An Arthur Schlesinger For Our Time

The New York Times has a feature on Philip Zelikow, public policy scholar and historian, former head of the University of Virginia's Miller center for Public Policy, and current advisor to Condoleeza Rice at State. For those of us who are scholars and who grate at the idea of acedemics being distant and tucked away in our Ivory Towers, it is a nice reminder how much government relies on the expertise and specialization of academics. I mention Arthur Schlesinger, the most prominent of the academics in the Kennedy White House who brought sexyback to academics in publis life, but he was also part of a long tradition stretching back most famously to the Brains Trust of Roosevelt and before that to the ideas of the Progressives and extending forward through to Condi Rice. Academics have earned status and even a moderate level of fame as the result of academic publications bringing the ideas that would serve the state -- think George Kennan or more infamously Chester Crocker. It is nice to know that Zelikow is part of this tradition and that he has the ear of someone like Rice, who of course herself was a scholar toiling away at Stanford before receiving the call.