A reader writes:
Rudy enrolled at
From "Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani" by Wayne Barrett on page 34:
"After seven semesters at Bishop Loughlin, Rudy's grade average of 84.8 earned him a ranking of 130, putting him in the class's second quintile. His report cards for those years show columns of mostly B's and C's, a few A's and one D. He scored a 65 in chemistry, a 74 in Latin and a 92 in American history. His combined College Board scores, 569 in verbal and 504 in math, were twenty-seven points shy of 1100, and quite ordinary."
Wayne Barrett is a writer at the Village Voice and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, if you want to check with the source.
Here's his academic history: "He attended
In comparison, George W. Bush scored 1206 and Al Gore 1330 on the SAT. All these scores are under the tougher pre-1995 scoring system. Add 70 or 80 points to get the equivalent under the current scores. Does anybody know what John McCain scored to get into
It's striking that more than a few men considered Presidential Timber wouldn't have gotten a callback if they had applied to join, say, the Navy SEALs. It's not that a fairly high IQ is so utterly crucial to being a good SEAL, but it does improve the odds. There are many men who want to be SEALs, and plenty of them have reasonably high IQs, so it's no-brainer for the Navy to weigh IQ in the mix of qualifications.
Being Presdient, in contrast, does not generally require the physical ability to infiltrate an enemy harbor and silently kill sentries, so one might expect that IQ would be even more important in the Chief Executive job than in being a scuba commando.
Certainly, "intangibles" can make up for a modest IQ in a President, but are we so sure we are good at evaluating the intangibles of politicians? How good a job did we do with George W. Bush? And he wasn't some nobody from nowhere. He was the son of a President. Many important people had met him during the twelve years his father had held the two highest offices in the land, and few had thought him a worthy successor. We knew that his own parents considered him inferior to his own brother Jeb. And yet, the Republican Establishment got behind him in 1999, drinking Karl Rove's Kool-Aid that his intangibles would somehow make up for Bush's tangible deficiencies.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer