Kyle Johnson of Bumperactive has a Booklobby message for Barack Obama.

My concern is that you will inherit a government such as Kennedy’s, where the ablest minds have been culled, and only the yes men remain.

Kyle appears to have been busy with Bumperactive now offering a state-by-state bumper sticker featuring Senator Obama.

Here are Kyle’s comments for Senator Obama.

Dear Senator Obama:

I am excited and hopeful at the prospect that you will be the next President of the United States. At the same time, I am deeply concerned about the state of global affairs and the machinery of the government you will inherit.
Many in the country have high hopes an Obama Presidency can realize the unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy administration. Yet despite the idealism of Camelot, we cannot forget that it was the failings of Kennedy and his advisers that made irreversible the tragedy of the Vietnam War.

Like Kennedy, as president you will inherit a war not-of-your-choosing, although unlike Kennedy, you have made your strong opposition to this war widely known. Nevertheless, my fear is that you may underestimate the strength of the political forces that have brought us into the Iraq War, and their ability to color the decision-making of even a President who opposes them.

Please find enclosed a copy of David Halberstam’s "The Best and The Brightest," the definitive, decision-by-decision history of American military involvement in Vietnam. You are no-doubt familiar with the book— it even strikes me as highly likely that you’ve already read it. In any case, please revisit it again; I can only imagine how the lessons of the book might serve a newly-installed commander-in-chief.

There is, of course, no single cause that "made" Vietnam. However, Halberstam’s book illuminates the degree to which the legacy of McCarthyism permeated Vietnam policy, in ways both explicit and implicit. Moreover, there are bright parallels between the influence of McCarthyism on Vietnam and that of the Neoconservative movement on the Iraq War—to the degree that I believe Neoconservatism can be rightly viewed as the "successor movement" to McCarthyism.

McCarthyism impacted Kennedy’s decision-making explicitly through his fear that, as a Democrat, he was politically vulnerable to appearing "soft" on Communism. Accordingly, he made every effort to seem tough, from the moment of his inaugural address when he pledged to "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe" in defense of liberty (read: to fight communism).

In your opposition to the Iraq War, you have already opened yourself to comparable charges from the bellicose right. Moreover, you must surely realize that the real kvetching hasn’t even started yet. I have faith in you and your political staff to traverse these rapids.

However, it is the implicit influence of McCarthyism on Vietnam—and the analogous influence of Neoconservatism on Middle East Policy—that I find most deeply troubling. I urge you to begin measures to counteract this influence on Day 1 of your Presidency in order to restore the natural balance within American government.

In the 1950, McCarthyist fervor directed the methodical weeding-out of non-partisan, free-thinking careerists from the frontlines of all branches of the federal bureaucracy, and in particular the State Department. The tools were both blunt—mere mention of the word HUAC—and more subtle, via selective application of promotions and transfers. By the time Kennedy came to office, the damage had already been done:

There were literally no East Asia policy experts remaining in government to provide a nuanced assessment of the nationalist origins of the North Vietnamese cause, the 1,000-year blood-feud between China and Vietnam, and the glaring schism between Mao’s China and the Soviet Union. Simply put, The Domino Theory did not compute as a cause for war in the assessment of the people most knowledgeable about the region.

Tragically, those civil servants had all been systematically removed by one means or another for insufficiently hewing to the (incorrect) McCarthyist notion of global "Monolithic Communism." As a result, it took 14 years and 58,000 American lives for their considered judgment to become policy.

I specifically refer you to the index of The Best and The Brightest, and the pages relating to the careers of John Stuart Service and John Paton Davies, for the account of the McCarthyism-driven purge of the State Department and its impact on the policy alternatives afforded to Kennedy and his advisers.

The abuses of the present administration are well documented. At every turn, voices deviating even marginally from, the party line have been silenced and exiled. Across government, talented, career civil servants have been replaced by sycophants and dilettantes, with the implosion of the response capability of FEMA serving as the starkest example within these shores.
My concern is that you will inherit a government such as Kennedy’s, where the ablest minds have been culled out, and only the dim yes -men and -women remain.

I urge you to seek out and "re-recruit" career civil servants who left the government during the Bush years, particularly those who did so for lack of advancement or ideological "incorrectness." Doing so will send a clear message that the Bush standard of seeking political expediency over candid analysis is no longer acceptable.

I urge you to aggressively recruit new minds of all political ideologies into government from the private sector, to make it known that new, bold ideas are valued higher than business and politics as usual.

Most crucially, I urge you to appoint a trusted member of your senior staff to oversee a vetting of middle management for quality control. The layer of government that will make-or-break your Presidency is that of the "supervisor of senior career professionals." In Halberstam’s book, this is generally the level of Assistant Secretary, although I imagine things may have changed since that era.

In any event, you must take special care to restore and ensure the competence of the cadre of officials at the nexus of top-down policy implementation and bottom-up data analysis; i.e., the people who are not only responsible for implementing your policy directives, but also ensuring those directives are formulated from the best available information available. Above all else, you need to be sure these people have the mettle to fight for the judgment of their staffs in the face of political pressure.

I believe you will find it easy enough to attract the talented and capable, top-level officials with whom you will interact on a daily basis—the luster of the Oval Office is more than sufficient for that. On the other hand, ensuring the quality of the advice your advisers receive may be the truest challenge of the Presidency.
It is the fear of every American that a problem will land on the President’s desk—be it military, economic, environmental or cultural—for which there is no simply no "good" option. Do not let that be because no one within the apparatus of government has the wisdom to provide you with one.
Senator Obama, thank you for your consideration and I hope you enjoy the book. My thoughts and prayers are with you in the campaign.

Sincerely and hopefully,

Kyle Johnson
Founder, www.bumperactive.com
kyle@bumperactive.com

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