rethinking groupthink

So for this post I am going to briefly comment on the article entitled "Groupthink."  This article describes this term as a type of conformity in which members of the group abandon their own beliefs and ideas to conform to those of their leader or colleagues.  The author states that the main reason the members of the group do this is to avoid being too harsh in their judgments of others' ideas.  The author then gives a laundry-list of examples in which he takes a decision that went wrong in the past, and credits the negative outcome to groupthink.  Once I read one of his examples, I began to disagree with the remainder of what he had to say in the article.

The example I am pertaining to is under the "morality" section, where he criticizes the members of President Johnson's cabinet of ignoring their own individual ethical and moral values in order to adhere to those of the group when selecting targets for bombing in Vietnam.  Johnson's cabinet had a protocol for selecting the targets, in which they considered the military advantage, the risk to aircraft and pilots, the danger of forcing other countries into fighting, and the danger of heavy Vietnamese civilian casualties.  The author claims groupthink is present in this situation because everyone followed this procedure, instead of individually deciding based on their own morals.  Let me first start by saying that this is probably the biggest stretch of an argument I've read so far this semester.  Later in the paragraph, the author admits that the evidence supporting his claim is "scant", so even he knows his argument is not legitimate.  Next, let me say that since this article was written in the early 1970's, it is easy to point the finger and place the blame on his cabinet because the article is written in hind-sight.  If the author was sitting in the room making the bombing target decisions, his groupthink theory would not have even crossed his mind because he would agree to follow the procedure.  However, since Vietnam was, and still is a very controversial topic, he saw the overall failure of the war and any decisions made during the war as supposed support to his groupthink theory .  It was a good attempt, but personally I did not buy it.  Finally, the four step procedure Johnson's cabinet used to select bomb targets seemed pretty legitimate to me.  They considered the safety of their own troops, the inhabitants of other countries, and the civilians in Vietnam.  I'm not sure about you, but this sounds pretty moral to me.  If individual members were to follow their own morals in making decisions, I'm pretty sure these four factors would have been their main concerns anyway, so I do not see why it was a big deal that the group as a whole felt the same way.  If you ask me, I think the author was immoral for trying to use Johnson's cabinet as a scapegoat for his theory when he even admits there was very little evidence to support his groupthink claim.