What are the characteristics of a good politician? Judging by the caliber of many current aspirants for public office, it’s a question we rarely bother to ask anymore, preferring instead to shrug and say, Who cares so long as the politician can win elections?
We ought to care, or so argued Stimson Bullitt in To Be a Politician, a quirky, forgotten book first published during the Eisenhower administration and reprinted in 1977, in the aftermath of Watergate. The son of a wealthy, well-connected Seattle family, Bullitt lunched with Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park as a teenager, earned a Purple Heart in World War II, and made two failed bids for Congress in the 1950s, running as a Democrat, before settling into a successful career as a lawyer. In other words, Bullitt was no everyman.
Comments