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The Best and the Brightest

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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.

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.

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

This is a truly excellent book on American policy making in Vietnam.

I first read it in 1973 or 1974. It blew my mind that 'the best and the brightest' could act as they did, whether from honest but gross misjudgments to outright lies, most often bound with incredible arrogance.

Some of the material is found in the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's own study of the war. Another reviewer commented that they had not yet been published, but Halberstam, ace that he was, apparently had access to them.

This book provided another, and large, nail in the coffin of my naive idealism of someone growing up in post WWII America (college, class of 1966) with respect to the US government.

I was totally absorbed when reading it. Halberstam does occasionally overuse some of his pet phrasings,e.g. 'rare ability'.

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.

"The Best and the Brightest"
By David Halberstam (1934-2007)
Reviewed by Philip Henry

David Halberstam survived wars, literal and figurative landmines, popular acclaim, political opponents and the Fifties and Vietnam. Ironically, after all of that he was killed in a car crash near San Francisco April 23, 2007. Characteristically, he was on his way to an interview for a new book.
Halberstam was one of the pioneers in Vietnam reporting (along with Neil Sheehan)--posted there several times in the `60's by The Times. His `The Making of a Quagmire " accurately forecast the course of an unwinnable war. "The Best and the Brightest" focused on the irony of well-qualified but ill-advised policy makers in a thicket of foreign policy.

Halberstam didn't confine himself to one area or one period: he was equally at home with major league baseball and high-level foreign policy debates. Like George Will, his ideological antithesis, he appreciated a good story, a good ballgame, and had an infallible nose for lies and evasion.

Halberstam received 20 Honorary degrees, spoke at many college commencements, and received the Pulitzer in 1964 at the age of 30 for his Vietnam reporting for the Times. Five of his 15 bestsellers have been about sports, and it reflects the breadth of his work and the public's response to it that both The Best and The Brightest and Summer of '49 (on an epic pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox), were #1 New York Times bestsellers.
If one were to replace "Vietnam" with "Iraq"; "President Lyndon Johnson" with "George Bush'; and Robert McNamara with Donald Rumsfeld, one would read exactly the same facts into the current fiasco in Iraq. If there is one book that all Presidents and Candidates should be required to read, it's "The Best and The Brightest." That would be Halberstam's greatest tribute.

In the 1970's, I was an enlisted man serving with American Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN). One of my assignments was to record and report on the daily briefings by MACOI ( Military Assistance Command Vietnam/ Office of Information) Briefers. The idea was to give the troops the Pablum from the Command; not the truth, which would have been counter-productive to the political objectives of the administration.
Thankfully, Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, George Esper (AP Saigon Bureau Chief);
John Laurence (CBS News) and others were there to refute the official line. David
Halberstam was a role model, a true professional, and an American Institution.
*I nominate Halberstam for the Baseball Writers' Hall of Fame. That would be appropriate.


*****

Halberstam's book's most illuminating quote is attributed to one of Walt Rostow's (the chief architect of the US bombing of North Vietnam) Harvard colleagues. After his friend departed Cambridge, to take up his position the Kennedy administration, this colleague walked into a roomful of students, and said, more or less, "you never sleep as well at night when you actually know people running the country."

This book is all about the men (the best and the brightest) who mired this nation in Vietnam. It's also about other men, men like John Peyton Davies, perhaps the State Department's best Asian expert, purged from public service after the McCarthy juggernaut swept through the country. It's also about applying the wrong lessons of history to wrong problems: Kennedy and Johnson learned from Munich that nations shrink from "tyranny" at their own peril, and therefore decided to confront the "tyranny" of North Vietnam communism, which, according to Halberstam, was simply nationalism -- the extension of their colonial wars of the 1950s. Men like Davies would have realized this, and then warned against intervention; but men like Davies, ostensibly "soft" on communism, had already been run out of Washington (during the Vietnam War, Davies, the man Halberstam uses to personify the flight of those who really understood the intentions of North Vietnam, was making furniture in Peru). Men like McNamara, the Bundys, and Dean Rusk, despite their rationalism and considerable mental horsepower, didn't get this. Nor did they understand how to bring themselves (and the country) back once they'd stepped beyond the brink.

For all its quality and insight, the book makes a little much of the "establishment" credentials of the war's architects. It's as if Halberstam believes that, since these men came from storied Atlantic families, they were somehow doomed to err. It's likely that these credentials made these men arrogant; but I also believe that an administration filled with men self-made men, men who'd never known any family privilege, might easily have made the same mistakes as the McGeorge Bundys of the world.

Still, this is a remarkable book. A side note: I think this book should be required reading for the business executives of today. This is where today's best and brightest operate, and they are capable of making the same sorts of mistakes. Look at the executives of Enron and WorldCom: Just like the men of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, they're capable of believing in their own infallibility just because everyone around them says it's so.

A large-scale work focused on the origins of the war, this book was the first of its kind by far -- published in 1972, it was written without the benefit of the Pentagon Papers. It's also entirely unreferenced, which would be troubling except for the fact that its conclusions have mostly stood up to the test of time. The depth is impressive, one of the results of its large size; at about 400,000 words, it is larger than any Vietnam War history I know of. (Karnow's "Vietnam: A History," for example, is about 330,000 words.) Especially good are the unusually detailed portraits of the principal figures involved in the origins, including Bob McNamara, President Johnson, Dean Rusk, President Kennedy, Mac Bundy, and Max Taylor. It ends with Nixon's 1968 election.

Besides being a great historical resource, this book shows the amazing degree to which the problems and deceptions surrounding Vietnam were known in the late 1960's. Although many useful Vietnam histories have been published in the last five years, they add only marginally to what was known and written by Halberstam and others thirty years ago.

I had to read this book for a history class I took in college. We only had two weeks to get through it, and I remember thinking it was such a great book that I'd like to read it again when I had more time, so I could enjoy it. I've read it a few more times since then, and it is probably the best non-fiction book I've ever read.

Halberstam, who has never written a bad book, gives us a fascinating look at the brilliant people who made up the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and shows us how these brilliant people made some horrible errors to get us deeper and deeper into the war. The book is filled with great anecdotes about these people, but it's not just about how the brilliant people screwed up. It also includes some heroic figures, like George Ball, who often found himself fighting against all of the others to try to convince the president to get out of Vietnam.

If you've never read anything by Halberstam do yourself a favor and buy this book. This was the first book I read by him, and ever since the first time I read this one, I've been buying everything I can find by him. I've never been disappointed yet.

Some of his best other books are:

October 1964 (baseball)
The Powers That Be (journalism)
The Children (Civil Rights)
The Teammates (baseball)
The Fifties (history)
Summer of '49 (baseball)
Breaks of the Game (basketball)
The Reckoning (the auto industry)
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (the 1968 election)

This is a well written epic that chronicles in great detail the American decision to go to war in S.E. Asia. One thing that strikes me is that this is a non-partisan work which is refereshing given the recent series of books (left and right)on Iraq. I have read about 20 books on the subject of Vietnam and this is by far the best.