Only once in a generation or so does someone come along who is wise well beyond his years. Wisdom usually waits for wrinkles to set in, and for the battering winds of change to blast him until his hide is well-conditioned for the trials of life. Enter Jon Meacham. At only 51 years of age, he is much too young for the role. And Chattanooga, Tennessee is not well-known as a breeding grounds for brilliant young minds. But it sure delivered when it pushed young Jon out into the world to brighten up the place with charm, with impeccable logic, and with clarity, and them deliver them with sheer brilliance. What a refreshing combination in a television age that seems to be dominated by klutzes, nit wits, and wannabes!

Jon is already a former Executive editor for Random House, a contributing editor to Time, former editor-in-chief of Newsweek, he has written 13 books including a biography of Andrew Jackson for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize at age 40. He holds an endowed chair in political science at Vanderbilt.

OK, that’s the easy stuff. He is now a consultant for MSNBC News where he simply makes all others look and sound like mere children. Anyone who appreciates a gifted news anchor also knows that Brian Williams is among the best, if not the very best, in the business. Brian is also smart enough to wait until all his correspondents have had their say before he turns to Jon Meacham to summarize the day’s events and cast them in their historical perspective. That is when the magic happens.

It matters not the subject, the event, or what others have had to say about them. Jon Meacham reaches into mental places that few others know exist. He looks straight into the camera, without reading from a script or a teleprompter, and in perfectly constructed sentences he tells us about the day’s events. He puts them in historical perspective, compares and contrasts them with other events, and quotes from sources I have never heard of. And then he closes with a stunning philosophical encapsulation.

No professor in my experience ever reached Jon Meacham’s level of entertaining enlightenment with the possible exception of Carl Sagan.