Twenty -seven years after David Halberstam published "The Best and the Brightest" Aaron Sorkin brought "The West Wing" to prime time TV.
If ever Santayana's aphorism about learning from the past or being doomed to repeat it seems applicable, these two events would seem a case in point.
Halberstam, writing almost a decade after John F. Kennedy's murder, was decried as a sort of second assassin, but that only reinforces the essential truth he described a decade after Camelot on the Potomac passed from the scene.
The assassins' bullets really did alter the direction of politics in this country, both in 1963 and 1968; they brought down the glamour and glitz which had invested the 60's service in government and not until Barack Obama was elected did large numbers of Americans again see the Presidency and the White House as glamorous.
I am not speaking of history here; in my case, I'm speaking of memory. There is a difference between the history of a time written when every every last person who lived in those years has died, and histories written about the 50's, 60's and 70's, times people still alive remember.
I remember my parents smiling and being a little dazzled by the new President's men. My father was less impressed with Kennedy, who he knew as a playboy Congressman and Senator without much apparent interest in weighty issues. Adali Stevenson impressed my father, not JFK. But you judge a President, they said, in large measure by whom he brings with him, who he surrounds himself with, and Kennedy seemed to be bringing the entire Harvard faculty, plus men who had stellar careers at various foundations and think tanks. This was an impressive crew, far superior to Eisenhower's worn out old hacks. These men carried academic credentials galore.
McGeorge Bundy was a wunderkind, who had gone to Groton, then Yale (Skull and Bones) and then Harvard, where a professor in the department of government said a paper Bundy wrote as a new arrival was so astonishing, he thought not more than one or two tenured Harvard professors could have written anything of that quality. Bundy was first in his class at Groton and so brilliant he did not want to waste his time in the drudgery entailed in a PhD but was placed in a program called Junior Fellows, and got appointed to the faculty of government without having taken a course in government and he was made Dean of Harvard College with head spinning celerity. Then he decamped to Washington, D.C. where he could sit on couches in the Oval Office and exude brilliance.
All this brings to mind a scene in West Wing when Toby is discussing foreign aid, which the Republicans are assailing because they want the money spent on problems at home in the USA and Tobey, in the voice he uses when explaining something to really stupid, ignorant people who he thinks should stay out of governing and leave that to the smart boys, says, "So you cut foreign aid for schools in Sudan and then 6,800 madrassas spring up to fill the gap; you cut aid for a farm program in Bolivia and the farmers plant 10,000 hectares of cocaine instead of soybeans and coffee and we've just blown our police and Coast Guard interdiction budgets for the next 10 years!"
This is just one moment among thousands in West Wing, where Toby or Sam or the President cite numbers, without reference to a study, which they use numbers as sabers of expertise, to sound and look like they know so much more than their adversaries.
But, fact is, they do not know more than those hapless rubes in Iowa or New Hampshire who cannot understand the wisdom of spending money abroad to prevent problems from coming back home.
What makes Toby think that if we spent money on schools in Sudan those 6,800 (such a specific number!) would not have sprung up anyway? Who spent the money to build those madrassas and would they not have spent money to compete with secular Western schools (sometimes taught by Christian missionaries) even if we had spent that money? We are talking about a lot of culture and context here. How far is Toby from becoming a Robert McNamara who thought he could calculate the number of tons of bombs he'd have to drop on Vietnam to win that war, as if culture and local belief and desire had nothing to do with it?
And what makes Toby think if we had just given money to farmers in South America those farmers would have grown soybeans or coffee rather than the much more profitable cocaine? Oh, the Americans are paying us $1000 so we will forget about the $100,000 we can make growing coca!
West Wing is all about quickness, telegraphic communication, not the teasing out of opposing points of view. Repartee, quick wittedness, sexiness is the currency of the power players in the White House, that and a sense of entitlement: We are the chosen ones. Our talents, to write great speeches which inspire, which can launch a thousand ships is rare. We constitute an exalted club: the Skull and Bones of American politics.
Sam Seaborne sends a new guy, Will Bailey, to Toby with the note, "He's one of us." And the context makes it clear that one of us means one of the few human beings on the planet who can write great speeches for the President and the world. Halberstam tells a story about Teddy Roosevelt sending a man to a Secretary of state with a note which said exactly that. This is the old legend of the Sword and the Stone: Some people carry mystical powers which allow them to draw the sword from the stone and they are the people of destiny.
Toby and Will talk a lot about iambic pentameter. They talk about the craft of speech writing as if they are describing the parameters of some difficult neurosurgical procedure. They detect pentameter in the written opinion of a Supreme Court justice and Will does his homework as a speech writer for the President by requisitioning every speech the President has ever made so Will can get the rhythm of the President's speech. We are thus shown how very complicated, rare and extraordinary any human being writing for the President must be.
Of course, nowhere is it mentioned that Lincoln wrote his own best speeches and so did Obama. These are men who we listened to because their words were more than words or meter or iambic pentameter. These were the words from men who had been in the field of battle. We knew they knew something because they had been there.
This is the essential truth those knucklehead fans of Donald Trump have seized upon: All you Ivy Leaguers act like you've got some mystical right to rule. You try to prove it by quoting studies or statistics and sounding all academic and well educated but your knowledge is no more real, authentic or accurate than the stuff Donald Trump spews out at the podium at every rally. And he just makes it all up! We know that. But he doesn't have to prove it because we know he can't and we know you can't prove what you are saying either.
All those pundits: Nate Silver, who told us Hillary Clinton had a lock on the election in 2016, until she lost and then he said: But I told you she had a one in 3 chance of losing. You just didn't listen to me or understand that a 1 in 3 chance is a substantial chance; think of a baseball player who gets a hit 1 out of 3 times at bat--he's a successful player! It wasn't me who was wrong: It was you. You failed to understand probability theory!
And we know, well, Nate, if you had said, "anything's possible" everyone would have turned away and rushed off to listen to someone who claimed to have Delphic prophesy powers and ignored you; so you sold us on your clairvoyance. Then you blamed us for buying it.
Yes, Donald Trump is a con man who says there's an invasion of brown skinned rapists threatening white suburban women, that COVID19 was made in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread by pedophile aliens from Area 51 under the direction of Obama and Hillary Clinton to wreck Trump's Presidency and COVID is actually gone now but the doctors are trying to say it's still killing people because they make more money that way.
But, fact is, how do we know anything is true? The Best and the Brightest guys from Harvard quoted us numbers, cited studies in journals we couldn't see, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, Nature. And they were as full of vaporous hot air as Trump.
We know we can't believe him. We don't take him literally. But we take seriously the proposition we cannot believe you. So we'll just believe whatever we want to believe.
We know he is all spoof. His schtick is all lampoon. He's saying, "Look a me, up here in my expensive suit and tie speaking at the podium. I'm a clown. I'm the court jester. But the court jester gets at a truth the serious courtiers cannot dare to say."
No child was killed at Sandy Hook. It was all just a TV set, like the moon landing. How do you know anyone was killed there? Were you at the school? At the morgue?
I actually heard Alex Jones's lawyer say that on NPR. "Were you at the morgue?"
And that is the basic question: How do any of us know anything unless we were at the morgue ourselves?
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