Who Is it? Rooney

Rooney Lee, son "Ol' Marse" Robert E. Lee; papa was, of course, the commander  of the Confederate Army and the iconic arch-saint in the mythology of the Old South.  The description comes from the iconic New Englander Henry Adams, as quoted in what may be the best book ever written about the Southern ethos: W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South at 102.    Adams and the young Lee were at Harvard together from 1854 to 1858.  Cash draws Adams' description from Adams' autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.   Ellipses re in Cash's quotation:

Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginia openness toward all he liked he [Lee] had also the Virginian habit of command. … For a year, at least … was the most popular and prominent man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command was not enough, and the Virginian had little else.  He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground
 … Strictly, the Southerner has no mind;  he  had temperament.  He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two.

Cash remarks that Lee and his Southern classmates "had behind them two hundred years of shaping in the pattern and [] are  to be taken, as Adams infers, as the typical flower of the Old South at its highest and best."  Cash sums up:

From first to last, and whether he was a Virginian or a nouveau, he did not (typically speaking) think; he felt and, discharging his feelings immediately, he developed no need or desire for  intellectual culture in its own right--none, at least, powerful enough to drive him past his taboos to its actual achievement. 

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Who is the COS?

The Chief of Staff is Denis Richard McDonough who came to the job earlier this year via the foreign policy apparatus and former Senator Tom Daschle.  He is said to be noteworthy for his loyalty, and for the fact that he once played football on a team called the Johnnies.   Back to main post.