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Crisis Management Center—represented a generational leap for the White House, and it was the kind of work for which Poindexter had shown an early inclination. Just prior to graduating first in his class from the academy, he was tapped by the Navy for an elite new technology and engineering program, launched as a reaction to Sputnik. Poindexter, with four other midshipmen, was offered a free ride to any doctoral program that would admit him, and in keeping with his track record he aimed for the top—the nuclear physics program at Cal Tech. He had no particular background in the subject, but he was fascinated by the inner workings of complicated things. And when the civilian leading the scholars program concluded Poindexter would never meet the admissions requirements, much less keep up with the other students, he was convinced it was the right program for him.
    He sailed through, despite one hiccup with a particularly challenging course in classical mechanics, a basic requirement for the program but a field for which Poindexter had received no training at the academy. After discovering early on that he was in danger of failing the course, he piled up all the books he’d have to read on the floor next to his desk. He put what he knew on top and worked his way down to the unknown, through three feet of texts. He finished the course with a B. A year later he was studying gamma rays alongside a German scientist who won the 1961 Nobel Prize in physics.
    In 1966, Poindexter joined yet another cadre of elites that set him on his trajectory to the White House—Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s “Whiz Kids.” McNamara hand-selected geniuses from the nation’s top universities, corporations, and think tanks and deployed them throughout the Pentagon bureaucracy. The Whiz Kids had a mandate to infuse the system with new thinking. Technology, economics, metrics-driven management. These were the tools and saviors of a new military, and the keys, so McNamara thought, to winning the war in Vietnam—the generals and admirals be damned. Poindexter landed in the aptly named Systems Analysis division where, under the guidance of another prize-winning scholar, he and his new colleagues set to work trying to understand problems whose complexity was surpassed only by their grimness: the causes and consequence of a nuclear war, or the survivability of a land battle with the Soviets. Its disciples called it “the science of war.” And Poindexter approached it with the same systematic determination and faith as he did a three-foot stack of physics books.
    Poindexter hadn’t anticipated that the rest of the White House staff wouldn’t share his discipline. When he arrived the entire crisis management apparatus was in shambles. He often remarked to friends that the White House was like a ship at sea without a map. Across the government, crisis management fared no better. The president and his cabinet, the decision makers in government, were ill served by the intelligence agencies and the military, he felt. Reagan had not run as a foreign policy president, and yet the most significant challenges of his first term came from abroad. Beyond the horizon, an array of threats lined up—the Soviets, socialists in Latin America, and now suicidal fanatics.
    Poindexter wanted the system to predict those surprises. And when crisis bloomed, to control it. He thought he was getting a handle on things. But sitting there in the early-morning dark, reading the first reports on the mayhem and devastation in Beirut, he knew the system had failed.
    Poindexter was not angry. He was not morose. He was annoyed. We should have seen this coming, he told himself.
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    The signals of a major terrorist attack on the Marines in Beirut had gone unnoticed by almost everyone in a position to stop them. Since May, U.S. intelligence agencies had received more than one hundred warnings of car bombs in Lebanon. Each one was