A.J. Howard's Reviews > The Best and the Brightest

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.