Death of the Best and Brightest

Robert S. McNamara, who died today at 93, was the exemplar of American know-how gone awry in a world too complicated for the practical mindset that built the most powerful nation on earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As one of JFK's "whiz kids" who went on to become LBJ's architect of the disastrous war in Vietnam, McNamara exemplified the limits of intellectual brilliance in a subtle and savage world.

"What went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese,” he said, looking back in an oral history. “It led President Eisenhower in 1954 to say that if Vietnam were lost, or if Laos and Vietnam were lost, the dominoes would fall...

"I am certain we exaggerated the threat. Had we never intervened, I now doubt that the dominoes would have fallen; I doubt that all of Asia would have fallen under communist control...

“We didn’t know our opposition. We didn’t understand the Chinese, we didn’t understand the Vietnamese, particularly the North Vietnamese. So the first lesson is know your opponents.”

A Harvard professor who left to become president of Ford after the financial devastation of his wife's illness, McNamara successfully brought his systems-analysis approach to running the Pentagon but became the main figure described in David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest," Kennedy's crew of academic and industry brainiacs who pushed "brilliant policies that defied common sense" in Vietnam.

In later years, McNamara rued his role. "External military force cannot reconstruct a failed state, and Vietnam, during much of that period, was a failed state politically," he told CNN in a 1996 interview. "We didn't recognize it as such."

The lessons of his life are a critical reminder for the Obama Administration of the hubris that can blindside brilliance without accompanying insight into the realities of human behavior. Robert S. McNamara learned them too late, but they can help guide American policy today.

Obama: Balancing Heart and Mind

At his press conference Friday, the President-Elect said he was rereading Lincoln for "inspiration," but he may also want to take another look at David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest."

Like JFK, Barack Obama values brains, but Halberstam's book might inspire him to be wary of the hubris that can blindside academic brilliance without accompanying insight into the realities of human behavior, as it did with Kennedy's overachievers who went on to bring down LBJ with their tunnel vision of the Vietnam war.

Obama has shown the self-awareness and empathy--some call it "emotional intelligence"--needed for leadership but, in overturning all the clichés about "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," the real test will come in creating and managing a government with all those qualities.

"The second most remarkable thing about his election," Nicholas Kristof writes, "is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual...

"Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse—a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance—doesn’t get very far either."

But, Kristof adds, "It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas."

The 1972 look back at Vietnam took its scathing "Best and Brightest" title from Kennedy's so-called "whiz kids," thinkers from industry and academia such as Robert McNamara and the Bundy brothers, whom Halberstam characterized as arrogantly insisting on "brilliant policies that defied common sense" in the Vietnam quagmire.

(For his pains, a new report shows Halberstam was closely tracked by the FBI for two decades, another sign that too much thinking of any kind is suspect in American politics.)

Obama's Illinois predecessor, Adlai Stevenson, who lost the presidency twice half a century ago being labeled an unworldly "egghead," observed, “The hardest thing about any campaign is how to win without proving you’re unworthy of winning.”

The President-Elect has cleared that hurdle and now faces the higher leap into governing with a winning balance of heart and mind.