Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 413

The portrait that had developed, fragmentarily but consistently, was the portrait of a man to whom serious thinking is alien enough that the making of a decision inhibits, when it does not forestall, any ability to review the decision in the light of new evidence.

This does not mean that the decision to run for office should inevitably have been revoked.

Instead it means that the thinking in which decision issues has the power to determine the morality of the decision, as in this instance the pressure for renewed practical or legislative attention to the constitutional problems the decision had uncovered might have done.

Drifting through a third illness, apparently without any provision for the handling of a major national emergency other than a talk with the vice-president, Eisenhower revealed the singularly static quality of his thinking.

Despite three warnings, no sense of moral urgency impelled him to distinguish his situation, and thus his responsibilities, from Wilson's.