Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Learning the wrong lessons from David Halberstam
[Benjamin Wallace-Wells is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone.]
Washington in the early days of a new administration is a didactic, lesson-drawing place, but even so, it has been striking to see how quickly the commentary on the death of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and architect of the Vietnam war, has turned to abstraction--as if it was not one exceptionally smart man being buried, but a certain kind of smarts itself. "What happened ... to Robert McNamara teaches a lesson to all those who talk of governments of all the talents," editorialized The Times of London. "Vietnam shattered the rationalist's faith," concluded David Ignatius in The Washington Post.
This theme looked particularly ripe for exploration because the Obama administration seems to echo the old Kennedy sensibility--ambitious, technocratic, self-consciously modern. McNamara, wrote Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal , "will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. ... These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase 'the best and the brightest' has been scrubbed of its intended irony."
There's the nub of it--The Best and the Brightest. This skepticism about an excess of brains in government has persisted so long in large part due to the vividness of David Halberstam's study of the McNamara cohort. His book played into two of the animating political fears of the late twentieth century: liberal worry about the cold rationalism of foreign policy hawks; and conservative panic that the country's soul was being seduced away by clever young men on the coasts. And so, Halberstam's title has come to serve as political shorthand for a nervousness, on both the left and right, about governance by technocrat--a fear that braininess carries the built-in risk of failures the size of Vietnam.
But Halberstam's conclusions are both more complex and more elegant than that. The "whiz kids" of the Kennedy era were the book's most vivid creation, cocksure and empirical; but their pathologies were not the war's only authors, or even its primary ones. In fact, the disaster of Vietnam, in Halberstam's full telling, was the consequence not of too much faith in technocratic expertise, but, rather, of too little.
Toward the end of his career, Halberstam became dedicated to a pretty staid brand of national nostalgia (Summer of '49, The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship), so it is a little arresting to detect, in this early book, the marks of a bracingly liberal sensibility. One of the earliest episodes that Halberstam chooses to include, chronologically, has little directly to do with Vietnam: It is the McCarthy-era purging of the State Department's Far Eastern desk in the 1950s.
Red hunters believed that the bright young men of that station--who had been (rightly) skeptical of Chiang Kai-shek and certain that the communists would take China--were ideologically compromised, and they paid with their careers. During the Vietnam crisis, Halberstam finds the best of them, John Paton Davies, nearly a decade out of government and trying to run a furniture factory in Peru. Had these experts not been persecuted, Halberstam writes, they would likely have been shaping Asia policy at the State Department during the Vietnam period, and "might have been able to provide that rarest of contributions in government: real expertise at a high operational level."
The other engine of Vietnam policy was the Pentagon, which was in the grips of an ideological fury. "Anti-Communism was the textbook of their life," Halberstam writes of senior military officials. It was the generals who pushed successive escalations, and Kennedy's "own White House staff which had to fight to limit the military." None of the generals had much political feel for Asia. Early in the conflict, while briefing Kennedy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer, gestured to a spot on a map and identified it as the Mekong Valley. Lemnitzer was pointing at the Yangtze...
Read entire article at The New Republic
Washington in the early days of a new administration is a didactic, lesson-drawing place, but even so, it has been striking to see how quickly the commentary on the death of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and architect of the Vietnam war, has turned to abstraction--as if it was not one exceptionally smart man being buried, but a certain kind of smarts itself. "What happened ... to Robert McNamara teaches a lesson to all those who talk of governments of all the talents," editorialized The Times of London. "Vietnam shattered the rationalist's faith," concluded David Ignatius in The Washington Post.
This theme looked particularly ripe for exploration because the Obama administration seems to echo the old Kennedy sensibility--ambitious, technocratic, self-consciously modern. McNamara, wrote Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal , "will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. ... These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase 'the best and the brightest' has been scrubbed of its intended irony."
There's the nub of it--The Best and the Brightest. This skepticism about an excess of brains in government has persisted so long in large part due to the vividness of David Halberstam's study of the McNamara cohort. His book played into two of the animating political fears of the late twentieth century: liberal worry about the cold rationalism of foreign policy hawks; and conservative panic that the country's soul was being seduced away by clever young men on the coasts. And so, Halberstam's title has come to serve as political shorthand for a nervousness, on both the left and right, about governance by technocrat--a fear that braininess carries the built-in risk of failures the size of Vietnam.
But Halberstam's conclusions are both more complex and more elegant than that. The "whiz kids" of the Kennedy era were the book's most vivid creation, cocksure and empirical; but their pathologies were not the war's only authors, or even its primary ones. In fact, the disaster of Vietnam, in Halberstam's full telling, was the consequence not of too much faith in technocratic expertise, but, rather, of too little.
Toward the end of his career, Halberstam became dedicated to a pretty staid brand of national nostalgia (Summer of '49, The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship), so it is a little arresting to detect, in this early book, the marks of a bracingly liberal sensibility. One of the earliest episodes that Halberstam chooses to include, chronologically, has little directly to do with Vietnam: It is the McCarthy-era purging of the State Department's Far Eastern desk in the 1950s.
Red hunters believed that the bright young men of that station--who had been (rightly) skeptical of Chiang Kai-shek and certain that the communists would take China--were ideologically compromised, and they paid with their careers. During the Vietnam crisis, Halberstam finds the best of them, John Paton Davies, nearly a decade out of government and trying to run a furniture factory in Peru. Had these experts not been persecuted, Halberstam writes, they would likely have been shaping Asia policy at the State Department during the Vietnam period, and "might have been able to provide that rarest of contributions in government: real expertise at a high operational level."
The other engine of Vietnam policy was the Pentagon, which was in the grips of an ideological fury. "Anti-Communism was the textbook of their life," Halberstam writes of senior military officials. It was the generals who pushed successive escalations, and Kennedy's "own White House staff which had to fight to limit the military." None of the generals had much political feel for Asia. Early in the conflict, while briefing Kennedy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer, gestured to a spot on a map and identified it as the Mekong Valley. Lemnitzer was pointing at the Yangtze...