' And he named other
similar virtues, 'Well,' I asked him, 'What is his defect?' 'Oh,'
he replied, 'the only trouble with Warren is that he lacks
mentality.'"
The story, like most stories, exaggerates. The President has the
average man's virtues of common sense and conscientiousness with
rather more than the average man's political skill and the average
man's industry or lack of industry. His mentality is not lacking;
it is undisciplined, especially in its higher ranges, by hard
effort. There is a certain softness about him mentally. It is not
an accident that his favorite companions are the least intellectual
members of that house of average intelligence, the Senate. They
remind him of the mental surroundings of Marion, the pleasant but
unstimulating mental atmosphere of the Marion Club, with its
successful small town business men, its local storekeepers, its
banker whose mental horizon is bounded by Marion County, the value
of whose farm lands for mortgages he knows to a penny, the lumber
dealer whose eye rests on the forests of Kentucky and West
Virginia.
The President has never felt the sharpening of competition. He was
a local pundit because he was the editor. He was the editor because
he owned the Republican paper of Marion. There was no effective
rival. No strong intelligence challenged his and made him fight for
his place.
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