The Best and the Brightest

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Summary: Absolutely stunning in its analysis and presentation
Review: This book is not for the faint-hearted. David Halberstam, who personally witnessed and suffered from the incompetence of the US and ARVN forces during a crucial period in the mid-1960s, has produced an overwhelming case study in poor political judgement, outmoded military thinking, and above all arrogance. Reading this book at the time of the US-led bombing of Serbia in mid-1999, and reflecting back on Halberstam's account of the US decision to bomb North Vietnam and the inevitable intervention of ground troops following that, I couldn't help thinking: does anyone out there ever bother to learn from our past mistakes? Our politicians and military leaders should be made to read this book, and read it again, until its messages sink home.

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Summary: Excellent Book on American policy making in Vietnam
Review: This is a truly excellent book on American policy making in Vietnam.

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

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

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

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

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Summary: The Times That Tried Men's Souls
Review: This is probably one of the most masterful non-fiction books written in America in the past thirty-five years. It is also the best book I have read on Washington power, with the possible exception of Hedrick Smith's "The Power Game".

What makes this book so distinctive is Halberstam's passion for his subject: The quagmire known as Vietnam. Rarely does one come across a writer who has not only a strong intellect, but a keen sensitivity and insight into the people who are portrayed in his pages.

Since I was born in 1963, the Vietnam War to me is just a vague memory of school classmates wearing POW/MIA bracelets on their wrists. Since I lived near a major air force base, some of the bracelets worn were of the children's own fathers and uncles. This book captures an era I knew nothing about. And it shows the truly sad confluence of stale policies, rigid mindsets, blind ambition, and cruel truths of history that came together in a little known country in Southeast Asia.

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Summary: Paranoia struck deep ...
Review: This may sound contradictory but: David writes with a beautiful, opinionated objectivity. He distills the pre-war accomplishments and connections of the elitist leftovers from the Kennedy administration with a remarkable deftness. He even flashes a rapier wit now and then.

Linguistically, Lyndon is the class clown, and David does well to step aside and let him speak his riotous argot for himself--talk about your potty-mouthed mover and shaker!

I love that Mr. Halberstam fearlessly calls a spade a spade, i.e. a moron a moron, no matter their stellar accomplishments or superhuman work ethic. The brothers Bundy are well revealed herein; as is the "MacBeth" of the Vietnam war: Robert McNamara.

David unspins the mountains of governmental hooey into fine threads of truth that he reweaves into a tale of unparalled hubris.

If you need to see how disconnected, how Strangelovian our military was, how absurdist the upper echelons of government were; from Dwight D. on--read this book.

It proves that for decades the lunatics were indeed in charge of that asylum called South Vietnam; they also ran the Pentagon, the Whitehouse and, very very much, the Department of State.

Step right up, folks! Buy this book! Read in awe as Mr. Dean Rusk does his uncanny impersonation of the Exxon Valdez.

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Summary: A dishonest classic that continues to shape the debate
Review: This profoundly dishonest book remains a must-read for students of the Vietnam War and American politics because of its widespread and continuing influence. Halberstam's basic thesis is (1) that Republicans in the McCarthy Era purged the State Department of people who understood Asia, and frightened the Democratic Party into supporting mindless anti-Communist politics in the U.S., (2) when the Kennedy Administration came to power, brutal incompetents in the military, abetted by a gutted State Department, somehow hi-jacked the Vietnam process from underneath Kennedy and McNamara's noses, and (3) succeeded, with the connivance of dim-witted or cravenly career-oriented Ambassadors, Generals, and mostly Republican hotheads lamentably brought into the Kennedy Administration, in escalating the U.S. into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.

The overt moral of "The Best and the Brightest", underlined by its clever title, is that the supposed rationalists and pragmatists of the Kennedy Administration were too clever by half in their belief that they could co-exist with the military and Cold Warrior Republicans, who ultimately bent them to their will and forced the U.S. into the Vietnam War.

Just one example of how preposterously distorted Halberstam's thesis is: Robert A. Lovett, who Halberstam portrays as an old-fashioned, courtly Democrat who was elbowed out of the way by Kennedy and his team of hard-charging pragmatists eager to appease the Republicans, was in fact the biggest support of Curtis Lemay during World War II, when LeMay pioneered the horrifically deadly fire-bombing strategy which killed more Japanese civilians than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Lovett fits right in with the Democratic establishment that blundered and deceived its way in to the fiasco of the Vietnam War, he was just a generation older than Kennedy and his guys.

Halberstam's attempt to stick Republicans with the blame for the Vietnam War is pretty thin gruel, disguised with lots of hearty chunks of chewy anecdotes produced by Halberstam's brilliant reporting. It's his over-arching thesis that is flawed. Today, it is clear that it was not the military but the civilians in the Kennedy Administration who were the bullies--willing to sick the U.S. Army onto the Vietnamese, willing to encourage the assassination of President Diem of South Vietnam, willing to do whatever it took to physically intimidate and kill any Vietnamese who got in their way. America now knows all too well that you don't call the military into a political or social situation until it is time to fight. Ironically, the major breaches of this doctrine have been under the Clinton Administration. Halberstam's account of the most politically motivated and controlled war the U.S. has ever fought brilliantly inverts the Vietnam War into a war caused by Republican and military control of a Democratic Administration. It is a fine, scintillitating performance by Halberstam, but it isn't history.

Halberstam and the many similar Vietnam era war correspondents never seem to be able to reconcile the fact that much of their information came from majors, LTCs, Colonels, and even the odd Brigadier General with their thesis that the War was the fault of the military, not two Democratic administrations in a row. The real issue with the military, which is now being examined, is how physically courageous 4 star Generals were so morally craven that they did not speak out or resign when their political masters gave them orders that they new to be fatally flawed strategically, and unconscionable morally.

Highlights of the book include much fine reporting and interesting Kennedy and Johnson-era gossip on figures in the establishment, a blizzard of details that disguises the mendacity and special pleading of the book's over-arching thesis. Finally, one reads the book and recalls the dictum that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The parallels between the Kennedy Administration and the Clinton Administration are astounding.

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Summary: Reads as if it were written yesterday, not 28 years ago.
Review: When I read "The Best and the Brightest" I could not believe how fresh it was, despite the fact that it was written in 1972 it feels as if it were written yesterday. I am amazed at how much information Halberstam was able to collect in the late 1960s, before the Freedom of Information Act, and while the war was still raging, about the Vietnam War and the decisions that led up to it. If Halberstam were to sit down today to write this book, with another 30 years of historical documentation available he might write a different book but I cannot see how he could write a better one. Halberstam shows how bad decisions, dishonesty, an unwillingness to face facts and sheer basic stupidity got America into a war that was lost from the start. The amazing thing that this book reveals is how so many smart, well-accomplished people, the best and the brightest of the American foreign policy and military were so incredibly wrong for so incredibly long. I wish that I had read this book a long time ago, I'm glad that I've read it now.