Maxwell Taylor was the Army's in-house Whiz Kid in the 50's, brought back to be Chief of Staff IIRC by Kennedy, who reconstituted Franklin Roosevelt's "brain trust" by calling in all the rest of the Roosevelt-era Whiz Kids: Macnamara, Galbraith, Schlesinger, the Bundy brothers, various others.
I read a paper on varieties of human intelligence once that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, that documented how Harvard, even in the 40's and 50's, had created just the culture you describe, and which Hackworth vilifies, in which people were completely power-driven and whose most notable characteristics, as students, was that they sucked up infinitely more than regular college students to their professors. Roosevelt made this culture normative for the United States Government through the creation of the "brain trust" and its "whiz kid" protege's.
The upshot of the Atlantic Monthly article was that people who have problem-solving and creative intelligence, and people who are socially helpful and adept, all tend to get shoved aside by the power junkie/suckup types, who don't value cooperation (they compete instead) and don't value concrete results -- only differential, competitive "results" that put more daylight between them and their competitors. People like that aren't real leaders as much as they are self-absorbed schemers and power-seekers.