Not long ago I was right about something. I knew it for an absolute fact, an indisputable certainty. It was a rare moment. Like most people, I am almost always wrong about whatever the business at hand may be, and for an instant it was exhilarating to sense that I was the only person in a room full of people who was absolutely right.
In fact, it was not a moment for exultation. It was a moment of extreme peril. There are few things more dangerous to social or political success than being right. Persons who are truly lucky never find themselves suffering from this affliction. One of the most successful politicians in recent times has been wrong on absolutely everything for the past twenty-five years and has been regularly rewarded with reelection by vast majorities.
This is not surprising. Most people are wrong most of the time. It is the human condition. Their hearts go out to a man who is so thoroughly one of them that his only superiority consists in an ability to be wrong even more consistently than they. “Good old Bill!” they say. “He’s my kind of guy.”
By contrast, there used to be a man in the United States Senate who was right about everything. In ten years of watching him perform, I never saw an occasion on which he was not utterly, breathtakingly right. He clearly saw distant dangers to the country and how they could be avoided. He knew precisely what was ailing the economy and how it could be healed. He even knew what was wrong with the Senate and forcefully explained how it could be corrected. What’s more, he never flinched from giving the Senate an irrefutable argument illustrating how right he was.
Time and time again, this poor, afflicted wretch saw his small efforts to improve man’s lot gleefully voted down by majorities of ninety to one. It is a hard fate to be right. It is a curse to be right and not be able to keep it a secret.
The more clever politicians are very good about handling themselves when right, as they occasionally are. They sense that to be right is to be in danger, to court dislike and possibly unemployment. They handle their rightness like herpetologists nursing a king cobra, all too aware that we who are wrong strike with sharp fangs unless carefully jollied.
In business and social life, the person who is unashamedly right is an intolerable lout to be disposed of by transfer to the Samoan branch office or struck from the guest list as a boor. In politics, he is often punished by dis-election.
Politicians have met this problem with characteristic elasticity. Their trick is to avoid being right at the wrong time. One of the most fatal judgments one politician can deliver against another is: “He was right too soon.”
Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were “right too soon” when they cast the only two Senate votes against Lyndon Johnson’s full-scale entry into the Vietnam war. The fact that great numbers of politicians eventually found the war to be disastrous did not much reduce the feeling among Washington types that people who came out against it “too soon” were, if not wrong, at least too insensitive to the nuances of timing about rightness to be fully skilled in the governmental art.
Everett Dirksen stated the politician’s philosophy of being right when he finally switched his position on civil rights and declared, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that fair treatment for black people was “an idea whose time has come.”
This is another way of saying that it is wrong to be right until the multitudes are so busy being wrong about something else—the Vietnam war, in this case—that they no longer much care.
It isn’t particularly surprising that we don’t want politicians being right soon enough about a-borning disasters to save us from the worst. Nor is it surprising that politicians oblige us.
The thing I was absolutely right about not long ago was the population of the United States in 1920. Everybody else in the room was wrong by at least 10 million people. I could have pulled down the almanac and proved that I was the only soul there who knew what he was talking about and sent them away feeling stupid. I didn’t. There were people there whose guest lists I didn’t want to be stricken from. Later, one or two will get the population figure right, but I shall not remind them that I had it right all along. I don’t want to be stigmatized as one of those kooks who are always right too soon.