Fred Greenstein, 88, and Nancy Wilson, 81, A goodbye

This is probably the only place you will ever read those two names together, but both were important to me, so indulge me.

Fred Greenstein was a political scientist who, in the Fifties, studied the attitudes of New Haven school children toward political authority.  He found that kids in the lower grades sometimes confused the President with god.  While they soon outgrew this, the idea that the President was more than mortal stayed with them.  When Kennedy was assassinated, people couldn’t sleep, felt bereft, were disoriented in a way that would not be the case if a U.S. Senator had died.

Greenstein, who wrote about the “benevolent leader,” was later criticized by political scientists who said he had only studied white middle-class students, and Latino and black students had a totally different view of authority, which they called the “malevolent leader.”  That doesn’t change his findings.

Greenstein later chaired the Political Science Department at Princeton.   His research compared presidential leadership, and his study of Eisenhower raised Ike’s standing among presidents, a conclusion I agree with.  Eisenhower was somewhat plodding, careful, and dull.  Kennedy was dashing and impulsive.  It was the difference between the D-Day invasion and the Bay of Pigs.

Now Nancy Wilson.  She was a “jazz singer,” but so much more.  I think I have every album she ever recorded.  I bought or was given–I can’t remember– a poster of her that I got at a record store in Lehighton [yes, there was a time when Lehighton had a record store] that I had above my bed when I was in grad school at Penn State.  I loved Nancy Wilson.

Linda and I saw her at a concert at Lehigh University.  She had lost much of the richness of her voice at that point, but she was still wonderful.  I continue to play her albums.  A part of who I am is gone.