Just before Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, I wrote a post about the disappearance of the White House intellectual, a peculiar, semi-official position that John F. Kennedy created for Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and that continued in various forms during the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford presidencies, before being silently eliminated by Jimmy Carter, never to be revived again (at least so far). Of course, while Presidents since Carter have not designated a single “intellectual in residence,” they have certainly involved themselves publicly and privately with intellectuals, both as sources of policy and political ideas, and (in their more public engagements) as Read more