“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.
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