On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

Neither Xerxes nor Artabanus, therefore, would have passed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test, from 1936, for a first-rate intelligence: “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”21 Fitzgerald may have intended nothing more than a reproach to himself. His writing career had stalled by then, and four years later he would die, of alcoholism, heart disease, and an obscurity made all the more painful by his earlier fame. He was only forty-four.22 But the cryptic capaciousness of his aphorism, like Berlin’s on foxes and hedgehogs, has made it immortal. The Delphic oracle would have been envious.23 One possible meaning for Fitzgerald’s opposites could be taking the best from contradictory approaches while rejecting the worst: precisely the compromise that Xerxes and Artabanus failed to reach twenty-four centuries earlier. How, though, might you do that? It’s easy to see how two minds can reach opposite conclusions, but can opposites coexist peacefully within one? They certainly didn’t in Fitzgerald’s, whose life was as tortured as Tolstoy’s, and half the length.