The Best and Brightest

I finished reading The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam a month or so ago and kept thinking I would write something but never got around too it. Then today I saw a story saying President Obama would be making his decision about sending up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan within the next week.
In The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam tries to explain how JFK and then Johnson got the nation involved in Vietnam, especially when some of their advisers, particularly Robert McNamara, McGeorge and William Bunday, among others were widely regarded as some of the smartest people to work in government. If I understood Halberstam, their own belief that they were so smart was a large part of the problem. JFK was able to hold back on their requests to send more troops to Vietnam. Johnson on the other hand, was unwilling to stand up to them, even when he thought they might be wrong. Halberstam attributes that to LBJ's insecurities.
I don't know what it is about presidents from Texas and insecurities about their manliness but the following quote seems to describe a more recent president in addition to LBJ.
"He had always been haunted by the idea that he would be judges as being insufficiently manly for the job, that he would lack courage at a crucial moment. More than a little insecure himself, he very much wanted to be seen as a man; it was a conscious thing....and at a moment like this he wanted the respect of men who were tough, real men, and they would turn out to be the hawks."
As Obama makes his decision, I hope this is one of the books that he read, or has at least had summarized for him. Halberstam describes how the military, primarily the Joint Chiefs, deliberately mislead civilians, asked for only a small contingent of troops, knowing that they would be attacked, and that then they could increase their troop requests to even higher levels, arguing that " more troops were needed in order to keep bases and other troops safe." The idea of just bringing them home never seemed to occur to anyone in the government, and if they did, they were afraid to mention it for fear of being seen as weak.
Throw in a strong dose of American arrogance and sense of superiority and these guys figured there is no way they could lose to the North Vietnamese. It was all a recipe for disaster, one I hope our current President does not repeat.