129 of 135 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reads as if it were written yesterday., July 27, 2001
When I read "The Best and the Brightest" I could not believe how fresh it was, despite the fact that it was written in 1972 it feels as if it were written yesterday. I am amazed at how much information Halberstam was able to collect in the late 1960s, before the Freedom of Information Act, and while the war was still raging, about the Vietnam War and the decisions that led up to it. If Halberstam were to sit down today to write this book, with another 30 years of historical documentation available he might write a different book but I cannot see how he could write a better one. Halberstam shows how bad decisions, dishonesty, an unwillingness to face facts and sheer basic stupidity got America into a war that was lost from the start. The amazing thing that this book reveals is how so many smart, well-accomplished people, the best and the brightest of the American foreign policy and military were so incredibly wrong for so incredibly long. I wish that I had read this book a long time ago, I'm glad that I've read it now.
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156 of 169 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Overview Of How We Slid Into A Quagmire In Vietnam!, August 12, 2000
Nothing so brilliantly crystallized and clarified the epic true story of how the American people were led into the tragedy of Vietnam better than did this classic book by David Halberstam. Already famous for his journalistic overview in "The Making of a Quagmire", Halberstam riveted the nation with his absorbing, literate, and very detailed account of how the arrogant, insular, technocratically well educated, and affluent sons and daughters of the Power Elite in this country led us into the unholy miasma of Vietnam. This is a classic story superbly told by a journalist with impeccable credentials.
Halberstam already had a wealth of personal experience as a correspondent in Vietnam before initiating the research for this book, and he draws a number of fascinating, intimate, and quite absorbing in-depth portraits of the major figures involved in this fool's errand formerly referred to as French Indochina. From the feckless and perhaps clueless Robert McNamara to McGeorge Bundy, brother William Bundy, former Oxford Scholar Dean Rusk, George Ball, William Westmoreland, Maxwell Taylor, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, all these alumni of the best schools and best families (with the single exception of LBJ, an accidental president) pranced their pseudo-macho way toward the single most disastrous series of military decisions this side of Pearl Harbor.
Unlike those of us who actually saw the jungles of Vietnam up close and personal, these men were neither ignorant, nor provincial (at least not in the ordinary use of that term), nor poorly informed; rather, they both considered themselves and were considered by others to be the most outstanding, capable, and effective members of the contemporary "Power Elite" i.e. the best of the then contemporary ivy League graduates Kennedy could lure from the bastions of the academic, business, and corporate world into the magic and presumptuous world of Camelot. In essence, these guys were seen as the best and the brightest of their generation. Just how their elite educations, presumptuous world-views, and de-facto actual ignorance and lack of what we would now refer to as "street-smarts" led them to conclude it was in the nation's interests to fight what others have called "the wrong war in the wrong place with the wrong foes at the wrong time" is an epic tale of arrogance, insular thinking, and mutually sustained delusions.
Through their efforts they embroiled us in an unwinnable war, a conflict that the rest of us paid so dearly for in blood, sweat and tears. They led a nation then so singularly blessed with affluence and peace into a bottomless cauldron of dissent, inter-generational strife, and almost pitched us off the precipice of social and political revolution. It is important to better understand what kind of men they were, and why they led us so carelessly into such sustained disaster. Why did they react to defeats by escalating, even when the evidence clearly indicated (as McNamara has recently admitted) doing so was futile? Who led whom down the primrose path in the meetings in which these decisions were repeatedly argued, hammered out and finally refined?
All these questions and many more are answered in this wonderfully documented and exhaustively detailed account of how it is that so few individuals engaged in a series of such disastrous policy decisions that led America into the quagmire of Vietnam. By the way, after carefully re-reading the book I am more convinced than ever that McNamara and Westmoreland (among others) should be indicted and tried as war criminals. Let them spend their dotage in federal prison. After all, there is no statute of limitations on conspiracy to commit murder, and I have dozens of friends gone too soon based on nothing more than the deliberately callous and reckless decisions made by these men as outlined in this book. I highly recommend it.
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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best account yet written of America's entry into Vietnam, November 24, 1996
By A Customer
David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest is the Iliad of America's doomed involvement in Vietnam, a book of audacious scope and intense human drama. Want to know why America became enmired in Vietnam, and why we lost? One could argue that there isn't a more important question to ask about any aspect of American history in the last 30 years, and Halberstam answers it as fully as it can be answered in a single narrative. Reading this book thirty years after it was published, one can't help but be struck by the extent to which Halberstam's version of events has become THE standard account; his argument is thorough, and thoroughly damning, and it is a difficult one to refute. Halberstam succeeds utterly in making palpable the forces that acted on the collection of flawed individuals who found themselves in the White House during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a cast of characters brought to life with novelistic virtuosity. To coin a cliche, if you're only going to read one Vietnam book, this is surely it
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