What do you think?
Rate this book
The Best and the Brightest
The Best and the Brightest is David Halberstam's masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy. Using portraits of America's flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country's recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam and why did it lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It's an American classic.
688 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
About the author
David Halberstam
101 books768 followersDavid Halberstam was an American journalist and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, and later, sports journalism. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964.
Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955 and started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee, he covered the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement.
In the mid 1960s, Halberstam covered the Vietnam War for The New York Times. While there, he gathered material for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at the New York Times. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig.
Halberstam's most well known work is The Best and the Brightest. Halberstam focused on the paradox that those who shaped the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, well-connected and self-confident men in America—"the best and the brightest"—and yet those same individuals were responsible for the failure of the United States Vientnam policy.
After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam plunged right into another book and in 1979 published The Powers That Be. The book provided profiles of men like William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, Phil Graham of The Washington Post—and many others.
Later in his career, Halberstam turned to the subjects of sports, publishing The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at the Bill Walton and the 1978 Portland Trailblazers basketball team; an ambitious book on Michael Jordan in 1999 called Playing for Keeps; and on the pennant race battle between the Yankees and Red Sox called Summer of '49.
Halberstam published two books in the 1960s, three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He published four books in the 2000s and was on a pace to publish six or more books in that decade before his death.
David Halberstam was killed in a car crash on April 23, 2007 in Menlo Park, California.
Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955 and started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee, he covered the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement.
In the mid 1960s, Halberstam covered the Vietnam War for The New York Times. While there, he gathered material for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at the New York Times. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig.
Halberstam's most well known work is The Best and the Brightest. Halberstam focused on the paradox that those who shaped the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, well-connected and self-confident men in America—"the best and the brightest"—and yet those same individuals were responsible for the failure of the United States Vientnam policy.
After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam plunged right into another book and in 1979 published The Powers That Be. The book provided profiles of men like William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, Phil Graham of The Washington Post—and many others.
Later in his career, Halberstam turned to the subjects of sports, publishing The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at the Bill Walton and the 1978 Portland Trailblazers basketball team; an ambitious book on Michael Jordan in 1999 called Playing for Keeps; and on the pennant race battle between the Yankees and Red Sox called Summer of '49.
Halberstam published two books in the 1960s, three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He published four books in the 2000s and was on a pace to publish six or more books in that decade before his death.
David Halberstam was killed in a car crash on April 23, 2007 in Menlo Park, California.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 590 reviews
November 3, 2018
"It sounds unspeakably dull and ponderous; it was not. I found I could not put the book down. It had all the ingredients of a great novel: a tragic plot of almost Shakespearean proportions, a fascinating cast of characters, and some wonderful writing." —Liaquat Ahamed, The Independent. 01 January 2010
"In 1963, the notion that a newspaper reporter might challenge the official story of generals and ambassadors in the middle of a war, essentially accusing them of lying, was so improbable that it could have occurred only to someone still in his twenties. The Second World War and the unquestionable prestige that it conferred on men in uniform were only a generation old." —George Packer, The New Yorker 7 May 2007
The foreign policy and the men that gave us the Vietnam War. The war is here as decisions: should we bomb, should we send troops, what lies to tell the public. McCarthyism set the stage, so alcohol was involved. Of course, there is more to it than that. The personal profiles of the men involved are excellent. Mostly they are Ivies with the right connections and families, “Grotton of course,” but there at least one barefoot farm boy and Johnson.
******************************************
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/op...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bes...
"In 1963, the notion that a newspaper reporter might challenge the official story of generals and ambassadors in the middle of a war, essentially accusing them of lying, was so improbable that it could have occurred only to someone still in his twenties. The Second World War and the unquestionable prestige that it conferred on men in uniform were only a generation old." —George Packer, The New Yorker 7 May 2007
The foreign policy and the men that gave us the Vietnam War. The war is here as decisions: should we bomb, should we send troops, what lies to tell the public. McCarthyism set the stage, so alcohol was involved. Of course, there is more to it than that. The personal profiles of the men involved are excellent. Mostly they are Ivies with the right connections and families, “Grotton of course,” but there at least one barefoot farm boy and Johnson.
******************************************
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/op...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bes...
August 9, 2012
The main question about World War 1 that Barbara Tuchmann's seminal The Guns of August was trying to answer was "How did this happen?" How did all these complacent European countries, many of whose leaders were related, with no clear reason to go to war, and with uncounted amounts of wealth in trade and prosperity at stake, end up sending millions of their youth to die in the mud over marginal amounts of land that they didn't even really want? Tuchmann identified a number of cognitive errors that clouded the minds of the people in charge: overconfidence in their own military prowess, fear of looking weak to domestic constituencies, excessive influence of war hawks in decision making, excessive bureaucratic infighting, the elevation of political considerations over military realities, disregard for negative feedback, and perhaps most crucially, a failure to understand how small moves could irrevocably commit nations to much larger future moves, with much greater consequences than originally anticipated. Being a well-read and perceptive intellectual, John F Kennedy was well aware of Tuchmann's insights, and, after being humbled by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, successful used them to avert nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, in one of those little ironies of history, he was completely unable to avoid following a similar path of small but irreversible escalations in Vietnam, until the full-on war he had been trying to avoid eventually trapped his successors and millions of people in the senseless slaughter of the Vietnam War.
I think Halberstam's book is easily as perceptive, in broad terms, as Tuchmann's classic. Tuchmann is only cited once, briefly, but even though this book, written in 1972, had a much closer vantage point to its still-active subject than The Guns of August, and hence is closer to unusually detailed and eloquent journalism than a straight-up history, Halberstam observes and recounts all the same organizational pathologies that plagued the French General Staff and the Prussian High Command that were still present in the American political and military leadership. One thing above all that this book does, alluded to in its title, is shatter the illusion that the only thing you need to face big problems is to acquire smart people. There are endless sections chronicling the brilliance and acuity of people like Robert McNamara, who could revolutionize vast domains like the auto industry, but were unable to figure out how to get themselves out of the Vietnam trap or even to make anything close to progress in any direction. Even lesser characters, like the legions of assistant deputy sub-under-secretaries who seem to be pretty bright fellows, managed closely and carefully by a White House that rewarded and encouraged cleverness, spend vast quantities of their page time engaged in self-destructive internecine struggles about whether to report bad news and how much, while the country whose destiny they were trying to determine slowly slipped out of their grasp. Men who had gone to the best schools, who had racked up acclaimed careers in industry or finance or the military, who had smoothly ascended through the toughest jungles of the American elite, were unable to conjure a victory against one of the smallest, weakest, and poorest countries in the world.
The struggles of these dramatis personae are told through extended profiles, which are the major highlights of the book due to their length and detail. Halberstam delves deeply into the life stories of all-but-forgotten figures like Averell Harriman, Dean Rusk, or Dean Acheson to show, over and over again, the truth of Yeats' lines about how "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity". It's impossible to overstate the role that McCarthyism specifically, and anti-Communism generally, played in leading the US to the war. People who accurately reported or expressed pessimism about the escalation into war in bother the White House and the military were repeatedly and systematically shunted aside, transferred to worse jobs, or rendered helpless by accusations of being "soft on Communism". For the men whose careers had spanned even "successful" wars like Korea, the traumas of witch hunting made it impossible to back down, like poker players who through pride or fear simply can't fold and cut their losses. And so as the stakes kept getting raised, hawkishness became the only permissible philosophy in the Cabinet throughout both Kennedy's "team of rivals" management style and Johnson's "my way or the highway" style, the war simply got more and more intense with its own peculiar self-reinforcing logic, and each man found himself a prisoner of events beyond his control. All the major players had big incentives to escalate and act tough; no one's career was helped by caution and disagreement. In fairness to Kennedy, book clearly lays out the Truman and Eisenhower-era roots of America's involvement in Vietnam, but as he makes clear, only during the Kennedy era did the Vietnam "conflict", "brush fire", or "quagmire" really start to become a war that we couldn't back out of, despite how smart all of these guys were.
Of course, even to this day, it's somewhat of an open question of which President is most to "blame" for the Vietnam War, depending on which part you're talking about and how you define "blame". Truman, for his inaction when the French were trying to regain control of their colonial empire and he was too distracted with the Korean War? Eisenhower, for his belief that the fight against the Soviets and the Chinese was more important than the Vietnamese desire for self-determination, and who allowed McCarthyism to poison vital parts of the government? Kennedy, for his refusal to look weak on Communism after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, the creation of the team who would oversee Vietnam's transformation into chaos, and for his timidity in taking a real stand one way or the other during crucial years of escalation? Johnson, who, unbriefed, unprepared, and unsure after Kennedy's assassination, publicly vowed that he wouldn't "lose" Vietnam the way that China had been "lost", and thought that if he just had a bit more time and money and men, he could make the issue go away with overwhelming force, salvaging his Great Society? Nixon, who, though his involvement came very late, still managed to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations with his "secret plan"? With the hindsight of 40 years after the book was written, it's clear that the problem went beyond any particular President, both because our goals were unclear, and because in a sense, the tools of government that each man used did not really belong to him. At one point, Vietnam genuinely was a tiny, unimportant country whose wishes could be safely ignored, but even with one of the greatest assemblies of talent the country had ever seen, the problem that they were trying to "solve" by propping up dictators, calculating meaningless body count statistics, and suppressing all dissent, was simply beyond their understanding.
Ho Chi Minh is frequently compared to George Washington; one wonders after reading this book if King George III had his own "best and brightest" ministers who advised analogous strategies like shelling Boston, propping up a puppet government in Georgia, rounding up colonists and settling them into "strategic plantations", or simply sending more and more redcoats. The profile of Lyndon Johnson in particular really brings home the weakness of the "imperial" style of government, as Arthur Schlesinger termed it, especially when not just Johnson but the country lost as the Great Society was upstaged by the war; Halberstam is nearly equal to Robert Caro in his ability to bring forth the drama in a man's soul and connect it to the larger currents of history. His account also prompts the modern reader to silently consider the many parallels to the way the Iraq War was promoted and managed, and its similar effects on the world. I don't know if all wars have their beginnings in the exact same kind of group stupidity recounted here, but if more governments read books like this, the world would certainly be a better place. I feel that this work, in some sense a Greek tragedy, is essential to understanding the Sixties, its war, and its place in our world.
I think Halberstam's book is easily as perceptive, in broad terms, as Tuchmann's classic. Tuchmann is only cited once, briefly, but even though this book, written in 1972, had a much closer vantage point to its still-active subject than The Guns of August, and hence is closer to unusually detailed and eloquent journalism than a straight-up history, Halberstam observes and recounts all the same organizational pathologies that plagued the French General Staff and the Prussian High Command that were still present in the American political and military leadership. One thing above all that this book does, alluded to in its title, is shatter the illusion that the only thing you need to face big problems is to acquire smart people. There are endless sections chronicling the brilliance and acuity of people like Robert McNamara, who could revolutionize vast domains like the auto industry, but were unable to figure out how to get themselves out of the Vietnam trap or even to make anything close to progress in any direction. Even lesser characters, like the legions of assistant deputy sub-under-secretaries who seem to be pretty bright fellows, managed closely and carefully by a White House that rewarded and encouraged cleverness, spend vast quantities of their page time engaged in self-destructive internecine struggles about whether to report bad news and how much, while the country whose destiny they were trying to determine slowly slipped out of their grasp. Men who had gone to the best schools, who had racked up acclaimed careers in industry or finance or the military, who had smoothly ascended through the toughest jungles of the American elite, were unable to conjure a victory against one of the smallest, weakest, and poorest countries in the world.
The struggles of these dramatis personae are told through extended profiles, which are the major highlights of the book due to their length and detail. Halberstam delves deeply into the life stories of all-but-forgotten figures like Averell Harriman, Dean Rusk, or Dean Acheson to show, over and over again, the truth of Yeats' lines about how "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity". It's impossible to overstate the role that McCarthyism specifically, and anti-Communism generally, played in leading the US to the war. People who accurately reported or expressed pessimism about the escalation into war in bother the White House and the military were repeatedly and systematically shunted aside, transferred to worse jobs, or rendered helpless by accusations of being "soft on Communism". For the men whose careers had spanned even "successful" wars like Korea, the traumas of witch hunting made it impossible to back down, like poker players who through pride or fear simply can't fold and cut their losses. And so as the stakes kept getting raised, hawkishness became the only permissible philosophy in the Cabinet throughout both Kennedy's "team of rivals" management style and Johnson's "my way or the highway" style, the war simply got more and more intense with its own peculiar self-reinforcing logic, and each man found himself a prisoner of events beyond his control. All the major players had big incentives to escalate and act tough; no one's career was helped by caution and disagreement. In fairness to Kennedy, book clearly lays out the Truman and Eisenhower-era roots of America's involvement in Vietnam, but as he makes clear, only during the Kennedy era did the Vietnam "conflict", "brush fire", or "quagmire" really start to become a war that we couldn't back out of, despite how smart all of these guys were.
Of course, even to this day, it's somewhat of an open question of which President is most to "blame" for the Vietnam War, depending on which part you're talking about and how you define "blame". Truman, for his inaction when the French were trying to regain control of their colonial empire and he was too distracted with the Korean War? Eisenhower, for his belief that the fight against the Soviets and the Chinese was more important than the Vietnamese desire for self-determination, and who allowed McCarthyism to poison vital parts of the government? Kennedy, for his refusal to look weak on Communism after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, the creation of the team who would oversee Vietnam's transformation into chaos, and for his timidity in taking a real stand one way or the other during crucial years of escalation? Johnson, who, unbriefed, unprepared, and unsure after Kennedy's assassination, publicly vowed that he wouldn't "lose" Vietnam the way that China had been "lost", and thought that if he just had a bit more time and money and men, he could make the issue go away with overwhelming force, salvaging his Great Society? Nixon, who, though his involvement came very late, still managed to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations with his "secret plan"? With the hindsight of 40 years after the book was written, it's clear that the problem went beyond any particular President, both because our goals were unclear, and because in a sense, the tools of government that each man used did not really belong to him. At one point, Vietnam genuinely was a tiny, unimportant country whose wishes could be safely ignored, but even with one of the greatest assemblies of talent the country had ever seen, the problem that they were trying to "solve" by propping up dictators, calculating meaningless body count statistics, and suppressing all dissent, was simply beyond their understanding.
Ho Chi Minh is frequently compared to George Washington; one wonders after reading this book if King George III had his own "best and brightest" ministers who advised analogous strategies like shelling Boston, propping up a puppet government in Georgia, rounding up colonists and settling them into "strategic plantations", or simply sending more and more redcoats. The profile of Lyndon Johnson in particular really brings home the weakness of the "imperial" style of government, as Arthur Schlesinger termed it, especially when not just Johnson but the country lost as the Great Society was upstaged by the war; Halberstam is nearly equal to Robert Caro in his ability to bring forth the drama in a man's soul and connect it to the larger currents of history. His account also prompts the modern reader to silently consider the many parallels to the way the Iraq War was promoted and managed, and its similar effects on the world. I don't know if all wars have their beginnings in the exact same kind of group stupidity recounted here, but if more governments read books like this, the world would certainly be a better place. I feel that this work, in some sense a Greek tragedy, is essential to understanding the Sixties, its war, and its place in our world.
November 30, 2021
Since I read his The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era, which is a most dishonest and misleading account of what happened in Vietnam prior to President Lyndon B. Johnson's full-scale invasion, I have blacklisted David Halberstam. His reporting on Vietnam had been shallow and sensationalist, and so was his book. I knew in advance that THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST would probably be just as full of lies, but I could not bypass it. The status of a bestseller has given many mediocre, or outright bad, works the reputation of a reliable source – Bobby Kennedy's THIRTEEN DAYS, which offered a tragically distorted account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is a prime example – so the myths such books create have to be dispelled from time to time. Otherwise, the lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth, and history dangerously disconnects from reality.
Since I mentioned the status of a bestseller this book (undeservedly) achieved, I have to point out that even its commercial success is a mystery to me. David Halberstam's prose is woven from clichés and therefore unengaging. His narrative consists of bits of research with hardly any meaningful connection between them.
The main problem, though, is that the book tragically lacks any discernible purpose. The author seems to have something special to convey to the readers, some ominous warning in regard to the shaping of American foreign policy and the selection of personnel, but he eventually fails to express it, and I finished reading without having acquired any additional understanding of how to prevent disasters similar to Vietnam in the future. David Halberstam asks, "Can we not learn from history?" yet I could hardly learn much from him, for he had concealed numerous sources, pleading the right of journalists not to identify their reporters. This means that, basically, a large part of his claims cannot be proved. Knowing his "exploits" as a reporter in Saigon (if you are interested, read my review of THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE, which elaborates on this topic, please), I am not at all inclined to believe him without evidence, and, just like in THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE, his writing does not inspire trust.
For instance, he is notably free with the word "lie," as applied to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and other American policy-makers he targets with his criticism. According to him, Adlai Stevenson "had stood and lied about things that he did not know." If he did not know, how could he be lying, deliberately deceiving? Rather, he was innocently repeating the lies that had been told to him, so David Halberstam's claim, two pages later, that "[i]t was better for Stevenson to go before the United States and lie" is a cheap attempt to slander the Ambassador. Furthermore, the author seems to have been infatuated with expressions that are more appropriate for a work of popular historical fiction than a scholarly one – "the older men would remember," "Luce's . . . conscience would bother him," etc. etc. His tone is often melancholic, overly full of "might have been"-s, but mostly ironic. Be mocks where there is nothing to mock. Had I not known better, I would have thought he was writing lore, or a prolonged satirical pamphlet, not historical non-fiction. Lucy Mallory's words are on-point in Halberstam's case: "No truth has ever been hurt by a sneer, but the growth of truth in the one who sneers has been stopped by his sneer, to his own detriment."
David Halberstam has attempted to shroud his book with a mysterious air of revelations. However, his promising insinuations notwithstanding, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST hardly reveals anything not generally known. Thanks to him, I was reminded that John F. Kennedy was a great golfer, much better than Ike Eisenhower, that he dragged presidential aide Michael Forrestal into a bathroom and asked him if he could persuade Averell Harriman to use a hearing aid, that Lyndon B. Johnson enjoyed reading FBI files and pretended to drink bourbon when he actually drank scotch, that he did not want to launch bombing strikes on North Vietnam during the Christmas season, and so on. Halberstam offers spicy details about the brilliant, self-assured MacGeorge Bundy, who had been recruiting for the CIA while teaching Government at Harvard, and useless, in this case, facts about the early lives, marriages, and social habits of the Kennedy and Johnson circles. He reveals, although I knew this already, that the Truman administration agreed to give military aid to the French in Indochina because the French agreed to approve the Schuman Plan, setting up the Coal-and-Steel community, which allowed West Germany to increase its coal and steel productions and become a solid protector against Communism. But so what? All of the aforementioned contributes almost nothing to my understanding of the flawed American policy-making that dragged America into the Vietnamese quagmire.
As Mary McCarthy observed quite insightfully, "History, for Halberstam, is cruel, ironic destiny; nobody controls events unless it is the military, who seem to be a supra-force, like destiny itself." He was fatalistic like a fortune-teller, with a penchant for dramatics. His sensationalist account requires a big, tragic central figure ("There were many Johnsons: this complicated, difficult, sensitive man"), "terrible decisions," and an unceasing stream of suspense. He insists on seeing Vietnam as an American tragedy and therefore presents its outcome as unavoidable, preordained, while promising a book that would expose the avoidable flaws of American foreign policy. His tragic voice almost made me forget that George Ball, one of the major dissenters against the escalation of the Vietnam conflict, offered counter-proposals to Lyndon Johnson's decision to deepen American commitment. The idea of clear-seeing policy-makers who might have stirred the American government away from that disastrous course of events loses all plausibility due to Halberstam's tendency to exaggerate and dramatize.
I think that David Halberstam also greatly exaggerated the menacing importance of the military. While it is true that generals always ask for more men, more hardware, and if you give them a finger, they will bite your whole arm off, aside from the exceptionally militant Maxwell Taylor, in regard to Vietnam they were not doing anything beyond what their job required. Generally, they perceived the rules of the Vietnam conflict quite clearly – if America was going to stay in Vietnam, it would need to send more men and hardware. It would have to bomb the North. Going by the main goal of the whole undertaking, they were right. Perhaps even General Curtis LeMay was right – if American policy-makers wanted victory over the Communists, they had to bomb Hanoi back to the Stone Age. Prior to 1967, there were hardly any signs from the majority of the American public that it preferred withdrawal to victory. Compromise was interpreted as a humiliating surrender.
Indeed, Lyndon Johnson's generals were guilty of providing chronically optimistic reports and forecasts, yet that was what Washington wanted to hear. For instance, instead of demanding supporting facts and figures, Robert S. McNamara was "elated" to hear from General Harkins in April 1963 that it all might be over by Christmas. It is weird that he swallowed the military's forged statistics, and the explanation Halberstam gives – that the Secretary of Defense did not want to encroach on the military's territory – is incorrect. Statistics were his forte, and he knew how to spot falsifications. However, he thought his country could not bear to hear the truth. The Vietnam policy required false figures to be carried on, and Robert McNamara was loyal.
The same conclusion could be drawn about the military. They were not some unruly force. They were loyal – to the American government, to the war effort it pursued, to the Cold War ideology in general. The fact that the generals' sunny reports did not coincide with their unceasing demands for more men and weaponry should have alerted the policy-making what way America's foreign policy was going. In 1962, the military was asking President John F. Kennedy for napalm, defoliants, and free-fire zones to store unused bombs in. While John Kennedy's experts were still attempting to sell him the strategy of "limited wars" and counter-insurgency, the generals' demands showed him it was time to get out, so he approved the NSAM-263 and began preparations for withdrawal, which ceased after he was assassinated, that is.
The military committed crimes – it encouraged and covered-up atrocities, it falsified statistics and reports – but Halberstam is wrong to charge it with dragging America deeper into the Vietnamese quagmire. The decisions to go ahead were made by American policy-makers and approved by Congressional majorities, which could have repealed the Tonkin Bay resolution any time. In Halberstam's account, though, Lyndon Johnson's figure appears tragic and sympathetic and the story dramatic, as he yields once again to the steady, merciless pressure from the professional warmakers.
American reluctance to leave Vietnam cannot be explained only with the unwillingness of a series of American leaders to be the "first American president to preside over defeat." Rather, the idea that the enemy could be within America's ally, not in North Vietnam, was unthinkable to policy-makers. They refused to admit the Vietnamese conflict was a civil war, for, they reasoned, nobody in his right mind could choose Communism, while receiving American aid.
The other major reason for the American government's willingness to get into Vietnam and stay there was America's technological superiority. It knew it had the "muscle" (a favorite word of Halberstam's), and this gave confidence to the decision-makers. They believed this technological superiority gave America an advantage over the Viet Cong that obliged it not to quit the war. Despite the "unfair" handicap of not being allowed to use atomic bombs, the American military could display an impressive array of weaponry, computer systems, and sophisticated radars. The production and maintenance of all this costly junk was an integral part of the American way of life, and the lack of appreciation by the Viet Cong of the clear evidence of America's overwhelming industrial capacity added another mysterious obstacle to the resolution of the conflict the American government wanted to achieve. After all, when Diem warned American journalists of Halberstam's ilk that Vietnam was no America, they did not listen.
David Halberstam touches on some of these reasons, but vaguely, between the lines. The lines themselves, though, ruin everything with their flashy styling, and are a constant distraction from important topics.
Finally, the author frequently underscores, and dramatizes, "the way high-level military destroyed dissenters" and cites the cases of Kattenburg, Sarris, Colonel Dan Porter, and others who were broken by the treatment or quit. Halberstam sounded quite convincing, and a significsnt parg of what he wrote might be true. Nevertheless, I once again caught him in a lie when I decided to find out what happened to the one-star General York, one of Halberstam's "favorite generals," whose story of alleged career loss the author leaves unfinished. I do not blame Halberstam for not anticipating the universal availability of personal computers, and therefore of an immense amount of information, in the 21st century. In the 1970s it must have been hard for most readers to check the veracity of his claims instantaneously, but all I had to do was google "Robert Howard Ford" to read that after his service as Director, Advanced Research Projects Agency, Research and Development Field Unit, and Joint Operation Evaluation Group in Vietnam, General York "returned to the United States to assume command of Fort Benning, Georgla and the Infantry School, 16 July 1965, where he served until he became Commanding General of XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg, 1 August 1967." Not only was his career not ruined, but he was eventually promoted. Sorry, David Halberstam.
In general, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST solidified David Halberstam's place on top of my black list of historians. It is a paragon of what a historic work should not be – sensationalist, poorly organized, overly detailed, and full of lies.
Since I mentioned the status of a bestseller this book (undeservedly) achieved, I have to point out that even its commercial success is a mystery to me. David Halberstam's prose is woven from clichés and therefore unengaging. His narrative consists of bits of research with hardly any meaningful connection between them.
The main problem, though, is that the book tragically lacks any discernible purpose. The author seems to have something special to convey to the readers, some ominous warning in regard to the shaping of American foreign policy and the selection of personnel, but he eventually fails to express it, and I finished reading without having acquired any additional understanding of how to prevent disasters similar to Vietnam in the future. David Halberstam asks, "Can we not learn from history?" yet I could hardly learn much from him, for he had concealed numerous sources, pleading the right of journalists not to identify their reporters. This means that, basically, a large part of his claims cannot be proved. Knowing his "exploits" as a reporter in Saigon (if you are interested, read my review of THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE, which elaborates on this topic, please), I am not at all inclined to believe him without evidence, and, just like in THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE, his writing does not inspire trust.
For instance, he is notably free with the word "lie," as applied to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and other American policy-makers he targets with his criticism. According to him, Adlai Stevenson "had stood and lied about things that he did not know." If he did not know, how could he be lying, deliberately deceiving? Rather, he was innocently repeating the lies that had been told to him, so David Halberstam's claim, two pages later, that "[i]t was better for Stevenson to go before the United States and lie" is a cheap attempt to slander the Ambassador. Furthermore, the author seems to have been infatuated with expressions that are more appropriate for a work of popular historical fiction than a scholarly one – "the older men would remember," "Luce's . . . conscience would bother him," etc. etc. His tone is often melancholic, overly full of "might have been"-s, but mostly ironic. Be mocks where there is nothing to mock. Had I not known better, I would have thought he was writing lore, or a prolonged satirical pamphlet, not historical non-fiction. Lucy Mallory's words are on-point in Halberstam's case: "No truth has ever been hurt by a sneer, but the growth of truth in the one who sneers has been stopped by his sneer, to his own detriment."
David Halberstam has attempted to shroud his book with a mysterious air of revelations. However, his promising insinuations notwithstanding, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST hardly reveals anything not generally known. Thanks to him, I was reminded that John F. Kennedy was a great golfer, much better than Ike Eisenhower, that he dragged presidential aide Michael Forrestal into a bathroom and asked him if he could persuade Averell Harriman to use a hearing aid, that Lyndon B. Johnson enjoyed reading FBI files and pretended to drink bourbon when he actually drank scotch, that he did not want to launch bombing strikes on North Vietnam during the Christmas season, and so on. Halberstam offers spicy details about the brilliant, self-assured MacGeorge Bundy, who had been recruiting for the CIA while teaching Government at Harvard, and useless, in this case, facts about the early lives, marriages, and social habits of the Kennedy and Johnson circles. He reveals, although I knew this already, that the Truman administration agreed to give military aid to the French in Indochina because the French agreed to approve the Schuman Plan, setting up the Coal-and-Steel community, which allowed West Germany to increase its coal and steel productions and become a solid protector against Communism. But so what? All of the aforementioned contributes almost nothing to my understanding of the flawed American policy-making that dragged America into the Vietnamese quagmire.
As Mary McCarthy observed quite insightfully, "History, for Halberstam, is cruel, ironic destiny; nobody controls events unless it is the military, who seem to be a supra-force, like destiny itself." He was fatalistic like a fortune-teller, with a penchant for dramatics. His sensationalist account requires a big, tragic central figure ("There were many Johnsons: this complicated, difficult, sensitive man"), "terrible decisions," and an unceasing stream of suspense. He insists on seeing Vietnam as an American tragedy and therefore presents its outcome as unavoidable, preordained, while promising a book that would expose the avoidable flaws of American foreign policy. His tragic voice almost made me forget that George Ball, one of the major dissenters against the escalation of the Vietnam conflict, offered counter-proposals to Lyndon Johnson's decision to deepen American commitment. The idea of clear-seeing policy-makers who might have stirred the American government away from that disastrous course of events loses all plausibility due to Halberstam's tendency to exaggerate and dramatize.
I think that David Halberstam also greatly exaggerated the menacing importance of the military. While it is true that generals always ask for more men, more hardware, and if you give them a finger, they will bite your whole arm off, aside from the exceptionally militant Maxwell Taylor, in regard to Vietnam they were not doing anything beyond what their job required. Generally, they perceived the rules of the Vietnam conflict quite clearly – if America was going to stay in Vietnam, it would need to send more men and hardware. It would have to bomb the North. Going by the main goal of the whole undertaking, they were right. Perhaps even General Curtis LeMay was right – if American policy-makers wanted victory over the Communists, they had to bomb Hanoi back to the Stone Age. Prior to 1967, there were hardly any signs from the majority of the American public that it preferred withdrawal to victory. Compromise was interpreted as a humiliating surrender.
Indeed, Lyndon Johnson's generals were guilty of providing chronically optimistic reports and forecasts, yet that was what Washington wanted to hear. For instance, instead of demanding supporting facts and figures, Robert S. McNamara was "elated" to hear from General Harkins in April 1963 that it all might be over by Christmas. It is weird that he swallowed the military's forged statistics, and the explanation Halberstam gives – that the Secretary of Defense did not want to encroach on the military's territory – is incorrect. Statistics were his forte, and he knew how to spot falsifications. However, he thought his country could not bear to hear the truth. The Vietnam policy required false figures to be carried on, and Robert McNamara was loyal.
The same conclusion could be drawn about the military. They were not some unruly force. They were loyal – to the American government, to the war effort it pursued, to the Cold War ideology in general. The fact that the generals' sunny reports did not coincide with their unceasing demands for more men and weaponry should have alerted the policy-making what way America's foreign policy was going. In 1962, the military was asking President John F. Kennedy for napalm, defoliants, and free-fire zones to store unused bombs in. While John Kennedy's experts were still attempting to sell him the strategy of "limited wars" and counter-insurgency, the generals' demands showed him it was time to get out, so he approved the NSAM-263 and began preparations for withdrawal, which ceased after he was assassinated, that is.
The military committed crimes – it encouraged and covered-up atrocities, it falsified statistics and reports – but Halberstam is wrong to charge it with dragging America deeper into the Vietnamese quagmire. The decisions to go ahead were made by American policy-makers and approved by Congressional majorities, which could have repealed the Tonkin Bay resolution any time. In Halberstam's account, though, Lyndon Johnson's figure appears tragic and sympathetic and the story dramatic, as he yields once again to the steady, merciless pressure from the professional warmakers.
American reluctance to leave Vietnam cannot be explained only with the unwillingness of a series of American leaders to be the "first American president to preside over defeat." Rather, the idea that the enemy could be within America's ally, not in North Vietnam, was unthinkable to policy-makers. They refused to admit the Vietnamese conflict was a civil war, for, they reasoned, nobody in his right mind could choose Communism, while receiving American aid.
The other major reason for the American government's willingness to get into Vietnam and stay there was America's technological superiority. It knew it had the "muscle" (a favorite word of Halberstam's), and this gave confidence to the decision-makers. They believed this technological superiority gave America an advantage over the Viet Cong that obliged it not to quit the war. Despite the "unfair" handicap of not being allowed to use atomic bombs, the American military could display an impressive array of weaponry, computer systems, and sophisticated radars. The production and maintenance of all this costly junk was an integral part of the American way of life, and the lack of appreciation by the Viet Cong of the clear evidence of America's overwhelming industrial capacity added another mysterious obstacle to the resolution of the conflict the American government wanted to achieve. After all, when Diem warned American journalists of Halberstam's ilk that Vietnam was no America, they did not listen.
David Halberstam touches on some of these reasons, but vaguely, between the lines. The lines themselves, though, ruin everything with their flashy styling, and are a constant distraction from important topics.
Finally, the author frequently underscores, and dramatizes, "the way high-level military destroyed dissenters" and cites the cases of Kattenburg, Sarris, Colonel Dan Porter, and others who were broken by the treatment or quit. Halberstam sounded quite convincing, and a significsnt parg of what he wrote might be true. Nevertheless, I once again caught him in a lie when I decided to find out what happened to the one-star General York, one of Halberstam's "favorite generals," whose story of alleged career loss the author leaves unfinished. I do not blame Halberstam for not anticipating the universal availability of personal computers, and therefore of an immense amount of information, in the 21st century. In the 1970s it must have been hard for most readers to check the veracity of his claims instantaneously, but all I had to do was google "Robert Howard Ford" to read that after his service as Director, Advanced Research Projects Agency, Research and Development Field Unit, and Joint Operation Evaluation Group in Vietnam, General York "returned to the United States to assume command of Fort Benning, Georgla and the Infantry School, 16 July 1965, where he served until he became Commanding General of XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg, 1 August 1967." Not only was his career not ruined, but he was eventually promoted. Sorry, David Halberstam.
In general, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST solidified David Halberstam's place on top of my black list of historians. It is a paragon of what a historic work should not be – sensationalist, poorly organized, overly detailed, and full of lies.
March 17, 2015
Halberstam gives us the inside story of how America entrapped itself in the Viet Nam War. He shows how the legacy of McCarthyism and 1940’s politics over China left a decimated State Department and influenced JFK’s and LBJ’s thinking. He details the many times JFK and others who doubted the war altered their positions out of fear of being seen as soft. He shows how the arrogance and overconfidence of Kennedy’s team and subsequently Johnson’s led the US into war. He takes us through the constant escalation ending with the Tet offensive of 1968 and the fall of the façade of competence, the public’s realization that its government as well as the war was lost and out of control. Along the way we learn the backgrounds, motivations and impact of key figures: Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, John Paton Davies, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Walt Rostow, Dean Acheson, George Ball, Averill Harriman, Clark Clifford, Roger Hilsman, John McNaughton, Maxwell Taylor, Paul Harkins, William Westmoreland, Robert Kennedy and of course JFK and LBJ.
We start with JFK selecting his team. He chose the never outspoken Dean Rusk for Secretary of State, wanting no one who would challenge him. Kennedy was really assigning himself the role of Secretary of State. Picking from the Boston elite, Kennedy chose the intellectual McGeorge Bundy as his Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. Mac Bundy was pedigree Eastern establishment having attended Groton then Yale where he graduated Suma Cum Laude and on directly to Harvard as a Junior Fellow skipping the PhD program and ascending to professor of government and dean even though he had never taken a course in government in college. This skill to impress and advance was well applied in his White House job. The quick and energetic Bundy took control and usurped the Department of State relegating Dean Rusk to the background. As a JFK favorite he controlled access to the president. He was supremely confident of his abilities and eminently capable of getting his way; however, he had no actual experience in foreign affairs. His hardline approach to the Soviets reflected his father’s, a former Henry Stimson aide, and Dean Acheson’s to whose daughter his brother, Bill Bundy, over at Defense was married.
Several factors led JFK to look at Viet Nam as a part of the cold war and to take a tough approach. First, the Bay of Pigs debacle which JFK lackadaisically let happen forced him to adopt a strong anti-communist line since he could not again afford to look weak. It led Kennedy to take a hard stance in his meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna ending in Khrushchev’s bombast which in turn caused Kennedy to send more troops to Europe and to Viet Nam to show his toughness. Second, the legacy of the McCarthy period was still acutely felt in the Kennedy administration. While JFK believed that not recognizing and hence not engaging with Red China was a mistake, fear of political backlash prevented any change in policy. JFK’s decision bode ill for any rational policy towards Viet Nam. Making China part of the problem rather than part of the solution only left one option, further escalation. Third, during the Truman administration conservative Republicans challenged the loyalty of Foreign Service officers who dared report the truth about Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists’ likely defeat. China experts such as John Carter Vincent, John Stewart Service and John Paton Davies had their careers ruined. Truman’s attempt to preempt the conservative’s attacks with his own loyalty investigations only gave credence to Republican charges. In 1950, Joseph Alsop’s article in the “Saturday Evening Post” entitled “Why We Lost China” fueled Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts for those responsible. The fall of China, the Korean War and McCarthyism caused a re-characterization of the French Indo-China war from colonial to anti-communist, an altered perception that would carry into the sixties.
After the Geneva conference which split Viet Nam into North and South in 1954, John Foster Dulles convinced Eisenhower to send 200 advisors and foreign aid money to bolster the South. Thus America replaced the French in Viet Nam. By 1961 the Viet Cong were expanding and South Viet Nam’s President Diem’s situation was growing dire. With Foreign Service Asian experts discredited and discarded, two European experts with no experience in Asia, the new Ambassador Frederick Nolting and his friend William Truehart, were assigned to Viet Nam. With background in NATO and European affairs they viewed events through the prism of the communist threat and ignored the nationalistic nature of the Viet Cong insurgency.
JFK then sent interventionists General Maxwell Taylor and Mac Bundy deputy Walt Rostow to Saigon to report back. In December 1961, their report caused JFK to send thousands of US “advisory” troops and General Harkins, Taylor’s longtime friend, to lead them. JFK from this point on would be deceived about the true situation in Viet Nam. JFK appointed John McCone to head the CIA. McCone was a conservative Republican California millionaire picked at RFK’s urging. JFK picked the hardline McCone to keep Republicans off his back appalling his traditional liberal supporters. Trying to placate the hardliners JFK was playing right into their hands.
Harkins, Ambassador Nolting, and the American contingent worked through the autocratic, insular, moody Diem. The more Diem relied on American aid; the more he was hated by the Vietnamese. But his truth was America’s truth and reporters who dared report anything different were pressured and disparaged as were American field commanders in the advisory mission. When they told the truth about what they saw, the total ineffectiveness of the ARVN, the expansion of the Viet Cong, they were at best dressed down by Harkins, at worst transferred out, their careers shattered. Those who tried to go around Harkins soon found out his support and instructions came from his friend at the top, JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor. JFK’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara too was fooled, taking at face value the reporting of Taylor and Harkins as late as mid-1963.
McNamara’s stellar image as the dynamic can do businessman lent credibility to the military which was dictating policy to the civilians. McNamara had worked his way up to the President of Ford Motor Company as a financial systems expert, controlling costs and streamlining operations. A former Harvard accounting professor, he had originally done this type of financial, logistics and production planning for the air force during WWII. He brought his statistical control oriented mind set to Washington.
The McNamara – Taylor visit to Viet Nam in September 1963 finally made McNamara doubt the information he was receiving from the military. JFK also lost faith in the military’s reporting and realized his administration was hopelessly divided between hardliners and those at State who saw the war both as a military and political failure. While all agreed that Diem was part of the problem, for the liberals criticizing Diem was a copout. It was safe to vent against Diem rather than the military which lashed out at any criticism. But it left the fundamental problem unaddressed which was recognizing the Viet Nam war as one of nationalism rather than as part of the cold war. Diem was killed in a US approved coup Nov 1st. The new South Vietnamese leadership let the truth out about the progress of the war and even the doubters were shocked by how bad things were.
JFK was assassinated three weeks after Diem. JFK had kept his misgivings about the war to his inner circle. Publically he extolled the progress of the war and virtue of the American mission thus making it difficult for Johnson to even consider disengaging. Kennedy’s timid approach left a quickly unraveling situation and a public completely unprepared for the reality of the war. Johnson said he would not lose Viet Nam like China had been lost. But he, just as Kennedy had planned, wanted the Viet Nam issue on the backburner until the 1964 election was over. His Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, never one to make waves, gladly went along. Rusk viewed Viet Nam as a military problem, not a political one. He never even visited Viet Nam.
One who visited frequently was McNamara and he took charge in 1964 expanding his role in the vacuum of the State Department. Johnson was in awe of McNamara who he regarded as super intelligent and organized. In 1964, McNamara began focusing on Hanoi as the solution. He learned on his December 1963 visit after the coup how much he had been lied to and how precarious the situation was. He switched strategy to focus on North Viet Nam as the source of the problem ignoring the indigenous nature of the Viet Cong. Planning was begun on different bombing scenarios and their effect. Meanwhile Johnson’s style of imposing consensus stifled opposition. Naysayers were driven out at the demands of the military or Johnson himself. Johnson held Viet Nam policy discussions only with his closest advisors shutting out any possible dissent.
In August 1964, the destroyer Maddox was “attacked” in the Tonkin Gulf. The US and South Vietnamese had been conducting raids on the North’s coast so this was possibly a response or it could have been a complete illusion. The facts are cloudy, but LBJ used this incident to get a resolution through Congress authorizing the president to use conventional forces. He assured Congress that this authorization did not mean ground troops in Viet Nam which is how Johnson would use it after the election. Bombing a few of the North’s PT boat bases in retaliation, LBJ was seen as being restrained in his response to the alleged attack. Partly this image was due to the comparison to his election opponent, Goldwater, who was seen as possibly starting a nuclear war.
JFK had appointed General Maxwell Taylor as his personal military advisor then made him Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Taylor had deferred to JFK on policy supporting his and McNamara’s graduated approach, quieting the Joint Chiefs who wanted either all-out war or to leave. LBJ appointed Taylor ambassador to South Viet Nam in July 1964. Taylor, frustrated, began to entertain bombing as an answer, albeit as a political statement more than an effective military measure. Thinking Hanoi would not want to lose its industrial base that they would negotiate.
LBJ was leery of bombing, listening to the lone major dissenter left, George Ball, whose memos critical of bombing were funneled to the president through Press Secretary Bill Moyers. But the pressure was on from Taylor, McNamara and the JCS and the press in the form of the strident Joe Alsop. The CIA and INS had studied bombing and found it would be ineffective, but these studies were suppressed by Taylor and never reached LBJ. The likely Hanoi response was to infiltrate more troops to the South which they did. Bombing advocates had no plan B if Hanoi matched Washington’s escalation. Bombing advocates looked at it as a middle ground between abdicating and sending in ground troops believing they could always stop. But they couldn’t, the war became personal. Taylor, McNamara, Bundy, Rostow and others could not admit defeat and ever increasing escalation ensued. The turning point was February 1965. With the Viet Cong mortar attack that killed eight Americans and wounded fifty at Pleiku, McNamara and Bundy said the US must retaliate against the North or look hopelessly weak hitting Johnson in a soft spot.
A major rationale for bombing was to avoid sending in ground troops. But ground troops would be needed to protect the airfields, which would expand to controlling enclaves surrounding them and ultimately to Westmoreland’s use of troops for search and destroy missions. While the JCS and Westmoreland expected and planned for ground troops, Taylor objected, but found himself out of the loop. He was now a civilian and the military had taken control. Taylor realized the inadequacy of Americans fighting in the jungle, but Westmoreland and his top general Depuy saw Americans as superior fighting men armed with more and better weapons. They would learn the hard way.
By April 1965, plans were made to increase the troop commitment to 80,000. Westmoreland requested troops to protect airstrips and provide security for infrastructure, but his real intent was to use them for search and destroy missions. Several factors led to the commitment of combat troops: The declining influence of Taylor who opposed search and destroy operations but acquiesced in the enclave strategy; the continued ascendency of McNamara and his facts and figures such as force ratios which he pulled out of nowhere; the acknowledged failure of the bombing campaign (Rolling Thunder) to bring the North to the table; the unwillingness of LBJ to look weak by looking for a way out; the lack of any real opposition, only George Ball actively dissented.
By July of 1965, it was apparent that as fast as the US sent troops, more infiltrated from the North, thus Westmoreland constantly upped his requirements from 200,000 to 300,000 to 400,000 to 500,000. McNamara submitted budgets with the false assumption that the war would end in 1967. Much of the rationale was LBJ’s desire to get his Great Society programs through Congress first. If the true cost of the war were known, LBJ was sure his domestic programs would be rejected.
Through 1966 and 1967, departures of disillusioned doubters and advocates turned doubters ensued: George Ball, Bill Moyers, Mac Bundy and Bob McNamara. Some like McNamara turned dove (Johnson shipped him off to the World Bank and replaced him with Clark Clifford), others like Moyers and Bundy simply moved on, and longtime dissenter George Ball left in disgust. Johnson simply became more insular. Bundy was replaced with eternal optimist Walt Rostow who fed Johnson his preferred diet. The 1968 Tet offensive was the final straw. Now the whole nation saw the hopelessness of the war and dissent took hold across the country. Eugene McCarthy took on Johnson in the 1968 primaries and showed Johnson he had no support for reelection. Clark Clifford, to Johnson’s chagrin began telling Johnson the truth. But it took a group of powerful establishment business and political leaders to meet with Johnson and tell him he was destroying the country, before he relented and agreed to begin backing off the war.
In spite of Halberstam’s tendency to belabor his points, the book is highly readable. But what makes this book so valuable is the insight into how arrogance, fear of being seen as weak, and misapplication of past experience led to failure. It was disheartening to see how those who saw the dangers and knew better compromised with those who didn’t, eroding their positions, allowing the relentless hawks to get their way. I was struck by the similarity of the failure to take on Joe McCarthy early on and the failure to take on vigorously the Viet Nam hardliners. Clearly compromise is not always the best way.
We start with JFK selecting his team. He chose the never outspoken Dean Rusk for Secretary of State, wanting no one who would challenge him. Kennedy was really assigning himself the role of Secretary of State. Picking from the Boston elite, Kennedy chose the intellectual McGeorge Bundy as his Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. Mac Bundy was pedigree Eastern establishment having attended Groton then Yale where he graduated Suma Cum Laude and on directly to Harvard as a Junior Fellow skipping the PhD program and ascending to professor of government and dean even though he had never taken a course in government in college. This skill to impress and advance was well applied in his White House job. The quick and energetic Bundy took control and usurped the Department of State relegating Dean Rusk to the background. As a JFK favorite he controlled access to the president. He was supremely confident of his abilities and eminently capable of getting his way; however, he had no actual experience in foreign affairs. His hardline approach to the Soviets reflected his father’s, a former Henry Stimson aide, and Dean Acheson’s to whose daughter his brother, Bill Bundy, over at Defense was married.
Several factors led JFK to look at Viet Nam as a part of the cold war and to take a tough approach. First, the Bay of Pigs debacle which JFK lackadaisically let happen forced him to adopt a strong anti-communist line since he could not again afford to look weak. It led Kennedy to take a hard stance in his meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna ending in Khrushchev’s bombast which in turn caused Kennedy to send more troops to Europe and to Viet Nam to show his toughness. Second, the legacy of the McCarthy period was still acutely felt in the Kennedy administration. While JFK believed that not recognizing and hence not engaging with Red China was a mistake, fear of political backlash prevented any change in policy. JFK’s decision bode ill for any rational policy towards Viet Nam. Making China part of the problem rather than part of the solution only left one option, further escalation. Third, during the Truman administration conservative Republicans challenged the loyalty of Foreign Service officers who dared report the truth about Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists’ likely defeat. China experts such as John Carter Vincent, John Stewart Service and John Paton Davies had their careers ruined. Truman’s attempt to preempt the conservative’s attacks with his own loyalty investigations only gave credence to Republican charges. In 1950, Joseph Alsop’s article in the “Saturday Evening Post” entitled “Why We Lost China” fueled Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts for those responsible. The fall of China, the Korean War and McCarthyism caused a re-characterization of the French Indo-China war from colonial to anti-communist, an altered perception that would carry into the sixties.
After the Geneva conference which split Viet Nam into North and South in 1954, John Foster Dulles convinced Eisenhower to send 200 advisors and foreign aid money to bolster the South. Thus America replaced the French in Viet Nam. By 1961 the Viet Cong were expanding and South Viet Nam’s President Diem’s situation was growing dire. With Foreign Service Asian experts discredited and discarded, two European experts with no experience in Asia, the new Ambassador Frederick Nolting and his friend William Truehart, were assigned to Viet Nam. With background in NATO and European affairs they viewed events through the prism of the communist threat and ignored the nationalistic nature of the Viet Cong insurgency.
JFK then sent interventionists General Maxwell Taylor and Mac Bundy deputy Walt Rostow to Saigon to report back. In December 1961, their report caused JFK to send thousands of US “advisory” troops and General Harkins, Taylor’s longtime friend, to lead them. JFK from this point on would be deceived about the true situation in Viet Nam. JFK appointed John McCone to head the CIA. McCone was a conservative Republican California millionaire picked at RFK’s urging. JFK picked the hardline McCone to keep Republicans off his back appalling his traditional liberal supporters. Trying to placate the hardliners JFK was playing right into their hands.
Harkins, Ambassador Nolting, and the American contingent worked through the autocratic, insular, moody Diem. The more Diem relied on American aid; the more he was hated by the Vietnamese. But his truth was America’s truth and reporters who dared report anything different were pressured and disparaged as were American field commanders in the advisory mission. When they told the truth about what they saw, the total ineffectiveness of the ARVN, the expansion of the Viet Cong, they were at best dressed down by Harkins, at worst transferred out, their careers shattered. Those who tried to go around Harkins soon found out his support and instructions came from his friend at the top, JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor. JFK’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara too was fooled, taking at face value the reporting of Taylor and Harkins as late as mid-1963.
McNamara’s stellar image as the dynamic can do businessman lent credibility to the military which was dictating policy to the civilians. McNamara had worked his way up to the President of Ford Motor Company as a financial systems expert, controlling costs and streamlining operations. A former Harvard accounting professor, he had originally done this type of financial, logistics and production planning for the air force during WWII. He brought his statistical control oriented mind set to Washington.
The McNamara – Taylor visit to Viet Nam in September 1963 finally made McNamara doubt the information he was receiving from the military. JFK also lost faith in the military’s reporting and realized his administration was hopelessly divided between hardliners and those at State who saw the war both as a military and political failure. While all agreed that Diem was part of the problem, for the liberals criticizing Diem was a copout. It was safe to vent against Diem rather than the military which lashed out at any criticism. But it left the fundamental problem unaddressed which was recognizing the Viet Nam war as one of nationalism rather than as part of the cold war. Diem was killed in a US approved coup Nov 1st. The new South Vietnamese leadership let the truth out about the progress of the war and even the doubters were shocked by how bad things were.
JFK was assassinated three weeks after Diem. JFK had kept his misgivings about the war to his inner circle. Publically he extolled the progress of the war and virtue of the American mission thus making it difficult for Johnson to even consider disengaging. Kennedy’s timid approach left a quickly unraveling situation and a public completely unprepared for the reality of the war. Johnson said he would not lose Viet Nam like China had been lost. But he, just as Kennedy had planned, wanted the Viet Nam issue on the backburner until the 1964 election was over. His Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, never one to make waves, gladly went along. Rusk viewed Viet Nam as a military problem, not a political one. He never even visited Viet Nam.
One who visited frequently was McNamara and he took charge in 1964 expanding his role in the vacuum of the State Department. Johnson was in awe of McNamara who he regarded as super intelligent and organized. In 1964, McNamara began focusing on Hanoi as the solution. He learned on his December 1963 visit after the coup how much he had been lied to and how precarious the situation was. He switched strategy to focus on North Viet Nam as the source of the problem ignoring the indigenous nature of the Viet Cong. Planning was begun on different bombing scenarios and their effect. Meanwhile Johnson’s style of imposing consensus stifled opposition. Naysayers were driven out at the demands of the military or Johnson himself. Johnson held Viet Nam policy discussions only with his closest advisors shutting out any possible dissent.
In August 1964, the destroyer Maddox was “attacked” in the Tonkin Gulf. The US and South Vietnamese had been conducting raids on the North’s coast so this was possibly a response or it could have been a complete illusion. The facts are cloudy, but LBJ used this incident to get a resolution through Congress authorizing the president to use conventional forces. He assured Congress that this authorization did not mean ground troops in Viet Nam which is how Johnson would use it after the election. Bombing a few of the North’s PT boat bases in retaliation, LBJ was seen as being restrained in his response to the alleged attack. Partly this image was due to the comparison to his election opponent, Goldwater, who was seen as possibly starting a nuclear war.
JFK had appointed General Maxwell Taylor as his personal military advisor then made him Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Taylor had deferred to JFK on policy supporting his and McNamara’s graduated approach, quieting the Joint Chiefs who wanted either all-out war or to leave. LBJ appointed Taylor ambassador to South Viet Nam in July 1964. Taylor, frustrated, began to entertain bombing as an answer, albeit as a political statement more than an effective military measure. Thinking Hanoi would not want to lose its industrial base that they would negotiate.
LBJ was leery of bombing, listening to the lone major dissenter left, George Ball, whose memos critical of bombing were funneled to the president through Press Secretary Bill Moyers. But the pressure was on from Taylor, McNamara and the JCS and the press in the form of the strident Joe Alsop. The CIA and INS had studied bombing and found it would be ineffective, but these studies were suppressed by Taylor and never reached LBJ. The likely Hanoi response was to infiltrate more troops to the South which they did. Bombing advocates had no plan B if Hanoi matched Washington’s escalation. Bombing advocates looked at it as a middle ground between abdicating and sending in ground troops believing they could always stop. But they couldn’t, the war became personal. Taylor, McNamara, Bundy, Rostow and others could not admit defeat and ever increasing escalation ensued. The turning point was February 1965. With the Viet Cong mortar attack that killed eight Americans and wounded fifty at Pleiku, McNamara and Bundy said the US must retaliate against the North or look hopelessly weak hitting Johnson in a soft spot.
A major rationale for bombing was to avoid sending in ground troops. But ground troops would be needed to protect the airfields, which would expand to controlling enclaves surrounding them and ultimately to Westmoreland’s use of troops for search and destroy missions. While the JCS and Westmoreland expected and planned for ground troops, Taylor objected, but found himself out of the loop. He was now a civilian and the military had taken control. Taylor realized the inadequacy of Americans fighting in the jungle, but Westmoreland and his top general Depuy saw Americans as superior fighting men armed with more and better weapons. They would learn the hard way.
By April 1965, plans were made to increase the troop commitment to 80,000. Westmoreland requested troops to protect airstrips and provide security for infrastructure, but his real intent was to use them for search and destroy missions. Several factors led to the commitment of combat troops: The declining influence of Taylor who opposed search and destroy operations but acquiesced in the enclave strategy; the continued ascendency of McNamara and his facts and figures such as force ratios which he pulled out of nowhere; the acknowledged failure of the bombing campaign (Rolling Thunder) to bring the North to the table; the unwillingness of LBJ to look weak by looking for a way out; the lack of any real opposition, only George Ball actively dissented.
By July of 1965, it was apparent that as fast as the US sent troops, more infiltrated from the North, thus Westmoreland constantly upped his requirements from 200,000 to 300,000 to 400,000 to 500,000. McNamara submitted budgets with the false assumption that the war would end in 1967. Much of the rationale was LBJ’s desire to get his Great Society programs through Congress first. If the true cost of the war were known, LBJ was sure his domestic programs would be rejected.
Through 1966 and 1967, departures of disillusioned doubters and advocates turned doubters ensued: George Ball, Bill Moyers, Mac Bundy and Bob McNamara. Some like McNamara turned dove (Johnson shipped him off to the World Bank and replaced him with Clark Clifford), others like Moyers and Bundy simply moved on, and longtime dissenter George Ball left in disgust. Johnson simply became more insular. Bundy was replaced with eternal optimist Walt Rostow who fed Johnson his preferred diet. The 1968 Tet offensive was the final straw. Now the whole nation saw the hopelessness of the war and dissent took hold across the country. Eugene McCarthy took on Johnson in the 1968 primaries and showed Johnson he had no support for reelection. Clark Clifford, to Johnson’s chagrin began telling Johnson the truth. But it took a group of powerful establishment business and political leaders to meet with Johnson and tell him he was destroying the country, before he relented and agreed to begin backing off the war.
In spite of Halberstam’s tendency to belabor his points, the book is highly readable. But what makes this book so valuable is the insight into how arrogance, fear of being seen as weak, and misapplication of past experience led to failure. It was disheartening to see how those who saw the dangers and knew better compromised with those who didn’t, eroding their positions, allowing the relentless hawks to get their way. I was struck by the similarity of the failure to take on Joe McCarthy early on and the failure to take on vigorously the Viet Nam hardliners. Clearly compromise is not always the best way.
January 31, 2022
How can brilliant and accomplished people make such terrible decisions? The Best and the Brightest , which focuses on the JFK and LBJ years of the Vietnam War, explores this question. Relative to other books about the war, the book gives special emphasis to the JFK years and his leadership team, as they would provide the intellectual foundation for intervention that proved very hard to shake off.
Each of the Vietnam War orchestrators profiled in the book has a little bit of a different story for how they got sucked in, but there are some common themes. I don’t think any of the reasons are too surprising. Depending on the person and situation it might be: Arrogance, craven pursuit of power, lack of courage to go against the grain, or a lack of broader cultural and political expertise.
While this was all interesting, it wasn’t my favorite part of the book. What I most enjoyed was hearing Halberstam’s perspective as someone who understood the political background of the moment. He has great knowledge and insights on how things like the fall of China to the communists, or the McCarthy era, influenced what happened in Vietnam. He also understands the different political factions of the left – what motivated them and how Democrats tried to play to them.
I’ve read before how both JFK and LBJ expressed doubts about the interventions in Vietnam at various times. But they never summoned the courage to demand better explanations from the pro-war leaders and rethink our approach. The Best and the Brightest helps me better understand why this didn’t happen.
Halberstam explains the backdrop to the war. How entrenched bureaucracies in State and Defense were led and staffed by people who believed the spread of communism had to be stopped at nearly all costs. How the fall of China to the Communists emboldened the hawks and embarrassed the doves. How there was just a general fear of appearing “soft”. LBJ in particular was vulnerable to this one. While none of this absolves JFK or LBJ, it does help me understand why neither of them followed through on their instincts and just said something like “guys, this isn’t working, let’s rethink everything and be prepared to exit”.
Halberstam doesn’t address this, but after reading the book and thinking about each of the JFK years and the LBJ years, it made me think about what would have happened had JFK not been assassinated. Would we have made a quicker exit from Vietnam? There are two strong arguments against this.
One, LBJ basically kept all of JFK’s leadership team, so the same people advising LBJ to escalate would have been telling JFK the same thing. Two, JFK was philosophically more hawkish than LBJ. LBJ would have preferred to just focus on his domestic programs, and reluctantly acted otherwise because his advisors convinced him of it, and because he feared the political consequences of exiting.
On the other hand, it was LBJ’s worst qualities that turned things into such a quagmire. His dishonesty and penchant for secrecy. He suppressed open debate and instead would bully his team into a phony consensus. And more generally, I don’t think he had much in terms of ethics and principles.
Overall, I would guess that JFK still would have escalated the war but would have changed course quicker when things were not working.
Getting back to the whole “best and brightest” theme and where smart people went wrong, this brings me to my only criticism of the book. Everything seemed to fit neatly into Halberstam’s narratives. I can’t say where he went wrong anywhere with his analysis. Halberstam knows his stuff so I can’t second guess him. But the way he explained things, people seemed to fall into categories of “good guys” and “bad guys”. For the “bad guys”, there was some sort of psychoanalysis explaining where they went wrong. It seemed a little too convenient at times and I suspect the true stories were more complex.
Each of the Vietnam War orchestrators profiled in the book has a little bit of a different story for how they got sucked in, but there are some common themes. I don’t think any of the reasons are too surprising. Depending on the person and situation it might be: Arrogance, craven pursuit of power, lack of courage to go against the grain, or a lack of broader cultural and political expertise.
While this was all interesting, it wasn’t my favorite part of the book. What I most enjoyed was hearing Halberstam’s perspective as someone who understood the political background of the moment. He has great knowledge and insights on how things like the fall of China to the communists, or the McCarthy era, influenced what happened in Vietnam. He also understands the different political factions of the left – what motivated them and how Democrats tried to play to them.
I’ve read before how both JFK and LBJ expressed doubts about the interventions in Vietnam at various times. But they never summoned the courage to demand better explanations from the pro-war leaders and rethink our approach. The Best and the Brightest helps me better understand why this didn’t happen.
Halberstam explains the backdrop to the war. How entrenched bureaucracies in State and Defense were led and staffed by people who believed the spread of communism had to be stopped at nearly all costs. How the fall of China to the Communists emboldened the hawks and embarrassed the doves. How there was just a general fear of appearing “soft”. LBJ in particular was vulnerable to this one. While none of this absolves JFK or LBJ, it does help me understand why neither of them followed through on their instincts and just said something like “guys, this isn’t working, let’s rethink everything and be prepared to exit”.
Halberstam doesn’t address this, but after reading the book and thinking about each of the JFK years and the LBJ years, it made me think about what would have happened had JFK not been assassinated. Would we have made a quicker exit from Vietnam? There are two strong arguments against this.
One, LBJ basically kept all of JFK’s leadership team, so the same people advising LBJ to escalate would have been telling JFK the same thing. Two, JFK was philosophically more hawkish than LBJ. LBJ would have preferred to just focus on his domestic programs, and reluctantly acted otherwise because his advisors convinced him of it, and because he feared the political consequences of exiting.
On the other hand, it was LBJ’s worst qualities that turned things into such a quagmire. His dishonesty and penchant for secrecy. He suppressed open debate and instead would bully his team into a phony consensus. And more generally, I don’t think he had much in terms of ethics and principles.
Overall, I would guess that JFK still would have escalated the war but would have changed course quicker when things were not working.
Getting back to the whole “best and brightest” theme and where smart people went wrong, this brings me to my only criticism of the book. Everything seemed to fit neatly into Halberstam’s narratives. I can’t say where he went wrong anywhere with his analysis. Halberstam knows his stuff so I can’t second guess him. But the way he explained things, people seemed to fall into categories of “good guys” and “bad guys”. For the “bad guys”, there was some sort of psychoanalysis explaining where they went wrong. It seemed a little too convenient at times and I suspect the true stories were more complex.
July 13, 2012
Recently Colin Powell answered a NYT book review question by saying that this book is the one he would require President Obama to read . I read Halberstam's master work decades ago--loved it--own it--in hardback no less. However,I couldn't quite pinpoint why Powell thought Obama should read it, so I had no choice but to read it again (joy). Yes, it is a war book (Vietnam) but far more than that it's a fascinating character study of how the flaws of the top people in government got us into Vietnam and kept us there. I confess I'm still not sure what Powell would expect Obama to get out of it but I can take a guess. The book starts with Kennedy's election and how he staffed his administration with "the best and the brightest" men of the time. Their credentials were impeccable but Kennedy had a private definition of that phrase that went beyond demonstrated brilliance. To be on the Kennedy team, you had to be pragmatic, logical and never allow emotions to cloud thinking. The public John Kennedy was an inspiring speaker, just like our current President. On the stump, both connected with people on an gut level. Both were able to elicit from voters an emotional response--the belief that almost anything was possible. In private, Kennedy and his men mocked colleagues who were motivated primarily by idealism or ideology. Their answer to making America great was to approach everything with personal detachment and analyze the situation from a purely pragmatic standpoint. Only minds such as theirs were capable of reaching the right conclusion. They had no use for advice based on previous experience. The past wasn't prologue--it was a waste of time. Arrogance and ego ran rampant. I don't know about the people surrounding Obama but long before the election I was positive that, regardless of the stirring rhetoric, this man functioned from a purely pragmatic base. I think what Powell hoped the President would learn is that pragmatism uncoupled from humanism is a blueprint for failure.
Powell put it more simply in the only other line attributed to him by the NYT. "People-its all about people."
Powell put it more simply in the only other line attributed to him by the NYT. "People-its all about people."
Read
December 2, 2021The author tries to turn this densely written tome into a compelling moral drama, like something from the Greeks, but it doesn't quite work.
July 25, 2022
Tragic in the truest sense. It shows the cost of huebris and reminds us that even the best of our leaders cannot really see the end from the beginning. Real leaders with equal parts curiousity to ask question after question and the skeptism to evaluate answers from all angles are rare indeed.
August 16, 2011
The short version of the book: Boys will be boys!
This is a baby boomer book. The idealism of the Kennedy presidency seems very much like the idealism of the Obama campaign and early presidency. Some reviewers have compared how the U.S. got into Vietnam with how we got into Iraq: Congressional action based on misinformation. In both places the ‘enemy’ wears no uniform and blends into the people and the countryside.
Learn about Laos. Maybe you have barely heard of it, let alone know anything about it. But we bombed Laos too. And Cambodia. We were really assholes playing with fireworks. Big time.
One of the most distressing parts of the book is in the beginning when it shows the many opportunities for the U.S. to avoid war in SE Asia. We just couldn’t pull it off in spite of the best minds of the day. They didn’t get it about a little bit pregnant.
Have you noticed that this is a book about men? Well, of course, it’s about politics and war in the 1960s and 1970s when women didn’t exist in these arenas. Women politicians? Nah! Women soldiers? Are you kidding? In SE Asia women were in brothels for the guy soldiers. No, not the gay soldiers. We didn’t have those back then.
It is hard not to notice the preponderance of men in power in the 1960s: McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Maxwell Taylor, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Daniel Ellsberg, George Ball, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers, Sargent Shriver, Lyman Lemnitzer, Henry Cabot Lodge, John McNaughton, Hubert Humphrey, William Westmoreland, Ellsworth Bunker, Richard Nixon. . .
This is a stunning book. If it has been a while since you thought about what happened in Vietnam or you missed that era, you need to read this book. The details, including behind the scenes and behind the reports, are there in a readable presentation. The men who called the shots, withheld critical information and made serious misjudgments are examined in detail. Although this is a book about what happened in Washington, DC and southeast Asia in the 1960s, you can imagine the politics and events recently in the middle east following some of the same patterns. The names have changed, but…
This book was written and published in the midst of the war and is credited with being a factor in the ending of that war. I think it would be fair to call Halberstam a whistle-blower. The book was and is an eye opener about the workings of the federal government, especially the Executive Branch and the military.
I don’t read the tell-all books that politicians seem to write at the end of their terms of office or careers so I cannot compare. But I do not see that this book is in that same category anyway. The inside information that fills this book all applies to the topic at hand and is not sensationalism. The revealing information here is how the United States was maneuvered into a war by the best and the brightest.
An easy four stars for me. It is a very long book and could have been shortened by a hundred pages by cutting back on some of the biographical information about the principal characters. I actually did find the book to be a page turner at times but mostly not in the biographical segments.
One last thing: in 1964 Lyndon Johnson was elected President by a landslide as the peace candidate! If you are a Baby Boomer, as I am, this book will remind you of some things that you may have tried hard to forget. But it will also tell you some things you never knew.
This is a baby boomer book. The idealism of the Kennedy presidency seems very much like the idealism of the Obama campaign and early presidency. Some reviewers have compared how the U.S. got into Vietnam with how we got into Iraq: Congressional action based on misinformation. In both places the ‘enemy’ wears no uniform and blends into the people and the countryside.
Learn about Laos. Maybe you have barely heard of it, let alone know anything about it. But we bombed Laos too. And Cambodia. We were really assholes playing with fireworks. Big time.
These men were all liberals, committed to the good things in life, to decency and humane values. They were for civil rights and for peace; they did not talk about keeping the niggers in their place, or lobbing grenades into the Kremlin men’s room; they were good men, urbane, modern, if they were for a war, it would be a good war.
One of the most distressing parts of the book is in the beginning when it shows the many opportunities for the U.S. to avoid war in SE Asia. We just couldn’t pull it off in spite of the best minds of the day. They didn’t get it about a little bit pregnant.
Have you noticed that this is a book about men? Well, of course, it’s about politics and war in the 1960s and 1970s when women didn’t exist in these arenas. Women politicians? Nah! Women soldiers? Are you kidding? In SE Asia women were in brothels for the guy soldiers. No, not the gay soldiers. We didn’t have those back then.
It is hard not to notice the preponderance of men in power in the 1960s: McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Maxwell Taylor, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Daniel Ellsberg, George Ball, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers, Sargent Shriver, Lyman Lemnitzer, Henry Cabot Lodge, John McNaughton, Hubert Humphrey, William Westmoreland, Ellsworth Bunker, Richard Nixon. . .
This is a stunning book. If it has been a while since you thought about what happened in Vietnam or you missed that era, you need to read this book. The details, including behind the scenes and behind the reports, are there in a readable presentation. The men who called the shots, withheld critical information and made serious misjudgments are examined in detail. Although this is a book about what happened in Washington, DC and southeast Asia in the 1960s, you can imagine the politics and events recently in the middle east following some of the same patterns. The names have changed, but…
This book was written and published in the midst of the war and is credited with being a factor in the ending of that war. I think it would be fair to call Halberstam a whistle-blower. The book was and is an eye opener about the workings of the federal government, especially the Executive Branch and the military.
I don’t read the tell-all books that politicians seem to write at the end of their terms of office or careers so I cannot compare. But I do not see that this book is in that same category anyway. The inside information that fills this book all applies to the topic at hand and is not sensationalism. The revealing information here is how the United States was maneuvered into a war by the best and the brightest.
An easy four stars for me. It is a very long book and could have been shortened by a hundred pages by cutting back on some of the biographical information about the principal characters. I actually did find the book to be a page turner at times but mostly not in the biographical segments.
One last thing: in 1964 Lyndon Johnson was elected President by a landslide as the peace candidate! If you are a Baby Boomer, as I am, this book will remind you of some things that you may have tried hard to forget. But it will also tell you some things you never knew.
August 14, 2019
"The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam appears on a number of lists of the most important nonfiction books of the twentieth century. I totally concur. It should be required reading for college Twentieth Century American History, and maybe even high school. It is a 5-plus star book in every sense.
This is the definitive story of how America found itself in the quagmire of the Vietnam War in the decade of the 1960's. And no one was better equipped to tell this story than Halberstam. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his in-country reporting (1962-64) from Vietnam in 1964. In 1965 he wrote "The making of a quagmire : America and Vietnam during the Kennedy era". He was vilified by presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon for his forthright, honest reporting of the corruption and deceit in Vietnam and the lies being perpetrated by both the South Vietnamese and American governments. In an epilog of the book written years later he said it was the saddest story he witnessed in his lifetime. The quotes alone in the book are worth the read.
The book is written around short biographies of key players in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations ("The Best and the Brightest"), particularly Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, William Westmoreland, Kennedy, and LBJ. They are fascinating portraits.
It is a rather long book, but I found it so compelling, that it read quickly. The audiobook is also well done. This book should be on everyone's list.
This is the definitive story of how America found itself in the quagmire of the Vietnam War in the decade of the 1960's. And no one was better equipped to tell this story than Halberstam. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his in-country reporting (1962-64) from Vietnam in 1964. In 1965 he wrote "The making of a quagmire : America and Vietnam during the Kennedy era". He was vilified by presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon for his forthright, honest reporting of the corruption and deceit in Vietnam and the lies being perpetrated by both the South Vietnamese and American governments. In an epilog of the book written years later he said it was the saddest story he witnessed in his lifetime. The quotes alone in the book are worth the read.
The book is written around short biographies of key players in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations ("The Best and the Brightest"), particularly Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, William Westmoreland, Kennedy, and LBJ. They are fascinating portraits.
It is a rather long book, but I found it so compelling, that it read quickly. The audiobook is also well done. This book should be on everyone's list.
December 14, 2008
The Best and the Brightest is an 816-page tome about the men who came to power under Kennedy and continued to serve under Johnson. The men who were supposedly the brightest and most able men ever assembled by a President. The men who led their country into the disastrous Vietnam war.
Halberstam spent over two years interviewing people to write this book and he clearly did his research. His writing shows a clear understanding of the region, history, politics and players. Despite some repetitive or dry sections, most of the book is surprisingly fast-moving and well written.
In an effort to portray a complete picture of the players, there are a lot of men covered, not all of whom seem critical. I felt I could use an organizational chart or a quick reference section at the end to remember who was who and what their role was.
Though written over 30 years ago, this book’s lessons are still relevant today. Halberstam teaches readers about the restrictions on speaking up against China policy, then Vietnam. He tells of how the officials demanded patriotism, opposing viewpoints were closed off, considered non-patriotic, their proponents excluded from access to power. The lesson is the importance of debate, of being open to information (bad news as well as good), of the difficulty many people have in holding on to their principles when power is at stake.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of the book is that “best and brightest” is a relative term. Even the seemingly most perfect people have flaws that can have disastrous consequences, especially in situations where dissent is discouraged and problems are papered over. And also, that best and the brightest in the 1960s was an exclusive word, limited to ambitious white men, most of whom craved power and were afraid to make mistakes. If the definition of best and brightest had been more inclusive, if different types of intelligent and thoughtful people had been allowed access to decision-making, the results might have been different.
For those interested in how decisions were made from the American side, in how a group of smart men could make such serious mistakes, this is a book worth reading.
Halberstam spent over two years interviewing people to write this book and he clearly did his research. His writing shows a clear understanding of the region, history, politics and players. Despite some repetitive or dry sections, most of the book is surprisingly fast-moving and well written.
In an effort to portray a complete picture of the players, there are a lot of men covered, not all of whom seem critical. I felt I could use an organizational chart or a quick reference section at the end to remember who was who and what their role was.
Though written over 30 years ago, this book’s lessons are still relevant today. Halberstam teaches readers about the restrictions on speaking up against China policy, then Vietnam. He tells of how the officials demanded patriotism, opposing viewpoints were closed off, considered non-patriotic, their proponents excluded from access to power. The lesson is the importance of debate, of being open to information (bad news as well as good), of the difficulty many people have in holding on to their principles when power is at stake.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of the book is that “best and brightest” is a relative term. Even the seemingly most perfect people have flaws that can have disastrous consequences, especially in situations where dissent is discouraged and problems are papered over. And also, that best and the brightest in the 1960s was an exclusive word, limited to ambitious white men, most of whom craved power and were afraid to make mistakes. If the definition of best and brightest had been more inclusive, if different types of intelligent and thoughtful people had been allowed access to decision-making, the results might have been different.
For those interested in how decisions were made from the American side, in how a group of smart men could make such serious mistakes, this is a book worth reading.
February 7, 2021
Hands down, The best book I have ever read about the policies that got us deeper and deeper involved in Vietnam! Throughout, it brought me to tears when I thought of the ignorance, lies, incompetence, dismissal of facts, and egos in the American government and military that cost the lives of fifty-six thousand American soldiers and quite possibly a million or more lives of civilians living in Vietnam.
In 1961 the new administration of President Kennedy was supposed to represent a new and glorious period in America. The handsome and young president, the Harvard and Yale educated eastern elite that made up his staff and who surrounded him. All brilliant, the best and brightest, who in reality knew very little about running a government as big as the US government and controlling the military. In fact, instead of shedding and putting to rest the ugly period of McCarthyism and his hunt for Communists, they embraced it. They were dead set on eradicating Communism in any country where such ugly principles were taking hold.
First, there was Cuba and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and eventually the sending of thirty-five hundred advisors to Vietnam to help the faltering government of South Vietnam against the communist insurgents in their own country, and the North Vietnamese sponsors of the insurgence and the crossing of their troops into the south. The Kennedy administration didn't learn anything from the Korean War, and the ugly lessons of the French in trying to hold on to Vietnam for over eight years. By the time President Kennedy had second doubts about Vietnam, he was assassinated. In one word, the author of this amazing book, sums up President Kennedy and his administration as "timid." They did not want to be seen as soft on Communist, how very sad.
In comes President Johnson, and the complete takeover by the military in Vietnam, under the guidance of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, whose chief fame up to this point was his connection to the Kennedys and one week as President of the Ford Motor Company. He was a numbers man, and knew nothing about running a war, nor did he bother to understand the culture of the Vietnamese people and the ineptitude of the South Vietnamese government. Along with him and a presidential staff that was afraid to tell President Johnson any news about the war that would upset him, like the countless reports and studies by the intelligence departments and the CIA about the war in Vietnam being a lost cause, and that we should not bomb or send any ground troops.
Instead, they showed the President the military assessments of fighting a war in Vietnam and how we could easily push back the communists. Johnson, unwilling to go down as a President who lost a war, simply went along with all the suggestions of General Westmoreland and the military brass and in a few years we had over 560 thousand troops in Vietnam, and bombed the country and the Communists into so called oblivion, but like the Phoenix in Greek mythology they always seem to rise back up and continue to fight.
The Johnson administration was quite adept at lying, rewriting reports by the intelligence departments that told a different story, and blaming the negative reports about the war on false reporting by the press. The Pentagon papers would reveal the level of corruption, misinformation, and the lack of understanding on the part of the military about the people of Vietnam and their culture.
President Johnson, his staff and advisors, were knowingly complicit in the deaths of countless people, more concerned about their egos and reputation than about the country and citizens they swore to protect... Disregarding the morality that supposedly made America so great. If there is a hell, they all deserve a special place next to Lucifer.
And finally, there is President Nixon and Kissinger and, need I say more. Mr. Halberstam only deals with their immorality and evilness in the last few pages of the book that was published in 1972. The author deals mainly with the sixties and the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Like I said earlier, by far the best book on the policies involving Vietnam that I have ever read. It is a very long and detailed analysis of the war, and it it pulls at the strings of one's heart when you think of the tragic consequences of a war we should never have been involved in.
In 1961 the new administration of President Kennedy was supposed to represent a new and glorious period in America. The handsome and young president, the Harvard and Yale educated eastern elite that made up his staff and who surrounded him. All brilliant, the best and brightest, who in reality knew very little about running a government as big as the US government and controlling the military. In fact, instead of shedding and putting to rest the ugly period of McCarthyism and his hunt for Communists, they embraced it. They were dead set on eradicating Communism in any country where such ugly principles were taking hold.
First, there was Cuba and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and eventually the sending of thirty-five hundred advisors to Vietnam to help the faltering government of South Vietnam against the communist insurgents in their own country, and the North Vietnamese sponsors of the insurgence and the crossing of their troops into the south. The Kennedy administration didn't learn anything from the Korean War, and the ugly lessons of the French in trying to hold on to Vietnam for over eight years. By the time President Kennedy had second doubts about Vietnam, he was assassinated. In one word, the author of this amazing book, sums up President Kennedy and his administration as "timid." They did not want to be seen as soft on Communist, how very sad.
In comes President Johnson, and the complete takeover by the military in Vietnam, under the guidance of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, whose chief fame up to this point was his connection to the Kennedys and one week as President of the Ford Motor Company. He was a numbers man, and knew nothing about running a war, nor did he bother to understand the culture of the Vietnamese people and the ineptitude of the South Vietnamese government. Along with him and a presidential staff that was afraid to tell President Johnson any news about the war that would upset him, like the countless reports and studies by the intelligence departments and the CIA about the war in Vietnam being a lost cause, and that we should not bomb or send any ground troops.
Instead, they showed the President the military assessments of fighting a war in Vietnam and how we could easily push back the communists. Johnson, unwilling to go down as a President who lost a war, simply went along with all the suggestions of General Westmoreland and the military brass and in a few years we had over 560 thousand troops in Vietnam, and bombed the country and the Communists into so called oblivion, but like the Phoenix in Greek mythology they always seem to rise back up and continue to fight.
The Johnson administration was quite adept at lying, rewriting reports by the intelligence departments that told a different story, and blaming the negative reports about the war on false reporting by the press. The Pentagon papers would reveal the level of corruption, misinformation, and the lack of understanding on the part of the military about the people of Vietnam and their culture.
President Johnson, his staff and advisors, were knowingly complicit in the deaths of countless people, more concerned about their egos and reputation than about the country and citizens they swore to protect... Disregarding the morality that supposedly made America so great. If there is a hell, they all deserve a special place next to Lucifer.
And finally, there is President Nixon and Kissinger and, need I say more. Mr. Halberstam only deals with their immorality and evilness in the last few pages of the book that was published in 1972. The author deals mainly with the sixties and the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Like I said earlier, by far the best book on the policies involving Vietnam that I have ever read. It is a very long and detailed analysis of the war, and it it pulls at the strings of one's heart when you think of the tragic consequences of a war we should never have been involved in.
October 7, 2014
Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest describes America’s inexorable drift into war in Southeast Asia. Reviewing the political players in Washington DC during the slide, Halberstam begins with a focus on the Kennedy years and how JFK emerged on a promise of change after years of disappointment in leadership … much like Barack Obama would come forward 50 years later. The key for JFK, and eventually Lyndon Baines Johnson, was the people he surrounded himself with — the titled The Best and the Brightest, and how each played a role in enabling the passage into a miserable and tragic war. In addition to the various presidents, the narrative looks in-depth at people such as George Ball, William and McGeorge Bundy, Clark Clifford, John Foster Dulles, Daniel Ellsberg, Paul Harkins, Averell Harriman, Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, John McNaughton, Dean Rusk, Adlai Stevenson, Maxwell Taylor, William Westmoreland, and a host of others. Halberstam’s narrative style draws one in and paints a comprehensive interpretation of the times. Fine historical research and reporting. Must reading to understand the politics and intrigue of the 1960s. Highly recommended.
June 15, 2014
A wonderfully written and engaging history of the war in Vietnam from its origins in the 1940s until 1970.
I have read this book and three other histories (Fitzgerald, Sheehan and Mann) over the last month, and the story is remarkably consistent: the unshakable, implacable arrogance and the impenetrable, willful ignorance of civilian politicans and bureaucrats over the period, as well as the malfeasance of the US military, i.e. institutional loyalities, personal vanities and careerism of top brass, during these years that saw the deaths of millions. It's inconceivable that rational human beings can act in this way, so one must conclude that Presidents, presidential hangers-on and career soldiers can't possibly be rational human beings, and that includes the gang of war criminals, Obama, Gates and Clinton, currently in power.
One can only hope that the national debt grows to many tens of trillions of dollars, to whatever level it needs to rise - even if a consequence is the total liquidation of "middle America" as a class - so that we can no longer indulge the flaws of our national character, apart, one also hopes, from our penchant for civil war and mutual extermination. The world will be a better place when those circumstances appear.
I have read this book and three other histories (Fitzgerald, Sheehan and Mann) over the last month, and the story is remarkably consistent: the unshakable, implacable arrogance and the impenetrable, willful ignorance of civilian politicans and bureaucrats over the period, as well as the malfeasance of the US military, i.e. institutional loyalities, personal vanities and careerism of top brass, during these years that saw the deaths of millions. It's inconceivable that rational human beings can act in this way, so one must conclude that Presidents, presidential hangers-on and career soldiers can't possibly be rational human beings, and that includes the gang of war criminals, Obama, Gates and Clinton, currently in power.
One can only hope that the national debt grows to many tens of trillions of dollars, to whatever level it needs to rise - even if a consequence is the total liquidation of "middle America" as a class - so that we can no longer indulge the flaws of our national character, apart, one also hopes, from our penchant for civil war and mutual extermination. The world will be a better place when those circumstances appear.
January 3, 2016
At the very end of his long and thorough work, The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam comments that "the trap was set long before anyone realized it was a trap." This phrase adequately summarizes the main theme of the work. This book isn't designed to give you an understanding of the war in Vietnam. Instead, its an account of extremely decent, brilliant, and well-qualified men slipped into a trap, and how their struggles to break free of this trap only got them more firmly stuck.
My only other experience with Halberstam is with his sports writing, specifically his masterful Breaks of the Game, an account of a season Halberstam spent with the Portland Trailblazers in the late 1970s. Breaks of the Game, and other books that focus on a sports individuals, tend to follow a similar structure: the author uses the built-in narrative of a season to profile specific individuals. This allows a talented writer to expand his range of topics. For example, although Breaks is ostensibly about the 1979-80 Portland Trailblazer's season, it also works as a thought-provoking analysis of the NBA in the '70s.
Halberstam uses a similar structure in The Best and the Brightest. As the reader follows the decision making concerning Southeast Asia throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administration Halberstam parses out in depth profiles of the major players. However, Halberstam is truly a master of digression, and he doesn't limit himself to profiles.
The book isn't so much about the men who made the decisions, as its about the thinking behind the decisions itself. The trap Halberstam describes is not the situation in Vietnam, but a system of thought, influenced by World War II and the early years of the Cold War. Vietnam was merely the locale where the inherent fallacy of American policy was exposed. According to Halberstam, we didn't get stuck in Vietnam when we sent in combat troops, or we started bombing North Vietnam, or when we deposed Diem. Instead, as Halberstram illustrates, the seeds of tragedy were planted when China went Communist in 1949. Truman was blamed with losing China, as if it was ever ours. The outrage gave ammunition to Joe McCarthy and helped launch his career. Asian experts in the state department, who were generally only guilty of being accurate, were forced from their career. France's troubles in Indochina, which were previously viewed as a revolutionary struggle against colonialism, were cast as part of the free world's struggles against the red threat. Halberstam details how the consequences of this system of thought all contributed to, and in a certain way led inevitably toward the eventual tragedy.
A conclusion one could draw from the book is that it didn't necessarily matter who made the decisions, what dictated the outcome was the conventional thought of the period. However, the book's other theme is the effect of the political establishment on the decision-making process. By giving rich and illuminating profiles of the individuals behind the decisions Halberstam paints a portrait of the American political establishment. The reader is given a real sense of the characters of the men in power and their motives. If the The Best and the Brightest works best as a tragedy, it is not lacking in tragic characters.*
Halberstam is a really great writer, probably one of the best writers of nonfiction I've ever read. His prose can be lyrical, or straight forward when he needs it to be. His has a firm grasp on the players and the events and acts as a excellent guide. I never got bogged down in details and the book remained a joy to read throughout.
I first picked up The Best and the Brightest looking for a better understanding of the war in Vietnam and I really didn't get that. However, I did get an account of how the United States' found itself committed the biggest policy blunder in its history. Men who should have known better, the best and the brightest we had to offer, patently refused to consider unconventional thought, and displayed a startling ignorance of history.**
*I really admired the way Halberstam wrote of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara.
**Good thing we learned our lesson.
Oh, wait.
My only other experience with Halberstam is with his sports writing, specifically his masterful Breaks of the Game, an account of a season Halberstam spent with the Portland Trailblazers in the late 1970s. Breaks of the Game, and other books that focus on a sports individuals, tend to follow a similar structure: the author uses the built-in narrative of a season to profile specific individuals. This allows a talented writer to expand his range of topics. For example, although Breaks is ostensibly about the 1979-80 Portland Trailblazer's season, it also works as a thought-provoking analysis of the NBA in the '70s.
Halberstam uses a similar structure in The Best and the Brightest. As the reader follows the decision making concerning Southeast Asia throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administration Halberstam parses out in depth profiles of the major players. However, Halberstam is truly a master of digression, and he doesn't limit himself to profiles.
The book isn't so much about the men who made the decisions, as its about the thinking behind the decisions itself. The trap Halberstam describes is not the situation in Vietnam, but a system of thought, influenced by World War II and the early years of the Cold War. Vietnam was merely the locale where the inherent fallacy of American policy was exposed. According to Halberstam, we didn't get stuck in Vietnam when we sent in combat troops, or we started bombing North Vietnam, or when we deposed Diem. Instead, as Halberstram illustrates, the seeds of tragedy were planted when China went Communist in 1949. Truman was blamed with losing China, as if it was ever ours. The outrage gave ammunition to Joe McCarthy and helped launch his career. Asian experts in the state department, who were generally only guilty of being accurate, were forced from their career. France's troubles in Indochina, which were previously viewed as a revolutionary struggle against colonialism, were cast as part of the free world's struggles against the red threat. Halberstam details how the consequences of this system of thought all contributed to, and in a certain way led inevitably toward the eventual tragedy.
A conclusion one could draw from the book is that it didn't necessarily matter who made the decisions, what dictated the outcome was the conventional thought of the period. However, the book's other theme is the effect of the political establishment on the decision-making process. By giving rich and illuminating profiles of the individuals behind the decisions Halberstam paints a portrait of the American political establishment. The reader is given a real sense of the characters of the men in power and their motives. If the The Best and the Brightest works best as a tragedy, it is not lacking in tragic characters.*
Halberstam is a really great writer, probably one of the best writers of nonfiction I've ever read. His prose can be lyrical, or straight forward when he needs it to be. His has a firm grasp on the players and the events and acts as a excellent guide. I never got bogged down in details and the book remained a joy to read throughout.
I first picked up The Best and the Brightest looking for a better understanding of the war in Vietnam and I really didn't get that. However, I did get an account of how the United States' found itself committed the biggest policy blunder in its history. Men who should have known better, the best and the brightest we had to offer, patently refused to consider unconventional thought, and displayed a startling ignorance of history.**
*I really admired the way Halberstam wrote of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara.
**Good thing we learned our lesson.
Oh, wait.
November 7, 2012
Read this years ago when it first appeared. As a result, I read everything Halberstam wrote. Whenever I hear anyone discuss hiring only the "best and the brightest" now, I shudder.
August 2, 2011
The torch was indeed passed-passed from one generation of the wealthy elite to the next.
The book is infinitely enjoyable to a political history junkie like myself. It's impressive in it's coverage of a lot of the most interesting political moments of that time. Sadly, it also helped to drive home a cynical reality I've been avoiding for over twenty years and, for that, I am not grateful. While reading this book current political events compelled me to finally give in to the reality of politics in America which is that, unless you're one of the people from a background similar to the "best and the brightest" reported on in this book, your impact on politics is minimal if indeed you make any impact at all. What I took away from the book was a feeling of cynical remorse for what might have been, for how our political mistakes as a people seem to have taken such a dramatic turn during and after this time period but, also, a feeling that the American public bought into a myth, an idea that seems to have never really existed. The best and the brightest who manned our halls of government were from the same moneyed, upper class, aristocratic families of those who man our halls of government today. The myth, however, was that these then were somehow truly different, that they, as the best and the brightest, heeded what the American public wanted. All we had to do was stay involved. Write our congressmen, our presidents, and keep working. The best and the brightest would act in our best interest and, we assumed, in the world's. We had faith in our government and trusted it. This myth still pervades the politically engaged today. With the internet's vast resources, we get constant information on what our government seems to be doing. We think we are in the halls ourselves. We feel like our leaders are listening to us, that they're reading our comments, our blogs, our status updates and our tweets. They are not. They represent those who helped hoist them into their positions for us to consider them among the best and the brightest.
The book is infinitely enjoyable to a political history junkie like myself. It's impressive in it's coverage of a lot of the most interesting political moments of that time. Sadly, it also helped to drive home a cynical reality I've been avoiding for over twenty years and, for that, I am not grateful. While reading this book current political events compelled me to finally give in to the reality of politics in America which is that, unless you're one of the people from a background similar to the "best and the brightest" reported on in this book, your impact on politics is minimal if indeed you make any impact at all. What I took away from the book was a feeling of cynical remorse for what might have been, for how our political mistakes as a people seem to have taken such a dramatic turn during and after this time period but, also, a feeling that the American public bought into a myth, an idea that seems to have never really existed. The best and the brightest who manned our halls of government were from the same moneyed, upper class, aristocratic families of those who man our halls of government today. The myth, however, was that these then were somehow truly different, that they, as the best and the brightest, heeded what the American public wanted. All we had to do was stay involved. Write our congressmen, our presidents, and keep working. The best and the brightest would act in our best interest and, we assumed, in the world's. We had faith in our government and trusted it. This myth still pervades the politically engaged today. With the internet's vast resources, we get constant information on what our government seems to be doing. We think we are in the halls ourselves. We feel like our leaders are listening to us, that they're reading our comments, our blogs, our status updates and our tweets. They are not. They represent those who helped hoist them into their positions for us to consider them among the best and the brightest.
February 1, 2020
Long, dense and ultimately devastating history of the currents and ideals that got America into a war in Vietnam. I would recommend this book after familiarizing yourself with a general history of the Vietnam War first. It begins with the Kennedy administration looking for a Secretary of State and ends with the Johnson administration bowing out of the 1968 campaign in disgrace.
April 16, 2019
The Vietnamese war was an epic failure of governance on every level.
In 1969, a New York Times reporter who witnessed from the front lines the impact of twenty five years of bad management, where the results are truly felt, comes home to dissect the mistakes and the people responsible. The Best and The Brightest is his indictment... His effort to hold every single one of them responsible. And to define each of their failures - whether trying to do too much, or too little... Or as he often points out in more elegant words: just how fucking stupid smart, experienced people can be.
That is what this book is about. In the author’s own words: “I set out to study the men and their decisions. What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place?”
He wanted to understand why these uber-men that the majority admired for their pedigree and experience could botch something to such a massive degree. When I heard the concept of this book, I just had to read it.
The Best and The Brightest is an analysis of how the epic disaster of the Vietnam War happened. It is not a military history. It is a series of portraits of the Deciders and an analysis of their decision-making between 1948-1965 which triggered the final stupidest decisions to add and keep adding U.S. ground troops to a war which on paper was already lost years before. And to top things off - most of those decisions were made by men who were considered, in the values of the country at the time, the best and the brightest - the elite, the most impressive, the most educated, the wisest.
A case study in bad management by good managers.
And although Halberstam does not summarize the lessons learned at the end, the implications are rampant through every page.
Three key points keep coming back:
1. No one paid attention to the middle management field experts in the earliest stages (early 50’s) of the developing situation. Why? because they were a group of experts in Asian affairs in the State Department who had been studying the Chinese Communists in depth and understood the regional dynamics better than anyone BUT because of the Red-baiting of the concurrent McCarthy era, they were all marginalized as too close to The Enemy and soundly ignored or eliminated. This group of middle managers recommended a completely different path for our Vietnam policy, and predicted with eerie accuracy the disastrous events of the next 15 years if we did not follow their recommendation. Lesson: listen to the guys in the trenches and ignore the posers trying to score media points.
2. Success in one arena, does not mean success in another. This is more an indictment of military assessments - where WW2 heroes are unable to evaluate accurately what is happening on-the-ground in front of them because the Viet Cong used completely different tactics than anyone we had fought before (e.g. the Koreans or the Germans). Thus, for the first 5 years of engagement, the military reports insisted that everything was going great, when they most decidedly were not.
3. Each decision that followed cornered the leaders into an inevitable sequence of decisions which pulled the entire operation deeper and deeper down an erroneous path. This is a fascinating lesson - the bonehead decision was at the beginning; after that, without someone having the courage to change course, the script was already written. To jump off the path would have been a disaster of public opinion, so no one ever considered doing the Right Thing. Very few even had the courage to point out the trap; they all lived in a micro-point world where one decision of escalation naturally followed the results of the previous one.
It is astounding how we have seen these exact same failures play out in decision-making in the almost fifty years since this book was written which suggests that it is a trap either innate to our system of government or innate with human beings in general.
"Even though it's the right thing to do, if I change course, I will lose my job or even worse, my Party will lose power and those other crazies will take over. So, I will not even evaluate the Smart Path." (Sound familiar, everyone in government right now?)
When you spend 700 pages with an author, you really get to know them. David Halberstam is angry and very, very bitter. His jaw is in permanent drop position at the utter foolishness of so many people. No one is spared his wrath except a few obscure players through the years who predicted the errors of their superiors and were quickly marginalized, fired or worse; and then, all their predictions came true in the years that follow. There are several, but most notable is George Ball who time and time again is mentioned as someone with the courage to warn and challenge. They are the hidden heroes of the story - although in the end their only accomplishment was being right, since no one ever listened to their warnings.
The book is a hard slog at times. The one-note tone of exasperation is a beast to power through. And there is assertion after assertion of major characters’ inner thoughts without direct attribution to what was the source. (The author lists an extensive bibliography and attests to 500 unnamed people interviewed but there are no chapter notes of sources.) Under normal circumstances, with so little direct attribution, one could dismiss the entire book as being invented, but if one stays in the macro, and recognizes that the lessons of the history are so clearly accurate - as history has proven out over and over again - then I forgive this flaw because the ends justify the means. Too bad the same cannot be said about the Vietnam War.
A great read for the Vietnam curious, and honestly for anyone who is interested in good management case studies. Personally, I zigzagged between chapters of this book and the Ken Burns PBS documentary which focused on the impact of these decisions on the people on the ground. A terrific combo that I highly recommend.
In 1969, a New York Times reporter who witnessed from the front lines the impact of twenty five years of bad management, where the results are truly felt, comes home to dissect the mistakes and the people responsible. The Best and The Brightest is his indictment... His effort to hold every single one of them responsible. And to define each of their failures - whether trying to do too much, or too little... Or as he often points out in more elegant words: just how fucking stupid smart, experienced people can be.
That is what this book is about. In the author’s own words: “I set out to study the men and their decisions. What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place?”
He wanted to understand why these uber-men that the majority admired for their pedigree and experience could botch something to such a massive degree. When I heard the concept of this book, I just had to read it.
The Best and The Brightest is an analysis of how the epic disaster of the Vietnam War happened. It is not a military history. It is a series of portraits of the Deciders and an analysis of their decision-making between 1948-1965 which triggered the final stupidest decisions to add and keep adding U.S. ground troops to a war which on paper was already lost years before. And to top things off - most of those decisions were made by men who were considered, in the values of the country at the time, the best and the brightest - the elite, the most impressive, the most educated, the wisest.
A case study in bad management by good managers.
And although Halberstam does not summarize the lessons learned at the end, the implications are rampant through every page.
Three key points keep coming back:
1. No one paid attention to the middle management field experts in the earliest stages (early 50’s) of the developing situation. Why? because they were a group of experts in Asian affairs in the State Department who had been studying the Chinese Communists in depth and understood the regional dynamics better than anyone BUT because of the Red-baiting of the concurrent McCarthy era, they were all marginalized as too close to The Enemy and soundly ignored or eliminated. This group of middle managers recommended a completely different path for our Vietnam policy, and predicted with eerie accuracy the disastrous events of the next 15 years if we did not follow their recommendation. Lesson: listen to the guys in the trenches and ignore the posers trying to score media points.
2. Success in one arena, does not mean success in another. This is more an indictment of military assessments - where WW2 heroes are unable to evaluate accurately what is happening on-the-ground in front of them because the Viet Cong used completely different tactics than anyone we had fought before (e.g. the Koreans or the Germans). Thus, for the first 5 years of engagement, the military reports insisted that everything was going great, when they most decidedly were not.
3. Each decision that followed cornered the leaders into an inevitable sequence of decisions which pulled the entire operation deeper and deeper down an erroneous path. This is a fascinating lesson - the bonehead decision was at the beginning; after that, without someone having the courage to change course, the script was already written. To jump off the path would have been a disaster of public opinion, so no one ever considered doing the Right Thing. Very few even had the courage to point out the trap; they all lived in a micro-point world where one decision of escalation naturally followed the results of the previous one.
It is astounding how we have seen these exact same failures play out in decision-making in the almost fifty years since this book was written which suggests that it is a trap either innate to our system of government or innate with human beings in general.
"Even though it's the right thing to do, if I change course, I will lose my job or even worse, my Party will lose power and those other crazies will take over. So, I will not even evaluate the Smart Path." (Sound familiar, everyone in government right now?)
When you spend 700 pages with an author, you really get to know them. David Halberstam is angry and very, very bitter. His jaw is in permanent drop position at the utter foolishness of so many people. No one is spared his wrath except a few obscure players through the years who predicted the errors of their superiors and were quickly marginalized, fired or worse; and then, all their predictions came true in the years that follow. There are several, but most notable is George Ball who time and time again is mentioned as someone with the courage to warn and challenge. They are the hidden heroes of the story - although in the end their only accomplishment was being right, since no one ever listened to their warnings.
The book is a hard slog at times. The one-note tone of exasperation is a beast to power through. And there is assertion after assertion of major characters’ inner thoughts without direct attribution to what was the source. (The author lists an extensive bibliography and attests to 500 unnamed people interviewed but there are no chapter notes of sources.) Under normal circumstances, with so little direct attribution, one could dismiss the entire book as being invented, but if one stays in the macro, and recognizes that the lessons of the history are so clearly accurate - as history has proven out over and over again - then I forgive this flaw because the ends justify the means. Too bad the same cannot be said about the Vietnam War.
A great read for the Vietnam curious, and honestly for anyone who is interested in good management case studies. Personally, I zigzagged between chapters of this book and the Ken Burns PBS documentary which focused on the impact of these decisions on the people on the ground. A terrific combo that I highly recommend.
May 8, 2022
I'd been wanting to read this for many years and I'm glad I finally made the commitment to plow through it.
Not that doing so is difficult. Halberstam is a masterful writer and storyteller, and he brings alive the incredibly complex characters who masterminded and pursued the Vietnam war despite evidence and realities which suggested the US could never succeed. Obviously, this has many echoes with the Bush administration's pursuit of the war in Iraq and it's interesting to consider how they are similar and different.
———-—————————-
I’m not sure why I love this book THIS much. This was really my 3rd time through, not my second; there’s just something so exacting in word choice, complex in characterization, and Shakespearean in scope that it never ceases, despite its length and massive dramatis personae to make me oddly calm and happy to be a reader.
Not that doing so is difficult. Halberstam is a masterful writer and storyteller, and he brings alive the incredibly complex characters who masterminded and pursued the Vietnam war despite evidence and realities which suggested the US could never succeed. Obviously, this has many echoes with the Bush administration's pursuit of the war in Iraq and it's interesting to consider how they are similar and different.
———-—————————-
I’m not sure why I love this book THIS much. This was really my 3rd time through, not my second; there’s just something so exacting in word choice, complex in characterization, and Shakespearean in scope that it never ceases, despite its length and massive dramatis personae to make me oddly calm and happy to be a reader.
November 2, 2013
I'd always viewed Halberstam as an excellent conventional journalist. The mainstreamest of the mainstream, as it were. Hey, maybe I should have read him? While he did write mainstream books and they're excellent, The Best and the Brightest is something else, very unorthodox in its way and stunningly brilliant. Halberstam researched the dickens out of his material and came to understand it in a way that surpasseth understanding. He got it, deeply deeply deeply, and wrote it from the right side of his brain. His sentence structure is often, let's call it creative. And he nails it. The personalities, the conflicts, the complexities, the dangers of bureaucracy and the biases of institutions. A gripping and extraordinary work of genius.
October 29, 2021
A detailed look at many men who worshipped at the feet of the same intellectual font. The tragic opus of how the well intentioned, the well prepared, and the well armed failed to meet the demands of the central foreign policy challenge of their time.
December 27, 2014
This book features almost all the people who had a hand in the decision on the US’ involvement in Vietnam. There was no question that these were the best and the brightest, which all more makes the reader wonder why the US eventually found herself in the quagmire. By the end of the book the reader may still not find the answer, but what he or she will find is a lesson in human folly and how the illusion of superior ability can lead one to arrogance, or perhaps less, over-confidence, but ending in hubris nevertheless.
This book is cleverly structured, the first half featuring one president (and the presidency) and the second half the next. Under this over-arching framework, the author added the layers below the presidents, starting with the national security advisor, secretaries of defense and states, their deputies and assistants, then the chief of staffs, and finally the ambassadors to South Vietnam. In some cases these happen to be the same people who worked across the administrations, in others there were multiples changes. But all the time the message was consistent – these are the most brilliant people, although in different ways. Yet there was no denying that these were the best and the brightest.
And thus the reader is led to ask – why then did the US eventually slipped into the Vietnam War which killed more than 50,000 Americans, severely draining the treasury, divided the country, and lost the country of a lot of its prestige and goodwill? The author did not provide a simplistic answer to this complex question, rather, he showed the mixture of personalities, beliefs, politics, and self-interest that slowly pushes the country deeper and deeper into a situation from which they could not extricate themselves, even after some have changed their minds about the US’ involvement.
At the beginning there were those who did not know what Vietnam was about, besides the unpalatable fact that it was a French colony which the French should quit, but would not. But in view of the need for France’s support in Europe a little sweetener for them in Vietnam is of negligible cost to the US. Then there were those who framed it with cold-war rhetoric of having to stop the spread of Communism in Asia. After “losing” China, it would be unthinkable to let the rest of the dominoes fall. Later it began to look to others like it was a good place to fight a good war. To be sure, there were those who tried to stop the tide and where impossible, to at least retard it. But these were in the minority, their cases always weak and their stance uncoordinated. In the end they were among the earliest casualties, and the author took us up the hierarchy again, only this time showing the sequence of the casualties: the ambassadors, the deputy and assistant secretaries, the secretaries, and ultimately the president himself. Few came out looking good, those who escaped rather unscathed politically would look unprincipled in the book.
The author did not just write a book that recorded the events and the decisions, he wrote a book to caution decision makers of all kinds. His message is for people to remember that arrogance has no place even (or especially) among the best and the brightest, for the game will eventually play you. But the biggest chill that the author gave me was not the fact that if the best and the brightest can fall into such a folly what more the lesser beings, it was that it is precisely when you think you have control of the game that you lose control. When you think you have resisted the tide because you managed to not give your opponent all that he wanted, you have actually forgotten what you had to give him in exchange for that. The illusion of being on top of things will lure you into the trap. I think this book should be kept handy, not because it would serve as a reference, but it would serve as a good reminder that even if you think you are the best and the brightest, you can still be catastrophically wrong. And then you would have to live with it.
This book is cleverly structured, the first half featuring one president (and the presidency) and the second half the next. Under this over-arching framework, the author added the layers below the presidents, starting with the national security advisor, secretaries of defense and states, their deputies and assistants, then the chief of staffs, and finally the ambassadors to South Vietnam. In some cases these happen to be the same people who worked across the administrations, in others there were multiples changes. But all the time the message was consistent – these are the most brilliant people, although in different ways. Yet there was no denying that these were the best and the brightest.
And thus the reader is led to ask – why then did the US eventually slipped into the Vietnam War which killed more than 50,000 Americans, severely draining the treasury, divided the country, and lost the country of a lot of its prestige and goodwill? The author did not provide a simplistic answer to this complex question, rather, he showed the mixture of personalities, beliefs, politics, and self-interest that slowly pushes the country deeper and deeper into a situation from which they could not extricate themselves, even after some have changed their minds about the US’ involvement.
At the beginning there were those who did not know what Vietnam was about, besides the unpalatable fact that it was a French colony which the French should quit, but would not. But in view of the need for France’s support in Europe a little sweetener for them in Vietnam is of negligible cost to the US. Then there were those who framed it with cold-war rhetoric of having to stop the spread of Communism in Asia. After “losing” China, it would be unthinkable to let the rest of the dominoes fall. Later it began to look to others like it was a good place to fight a good war. To be sure, there were those who tried to stop the tide and where impossible, to at least retard it. But these were in the minority, their cases always weak and their stance uncoordinated. In the end they were among the earliest casualties, and the author took us up the hierarchy again, only this time showing the sequence of the casualties: the ambassadors, the deputy and assistant secretaries, the secretaries, and ultimately the president himself. Few came out looking good, those who escaped rather unscathed politically would look unprincipled in the book.
The author did not just write a book that recorded the events and the decisions, he wrote a book to caution decision makers of all kinds. His message is for people to remember that arrogance has no place even (or especially) among the best and the brightest, for the game will eventually play you. But the biggest chill that the author gave me was not the fact that if the best and the brightest can fall into such a folly what more the lesser beings, it was that it is precisely when you think you have control of the game that you lose control. When you think you have resisted the tide because you managed to not give your opponent all that he wanted, you have actually forgotten what you had to give him in exchange for that. The illusion of being on top of things will lure you into the trap. I think this book should be kept handy, not because it would serve as a reference, but it would serve as a good reminder that even if you think you are the best and the brightest, you can still be catastrophically wrong. And then you would have to live with it.
March 29, 2013
Outstanding book, as is anything that I have read by Halberstam. He was such a gifted reporter and writer, able to flesh out the often conflicting motives in people and describe how their personalities significantly impacted policy decisions. Halberstam does focus on personalities as far as history goes - believing that peoples' beliefs, concerns, fears, flaws, and strengths had much more impact on events than the reverse. I recently read "War in a Time of Peace" which definitely seemed like it was patterned off of this book. Both books are remarkably similar although they deal with different time periods and people.
This book concerns the massive bungling, ineptitude, hubris, and poor policy planning during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations that led to the U.S. getting irrevocably entangled in Vietnam. Halberstam gives a mini-biography of all of the major players, and does a good job of adding background to the story by showing how the conflict started, what the U.S. did/did not do back in the 1940s and 1950s when France was still trying to retain colonial control. He also talks about the Eisenhower/John Foster Dulles foreign policy of the 1950s, and how some aspects of that were a reaction to the Truman Administration's supposed "loss" of China.
It is somewhat disturbing to read how doves were treated then, how they were ostracized, reassigned, shoved aside, or thrown out of government for voicing dissent or - in some cases - not even dissent but rather an alternative viewpoint that did not mesh with the propaganda that some people in the military and the administrations were trying to sell. There were so many culprits who had their hands all over the escalation policy and the lies that were sold to the American people and the Congress: McNamara, Rusk, Johnson, Nolting, Taylor, Rostow, Bundy, Westmoreland. It is amazing how all of these people kept deluding themselves into thinking that the U.S. could just overpower the Vietcong and be seen as heroes throughout most of the world, all the while never taking seriously exactly who the enemy was and what it was capable of doing. They did not seem capable of viewing things from anything other than a United States-is-superior manner. It is so unfortunate that thousands of American servicemen died due to this overconfidence and arrogance. It seems eerily similar to what occurred in Iraq over the past decade.
This book concerns the massive bungling, ineptitude, hubris, and poor policy planning during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations that led to the U.S. getting irrevocably entangled in Vietnam. Halberstam gives a mini-biography of all of the major players, and does a good job of adding background to the story by showing how the conflict started, what the U.S. did/did not do back in the 1940s and 1950s when France was still trying to retain colonial control. He also talks about the Eisenhower/John Foster Dulles foreign policy of the 1950s, and how some aspects of that were a reaction to the Truman Administration's supposed "loss" of China.
It is somewhat disturbing to read how doves were treated then, how they were ostracized, reassigned, shoved aside, or thrown out of government for voicing dissent or - in some cases - not even dissent but rather an alternative viewpoint that did not mesh with the propaganda that some people in the military and the administrations were trying to sell. There were so many culprits who had their hands all over the escalation policy and the lies that were sold to the American people and the Congress: McNamara, Rusk, Johnson, Nolting, Taylor, Rostow, Bundy, Westmoreland. It is amazing how all of these people kept deluding themselves into thinking that the U.S. could just overpower the Vietcong and be seen as heroes throughout most of the world, all the while never taking seriously exactly who the enemy was and what it was capable of doing. They did not seem capable of viewing things from anything other than a United States-is-superior manner. It is so unfortunate that thousands of American servicemen died due to this overconfidence and arrogance. It seems eerily similar to what occurred in Iraq over the past decade.
April 8, 2016
In a league of its own. As he says in the afterword, a book about America, not Vietnam. A book about what power and success mean in America, and the way those forces guided the tragedy in Vietnam. I felt that it was, in many ways a companion to "A Bright and Shining Lie" (the other titanic work in English language Vietnam literature). Points left out of "Bright & Shining" (particularly the fate of the State Department's China specialists in the early 1950s) are covered, and things pored over in "B & S" are mentioned here and there in passing in "The B & the B," almost like Easter eggs.
What makes the book truly special though, is the writing. I loved Halberstam's prose. It was flowing and conversational, pithy, circular, peppered with anecdotes and parenthetical details that bring the players and the era to life in a way no other work ever has for me. One of the books on Vietnam that I would recommend to English majors, simply for the language. Beautiful.
What makes the book truly special though, is the writing. I loved Halberstam's prose. It was flowing and conversational, pithy, circular, peppered with anecdotes and parenthetical details that bring the players and the era to life in a way no other work ever has for me. One of the books on Vietnam that I would recommend to English majors, simply for the language. Beautiful.
October 6, 2015
An incredibly good narrative on how America became so heavily involved in Vietnam. His profiles of the major figures, such as Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and MacGeorge Bundy, are both enlightening and disheartening. It is disheartening because many of these guys were so smart that they should have (and probably did) know better than to make the decisions they made. I guess the moral that anyone who reads this books should take away is that any president and/or administration that misleads and does not inform the American people of his or its policies, that doesn't get detailed, truthful, and correct intelligence on the enemy, is doomed to failure.
January 11, 2021
Two of the many themes that stood out to me in this book were 1) the failure of centrism and 2) the fallibility of the "experts".
Having to choose between the "Hawks" and the "Doves", JFK and LBJ chose the ostrich. The Hawks never got the all-out war they wanted at the beginning, and the ultimate failure of the war validated what the Doves believed they knew all along. I see a valid argument on both sides, but a side was not chosen, the failure was not choosing one. Experts that thought they could control events to manage the politics at home, could not.
Having to choose between the "Hawks" and the "Doves", JFK and LBJ chose the ostrich. The Hawks never got the all-out war they wanted at the beginning, and the ultimate failure of the war validated what the Doves believed they knew all along. I see a valid argument on both sides, but a side was not chosen, the failure was not choosing one. Experts that thought they could control events to manage the politics at home, could not.
March 10, 2023
This gripping account on Vietnam reminded me of a few things:
1) “All-star teams fail because they rely on the individual’s sole talent.” —Herb Brooks, Miracle on Ice hockey coach
2) “Save us from arrogant men and all the causes they’re for.”—From the song “Shades of Grey” on Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams” album
3) Having the humility to say “I don’t know” is not a sign of weakness.
Pretty much summarizes everything I have ever thought about the whole Vietnam quagmire. I’ve been to the wall in DC. Too many names. Such a tragedy.
1) “All-star teams fail because they rely on the individual’s sole talent.” —Herb Brooks, Miracle on Ice hockey coach
2) “Save us from arrogant men and all the causes they’re for.”—From the song “Shades of Grey” on Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams” album
3) Having the humility to say “I don’t know” is not a sign of weakness.
Pretty much summarizes everything I have ever thought about the whole Vietnam quagmire. I’ve been to the wall in DC. Too many names. Such a tragedy.
December 2, 2021
A true classic.
August 22, 2024
Another book that I didn't realize I had read previously, but this one a long time ago. I recently saw a 20th anniversary version at my smaller, more local, library. I'll post my review of it below, instead of above, the original, while first noting that I'm dropping the rating to four stars. Now that original:
==
I had long read about this book but never gotten around to actually reading it. Until now. It more than lives up to its reputation, not just on insights on the military and the "best and brightest" of JFK's administration, pre-assassination, but, above all, in Halberstam's insights on LBJ. I only hope hat Robert Caro picks up from here as he finishes his multi-volumne biography of LBJ.
==
And now, thoughts from the new.
First, this is a review specifically of the 20th-anniversary version.
The intro was interesting. He’s right that LBJ kind of got cornered on foreign policy by JFK’s legerdemain. That said, this was, per Johnson’s gushing to Mr. Sam about the Kennedy team, only for Rayburn to tell him he’d feel better if one of them had run for sheriff, partly of Johnson’s own making. Halberstam doesn’t mention the Cuban missile crisis, for example. I to this day find it unbelievable that LBJ didn’t figure out that missiles were swapped for missiles. (Johnson was nominally on the ExComm but excluded from most insider meetings.)
It’s also interesting that Halberstam says he wasn’t a romantic about 1960 Jack but was about 1968 Bobby. In other words, he didn’t think a lot about Clean Gene McCarthy.
And, that may be a bit of why I dropped my overall review off my original.
Chapter 1: JFK got rolled by Robert Lovett. His No. 1 recommendation for Defense? MacNamara. For State? Rusk. One of the top three for Treasury? Dillon. Even while, at Treasury, admitting he didn’t know their political alignment, then admitted he did.
Of course, Daddy Joe set up this pre-inauguration meeting, as Halberstam notes. However, he doesn’t spell out how much Joe, in essence, wished he could have been a Republican, and would have been one, were he not a Boston Irish Catholic.
Problem. Having read PLENTY of stuff ABOUT “The Best,” I was going to kind of grok. Not having a table of contents is not as big a ding as no index, but it is a ding, and a problem for grokking.
So, I skipped to the end.
Halberstam notes the struggles within LBJ’s administration after he announced his withdrawal from the presidential campaign, in part because Johnson himself wouldn’t fill a non-consensus vacuum.
The conclusion misses Nixon’s backdoor dealings with Saigon in the campaign, which were already tentatively and partially discussed in news stories at the time. Indeed, while Claire Chennault is listed in the index twice, early in the book, Anna Chennault is never there. (The Christian Science Monitor reported a bowdlerized version of the story at the time.)
Robert Parry later, after Halberstam’s 20th anniversary, tracked down the journalist who wrote that story. The burgling of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and possibly also that at Brookings, were apparently tied to Nixon attempts to get his hands on what Johnson knew about him, but, unknown to him and his cronies, Walt Rostow had deposited this at the LBJ Library.
It’s interesting that Halberstam didn’t stumble on even bits of this, nor on Clark Clifford et al persuading LBJ not to give confirmation to the Monitor’s Washington bureau head. That, too, may be part of why I dropped it to four stars.
Back to the intro, written specially for the 20th anniversary version. Halberstam notes that by the standard of books that followed his about the Kennedy Administration, this one was kind of mild. He’s right.
Also, even before the worst of McCarthy, “old China hands” at State, while they might have had insights, often also had FDR-type patronizing attitudes toward and about China. Had FDR’s successor not been Truman (nor Wallace), and been reasonably informed on Asia, China still would have been lost and still had patronizing attitudes before it was “lost.”
And, Halberstam appears to get one political tidbit wrong. Texas oil money did not run against Sam Rayburn and fight his congressional re-election in 1944 to try to prevent him from being FDR’s next Veep to replace Henry Wallace. Rather, FDR had apparently already offered it to him and he had already turned it down. (Texas had no “LBJ law” in 1944, so he could only have run for one position.)
Also, yeah, Kennedy wanted to be his own Secretary of State, in essence. Don’t most presidents? Didn’t Bill Clinton (albeit after the 20th anniversary book) say that, in essence, with his comments about foreign policy? Didn’t Tricky Dick show that with Bill Rogers as his first SoS?
So, yeah, grokking via the index and other things shows some holes in this book.
==
I had long read about this book but never gotten around to actually reading it. Until now. It more than lives up to its reputation, not just on insights on the military and the "best and brightest" of JFK's administration, pre-assassination, but, above all, in Halberstam's insights on LBJ. I only hope hat Robert Caro picks up from here as he finishes his multi-volumne biography of LBJ.
==
And now, thoughts from the new.
First, this is a review specifically of the 20th-anniversary version.
The intro was interesting. He’s right that LBJ kind of got cornered on foreign policy by JFK’s legerdemain. That said, this was, per Johnson’s gushing to Mr. Sam about the Kennedy team, only for Rayburn to tell him he’d feel better if one of them had run for sheriff, partly of Johnson’s own making. Halberstam doesn’t mention the Cuban missile crisis, for example. I to this day find it unbelievable that LBJ didn’t figure out that missiles were swapped for missiles. (Johnson was nominally on the ExComm but excluded from most insider meetings.)
It’s also interesting that Halberstam says he wasn’t a romantic about 1960 Jack but was about 1968 Bobby. In other words, he didn’t think a lot about Clean Gene McCarthy.
And, that may be a bit of why I dropped my overall review off my original.
Chapter 1: JFK got rolled by Robert Lovett. His No. 1 recommendation for Defense? MacNamara. For State? Rusk. One of the top three for Treasury? Dillon. Even while, at Treasury, admitting he didn’t know their political alignment, then admitted he did.
Of course, Daddy Joe set up this pre-inauguration meeting, as Halberstam notes. However, he doesn’t spell out how much Joe, in essence, wished he could have been a Republican, and would have been one, were he not a Boston Irish Catholic.
Problem. Having read PLENTY of stuff ABOUT “The Best,” I was going to kind of grok. Not having a table of contents is not as big a ding as no index, but it is a ding, and a problem for grokking.
So, I skipped to the end.
Halberstam notes the struggles within LBJ’s administration after he announced his withdrawal from the presidential campaign, in part because Johnson himself wouldn’t fill a non-consensus vacuum.
The conclusion misses Nixon’s backdoor dealings with Saigon in the campaign, which were already tentatively and partially discussed in news stories at the time. Indeed, while Claire Chennault is listed in the index twice, early in the book, Anna Chennault is never there. (The Christian Science Monitor reported a bowdlerized version of the story at the time.)
Robert Parry later, after Halberstam’s 20th anniversary, tracked down the journalist who wrote that story. The burgling of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and possibly also that at Brookings, were apparently tied to Nixon attempts to get his hands on what Johnson knew about him, but, unknown to him and his cronies, Walt Rostow had deposited this at the LBJ Library.
It’s interesting that Halberstam didn’t stumble on even bits of this, nor on Clark Clifford et al persuading LBJ not to give confirmation to the Monitor’s Washington bureau head. That, too, may be part of why I dropped it to four stars.
Back to the intro, written specially for the 20th anniversary version. Halberstam notes that by the standard of books that followed his about the Kennedy Administration, this one was kind of mild. He’s right.
Also, even before the worst of McCarthy, “old China hands” at State, while they might have had insights, often also had FDR-type patronizing attitudes toward and about China. Had FDR’s successor not been Truman (nor Wallace), and been reasonably informed on Asia, China still would have been lost and still had patronizing attitudes before it was “lost.”
And, Halberstam appears to get one political tidbit wrong. Texas oil money did not run against Sam Rayburn and fight his congressional re-election in 1944 to try to prevent him from being FDR’s next Veep to replace Henry Wallace. Rather, FDR had apparently already offered it to him and he had already turned it down. (Texas had no “LBJ law” in 1944, so he could only have run for one position.)
Also, yeah, Kennedy wanted to be his own Secretary of State, in essence. Don’t most presidents? Didn’t Bill Clinton (albeit after the 20th anniversary book) say that, in essence, with his comments about foreign policy? Didn’t Tricky Dick show that with Bill Rogers as his first SoS?
So, yeah, grokking via the index and other things shows some holes in this book.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 590 reviews