Washington in the early days of a new administration is a didactic, lesson-drawing place, but even so, it has been striking to see how quickly the commentary on the death of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and architect of the Vietnam war, has turned to abstraction–as if it was not one exceptionally smart man being buried, but a certain kind of smarts itself. “What happened … to Robert McNamara teaches a lesson to all those who talk of governments of all the talents,” editorialized The Times of London. “Vietnam shattered the rationalist’s faith,” concluded David Ignatius in The Washington Post. This theme looked particularly ripe for exploration because the Obama administration seems to echo the old Kennedy sensibility–ambitious, technocratic, self-consciously modern. McNamara, wrote Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal , “will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. … These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase ‘the best and the brightest’ has been scrubbed of its intended irony.”
more from Benjamin Wallace-Wells at TNR here.