It's Ok To Be Both Best and Bright

This Banjamin Wallace-Wells article in The New Republic argues that we have learned the wrong lessons from David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. To put it in simple terms, the lesson is not that getting the most talented and smartest people is somehow a bad thing but rather that during the Kennedy and Johnson era the "best and brightest" were brilliant generalists and not specialists. Despite the seeming condemnation of the New Frontier whiz kids, the problem with American Vietnam policy was still a lack of expertise, not its excess.