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.
“On the Republican side the best and the brightest are NeverTrumpers”
Then why did they lose? And why has their brand of conservatism been losing for decades?
Don’t the Democrats say the same thing about themselves (best and brightest) and the same about the NeverTrumpers (ignorant mediocrities).
Look, I taught my classmates Stats too. Many of the people you criticize on this blog also taught Stats to their classmates. It doesn’t seem to be a primary indicator.
Why did they lose? Because the establishment/elite/very serious people vote was split 15 ways.
Because they assumed the way to win in an anti-establishment regime was to double-down on pretending to be even more serious.
I told my terrified father 2 years ago that we would never elect the hated Hillary Clinton. I got a little scared because Trump managed to make it close.
But he was also really good at persuading just enough of who he had to to win.
False. This assumes everyone who voted for every other candidate would not have voted for Trump. Polls show that Trump was peoples second choice in enough cases to top 50%. The guy just won the election, lets stop the fiction that nobody supported him.
“Don’t the Democrats say the same thing about themselves (best and brightest) and the same about the NeverTrumpers (ignorant mediocrities).”
No. Obama’s final gambit was to claim that the NeverTrumpers had to share blame for Trump along with the Pro-Trumpers and Maybe-Trumpers.
I doubt that arrogance alone lost them the election, but now that we seem to be in the era of believing what makes us feel good, I think I’ll believe that.
Or maybe that is a yes, I agree with you there. People are playing games with the 2 party system.
If you are a Republican in the amazing predicament of actually considering supporting Clinton while being ridiculed for being in Trump’s party, might as well go full Trump.
In reality, there is probably never a smooth transition and even the Reagan/Bush move had a lot of bruised egos. The Bush/Obama was oddly enough probably one of the ‘smoothest’ but there was lots bickering on that one. (And remember Obama kept a number of the national security folks and the economics team was dominated by people with TARP experience. And the Trump transition looks like a shitshow but heck he won the election with a similar strategy so who knows.
I rationalize this election in a very simple ways. The last long recessionary period was 1973 – 1982 and we freaked out and had the 1970s. This has been a long recessionary period (2008 – 2015) and we were focus this freak out electing Trump who will be the center of controversy the next four years.
Here’s a good response to Eliot Cohen’s kvetchy, whiny article, from another conservative critic of Trump:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/442276/trump-transition-yuval-levin
Cohen’s claim that loyalty is valued above all rings false; exhibit 1 against it is the hiring and firing of campaign managers. He fired Corey Lewandowski, who he hired in 2014, after he created problems with the campaign. At time Paul Manafort seems to have won out, but he was replaced by Kellyanne Conway, who took over when he was well behind Clinton in the polls. The rest we know. He met her in 2006 when she was living in one of his buildings and he hired her after she had been working with Ted Cruz.
Trump recognizes talent and also expects results. Don’t underestimate him.
An alternative narrative is that this is when he rewards those who helped him but can relatively quickly replace them with insiders as a negotiating tactic.
It is interesting how paradigms change signs turning positivs into negatives. Being like Kennedy is a negative (yes, I know Trump us no Jack Kennedy).
And remember (at least) half the problem is people not wanting to work for Trump-because they beleved words spoken durine a campaign.
And remember Clinton had at least two enemies lists that we know of, and she had the DNC in her pocket.
I’d like to see Eliot Cohen’s daughter’s response to this post. It would be interesting to hear it from her perspective.