White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Problem of Old Leaders — Churchill’s Sad Last Years in Office

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Old age is a thorny issue. I can attest to that. As someone told my wife about me, “He’s got age on him.” Indubitably.

The problem, as now in the venomously debated case of former president Joe Biden, is how to measure mental deterioration. When do you take away an individual’s right to serve? When do you restrict choice and freedom by the calendar and not by some other measure? Can you oblige the old to pass arbitrary competency tests for everything from driving to running a country?

Part of the answer in the Biden case, and many things, is a vigorous and fearless press. Contrary to the current allegations that Biden’s health decline was hidden by the press, nothing was hidden except by those close to him.

Anyone who watched Biden on television or heard him speak knew he was having problems. Months before the last election, I wrote a column about it. And so did others. Nothing was hidden from anyone except the full severity of the decline, which might have been buried by Biden’s family and his White House staff.

Supposing they had felt strongly that the 46th president should step aside, how would that have been managed if Biden had refused their entreaties? How do we know what his wife, Jill, said to him privately? Biden had reason to go on to protect his son, Hunter, who was the victim of considerable political animus.

Most of all, Biden probably wanted to finish what he saw as the business he had started: promoting people he felt had been unfairly left out. The symbols of that were Vice President Kamala Harris and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Before Biden ran for president, I chatted with him at a reception by a brain cancer support group in Washington. I had interviewed some of the doctors involved on television, and I went away thinking how likable Biden was and what a pity he was too old to run for president.

But he did run, and the Biden presidency was a success, measured by the economy, peace and optimism about the future. By the end, it might have been running on inertia. Only those close to Biden know how much staff work was done what Biden directed.

Biden wasn’t the only man with trouble at the end of a successful political career. So did a much greater man, a true figure of destiny: Winston Churchill.

As the late historian and philosopher Roger Scruton courageously pointed out, the second Churchill administration was a disaster. The man who stepped into the prime minister’s role in 1951 wasn’t the great statesman who stepped into the same office in 1940, aged 65.

Ten momentous years had taken its toll. This was an old, forgetful man whose constant drinking added to his failing powers.

As he had during the war, he would call the news desk at The Daily Express every night and inquire, “What’s the news?” During his second term as prime minister, it is reported that he was often confused and didn’t seem to know what day it was. But he was Winston Churchill, the man who had saved Britain. And no one, no journalist on The Daily Express, was going to whisper that Churchill was failing.

Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of The Daily Express and close friend and ally of Churchill, did tell the paper’s editor, Bob Edwards, “I’m dying from the legs down and Churchill is dying from the neck up.”

Many problems in Britain weren’t addressed by the prime minister and his government and were to haunt Britain until Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. Foremost among these were a lack of any immigration restrictions for people from the former empire and trade union power allowed to grow unchecked.

The Churchill case is instructive. Had there been an age limit of 65 for prime ministers, as many companies have for their top executives, Churchill wouldn’t have been allowed to assume office when he was so needed in 1940.

Candor from loved ones may be the best defense against senility in leadership. After all, children do take the car keys from old and failing parents, or should.

If you love what you do, is it right for society to force retirement? Noel Coward, the prolific British playwright, actor and director, said, “Work is more fun than fun.” So, apparently, is high office.

The U.S. Is Great Now, Leads Envious World

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Don’t look if you don’t want to, but America is great now. Right now, this week, this day, this hour, this second.

Our economy is the envy of the world. Our mobility, socially and for work, is without equal. Our capacity to foster start-up business is without comparison. Our ability to lure the best talent and the most creative people around the world astounds our competitors.

We are a beacon for the best and smartest the world over.

Our technological abilities are formidable, from space travel to artificial intelligence. If the political class doesn’t fail it, America has a future that suggests wonders yet to come in creativity, in wealth creation, in standard of living, in better health, and in the overall human condition.

AI holds the promise of a new age for humanity, led by America, with greater productivity per worker and the elimination of much dead-end work.

The London-based, global magazine, The Economist, in a paean to this nation, stated in its latest edition: “Over the past three decades America has left the rest of the rich world in the dust. In 1990 it accounted for about two- fifths of the GDP of the G7. Today it makes up half. Output per person is now about 30 percent higher than in Western Europe and Canada, and 60 percent higher than in Japan — gaps that have roughly doubled since 1990.

“Mississippi may be America’s poorest state, but its hard-working residents earn, on average, more than Brits, Canadians or Germans. Lately, China too has gone backwards. Having closed in rapidly on America in the years before the pandemic, its nominal GDP has slipped from about three-quarters of America’s in 2021 to two-thirds today.”

It is possible to believe that we are on the threshold of  a new golden age. Yet we are just ending a political campaign where self-denigration has been a feature. The economic ideas of both candidates, if they become policy and law, threaten to jeopardize our ascent to what Winston Churchill called the “sunlit uplands.”

Kamala Harris has put forward a few ideas which have failed in the past, like protecting specific American industries and fighting the shibboleth of “price-gouging.” Who will she go after? Hotels, airlines, and electric utilities, which buy and sell in the wholesale market, all depend on opportunistic pricing. A free market is by its very nature opportunistic.

Down the line, Harris has sought to fix that which the market will repair by itself. Richard Nixon — wise in so much — tried price controls and failed hopelessly.

Housing is an example of where Harris’ plans to have the government interfere will achieve the opposite result to what she is seeking to do. She would give first-time buyers a down payment. That will most likely push up prices in the overheated housing market. What is needed is more houses, which means local restrictions need to be eased.

Donald Trump’s central economic idea is worthy of the kind of economic thinking favored by African dictators the day after a coup. His tariffs would impose a massive de facto sales tax on all Americans, push up inflation, and wreck the global trading system.

If there are reputable economists who endorse the tariff mania, let us hear from them. Where are they hiding? Even the Trump-friendly think tanks, like The Heritage Foundation, have shied away from this misguided enthusiasm. It is dangerous and if Trump is elected, Congress needs to aggressively restrain it.

Both candidates have laid out economic plans which are risible at some level and aimed to protect their voting blocs. Both, in their way, seek to buy their votes with promises which they either can’t deliver on or which would wreak havoc.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, the 18th-century Scottish jurist, saw doom for democracies when the money faucet is turned on. He said, “A democracy will exist until such time as the public discovers that it can vote itself generous gifts from the public purse.”

One might add, “or if leaders promise it such gifts.”

America is at a high point and can continue to climb if its politicians don’t arrest the ascent.