Ben Stein
Author & New York Times Columnist

In the late summer and early fall of 1974, President Gerald R. Ford invited me to a small number of cabinet meetings on subjects connected with speeches I was writing. My former boss, Richard M. Nixon, had generally not invited speechwriters to his cabinet meetings, and I was certainly not invited to them, though I became quite close to Mr. Nixon in later years.

The Ford cabinet experience was educational. The men and women in the room, high-ranking White House officials and secretaries of cabinet departments, were pleasant and well briefed. But they struck me as similar to small-town Rotary Club members or Junior Chamber of Commerce officials — polite and cordial, but far from rocket scientists. They were just high-average to B+ status, with the exception of some supersmart types like Henry Kissinger.

I have similar recollections of many of my colleagues in the Nixon White House. Some were just blowhards of no special ability. They did not know the answers to the deep questions in America and the world. They were just people.

This lesson is in my mind as we contemplate the end of eight years of the George W. Bush administration and the beginning of the Barack Obama administration.

People with great résumés got us into this incredibly dicey pickle about credit. But when compared with the scope of the crisis, they were ordinary. The credit issue is complex, and there is plenty of blame to go around. But while some foresighted people had inklings of danger, the exact total magnitude of the liabilities associated with low-grade credit instruments was not known, as far as I am aware, to anyone.

Hence, by the time the size of the iceberg became apparent, the Titanic was hard put to stop.

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