For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I'll use as my starting-point something that Black says on page 460.
"Nixon
moved on to Saigon and conducted his usual extensive private tour. He
was appalled at the views of his former running mate, [Henry Cabot]
Lodge, who had bought into the groupthink of the academics and theorists
around Kennedy and now Johnson, immortalized in David Halberstein's
description 'the Best and the Brightest.' It was about these people,
when Johnson effused to the late Sam Rayburn about how intelligent they
were, that Rayburn said, 'I hope you're right, but I just wish one of
them had ever run for county sheriff.' The word from Johnson's
inherited entourage at this point was that the war in Vietnam could be
won with social spending, acts of goodwill, and encouragements to
democracy. An inexpressible, unbelievable tragedy, on a new, hideously
magnified scale was about to spring, whole, from its Indochinese cradle
and be unleashed upon the world."
I first heard about "the Best
and the Brightest" when I was working at a library. One of the workers
there, an older gentleman and a long-time right-winger, told me about
the concept as it pertained to the Kennedy Administration. The library
was having a book sale, and one of the books on the sale-truck was
Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, which is about the
Kennedy Presidency. I was asking my co-worker if he wanted the
Schlesinger book, and he scoffed. He told me that Schlesinger was one
of those "Best and the Brightest" who was around Kennedy. "They thought
they were such experts," he told me. "What you or I thought would be
of no account to the upper echelon, but these Best and the Brightest
were considered so wise."
There is a strong part of me that is
anti-intellectual elite. I can't deny that. And it's a bipartisan
sentiment. For example, I can scoff at the Best and the Brightest
around Kennedy and Johnson, who thought that they were so smart yet had
ideas about the Vietnam War that did not seem to work. Right-wingers
may scoff at how these Best and the Brightest believed that a
humanitarian approach to Vietnam would have ameliorated the war and
brought Vietnam along the yellow-brick road to democracy. But one could
easily scoff at right-wing intellectuals, as well. The neocons in the
Bush Administration were smart, well-educated people. Some of them, if
I'm not mistaken, were called vulcans. And yet, did their "get tough"
strategy on the Middle East actually work? Many, for good reason, are
quite skeptical.
The thing is, I don't want to go to the other
extreme and say that knowledge does not matter. Going back to my
co-worker's comment, I would much prefer for the President to consult
someone who knows more than I do about the history of regions,
economics, politics, culture, etc., than for the President to consult
me. When a person has knowledge, he has more that he can work with,
even if his judgment is not always that good.