Donald Trump has repeatedly said he will make America great again by bringing the “greatest minds” into his administration to solve America’s domestic and foreign problems.
He assured Fox News in August. “I know the best negotiators. I always say, ‘I know the ones that people think are good.’ I know people that you’ve never heard of that are better than all of them.”
Certainly having a smart president and the best brains as his advisers is a desirable arrangement. But having the smartest people in the room is no guarantee of a triumphal presidency.
While it is obviously better to have smart people than less astute ones trying to figure out answers to current challenges, if offers no certainty that serious problems will be solved – or even that the right decisions would be made.
Here are three clear examples when having smart people at the White House did not lead to promised solutions – or anything resembling long-term answers – to daunting domestic and foreign dilemmas:
l US President Woodrow Wilson established “The Inquiry” in September 1917, to prepare for the peace negotiations certain to follow the Great War. He brought together 150 of the most accomplished academics in the United States.
University of Texas president Sidney Mezes, a philosopher, and Johns Hopkins University geography professor Isaiah Bowman led the group in helping Wilson devise proposals for what became the Versailles Conference in Paris, where the president hoped to negotiate an enduring peace.
Yet for all these experts’ authoritative knowledge about economics, geography, politics and foreign affairs, the Versailles settlement produced more acrimony than harmony and opened the way to another world war.
Neither Wilson nor his advisers – 21 accompanied him to Versailles – could chart a course around the passions for revenge that animated the heads of state and delegates attending the conference.
The treaty ending the Great War was a disaster that Wilson’s smart counselors could not set right.
l During the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin D Roosevelt, then governor of New York, brought together three celebrated Columbia University professors to devise a plan to overcome the Great Depression. Alfred Berle, Raymond Moley and Rexford Tugwell were dubbed the “Brain Trust”.
This trio morphed into a group of brilliant young academics who followed FDR to Washington after he won the presidency.
Roosevelt assembled these advisers into an alphabet soup of new government agencies to help him address the miserable economic and social dislocations of the time.
But for all their brainpower, the Brain Trust could not find a way out of the Great Depression. It was the industrial mobilisation for World War 2 that ultimately revived the economy.
To be sure, Roosevelt’s advisers helped him ease the terrible suffering brought on by the national economic collapse. They contributed mightily to humanising the US industrial system with a social safety network, instituting programmes and systems that function effectively to this day. But Roosevelt’s smart advisers fell short of a definitive solution to the economic collapse that had brought them to the White House.
l No better example of how overstated Trump’s pronouncements on how his “smart advisers” will transform the country can be found than in the record of the “best and brightest” brought together by President John F Kennedy in 1961.
The best and the brightest were from Harvard and several other prestigious universities – men with experience principally in economics and foreign affairs.
Indeed Trump and his supporters seem to have forgotten that Kennedy systematically surrounded himself with exceptionally smart men. As Kennedy told a group of Nobel laureates he had in for a lunch at the White House: It was the greatest collection of brains ever assembled there except for the time Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, had been a celebrated scholar for virtually his entire life. He was regarded as one of the smartest students ever to graduate from Yale University. He was then the youngest man ever to serve as dean of Harvard College.
In 1992, I interviewed him for biographies I wrote on Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson and still found him to be as sharp as many accounts had noted. He was most convincing on the origins of US involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
Likewise, Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defence secretary, was a storied figure in the business world. He had risen to the presidency of the Ford Motor Company at age 44 and revitalised its performance as a corporate titan.
I interviewed McNamara as well and found him to be a match for Bundy. He walked me through the ins and outs of the Cuban missile crisis, to show me why he and Kennedy had succeeded in that Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union.
And, like Bundy, he made a compelling case for the Vietnam War.
Yet no matter how whip-smart McNamara and Bundy were they were also two of the principal advisers shaping Kennedy’s failure at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. They believed they could topple the government of Fidel Castro by means of an invasion of roughly 1500 Cuban exiles.
The stunning failure rested on the Kennedy administration’s misjudgment of how the Cuban people would respond to the attack.
And before the covert operation began, Kennedy was discussing it with former secretary of state Dean Acheson. Acheson asked the president how many men the White House expected Castro could bring to the beaches to oppose the invaders. Kennedy said perhaps as many as 20000 to 25000.
An incredulous Acheson replied, it doesn’t take Pricewaterhouse to figure out that 1500 aren’t as good as 25000.
Having the smartest people in the room when he decided to go forward with the Bay of Pigs invasion did not insulate Kennedy from a mortifying, embarrassing failure.
True, he publicly took responsibility for the disaster, but the fact remained that he relied on his advisers in going ahead with such a faulty plan.
The greatest, most memorable blunder of Kennedy’s best and brightest was however, Vietnam.
During his thousand days in office, Kennedy was skeptical about fighting a ground war in Vietnam, but McNamara and Bundy, as well as the brainy Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Walt W Rostow, the brilliant accomplished economist, were confident they could defeat the communist insurgency by training South Vietnamese forces to counter the tactics of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese.
McNamara thought he could apply the metrics he had used to rebuild Ford to win the conflict in Vietnam. It was a searing experience for these exceptionally smart men, who laboured and failed for seven years to bring the war to a successful end.
Trump should go back and read this history before he makes additional pronouncements about how he and other brainy people will work wonders in advancing the economy, solving US foreign policy problems in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, and defending the US against terrorism.
If truth is told, the fact that he’s made himself a billionaire (starting out as only a millionaire) guarantees nothing about his possible performance as president.
Certainly, elect smart people to the highest offices, but voters do better to rely on men and women who have a sense of proportion and know some history in leading the country to meet its domestic and foreign problems. And it important to understand that there are no magic bullets that smart people can provide to solve a country’s problems. — Robert Dallek, Reuters
Brains no guarantee of success
He assured Fox News in August. “I know the best negotiators. I always say, ‘I know the ones that people think are good.’ I know people that you’ve never heard of that are better than all of them.”
Certainly having a smart president and the best brains as his advisers is a desirable arrangement. But having the smartest people in the room is no guarantee of a triumphal presidency.
While it is obviously better to have smart people than less astute ones trying to figure out answers to current challenges, if offers no certainty that serious problems will be solved – or even that the right decisions would be made.
Here are three clear examples when having smart people at the White House did not lead to promised solutions – or anything resembling long-term answers – to daunting domestic and foreign dilemmas:
l US President Woodrow Wilson established “The Inquiry” in September 1917, to prepare for the peace negotiations certain to follow the Great War. He brought together 150 of the most accomplished academics in the United States.
University of Texas president Sidney Mezes, a philosopher, and Johns Hopkins University geography professor Isaiah Bowman led the group in helping Wilson devise proposals for what became the Versailles Conference in Paris, where the president hoped to negotiate an enduring peace.
Yet for all these experts’ authoritative knowledge about economics, geography, politics and foreign affairs, the Versailles settlement produced more acrimony than harmony and opened the way to another world war.
Neither Wilson nor his advisers – 21 accompanied him to Versailles – could chart a course around the passions for revenge that animated the heads of state and delegates attending the conference.
The treaty ending the Great War was a disaster that Wilson’s smart counselors could not set right.
l During the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin D Roosevelt, then governor of New York, brought together three celebrated Columbia University professors to devise a plan to overcome the Great Depression. Alfred Berle, Raymond Moley and Rexford Tugwell were dubbed the “Brain Trust”.
This trio morphed into a group of brilliant young academics who followed FDR to Washington after he won the presidency.
Roosevelt assembled these advisers into an alphabet soup of new government agencies to help him address the miserable economic and social dislocations of the time.
But for all their brainpower, the Brain Trust could not find a way out of the Great Depression. It was the industrial mobilisation for World War 2 that ultimately revived the economy.
To be sure, Roosevelt’s advisers helped him ease the terrible suffering brought on by the national economic collapse. They contributed mightily to humanising the US industrial system with a social safety network, instituting programmes and systems that function effectively to this day. But Roosevelt’s smart advisers fell short of a definitive solution to the economic collapse that had brought them to the White House.
l No better example of how overstated Trump’s pronouncements on how his “smart advisers” will transform the country can be found than in the record of the “best and brightest” brought together by President John F Kennedy in 1961.
The best and the brightest were from Harvard and several other prestigious universities – men with experience principally in economics and foreign affairs.
Indeed Trump and his supporters seem to have forgotten that Kennedy systematically surrounded himself with exceptionally smart men. As Kennedy told a group of Nobel laureates he had in for a lunch at the White House: It was the greatest collection of brains ever assembled there except for the time Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, had been a celebrated scholar for virtually his entire life. He was regarded as one of the smartest students ever to graduate from Yale University. He was then the youngest man ever to serve as dean of Harvard College.
In 1992, I interviewed him for biographies I wrote on Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson and still found him to be as sharp as many accounts had noted. He was most convincing on the origins of US involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
Likewise, Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defence secretary, was a storied figure in the business world. He had risen to the presidency of the Ford Motor Company at age 44 and revitalised its performance as a corporate titan.
I interviewed McNamara as well and found him to be a match for Bundy. He walked me through the ins and outs of the Cuban missile crisis, to show me why he and Kennedy had succeeded in that Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union.
And, like Bundy, he made a compelling case for the Vietnam War.
Yet no matter how whip-smart McNamara and Bundy were they were also two of the principal advisers shaping Kennedy’s failure at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. They believed they could topple the government of Fidel Castro by means of an invasion of roughly 1500 Cuban exiles.
The stunning failure rested on the Kennedy administration’s misjudgment of how the Cuban people would respond to the attack.
And before the covert operation began, Kennedy was discussing it with former secretary of state Dean Acheson. Acheson asked the president how many men the White House expected Castro could bring to the beaches to oppose the invaders. Kennedy said perhaps as many as 20000 to 25000.
An incredulous Acheson replied, it doesn’t take Pricewaterhouse to figure out that 1500 aren’t as good as 25000.
Having the smartest people in the room when he decided to go forward with the Bay of Pigs invasion did not insulate Kennedy from a mortifying, embarrassing failure.
True, he publicly took responsibility for the disaster, but the fact remained that he relied on his advisers in going ahead with such a faulty plan.
The greatest, most memorable blunder of Kennedy’s best and brightest was however, Vietnam.
During his thousand days in office, Kennedy was skeptical about fighting a ground war in Vietnam, but McNamara and Bundy, as well as the brainy Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Walt W Rostow, the brilliant accomplished economist, were confident they could defeat the communist insurgency by training South Vietnamese forces to counter the tactics of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese.
McNamara thought he could apply the metrics he had used to rebuild Ford to win the conflict in Vietnam. It was a searing experience for these exceptionally smart men, who laboured and failed for seven years to bring the war to a successful end.
Trump should go back and read this history before he makes additional pronouncements about how he and other brainy people will work wonders in advancing the economy, solving US foreign policy problems in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, and defending the US against terrorism.
If truth is told, the fact that he’s made himself a billionaire (starting out as only a millionaire) guarantees nothing about his possible performance as president.
Certainly, elect smart people to the highest offices, but voters do better to rely on men and women who have a sense of proportion and know some history in leading the country to meet its domestic and foreign problems. And it important to understand that there are no magic bullets that smart people can provide to solve a country’s problems. — Robert Dallek, Reuters
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