heritage...
...All these things have been practiced in Washington for years, but never simultaneously...
...The two most important are these: first, what do we know about the nature of human intelligence...
...John Paul Norman, 45, the impresario of a national homosexual prostitution ring, the Odyssey Foundation...
...Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban patriot...
...He had a fabulous dream, wafting of money, power, and glory...
...So too is Nixon...
...John Dillinger, died as did Mr...
...George Wiley, perished when he fell from his yacht off Chesapeake Beach, Maryland...
...And his critics would have it no other way, for they were all driven by the American lust for the lurid and the calamitous: Nixon, his assistant presidents, the meathead senators, the media magnificoes...
...It is these results t h a t Herrnstein attempts to deal with...
...Nixon hired bureaucratic psychopaths and sharpsters...
...After arresting Mr...
...9 From Italy comes word that the toothache which was killing Mr...
...All this, of course, is neither new nor the Nature of Intelligence surprising...
...tests merely measure the degree of one's socialization into middle-class, white American values...
...And their trashy values eventually concealed the vestiges of splendor that remained in their dreams...
...Though many members of the press were characteristically garrulous and ill-mannered (prompting some commentators to demand that all traffic in spiritous refreshment cease twenty-four hours before scheduled press conferences) the press conference was surprisingly civilized, leaving both sides with a newlyfound respect for their opposition...
...Nixon has held his last party...
...But he wanted to be a masterpiece, a Kennedy snatched from martyrdom, and that was asking too much...
...Particularly today, when it has become popular in many circles to insist that social and economic distinctions are "wrong," any suggestion that such distinctions may reflect differences in ability rather than discrimination will be met with a stream of impassioned and self-righteous rhetoric, prominently featuring the word "racism...
...Malagoni, after an unendurable wait in his dentist's office, leaped through a third story window and passed away...
...They have both been in "the service of a vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty...
...Accordingly, Herrnstein goes on to cite the work of Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, among others, who discovered evidence indicating t h a t intelligence depends about 80 percent on genetic factors...
...His aides were the oddest fish ever to enter the White Ho~se...
...Within limits, these qualities can be measured...
...9 Back in Anthon, Iowa, Mr...
...tests are significant not as indicators of the basic "worth" of any individual, but rather as measures of a person's ability to think in the ways most valued by our civilization...
...Maxwell Perkins described Gatsby's gorgeous fling as a "pathetic episode" conveying "a sense of eternity...
...Roosevelt hired a brain trust...
...Quite simply, "IQ...
...No one can say absolutely t h a t "intelligence is 'x', and we can measure it precisely with test 'y...
...If this is true, are there differences in (continued on page 29) 4 The Alternative October 1973...
Vol. 7 • October 1973 • No. 1
