NEAL GABLER
The best and the brightest redux
By Neal Gabler
July 25, 2010
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WHEN AUTHOR David Halberstam wrote his account of what got this nation into Vietnam, he didn’t find that the architects of the war were obtuse or illogical or commie-obsessed or infatuated with American might. Instead, in Halberstam’s now iconic term that became the title of his best-selling book, they were “the best and the brightest’’ — a superior governing class that was the product of America’s best families, its most prestigious prep schools and universities, and most august law firms and investment banks. The irony is that these geniuses turned out to be so dangerously wrong that the very term “best and the brightest’’ became a sarcastic euphemism for a hubris that leads to disaster.
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One might have thought, then, that the “best and the brightest’’ would have been eternally discredited like the war they promulgated. But Barack Obama has such a strange, almost reverential faith in the very sorts of folks Halberstam flayed that the president threatens to lead his administration and the country down the same hubristic path.
Even before John F. Kennedy, these patricians had always hovered around Washington, but Kennedy was the one who collected them with the idea that if Harvard, Yale and Princeton trained the best minds, why not harness them for the national good. It was also, not incidentally, a form of retribution for the Irish Catholic president who, though Harvard-educated, still felt the stings of class hauteur. Now these Brahmins — old aristocrats like Robert Lovett, Averell Harriman, and Dean Acheson and their protégés like William and McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara — were working for him and for America, though, as Halberstam pointed out, “They were men more linked to one another, their schools, their own social class and their own concerns than they were linked to the country,’’ which meant that their sense of the public good was always subordinate to their sense of their own brilliance.
Above all, the best and the brightest believed in their own infallibility. They distrusted politics almost as much as they distrusted the proletariat because politics was about compromise and satisfying ninnies (us) who they felt were much beneath them. They were cold, logical, bloodless, and deeply pragmatic. They considered liberal idealists fools, and emotion a weakness. They knew best, which made them extremely intimidating. They failed because they didn’t think they could possibly be wrong.
In many ways, Obama was a sucker for this kind of coldblooded, upper-crust approach to policy and the elitism that went with it. Half-white, half-black, half-American, half-African, part Kansan, part Hawaiian, middle class and transient, Obama made the primary plaint and question of his book, “Dreams From My Father’’: Where do I belong? That question was posed as one of racial identity, but in the end, whether he fully realized it or not, Obama found himself not in black culture or white culture but in the culture of the best and the brightest. That’s where he belonged. That’s where he seemed to feel most comfortable.
So it is really no surprise that he has packed his administration with what one might call The Best and the Brightest 2.0 — people who are as dispassionate and rational and suspicious of emotion as the president prides himself as being: a bunch of cool, unflappable customers. (The exceptions are Vice President Joe Biden and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.) Like The Best and the Brightest 1.0, these folks — guys like Larry Summers, outgoing budget director Peter Orszag, and Tim Geithner, on the economic side; and William J. Lynn 3d, deputy secretary of defense, and James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, on the foreign side — are Ivy-educated, confident, and implacable realists and rationalists. Like their forebears, they have all the answers, which is why they have been so unaccommodating of other suggestions on the economy, where economists have been pressing them for more stimulus, or on Afghanistan, where the president keeps doubling down his bets.
The difference between 1.0 and 2.0 is that 2.0 are not all Protestant, white males sprung full-blown from the Establishment as 1.0’s fathers and their fathers’ fathers were. Like Obama himself, they are by and large onetime middle-class overachievers who made their way into the Ivy League and then catapulted to the top levels of class and power by being . . . well, the best and the brightest. But in elitism as in religion, no one is more devout than a convert, and these people, again like Obama, all having been blessed by the Ivy League, also embrace Ivy League arrogance and condescension. On this, the Republican critics are right: The administration exudes a sense of superiority.
So what difference does it make if our policy-makers think they are above criticism? As Halberstam shows in “The Best and the Brightest,’’ people who are concerned not with the fundamental rightness of something but with its execution, because the rightness is assumed; people who see what they want to see rather than what is; people who see things in terms of preconceptions rather than of human conduct; people who are incapable of admitting error; people who lack skepticism and the capacity to grow beyond their certainties are the sorts of people who are likely to get us in trouble — whether it is an ever-lengthening war in Afghanistan or ever-deepening economic distress here at home. After all, we’ve been there once before.
Neal Gabler is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
The-statist-quo wrote:
Neil Gabler wrote:
"On this, the Republican critics are right: The administration exudes a sense of superiority.
So what difference does it make if our policy-makers think they are above criticism? . . . people who are incapable of admitting error; people who lack skepticism and the capacity to grow beyond their certainties are the sorts of people who are likely to get us in trouble — whether it is an ever-lengthening war in Afghanistan or ever-deepening economic distress here at home. After all, we’ve been there once before."
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I am surprised that Gabler has drawn parallels between the Kennedy and Obama Administrations. My only quarrel with the best and brightest comparison is the top guy. Although Kennedy and Obama have similar Ivy League pedigrees, Kennedy saw war and diplomacy first hand in the Pacific and the Court of St. James, respectively. Kennedy had life experiences that prepared him for the Presidency. Obama has not had any experiences that prepared him similar to that of Kennedy's.
Couple that along with Gabler's Best and Brightest analysis, the odds are greater Obama's team are " . . . the sorts of people who are likely to get us in trouble". Those are my fears as well, given what has happened in the first year and a half.
7/24/2010 10:59 PM EDT
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BecknBuv wrote:
I think Obama has shown that he can rethink and compromise... it was George W. Bush who couldn't think of one thing he'd change about his tenure.
7/25/2010 8:08 AM EDT
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willyandBuster wrote:
I can't recall a single Obama compromise of any significance where it comes to heeding the wishes of the American People.
Obama is a Progressive and the core belief of Progressivism is that the People are idiots and should be managed by Enlightened Experts-- "The Best And The Brightest"--, whether they like it or not.
7/25/2010 9:16 AM EDT
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yooper2 wrote:
People much smarter than me try to figure out what makes BO tick. In my opinion two things, 1st he is a socialist, 2nd he is a racist.
7/25/2010 9:38 AM EDT
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Richmond12 wrote:
This is the first thing I have read which attempts to explain the president's hubris. No other president that I can recall has ever acted so boldly, in enacting policies with zero support from the GOP and opinion polls showing that the people are opposed as well.
George W. Bush had bipartisan support for everything he did. From tax cuts to military efforts to foreign policy, President Bush always created a bipartisan consensus. Not Obama, who acts too superior to need public or Republican support for anything.
This column begins to explain why.
7/25/2010 9:53 AM EDT
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mistermcfrugal wrote:
Tell you what, let's just throw all of them out on their _ss!
7/25/2010 10:14 AM EDT
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TheSageJohnLocke wrote:
The last paragraph was largely okay but the rest of this is largely bunk!
The author exposes himself as an idiot when he compares Obama's staff to Kennedy's. It's just absurd on its face.
7/25/2010 10:30 AM EDT
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willyandBuster wrote:
One flaw in Gabler's piece is that the "Best and Brightest" did their most destructive mischief by far under Johnson, not Kennedy, so that drawing a parallel between Obama and JFK doesn't really make much sense.
7/25/2010 11:02 AM EDT
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