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.
Showing posts with label David Halberstam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Halberstam. Show all posts
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Smart People, Dumb Choices
As an antidote to Bush fatuity, we now have the thinking man’s explanation for supporting the war and getting it totally wrong.
A former Harvard professor now a member of the Canadian parliament, Michael Ignatieff writes in the New York Times Magazine today:
“The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us...What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror...
“I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds...I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying...”
Ignatieff is more than a bit glib, but shrewd on the differences between academics and politicians: “Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.”
But Ignatieff is too easy on himself. Going back to David Halberstam’s dissection of the intellectuals who misled JFK into Vietnam, the ironically titled “The Best and the Brightest,” it has become fashionable to dismiss thinking in favor of instinct in matters of war and peace, life and death. We need both, and we need them in people who admit human fallibility and still have the courage to make the best decisions they can.
Informed emotion may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s our best hope.
A former Harvard professor now a member of the Canadian parliament, Michael Ignatieff writes in the New York Times Magazine today:
“The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us...What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror...
“I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds...I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying...”
Ignatieff is more than a bit glib, but shrewd on the differences between academics and politicians: “Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.”
But Ignatieff is too easy on himself. Going back to David Halberstam’s dissection of the intellectuals who misled JFK into Vietnam, the ironically titled “The Best and the Brightest,” it has become fashionable to dismiss thinking in favor of instinct in matters of war and peace, life and death. We need both, and we need them in people who admit human fallibility and still have the courage to make the best decisions they can.
Informed emotion may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s our best hope.
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