A couple of days before the collaring of 19-year-old Colton Harris-Moore — the so-called “Barefoot Bandit” who had an affinity for operating shoeless while stealing cars, boats and planes to further his alleged crime career — his mother told news reporters that her son is a genius, with an intelligence quotient “just three points lower than [Albert] Einstein’s.”
That would put his IQ at 157, making him possibly the smartest jailbird in the Bahamas at the moment, for, alas, that’s where young Einstein resides these days after Bahamian police arrested him following a bullet-punctuated high-speed boat chase nearly a week ago.
Harris-Moore’s arrest marked the end of his two-year life on the lam, which began when he escaped from a Washington state halfway house in 2008. He subsequently eluded authorities in an alleged crime spree that stretched from the West Coast to Indiana, where he stole an airplane which he flew more than 1,000 miles to the Bahamas, despite having had no formal flight training. He crash-landed the plane on Great Abaco Island, where he was blamed for at least seven break-ins, according to The Associated Press.
A week later, the engine of his stolen speedboat having been shot out by police, the genius was bagged and tagged, much to the disappointment of his thousands of squirrelly fans to whom he had become a cult hero for his ability to evade arrest.
Back home, a doting mother publicly defended her son, suggesting that the charges against him were exaggerated. She did not explain how the kid’s track record, including his final spectacular 1,000-mile run for the roses that ended in a chase scene worthy of Hollywood, could be much blown out of proportion, try as one might.
The mother’s claim of genius status for her son got me to wondering how many other geniuses might be running around loose doing dumb things with their IQs of 140 and up — the generally accepted cutoff point between those endowed with transcendent mental superiority, and the rest of us, hereinafter referred to as dummies.
The website www.kids-iq-tests.com carries a listing of famous people and their IQs. Some of the celebrities are dead and some are alive and still acting like the class know-it-all who drove most of us nuts back in the day.
The list comes with a disclaimer acknowledging that the site receives a lot of e-mail questioning the validity of the IQ scores, especially for people who lived long before the first intelligence test was developed. Like Beethoven, who came in at 165, five points higher than Einstein. Or Leonardo da Vinci, a serious egghead, at a mind-numbing 220. The estimated scores come from “The Calculated IQ Estimates For 301 Historic Geniuses,” which was published by psychologist Catherine Cox Miles.
Of the 18 U.S. presidents listed, from George Washington (118) to George W. Bush (125), the five picks of the litter, geniuswise, include John Quincy Adams, 175; Thomas Jefferson, 160; Jimmy Carter, 156; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at 147, two points smarter than Napoleon; and Richard Nixon, who met his Waterloo while sporting an IQ of 143, two points dumber than the late French emperor.
The rest of the group ranges from near-geniuses John Adams and Bill Clinton, at 137, to George H.W. Bush, 98, and Ronald Reagan, 105. Harry Truman is rated at 132; Ulysses S. Grant, 130; Lyndon Johnson 126; Andrew Jackson, 123; Eisenhower, 122; Ford, 121; JFK, 119. For comparison purposes, wannabe president Hillary Clinton comes in as a bare-minimum genius, at 140.
The moral of the story in the numbers would seem to be that although an impressively high IQ may temporarily be an asset in the barefoot bandit racket, in the presidential business — as in just about every walk of life — it is, by itself, no guarantee of greatness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
The genius of that proposition is that if the opposed ideas have to do with walking and chewing gum simultaneously most of us come off looking pretty good, even though our IQs may be closer to our hat size than to Einstein’s 160 benchmark.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him bye-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.