One of the left’s standard whacks at the right – especially at people like Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin – is that they’re “dumb” and “uneducated” for eschewing the trappings of the Ivy League paper chase.

Leaving aside that an Ivy background is evidence of nothing more than having been either a very motivated junior high kid or legacy of another generation of Ivy Leagers, this reverence for “credentials” has always puzzled me (and it’s far from strictly a lefty thing; Hugh Hewitt also audibly slavers at the mention of Ivy League degrees).

Because the record of Ivy Leaguers in office is pretty dismal.

Not just presidents, of course.  A classic example – perhaps the last of its type before Obama – was the Kennedy Administration, which packed its offices with frothy youngish Ivy Leaguers.

One of those young deans was Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense while in his early forties.  Technocratic to a fault – he’d served in the Army Air Force as a statistician in World War II – he joined Ford as what we would today call a “TQM” geek. He ascended to the presidency in fifteen years,and was promptly appointed Secretary of Defense by Kennedy, where his main accomplishment was bringing “Systems Analysis” to the role.  McNamara tried to treat war as a set of repeatable business processes that could be improved using the same sort of “quality” methods that have screwed up so many American businesses.  It took the US military over 20 years to undo McNamara’s damage; Edwin Luttwak documented the dismal results of McNamara’s era (which, to be fair, built on and exacerbated some ill-fated “reforms” after World War II) in The Pentagon and the Art of War; the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in the late eighties started addressing some of the problems long after McNamara had left office, but after his system helped lead to the Vietnam debacle, the would-be-comical-if-it-weren’t-so-tragic Mayaguez incident, the Desert One disaster, the fiasco in Beirut, and an escalating series of screwups that made the victory on Grenada cost vastly more effort, money and lives than it should have.

His other “accomplishment”?  Being among the advisors who first recommended Vietnam to John F. Kennedy as a possible face-saving quick win after the Bay of Pigs fiasco – and then running the war into the ground, first under Kennedy, then throughout the entire Johnson Administration.

Joe Galloway – who, working as a war correspondent in Vietnam, saw McNamara’s work up close – isn’t mourning McNamara’s passing one bit:

Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.

Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McMamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: “I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process.” Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.

Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and run McNamara’s comments past them for deconstruction and the addition of the truth.

The only disagreement I ever had with Dave Halberstam was over the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was Halberstam.

Read the whole thing and find out why.