“We need a leader; we need a leader,”
the professor from Yale pleaded. Who
am I, a product of middle western,
public (and in full disclosure — some

parochial) education to say, “We need
a leader.”? But even the Ivy League,
the best and the brightest, say, “We
need a leader.” Oh, wait, wasn’t it Ken-

nedy’s “best and brightest,” who got us
into the quagmire of Vietnam when the                    
quagmired French told us, “Don’t do it.                          
You need a leader.”? And Kennedy listen-

ed and then took a bullet (I was just 
turning the corner from Halsted onto 
144th Street that dark day in 1963.)
near a knoll in Dallas and the hayseed

from a Texas teacher’s college was
sworn in on an airplane and listened to
“the best and the brightest” instead of
himself and the protesters shouted, “We

need a leader,” and their voices echo
today, when in forty-some days we will
have a leader — educated at a state
university, a public school of American

higher education — educated as a
leader in the great and wonderful way
we (thanks to the 2020 Presidential
election) still have today — in the

democratic republic. But in all honesty,
the Ivy League does sometimes gets
it right, like the time Harvard beat Yale
at something when no one was watching.