Best, Brightest, Worst, Dimmest

I know we're supposed to be looking forward, not backward, but I can't help but ponder the words of the late journalist David Halberstam, who saw things before many others did and was not afraid to speak truth to power. He published The Making of a Quagmire, a look at the origins of the Vietnam conflict, in 1965 - and offered succinct observations on the venture's inevitable failure. He was best known for 1972's The Best and The Brightest, a scathing indictment of the road to war in Vietnam and the failure of the nation's foreign policy. While the outgoing administration could in no way be reasonably considered "the best and the brightest," Halberstam's verdict on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sounds awfully familiar:

...It is not the fact that it was a miscalculation of a LeMay or a Radford or even a Nixon, but that it was produced by the best and brightest men of a generation, that the decisions in 1965 were made by the McNamaras, Rusks, Taylors, Johnsons, and Bundys, and more, that having made them, they have not been big enough men to admit what went wrong. Thus there has been, I think, a drop in public confidence and faith in public institutions, as the men involved have all gone on to their newer and bigger jobs (while, more often than not, the few men who fought the policy at State and Defense have seen their careers seriously damaged and have quietly been moved out of the mainstream)....

...The absence of good reporting from Washington on how America went into the war is one of the major scandals of the journalistic profession and a serious reflection on the clubbiness of the top layer of the Washington press corps.....