Frank Rich: The Brightest Are Not Always the Best

By FRANK RICH
Published: December 7, 2008
IN 1992, David Halberstam wrote a new introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest,” his classic history of the hubristic J.F.K. team that would ultimately mire America in Vietnam. He noted that the book’s title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. “It is often misused,” he wrote, “failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.”

Halberstam died last year, but were he still around, I suspect he would be speaking up, loudly, right about now. As Barack Obama rolls out his cabinet, “the best and the brightest” has become the accolade du jour from Democrats (Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri), Republicans (Senator John Warner of Virginia) and the press (George Stephanopoulos). Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note. Perhaps even Doris Kearns Goodwin would agree that it’s time for Beltway reading groups to move on from “Team of Rivals” to Halberstam.

The stewards of the Vietnam fiasco had pedigrees uncannily reminiscent of some major Obama appointees. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, was, as Halberstam put it, “a legend in his time at Groton, the brightest boy at Yale, dean of Harvard College at a precocious age.” His deputy, Walt Rostow, “had always been a prodigy, always the youngest to do something,” whether at Yale, M.I.T. or as a Rhodes scholar. Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, was the youngest and highest paid Harvard Business School assistant professor of his era before making a mark as a World War II Army analyst, and, at age 44, becoming the first non-Ford to lead the Ford Motor Company.

The rest is history that would destroy the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and inflict grave national wounds that only now are healing.

more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/opinion/07rich.html

Rich is right, but Barack has to pick up the pieces from the worst presidency ever. Historical parallels disappear; the problems do not.

does he have an LBJ waiting in the wings?

We all know that pedigree and experience don't guarantee results. However, I think compared to Bush's the craziest and the cravenest it is an improvement.

JFK's appointments were quite different also. Generally they were untested theoretically capable people with impressive pedigrees. However, Obama's on balance are true veterans of the world. The average age is considerably higher. I can't compare Gates to McNamara and so on.

"In the Obama transition, our Clinton-fixated political culture has been hyperventilating mainly over the national security team, but that’s not what gives me pause. ... No, it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past." And he says they're better than Bush's crowd, or what McCain would have tried.

This is about the Treasury Secretary Geithner, who Rich says has no experience outside academia or government, and the advisers Summers (who Rich thinks is arrogant) and Rubin, who was knee-deep in Citibank as it failed.

Smart does not equal Wise. Summers is the poster boy for this. Anyone want to argue that he isn't smart? Anyone want to argue that he didn't totally F**k up his tenure at Harvard?



Paul Krugman has also chimed in on this subject with the same concerns. And I am not gonna argue with him over economics!

:thumbsup:

They weren't so bright. What made them different was a complete absence of integrity, and just enough intelligence to exploit people whose integrity "held them back".

But where's the proof that these people were the brightest?

I've read a lot of research about giftedness, and I also grew up doing stuff quite young - learned to read and play chess when I was two, was reading Agatha Christie and H.G. Wells in second grade and stuff like Martin Gray's For Those I Loved in third grade and took the SAT in 7th grade and qualified to go to Duke's TIP program. I took an individual IQ test in fifth grade and I cannot remember any numbers - I remember there being a graph and a number but I couldn't tell you more than that. I do, however, remember the text that said I was "working at college level and above" and that I had "the abilities and temperament to go far with her life."

I think that there is actual genetic giftedness, and then there's being born to privileged parents who have time and resources and connections to get you into good positions. There is nothing - okay, so actually there is lots of stuff that pisses me off more. But still, it really pisses me off when people judge intelligence based on external outcomes, which leads to the idea that giftedness is a concept to stroke the egos of rich white people in some people and the idea that rich white people are actually the most intelligent in others. Actually, it's that rich white people get the best external outcomes because they have the most environmental advantages. The smartest person on the planet could be a kid in South America picking over a garbage dump for scrap to sell, but he or she will most likely not get the opportunity to develop his or her potential in socially approved ways that result in socially approved rewards like fame and money and power and prestige.

Hell, even I had some advantages - there were books around the house and my mother could read to me and reading was a valued and acceptable way to spend your time in my household. And we weren't rich but we weren't really poor either - I was never hungry or homeless or cold. Also, my family wasn't abusive and was really a nice environment to grow up in - my mother occasionally lost her temper but she always apologized and made up for it. A person with my same genetics born into a family that didn't read and was unstable financially and emotionally wouldn't be able to do what little I've done.

I would imagine that they fit into the "optimal IQ" range of 120-150 or so. A bit smarter than average but not so much that they can't fit into society. So at most they were moderately gifted or perhaps highly gifted, and then they had advantages and opportunities that most people don't have.

There are exceptions, of course, but most of the research I've read indicates that the majority of people in the exceptionally to profoundly gifted range are introverted, compassionate, intensely ethical, into social justice, not motivated by power or money, non-conformist, and often get into trouble for going against the herd. For instance, Einstein was a socialist.

He indicated he would not send U.S. draftees to fight in another country's civil war.

LBJ reversed all that a week after Dallas and sent in the Marines after the phony baloney Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Frank Rich still carries The New York Time's lone-nut water.

and willful ignorance will get us into a mess like the one we're in now.