These people were almost to smart yeah they'd always been enormously successful and they
couldn't fathom how they could be such failures well that's that's the title of the book The
Brilliant Disaster and it's ironic of course and it's oxymoronic but the brilliant part
is the men who did it yeah they were the best and the brightest and uh you know he a number
of Rhodes scholars Dean Rusk the Secretary of State had been a Rhodes Scholar there were
many Rhodes scholars there was McGeorge Bundy who'd been the Dean of Arts and sciences at
Harvard at the age of thirty four he was just I think forty two at the time Robert McNamara
Secretary of Defense had been the president of Ford Motor Company at the age of forty
all of these guys were really smart and really successful and had never really failed at
anything and I do think you have to attribute part of what happened to the fact that when
they got in the room together and they looked around at each other they saw a lot of brilliant
people who they respected and in themselves they saw people who did not fail and they
forgot about Murphy's Law you know things go wrong yeah yeah so I jokingly say it might
have helped to have a few less brilliant people regular people uh you know in presidential
administrations uh people like me for instance I'm available people to point out that things
don't always go the way you plan them and that would've been a good thing for people
to think about people who ask what are thought to be dumb questions absolutely yeah that's
the thing and nobody nobody wanted to embarrass themselves by asking those dumb questions
right and that I take it is part of why you say that group think took over yes group think
did there were a number of factors I think that that lead to this bad decision you have
to forgive them a little bit because this did occur only three months into the beginning
of the administration and a lot of these they were still finding their way to the men's
room I mean they hadn't gotten their sea legs yet and then they also were they didn't want
to embarrass themselves in front of the president so or in front of each other uh but group
think is the famous book by Irving Janis written in nineteen seventy two that was inspired
by the Bay of Pigs he was asking himself how could it be that all these smart people could
make such a bad decision and he came up with a theory that when you get people of similar
backgrounds into a room yeah there is a an impetus to agree with each other nobody wants
to stand out particularly when I mean these guys really did come from they had similar
resumes a lot of them had gone to east coast boarding schools Ivy league colleges they
knew each other socially uh they had reason to agree with each other and to assume the
other guy was right and uh the one person Irving Janis' book really refers to one meeting
particularly that happened just over ten days before the invasion April 4th of 1961 when
you had all these guys in a conference room in the state department uh and they go andKennedy
goes around and asks them what they think and they all vote for it now later they all
say they had major reservations about it but they didn't voice them at the time yeah yeah
the one guy who did voice reservations was an outsider it was a senator who really shouldn't
have been at that meeting Senator William Fulbright right Kennedy had invited him in
knowing that he had problems with the plan and he got up and gave this rousing speech
about how this was a terrible idea un American impractical wrong in every respect and he
became the foil that everybody sort of ganged up on and as Janis wrote it really only confirmed
what people believed you know when you have one person that you can say oh he's the he's
the outsider uh those who are already are prone to agree with each other it it sort
of solidifies their belief in ther own opinion This excerpt is brought to you by the Massachusetts
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