Wit & Attitude Quote by Lewis B. Hershey

Hershey is making a cold-blooded case for incompetence as a form of safety. The line lands because it flips our usual meritocratic instinct: give me the smart one, we think, even if he has rough edges. Hershey, a career Army officer and longtime head of the Selective Service System, had spent decades inside a bureaucracy where loyalty, procedure, and custody of public trust matter more than brilliance. In that world, a little stupidity can be a guardrail. Honesty, even when paired with dullness, is predictable; crooked intelligence is adaptive, strategic, and therefore dangerous.

The intent is managerial, not philosophical. He is talking like someone who has had to sign off on budgets, classifications, promotions, and draft decisions and knows exactly how a clever bad actor works: he can make theft look like efficiency, favoritism look like policy, and personal gain look like mission. A stupid honest person may waste your time; a smart crooked one can waste your institution.

The subtext is also a warning about how systems actually break. We love to imagine corruption as loud and vulgar. Hershey points to its more lethal form: competence with a private agenda. His punchline, "I can't keep what I've got", is less about greed than stewardship. It frames integrity as the baseline cost of doing business and suggests a grim hierarchy of risks: ignorance can be trained around, but dishonesty weaponizes talent.