Obama's Sixties Flashback

Alfred Eisenstaedt / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images Why David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest should serve as a cautionary tale as Obama reconsiders the Iraq war—and Iran.

Some in the media have glibly referenced the title of David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest to describe the storied intellect of Lawrence Summers and other members of the president-elect’s economic team. Halberstam’s masterpiece is of course about John Kennedy’s foreign policy team and how their brainy group-think created the disastrous war in Vietnam. Anyone who has influence with Barack Obama would be well advised to read it as a cautionary tale as he faces the inevitable pressures from the next iteration of liberal or conservative hawks to expand the war in Afghanistan or start one against Iran.

In recent years both liberal and conservative hawks solemnly aver, “Iran cannot be permitted to possess nuclear weapons,” without any debate or analysis about what the word “permitted” means.

Halberstam recalls that the “best thing about JFK was his modernity, his lack of being burdened by myths of the past.” Of Kennedy’s establishment superstars like McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara “there was a sense that these were brilliant men [with] brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good.” The favorite word these men used to describe themselves was “pragmatic.”

Yet Kennedy’s foreign policy elite were also haunted by dark hidden forces. “Long after McCarthy himself was gone the fear of being accused of being soft on communism lingered among Democratic leaders. That was the terrible shadow of the McCarthy period.” According to Halberstam, the Vietnam War was “an ill defined commitment, one made in stealth and in considerable secrecy, because those making it were uneasy about their path and feared an open debate exposing the policy to any serious scrutiny.”

It all is eerily familiar. While there may have been some naïve Iraq war hawks motivated by “bad intelligence” or the notion that the war would reduce the world’s total of human rights abuses, there is little question that the cabal who effectively pushed for a second Iraq war intentionally obscured their motives, and that many of those well-funded, well-connected elites are still well-connected and well-funded and still have their cell phones and their agendas.

Such agendas often start as macho litmus tests. In Kennedy’s day, orthodoxy insisted that the “domino theory” was real and that it was a sign of weakness to “recognize Red China.” The Clinton administration gave us “regime change,” and in recent years both liberal and conservative hawks solemnly aver, “Iran cannot be permitted to possess nuclear weapons,” without any debate or analysis about what the word “permitted” means.

Most influential insiders in Washington, D.C., maintain their power by accommodating powerful pressures. Although some Democrats in Congress like Joe Lieberman supported the Bush-Cheney foreign policy because they actually agreed with it, many voted for the war because they feared looking “weak.” (When Bill Clinton said it was a “fairy tale” that Obama was more anti-war than Hillary, he meant that Obama had been able to make a prescient anti-war speech because he was not subject to the same pressures that presumably influenced Hillary and many other Democrats to act differently.)