"Groton Cannot Lose" and the Foreign Policy Implications Thereof

Financial Times profiles Louis Auchincloss, a marvelous novelist and short story writer who aims his observant and calm eye mostly on the shifting mores of New York's monied and professional classes. I've read a lot of Auchincloss (though not nearly as much as the prolific 89-year-old has written), and never with anything less than pleasure and admiration.

An observation of his with some political interest:

"I used to say to my father," he says, "?'If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.' And the irony of my life is that they did." He pauses before invoking a 20th-century American foreign-policy who's who: "There was Cy Vance, Bill Scranton, Ted Beale, both Bundys, Bill and McGeorge – they all got behind that war in Vietnam and they pushed it as far as they could. And we lost a quarter of a million men. They were all idealistic, good, virtuous," says Auchincloss, "the finest men you could find. It was the most disillusioning thing that happened in my life."

Auchincloss has struggled to understand just how their shared patrician background could have produced this disconnect. And the answer would appear to be that wars are lost, if not always made, on the playing fields of New England. "Bill Bundy and I shared a study at Groton, and one day he came in from a football game, and I said: 'Who won?' and he said: 'We lost,' and then he burst into tears. You cannot lose. Groton cannot lose. That's what they believed in, no matter what," explains Auchincloss. "They all would have all been willing to die, if they hadn't already been in high positions. They believed America cannot lose. We stand for every virtue and right that's in the world."

I dare say, as a certain type of Auchincloss character might put it, that that mentality has a strong hold on the "American greatness" types who can't imagine America ever admitting to--or even ever making--a foreign policy blunder. And in failing to admit to blunders, they fall into crimes. Which, pace Talleyrand, are usually worse.

UPDATE: Check out Nick Gillespie's 2005 account of how he nearly got to meet Auchincloss--a man whose family Nick's grandmother used to work for as a cook and servant. The portentous Gillespie-Auchincloss cross-generational reunion was, alas, foiled by some of those outmoded WASP codes. Which ones? RTFA, as an Auchincloss would never say.