In the early winter months of 1970, a group of Columbia University professors gathered at a salon near the school’s Morningside Heights campus. The dinner topic was the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917.
Among guests at the table was a top Columbia Sovietoligist who insisted that the Marxist coup could have been forestalled had Russia’s provisional leader at the time, Alexander Kerensky, ordered his troops to fire at or above the mob approaching St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace that fateful day. Vladimir Lenin, the professor claimed, had ordered the masses to retreat if concerted fire erupted.
A fierce argument ensued, and as the assembled intellectuals squabbled, an unknown elderly guest at a corner of the table simply shook his head. Kerensky couldn’t have commanded the troops to fire, he later explained, because their rifles had been left unloaded at Kerensky’s direction. (RELATED: WILLIAM O’REILLY: The GOP’s 2024 Presidential Field Needs To Be Cleared. It Should Begin With Ron DeSantis)
The Sovietolgist, fit to be tied, lit into the man: I’ve been studying the Russian Revolution for decades, he sputtered, and have never heard such a thing. How could you possibly know those rifle barrels were empty?!
Because I am Alexander Kerensky, the man replied, and he was. (Kerensky died in New York months later at age 89.)
I share this story because a. It’s a great one, and any opportunity to recount it is worth taking, and b. it’s a dramatic reminder, albeit an obscure one, of the value of elders as debate is rekindled over limiting the maximum age for members of Congress.
The age limit discussion, spurred by unfortunate recent episodes involving Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and California Senator Diane Feinstein, will go nowhere of course. A Constitutional Amendment would be required and that’s not happening. But the sentiment behind it goes far beyond McConnell and Feinstein.
Where we once cherished the wisdom of our elders in this country, more and more we’re laying blame on them for our problems, real or manufactured. Often they’re dismissed in a word: Okay, Boomer. Translation: nothing you have to say matters because you’re from an earlier, unenlightened generation.
The hard political left, centered squarely in academia, has been at this for years, targeting “old white men” especially as the root of all wickedness. Even death doesn’t protect the condemned. Portraits of “dead white men” have been systematically removed from centers of liberal government across the nation in recent years, including New York’s City Hall, in a diabolical effort to diminish our nation’s small “c” conservative roots and unleash some imagined Utopian era. Talk about sophomoric.
There’s a reason our founders set a minimum age for federal office holders. They understood the passions of youth and wisely sought to limit them in government. We should be grateful for their prescience. Who among us would prefer to be governed by a 20-year-old than a 60-year old? Who among us doesn’t seek out an old steady hand for perspective and advice in a time of crisis?
If voters want to reduce the average age in Congress, they’d be better off demanding portable 401-k-type retirement plans for members of Congress, a column for another time.
In the meantime, I beg your indulgence for one last anecdote: In April 2010, I found myself sitting next to an elderly stranger on a train into New York’s Grand Central Station. The Apple iPad had just been released, and thanks to a generous boss, I was in possession of one. The woman, an octogenarian, was fascinated by the device, and I spent 45 minutes showing it off to her as if she were a second grader: “This. Is. What. They. Call. A. Mouse.”
It wasn’t until we reached the tunnel at Grand Central that I was able to ask about her background. She was one of the inventors of DOS.
If you’re too young to know what DOS is, look it up. We don’t have time to explain everything to you.
William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican strategist from New York.
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