is by David Halberstam, in The Best and the Brightest. Of course, it is about the Kennedy transition of 1960-1961. As the book opens, President Kennedy is meeting with Robert Lovett to discuss candidates for important offices, such as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.

Note that the first sentence of the book is “A cold day in December.” By today’s standards, Kennedy must have spent the month of November in “disarray.”

Halberstam explains that two party icons who might have offered independent thinking, Adlai Stevenson and Chester Bowles, were passed over for Secretary of State. One important reason is that during the nomination contest, Stevenson and Bowles had failed to live up to Kennedy’s standards of loyalty. Those standards evidently were met by Kennedy’s choice for Attorney General–his brother.

Kennedy selected for his key foreign policy team Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy, all of whom were wedded to orthodox views. They also had no independent political base to detract from their loyalty to Kennedy. Their legacy is the Vietnam War.

On the Trump transition, I ran across this WaPo piece by Eliot Cohen.

The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty…By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless.

Recall that before the election I wrote

On the Republican side the best and the brightest are NeverTrumpers, and I don’t see Mr. Trump reaching across those burned bridges.

Cohen is certainly not repairing those bridges (he is close to declaring them beyond repair). If his strong words are based on a single interaction he had with someone on the Trump team, then shame on him. On the other hand, if Cohen has accumulated a plural of anecdotes, then he is delivering a fair warning.

[UPDATE: Yuval Levin writes,

I respect Cohen, certainly share his concerns about Trump, and can understand his worries here. But I think his piece is unfair in some important respects, and ultimately unpersuasive

I should add that I also find the piece a bit strange, in this respect: my guess is that Cohen could reach a lot of his friends among conservative foreign policy wonks with a more private medium, such as email. What was the purpose in going public in the Post? As Levin puts it,

if Trump’s team concludes that every frank private conversation they have with anyone outside their circle will end up in the newspapers, they will be even less likely to reach beyond that circle in recruiting talent, and the country will pay for it.

Thanks to a commenter for pointing to Levin’s post, which I had somehow missed.
]

I do not know Eliot Cohen. However, it happens that his daughter was in my class when I taught AP statistics in 2001-2002. That was my first full year of high school teaching, and I was not yet competent at explaining concepts. After several months, I realized that what the students were getting from me was just a general indication of what they were supposed to know. Most of the students who were actually learning the subject were getting their instruction from Eliot Cohen’s daughter.