The Best and the Brightest

"[General] Harkins began by corrupting the intelligence reports coming in. Up until 1961 they had been reasonably accurate, clear, unclouded, by bureaucratic ambition... in effect the Administration created a situation where it lied to itself...

His [Harkins] two main distinctions during his years years in service in Vietnam would be, first, that his reporting consistently misled the President of the United States, and second, that it brought him to a point of struggle with a vast number of his field officers who tried to file realistic (hence pessimistic) reports. But even here the fault was not necessarily Harkins'. In all those years he felt that he was only doing what Max Taylor wanted, and there was considerable evidence that this was true, that his optimism reflected back-channeled directives from Taylor...

General Paul Donal Harkins, fifty-seven, was a man of compelling mediocrity...

'He wasn't worth a damn, so he was removed,' [Secretary of Defense] McNamara would say of him later, 'you need intelligent people.' Of course McNamara failed to explain why Harkins had held his position for almost two and a half years."