Teaching Common Sense. Henry Kissinger

quickly turns into a public relations disaster for the White House. “Even this hardened, jaded, seen-everything media community was . . . shocked by . . . Administration Press Spokesman [Knoop’s] expletive at this morning’s press conference,” a Washington Post editorial comments. “The question must be asked: is this the image [the president] wants to present to America’s public?”

      “Perhaps it’s time for a Press Spokeswoman,” tweets Foxes & Hedgehogs, a moderate political news outlet.

      Calling for a congressional hearing, the Republican House majority leader tells conservative news agency Justice Now that Knoop’s behavior “is just ineptitude, left and right, back and forth, diagonally.”

      Even German tabloid Bild-Zeitung joins in: “Oh Scheisse: ‘Aw crap’ crosses the Atlantic!” The newspaper continues: “Let the Americans pay for the c*** they deposited on our doorstep in Ukraine and Georgia. Why should Germany pay for the fallout from another act of aggressive American policy?”

      The president’s intentionally light calendar seems to be shredding.

      But none of this is real.

      It’s part of an elaborate crisis simulation run by Yale University’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. The Oval Office is a second-floor classroom in Linsly- Chittenden Hall (LC), a nineteenth-century Romanesque Revival brownstone, on High Street in New Haven, Connecticut. The president and vice president, both women, were elected by their classmates a couple of weeks earlier. Other students have been appointed to play cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, White House aides, or bloggers. What happens next depends on the professors and staff sitting around a scuffed oak table in the “control room”—another LC classroom—and a stack of handwritten cards laying out various fictional disasters.

      Sometimes the note-card scenarios have closely paralleled subsequent actual events.

      The two-day crisis simulation caps the Grand Strategy program’s (GS) yearlong, admission-by-invitation, interdisciplinary course—a class in four acts that includes a spring semester spent mastering great books on statecraft and diplomacy; a summer experience that’s supposed to be an “odyssey” in the Patrick Leigh Fermor tradition;² and a fall semester featuring military-inspired “murder boards,” more delicately known as “Marshall Briefs” after soldier-statesman George C. Marshall’s demand for brevity on some of contemporary society’s most urgent issues. The year also includes a full schedule of extracurricular lectures, workshops, and off-the-record dinners with government officials, journalists, authors, poets, ambassadors, and other dignitaries—usually including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

      GS was established in 2000 by Professors John Lewis Gaddis, Yale’s Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History and founding director of the program; Paul M. Kennedy, the university’s J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of British History and founding director of Yale’s International Security Studies Program (ISS); and Charles Hill, a “practitioner” professor who distinguished himself as a career Foreign Service officer before coming to Yale to teach full time. At a cost of $1.4 million annually,³ the program is expensive. It’s also an attention grabber. Two years before he joined its faculty as a practitioner professor in 2013, New York Times columnist David Brooks described the seminar as “the best course in America.”⁴ The class has been the subject of articles and blog posts in the Wall Street Journal, the Nation, and the New Republic. Most significantly GS attracted the notice of Nicholas F. Brady (Yale, ’52) and Charles Johnson (Yale, ’54), who endowed the program in 2006.

      Brady, the longtime senior partner at a leading Wall Street investment banking firm, US senator, and treasury secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, is best known for the Brady Plan, which resolved the 1980s international debt crisis. He went on to found Darby Overseas Investments, a pioneer in emerging markets private equity investment. Johnson is the retired chairman of Franklin Resources, a money management company that he led for nearly fifty years. One of the largest single-gift donors in Yale’s history—for the construction of its two new colleges⁵—Johnson also underwrote renovations in Yale’s athletic facilities and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, which supports research in the Kissinger papers at Yale. The two men believe that the Grand Strategy course fills a void in American higher education. “Colleges are turning out hothouse flowers,” Brady said. “These overstudied, underexposed students need a course in common sense.”⁶ As he wrote in a monograph on common sense (defined as “sound, practical judgment in everyday matters”) it’s “a key ingredient in the best leadership.”⁷ “If you don’t teach leadership and people aren’t exposed to it,” Johnson added, “they don’t even know what they missed.”⁸

      Kissinger saw a similar gap. “I think one of the empty spaces in our country . . . is the study of strategic issues,” he commented. “We lack [the] preparation of a young leadership group . . . That is, how you assemble the issues that are relevant to national decision making and develop a habit of thought that you get to automatically. The American tendency is to wait for a problem to arise and then to overwhelm it with resources or with some pragmatic answers. But what you need is a framework of decisions that helps you understand where you’re trying to go.”⁹

      Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill, each of whom is now a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, built GS in response to Kissinger’s observation that “the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.”¹⁰ Unlike the performance-driven approach that’s the subject of most motivational business books, their leadership model is character driven. “Education used to prepare people to think about the biggest and most complex questions of the human condition,” Hill said. “That preparation was through literature and philosophy and classical texts, not through political science or psychology. You got psychology much better from great books than from the psychology professor who was working on a tiny corner of something.”¹¹ The GS faculty anticipated, by more than a decade, higher education critic William Deresiewicz’s complaint that what prestigious universities “mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.”¹² Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus in Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It, echo the thought: “To our mind, leadership refers to a willingness and ability to rouse people to a party, a purpose, a cause,” they write. “We’re not convinced that what happens in classrooms or on campuses nurtures leaders more than other settings—than, for example, back roads of the Mississippi Delta or lettuce fields in California.”¹³

      A GS applicant’s 4.0 grade point average, by itself, doesn’t impress the professors. “We consider those people more drones than leaders,” a former GS administrator said. Neither do enticements. One student application was personally delivered with an expensive box of chocolates, and another applicant’s parents offered a “substantial” donation in exchange for their child’s acceptance into the program.¹⁴ Both efforts had the opposite effect. The selection committee aims to identify young people with eclectic backgrounds and a capacity for resilience