The Best and the Brightest

Mr. Halberstam's genius was showing how internal domestic political pressures inform foreign policy, including such huge decisions as going to war. Would JFK felt the need to make a stand against the communists in that "little Indochina backwater" where the French had failed to hold onto their colony, had Truman and the Democrats not been savaged as having "lost China" to the communists, or attacked as "weak on communism" during the Red Scare throughout the '50s by right wing red baiters like McCarthy and others? Or if the Korean War had not been seen widely as a failure? Would he have had better and likely far more skeptical expertise available to him had so many China experts who were victims of that paranoid period not been run out of government? Or if he felt that the Soviets respected him personally more, post-Bay of Pigs or Cuban Missile Crisis? Halberstam paints a portrait of JFK as a president not quite in command of his own Vietnam policy, going along with the most brilliant and well educated minds of his generation, career climbers and technocrats all, who were eager to show the world that the US could fight a war against the communists and do it on their own terms. High tech, efficient, awesome. Vietnam may have been at root an unsolveable political problem (at least for the Americans) but to the leaders of the war it was a military, operational and technical problem - it had to be, as it was the only tool they had at their disposal. LBJ inherited JFK's commitment to Vietnam, and a GOP congress which was hostile to his Great Society policies, LBJ's crown in the jewel. He essentially gave in to the war, started bombing North Vietnam and ultimately putting in troops, with the idea that he could assuage right wing anti-communist Republicans and obtain their acquiescence on his domestic policies. He too, thought he could control the war. Much of the book is made up of mini-biographies of the great minds who populated both presidents' cabinets, famous and infamous, and their drives, points of view, ambition. It is a Greek tragedy of hubris, groupthink, bureaucracy, believing what one wants to believe, rejecting realities that get in the way, internecine rivalries, ambition, stubbornness. Halberstam was among the most brilliant historians of fairly recent US history, and this book is extremely important.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST by David Halberstam interprets US Foreign Policy of the Vietnam War as delusional. The principals: Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, George Ball, Dean Rusk, Averill Harriman, and Dean Acheson, not to mention Maxwell Taylor, and General Westmoreland. There are others of course. The author weaves the character of each individual with the politics of the day and shows how it led to decisions that were made from inner needs and wishful thinking rather than on facts. This error in thinking started at "the creation" i.e. the end of WWII. It torpedoed the power of rational thought. Halberstam reasons that the US perceived the Soviets to be on the verge to swallow Western Europe. This led the US to turn to France to provide a bastion against them. Charles De Gaulle was ready to cooperate but only if the US allowed France to seize Indochina again. In Halberstam's mind, the loss of China to the Communists, the Communist North Korean invasion of South Korea, the Communist Chinese invasion of Korea, McCarthy's hunt for Communists in the government, and then the Cuban missile crisis exacerbated and perpetuated fears about world domination by the Communists. These factors, according to Halberstam, contributed to the continued support of France in Indochina as an ally against monolithic Communism. After Dienbienphu, we did replace the French and decided that we would carry the crusade against Communism. We were then perceived by Ho Chi Minh as another western power colluding with another western but effete colonial power. The US nevertheless chose to allow France to regress to its former status as a colonial power over Vietnam in the name of stopping Communist aggression. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson could show hesitation, ambivalence, or appeasement. Their obsession of not wanting to be viewed as weak trumped their instincts to look for alternatives. All the leaders, especially Dean Rusk, and with the exception of George Ball, put forth the Munich analogy to justify intervention and escalation. In Halberstam's analysis, the Vietnam War was a defeat before it even began because it was based on a faulty strategy: To stop communist aggression. The idea to expel the French once and for all and to help unify North and South Vietnam was thought about but never acted upon. Halberstam holds the Bundy brothers along with McNamara responsible not only as instigators but the propagators of the war. McNamara was characterized as a whiz kid with a funny haircut who used his unbelievable grasp of statistics to flim-flam the pentagon in doing his bidding. It brings to mind Mark Twain's three types of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Despite their super-education, their impeccable character, and their natural brilliance all the principals viewed the war as a war against Communist hegemony; they too could not show any hesitation, ambivalence, or appeasement to their president. To do otherwise was political suicide. On the other hand, George Ball was consistent in his opposition to the war from JFK to LBJ. To Halberstam JFK was changing his mind about the morality of the war but got gunned down; George Ball was the hero, LBJ the loser and France the thorn in our side.

Second read. This review is of the 1993 Ballantine Books softcover. This is a solid introduction to the thinking and bureaucratic struggles on the US side that led to a failed policy and war in Vietnam. Several streams of thinking went into these decisions. As Halberstam recounts, a major fear for Democrats across two presidencies and after McCarthyism was being pegged as soft on communism. Johnson, in particular, felt that getting labelled as such would jeapordize his Great Society program. The US lost a lot of its Asian expertise due to the McCarthy-era purges; many of these China experts warned about Chiang's weakeness, and so were tarred with the communist brush. Another component was a sense of 1960s can-do optimism, which was fostered by men who seemed to have easy success in their lives, and a sense that American power can achieve anything. There was an ongoing sense that, in order to reassure Western Europe about the USSR, we had to show that we had the resolve to stand up to communist aggression in places like Vietnam. Too, there was a belief in a global, unified communist threat, and a misperception that China was the main driver in Vietnam, similar to its role in the Korean conflict. Again and again, Johnson and other key leaders assumed that Ho would respond the way they would respond; drop a few bombs on Hanoi, ask for negotiations. Repeatedly, this never seemed to work, and the through these kinds of half-steps, the US tip-toed into a full-blown war. The Johnson administration, in particular, was never completely transparent about the truth of the Vietnam war, and the best example of this perhaps came during the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Throughout, there are some implicit sub-themes. There was a fundamental lack of honesty. Military reporting was fudged. The Army, in particular, seemed to be under pressure in the nuclear era to prove that it had a useful role, to prove that it could make counterinsurgency work. The squashing of the China experts was really a punishment for honest reporting and clarity of insight from the State Department. Robert McNamara would forcefully cut down dissenters in meetings, but then privately harbor his own doubts, grow closer to Robert Kennedy, and order the compilation of the Pentagon Papers (if anything, a massive compilation of the internal debates about Vietnam policy). If anything, the leadership lied to itself. There was a bureaucratic, quite corporate pressure to be on the same page as the President, to maintain one's position and stay close to the power circle of decision makers. The State Department could have balanced the military point of view, but as Halberstam tells it, Rusk was more of a passive player, acquiescing to the more vocal and forceful McNamara. As a result, Defense became the driving force of policy toward Vietnam. Too, the long involvement of several key players (Taylor, McNamara, Rusk) across administrations may have reinforced thinking when fresh thinking, and a willingness to admit mistakes, was vitally needed. Another sub-theme, seldom articulated plainly in most histories on the subject, is that this war was led by the Greatest Generation. World War II (and, of course, Korea) shaped much of the perceptions of the American leadership of this war, and just about every player served in some way during WWII. Kennedy, Westmoreland, Taylor, Rusk, McNamara, and even Johnson all served in WWII. How their war experiences shaped their thinking isn't made entirely clear, except perhaps that WWII shaped their perceptions of American power, a noble cause, and a sense of personal commitment to a fight. Involvement in WWII also may have tended to give their judgments great weight, even when they were flat-out wrong. Halberstam includes one quote from Johnson, who slammed a dissenter for not being to young to be in WWII, which alone says a lot. The Author's Note is perhaps the most clear about Halberstam's methods, intent, and clarifying some of these themes. This is not a historian's book, with plenty of footnotes and primary documents cited. Rather, what is impressive is that Halberstam conducted some 500 interviews, sometimes interviewing the same subject 10 times for clarification. He also candidly admits that he went through the typical Vietnam arc in his own experience: approaching it with optimism and a determination to stop communism, and then slowly realizing the truth, seeing the lack of progress, and sensing the inevitable defeat. Through this approach, seldom has history seemed so human, the foibles of leadership easy to understand. Still, I'm bothered by Halberstam's tendency to overwrite. One example: even his "Epilogue" is followed by "A Final Word." Not that I'm against long books; I've read this one twice, after all. It's that Halberstam, at least here, can be unclear in some spots. His tendency to use long parenthetical statements doesn't help. For every jewel of clarity, I've stumbled upon an equal number of opaque rocks. For example, a couple of times he brings up possible racism as a undercurrent in American thinking about Asian and thereby Vietnam. If true, it no doubt may have clouded thinking about policy, but Halberstam mentions this only in passing and it therefore comes across as a poorly argued afterthought. In that way, I have wished Halberstam's writing could be more focused. Here, I was surprised by a revelation in the Author's Note. In the next-to-last page he admits his indebtedness to a State Department official, James Thomson. Thomson wrote in the Atlantic Monthly what essentially is an outline for Halberstam's book. This 1968 article is available online and perhaps gets to the heart of the matter much more cogently in one article than Halberstam was able to in his book. As Halberstam wrote, Thomson's article "is by far the best single analysis of what happened." Indeed.

Great book. Great service.

Like other reviewers I had this on my bookshelf for 20 years or more. Even 40 to 50 years after the fact the American involvement in Vietnam is very hard to understand and accept. I have to say that this book totally lives up to its billing. Despite its length there is tremendous pace and drama throughout. It was very hard to put it down. Mr. Halberstam is a great writer and historian. Halberstam profiles the leading military and political figures in rich detail. Each person; Johnson, McNamara, Bundy, Taylor, Westmoreland and so many others are truly three dimensional. He overlaps with the events of the day on the war front and at home to really give the reader a fuller experience than most history books. It is so fresh, alive and virile even today. Considering he published this in 1970 or 1971 without the benefit of more perspective I think it is amazing how spot on he was in his reporting, observations and conclusions. I would give this six stars if I could - both an important history lesson and one of the most engrossing books that I have ever read. Incidentally I read this just after "No Ordinary Time" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. You can't escape that sad reality of how we blew our position in the world in such a short period of time. The arc of American history from 1940 to 1970 is one of ascendency to superpower from humble, inward roots. In only 30 years we squandered a great deal and our position on the planet with arrogance, poor decisions, stubbornness, a lack of vision and weak leadership. Sadly 1990 to 2010 seems to be an echo of that prior period reflecting our inability to learn anything and dooming us to repeating our mistakes. I really hope this continues to be read widely. Maybe it will inspire the the best of the next generation to politics or to write a great book!

Just under two months ago, a friend recommended a book that I had seen when it was first published. I have just completed it. The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam is about the Vietnam War, and about how many of the most important American civilian officials and military officers made it turn out the way it did. The book is centered primarily on the time frame from early 1961 though 1968, but there is sufficient coverage of prior decades, of the involvements of prior administrations, of the French post-war colonial experience, and of the broader story of the civil war in China to give it very broad perspective. The Best and the Brightest is a relic of an extinct life form: journalism. Today, there is neither the supply nor the demand to sustain real journalism. A reader may detect a few signs of some of Halberstam's biases, but they are well controlled. They do not make the book, or detract from it. What Halberstam has done is to develop a few dozen well-documented biographies of the principals and to weave them into a tapestry that gives us a coherent history of the whole Vietnam debacle. Those who were around at the time will remember when the newly-elected President John Kennedy put together an Administration of highly educated, very intellectual persons, many of whom had at least some arguably relevant experience from their careers during WWII. Halberstam covers that in great detail, Those who were around at the time will probably also recall how just about every other speech made by JFK from the fifties on contained some reference to the threat of world communism. And some, if not many, will remember how Kennedy had become enamored with the idea of waging limited "brushfire" wars to combat communist aggression wherever it may rear its ugly head. Halberstam aggresses that latter point well. We may compartmentalize our memories and think of Berlin, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis as subjects separate from Vietnam. Halberstam corrects us on that--to the US Administration, it was all part of a global chess game. Of course, most of what we read and hear today about JFK paints a picture of some kind of idealistic, fictional, and mythical Hollywood royalty described as "Camelot". And then there was Johnson, who inherited US participation in the conflict in Southeast Asia and who surely made it much worse in every possible way. Reading the words of the principal actors today reveals some surprises. Some whom I had thought of as "doves" were anything but. The book is much more than an ccount of gross misunderstandings, bad strategy, failures of comprehension, and so on. To me, there are two really shocking things that come out. First, quite a number of highly qualified professional people who were sent to Vietnam to evaluate the situation first-hand became persona non grata when their honest evaluations for the facts as they saw them differed from the Administration party line. The careers were ruined, as others lied and many others died. The other is the abject dishonesty exhibited by more than a few of the top players. Generals falsified reports. LBJ told different people different and conflicting things on the same day, kept communications compartmentalized, and bullied everyone he could, including his own Vice President. And it is convincingly revealed that the Exalted High Priest of the Numbers Men, upon whose analyses the entire war strategy had been based, thought nothing of making up numbers from whole cloth during meetings as he went along, for the sole purpose of discrediting others. A handful of people are seen in good light. Most of the bad ones ultimately got their comeuppance, albeit at the great expense of so many others.

I was actually really looking forward to reading "The Best and the Brightest," but only a few pages into it I became annoyed and frustrated with Halberstam's verbose, ponderous, pretentious writing. Halfway into the book, I felt like I was mired in my own Vietnam War, devoting tremendous time and resources to winning it, and the more invested I became the more trapped I became in this pointless endeavor. "The Best and the Brightest" is ostensibly about how shining intellectuals -- primarily McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk -- of the Kennedy White House trapped America in Vietnam. And while there was some biographical detail of the three, I didn't feel that there was enough nuanced understanding (ironically, the richest psychological profile was of Lyndon B. Johnson, who was definitely not one of "the best and the brightest") of any of these three. In fact, I came away from the book with the keen sense that these "intellectuals" were just arrogant and shallow, self-serving and power-hungry individuals. The major point of the book comes from the Pentagon Papers -- that the American government is a self-serving bureaucracy only interested in the entrenchment and expansion of its own power, and that each President, no matter what his political affiliation or ideology, eventually subscribes to this bureaucratic mindset as his primary religion. This is something that was true of Johnson, and something that's still true of Obama. There really was no reason why "The Best and the Brightest" had to be 665 pages long (in fact, even the self-righteous introduction felt too long). The best book on the Vietnam War remains "Fire in the Lake."

The first (and only) time I read David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” was shortly after its publication in 1975… that is, until last week, when I finished reading it again. I was just as impressed with it this time as I was forty years ago. David Halberstam (1934-2007) was a journalist and author who reported from Vietnam for the New York Times in the early 1960s. He was one of a group of journalists (including Neil Sheehan and Peter Arnett, among others) who earned the ire of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for his reporting of what he viewed as the truth about Vietnam – that America was getting itself involved in a conflict it couldn’t win. Halberstam’s reporting from Vietnam earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. As Halberstam explains in his preface to “The Best and the Brightest,” he spent three years researching and writing the book. He intended his title to be ironic, not literal. The “Best and the Brightest” were leaders who were considered America’s elite – John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge and William Bundy, George Kennan, George Ball, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, John McCone, and others. They were mostly graduates from Ivy League schools, many with Ph.D.’s; men of keen intellect and supposed prodigious management and leadership skills. Men who prided themselves on straight talk. And yet, these men slowly and steadily entangled the United States in a war on the Asian mainland that they knew, from both the warnings they received and from bitter experience, they had little chance of winning. And once they got America entangled in Vietnam, they mismanaged the war and deceived the American people about it, and left the nation torn asunder by divisions that exist to this day. I don’t necessarily agree with all Halberstam’s judgments and conclusions in “The Best and the Brightest,” but I do think he made a powerful argument that seems to be largely vindicated in the four decades since the end of the Vietnam War. I believe “The Best and the Brightest” is simply the best book ever written about America’s involvement in Vietnam. If you only read one book about this subject, this is the book to read. Most highly recommended.

Un detalladisimo ensayo de como los hombres mas brillantes y mejores pudieron llevar a Estados Unidos a perder una guerra. Muy recomendable.

This is a fascinating glimpse into the making of foreign policy in the US during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, with a sharp focus on Vietnam. The spectre of ex-Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red-baiting is alive and well, even though the man himself is discredited and out of power. No one, not Kennedy, Johnson or their underlings, can afford to NOT see Vietnam through the prism of Communism/anti-Communism. This is what eventually leads to the US's defeat in Vietnam.

A book which casts a light over a pivotal period for USA and the whole world as we know it now. There is so much to understand and learn in the book through the description of the people, the decisions taken and the events that determined the USA policy over the sixties. This book is a milestone not only for each American citizen willing to understand what really happened in those years but also for everyone one else who whishes to comprehend how cold war policies and Vietnam war escalation have affected directly and indirectly the global community of nations. Halberstam style is straight and clear.

As I write this review, the Taliban have entered Kabul with little apparent resistance. 20 years after going in after 9/11, all guns and modern technology blazing, the modern armies the the west (principally the USA) are staring ignominious defeat in the face, once again to a 3rd World rag-tag force. Eerily, the situation in Afghanistan looks like the fall of Saigon all over again. This book describes brilliantly how a group of exceptionally talented individuals at the highest level of the US government got Vietnam so terribly wrong. Intelligence, however, is not everything. As these individuals took power after Kennedy’s election in 1960, they looked an impressive bunch. However, as one seasoned political hack observed, he would have felt much happier if they had “ever actually run something”. Intelligence brings baggage with it, namely arrogance and hubris. LBJ decided, after JFKs death, to keep the ‘best and the brightest’ in place. This would prove a pivotal decision. This book analyses the fundamental mistakes made as the Vietnam conflict escalated. The Democrats, wounded by the apparent charge that they had ‘lost China’ a decade before, were terrified that they would forever be seen as weak in the face of communism. This fear helped shape their future decisions. Their strategy was based on a number of flawed assumptions. Firstly, that a 3rd world army was no match for a modern one, that AirPower was decisive, the South Vietnamese government would get better and win local support, and that in the short term Ho Chi Minh would be forced to negotiate. Lets consider each in turn. The Generals were trained and had experience of fighting conventional European style wars. The Vietcong could just melt away, strike at will and then disappear. Hanoi could also reinforce battalions with ease and send them down the Ho Chi Minh trail. The US, thousands of miles from home, had Congress and the public to deal with. Also, Ho Chi Minh was fighting for an idea- they were in it to change their country. The southern government was corrupt, repressive and unpopular, with coups a normal occurrence. No wonder the natives flocked to Ho Chi Minh. The ‘best’ also had a condescending view of the Vietnamese- surely these people, simple as they are, will see what we are doing for them? However, this book explains that the conflict owes at least as much to Nationalism as it did to Communism. The French Indo-China war had done for the colonial power, enhancing the growing sense of Vietnamese nationhood, which was further developed by subsequent US involvement. The fact that the French, a decent army, was beaten should have sounded alarm bells for the US, but again this apparent contempt for all this not American seems incredible in retrospect. AirPower alone, was never enough to force Hanoi, fighting in their own backyard and knowledgable of the terrain, able to replenish losses at will, to the negotiating table. It was a fantasy. The author describes Vietnam as a ‘tar-baby’ the more you struggle the more you get stuck. Finally, the US simply underestimated Ho Chi Minh as an adversary. Also, the book describes how the ‘reports’ that reached the desks of the Pentagon were always hopelessness optimistic - a lesson to all about the dangers of subordinates telling you what you want to hear rather than the truth. The best and the brightest is a seminal work that everyone who aspires to office should read. What’s clear is how few people appear to have done so. One haunting section has proven to be eerily prescient as the Talibon, today, enter Kabul with little apparent resistance. In the mid 60’s Robert McNamara was asked by a question by a subordinate. What, he asked, was to stop the Vietcong just waiting for the day when inevitably we would have to go home? Would they not just take over? McNamara paused, and replied that he had not thought of that. And so in 2021, over 40 years since the fall of Saigon, we see the exact same playing out again in Kabul. The Best and the Brightest is an important lesson for all of those who believe to much in themselves.

A successful effort to explain how and why Vietnam happened. It's a must read for anyone seeking to go into, or facilitate anyone going into public life.