COLUMN ONE : Intellect Is Out in U.S. Politics : Unlike Europeans, Americans prefer pragmatists over philosophers and artists for elective office. But should they?

When Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel toured Washington recently, it was difficult to say what amazed people more: the visible evidence of another great gash in the Iron Curtain, or the spectacle of a nation turning over its highest political office to a playwright.

For a sense of how alien that concept is to the American political tradition, try to imagine Arthur Miller in the White House, or David Mamet. Or Saul Bellow or Tom Wolfe in the U.S. Senate.

Americans may have felt perfectly comfortable installing a former movie actor in the nation’s highest job. But they have historically been far more skeptical about entrusting hard, practical decisions to men and women who spend their lives pondering the ethereal: poets and playwrights, critics and philosophers.

Sam Rayburn, the legendary former Speaker of the House of Representatives, briskly summarized the prevailing attitude toward artists and intellectuals in American politics when he declared of President John F. Kennedy’s Ivy League best and brightest: “They may be just as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a hell of a lot better if just one of them had ever run for county sheriff.”

Havel offered a different perspective in his speech to Congress. It is time, he declared, for intellectuals to climb down from their ivory towers and match their words with deeds.

“If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness,” Havel said, “then it is obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their share of responsibility for the world and hiding their distaste for politics under an alleged need to be independent.”

If not exactly common, such activism is not unheard of in other parts of the world. To a considerable extent, artists and intellectuals led the revolt against Communist rule not only in Czechoslovakia but in all of Eastern Europe.

Closer to home, Venezuela elected novelist Romulo Gallegos as president in 1947. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa hopes to emulate his example in the Peruvian presidential election scheduled for later this year.

For American intellectuals and politicians alike, Havel’s comments to Congress left two questions unanswered. Why are so few artists and serious thinkers part of American politics? And would the nation be a better place if more of them were?

“We certainly couldn’t be worse off,” said historian Russell Jacoby, author of “The Last Intellectuals.”

Not everyone is so sure.

In Europe, Havel stands in the tradition of such artists as pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski, who served as Poland’s prime minister after World War I, and writers Andre Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whose views influenced debate on the most fundamental political and moral questions facing France after World War II.

In this country, by contrast, serious writers probably have less influence on political debate than radio talk-show hosts.

“There is quite a different tradition in Europe in relation to its intellectuals than in the United States,” said playwright Arthur Miller. “We regard fundamentally the writer as an entertainer. He is there in order to divert and amuse us, rather than to act as a moral leader of some sort.”

It was not always so. Many of the Founding Fathers were well-read, graceful writers and earnest amateur philosophers--intellectuals by any definition.

But even the Founding Fathers were the targets of potshots over their fondness for contemplation. In the 1800 presidential race, opponents attacked Thomas Jefferson for being too much of a “theorist” and suggested that, as “a man of letters,” he was unqualified to lead the government.

By the early 19th Century, the suspicion of intellectuals in government had fused with the populist revolt against the dominance of the young nation’s politics by wealthy landowners--not incidentally the people who had the most time to stay abreast of the latest developments in science and literature. Through most of the rest of the century, populist and then business values dominated Washington and pushed intellectuals away from power.

The rise of progressivism at the turn of the 20th Century brought experts back into government to stoke the engines of reform. After a step back in the 1920s, academicians triumphantly returned to Washington as the brain trust for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Since then, presidents of all ideologies have relied on the expertise of intellectuals to manage the increasingly complex affairs of state. From the logicians who plot nuclear strategy to the economists who plot monetary policy, the government could not function without intellectuals as advisers and technicians.

But the public has been far less willing to embrace intellectuals as fit for elective office. What the late historian Richard Hofstadter ornately described 30 years ago as the tradition of “anti-intellectualism in American life”--the populist suspicion of effete, impractical “eggheads”--remains a powerful current in American society today.

“We are a pragmatic society,” said Richard H. Pells, an intellectual historian at the University of Texas at Austin. “We distrust ideas, ideology. We distrust people with visions, we distrust abstractions.”

In 1912, a popular novelist named Winston Churchill--not to be confused with his famous British namesake--sought the governorship of New Hampshire and lost. During the Depression, novelist Upton Sinclair ran for governor on a radical program to End Poverty in California and lost. In 1958, historian James MacGregor Burns ran for Congress from Massachusetts and lost. Four years later, author James A. Michener put down his typewriter long enough to contest a congressional seat in Pennsylvania--unsuccessfully.

Conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr. and liberal novelist Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York during the 1960s with wit and erudition, but without electoral success. Novelist Gore Vidal, who feuded with both Mailer and Buckley over the years, had no more luck than his old antagonists, failing in bids for a New York congressional seat in 1960 and a California Senate nomination 22 years later.

Not all artists have fared so poorly. Acerbic playwright and editor Clare Boothe Luce served two terms in the House in the 1940s--though her marriage to Time magazine publisher Henry R. Luce probably helped her more than her Broadway pedigree.

Republicans think best-selling novelist Tom Clancy might beat the jinx too. Although Clancy might not be exactly the sort of writer Havel had in mind during his speech to Congress, the GOP is trying to recruit him to run against Democratic Rep. Roy Dyson in Maryland.

Generally, the closest thing to intellectuals in American politics have been university professors. Politicians as diverse as former President Woodrow Wilson, and former U.S. Sens. Eugene J. McCarthy and S.I. Hayakawa first learned how to construct alliances and break promises in the rough and tumble of academic politics. Today, about half a dozen of the 100 U.S. senators spent some time in the academic groves, usually before moving on to more profitable pursuits.

In the long view, though, those are nothing more than conspicuous exceptions. Of the roughly 11,000 men and women who have served in Congress, only about 250 had careers as professors, according to an analysis by the historian’s office of the House of Representatives. And some of those became academics only after they left Washington.

By contrast, there are that many lawyers in today’s Congress alone. “People whose main profession is the law have made up, on the average, 40% to 50% of the Congress for two centuries,” said Raymond Smock, the House historian.

Though academics have had more political success than writers, they often face the same hurdle--persuading the electorate that their experience has equipped them to govern.

When Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) left his post as an economics professor at Texas A&M; to seek a congressional seat in 1978, he quickly found that a career in academia was not something to advertise on a campaign billboard. One of his opponents constantly called him “professor,” Gramm recalled, “as if it was demeaning.”

Gramm minimized the damage with a folksy good-ol’-boy demeanor that he carries to this day. But in fact, like others from the academic world, he found the transition to politics a difficult one.

“You don’t necessarily possess the skills that are important in being elected,” Gramm said. “The campaigning was difficult for me because I felt I was sort of intruding on people by rushing up to shake their hands.”

For other intellectuals on the campaign trail, the greatest obstacle may be the opposite of shyness: saying whatever comes to mind. Boston University President John R. Silber, now seeking the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Massachusetts, is only the latest academic candidate in danger of being buried by his own words.

In just a few weeks of campaigning, Silber has accused Jews of “phenomenal” racism, called the state “a welfare magnet for immigrants” and lamented over “a collapse in the gene pool in Massachusetts because 17.5% of our kids are weird.” He has similarly offended two other important voter groups, state employees and educators.

“Silber’s case seems to me a classic in some respects,” said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of the Political Report, a Washington newsletter. “Academics take great pride in encouraging debate . . . , and sometimes that leads them to say some outlandish things. Politicians can’t afford to do that. Politicians can’t afford to say things that are on the surface unusual, bizarre, a gamble.”

That rule is not inviolable. It is probably no coincidence that three members of Congress who produce some of the institution’s boldest proposals--ideas that upset the traditional political order--spent long periods in academia: Gramm, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who taught European history at West Georgia College, and, most vividly of all, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who taught sociology and urban affairs at Harvard.

To Gramm, legislators from an academic background simply approach the job differently from lawyer-legislators. For academics, he said: “No matter what your discipline is . . . , you have some basic theorems and, at least in an abstract sense, you are looking for truth.”

Lawyers have no such pretensions, Gramm said.

“The legal background is one where there is no black and white, and it is all a matter of negotiation and compromise,” he said.

Would the country be better off then with more intellectuals and even artists among its political leaders? Burns, the historian who sought a congressional seat three decades ago, thinks so. “There should be a much stronger mix of people who do take the long view,” he said.

Intellectuals, added Miller, “are as corruptible as anybody else. But an appreciable number of them do feel their mission is to advance the cause of truth--and a politician, more likely than not, may have that in the far reaches of his mind, but not in the center.”

If more artists sought political office, Gingrich contended, it might “infuse more reality into the arts and more idealism into politics.”

But, as in all intellectual debates, there are plenty of dissenters.

Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative editor of Commentary magazine, belligerently maintains that “with very rare exceptions, writers and intellectuals have tended to be a destructive force in political life. . . . In the West, the intellectual class for the last 100 years . . . has been animated by a strong dislike of the foundations of Western society.”

From the other end of the ideological spectrum, Irving Howe, the leftist literary critic and editor of the political journal Dissent, doubts that “writers have any greater claim to moral insight when it comes to politics than any other person.”

Not many writers in this country are likely to get the opportunity to challenge that proposition.

Havel emerged from unusual historical circumstances in a nation suddenly struggling to form new political institutions--not unlike the U.S. Founding Fathers. As one State Department official observed, artists in Eastern Europe were virtually compelled to become voices of dissent during the years of Communist repression, while traditional forms of political leadership in Eastern Europe were silenced.

Partly because artists do not bear that responsibility in the United States, few political analysts expect an American equivalent of Havel to emerge anytime soon.

“These tend to be episodic things,” Moynihan said. “In the main, government is a pedestrian enterprise. . . . It only rarely reaches the level of being creative. And it’s at those moments of great national awakening that a man like Havel comes to his role: as the prophetic voice of the artist.

“But those are intervals in human history. . . . And in the main, it is getting the highways paved and collecting enough money to service the debt and trying to do something about air toxics.”

Nor are the thinkers Havel exhorted rushing to offer themselves to the nation. Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, now a professor of government at Georgetown University, said elected office offers “very little time for creative thinking about policy.” Many academics agree.

As for writers, Vidal said “it would never occur to them” to seek political influence. “The artists have been totally trivialized in American culture since the beginning.”

Even in the new societies of Eastern Europe, artists may not retain their role as other segments of society regain their political voice.

“I can’t imagine the fifth president of Czechoslovakia will be a playwright,” Moynihan said. “I think it is more likely to be a lawyer.”

Researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.