The Best and the Brightest

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.

If you were drafted and had to serve under LBJ and wondered how naive Americanswere in the 60's, you may want to read this book. What a Croc of Stuff--people with years of experience and knowledge of Vietnam were purged from group of advisors if they did not know how to "go alongto get along." This book is half biographies of about a dozen men and half historical matter; makes generals look dumb and proven liars (yes, we had them back then too). Group think of Military men helped to kill over 58,000 Americans. Unless you believed in Colonization (Saigon leaders spoke French and had been educated by French), or believed in "saving face," or bit on the crap about "dominoes," this War was not for you. A great investigative book about a pathetic War. Purely Pathetic Time in America. It was a page turner in that I learned so much about personalities and who stood for what and who had backbone and who did not. The book was NOT a page turner because it was exciting. Time issuppose to heal but Vietnam is a running sore for me. What is additionally sad is that we did not learn much from our involvement--30 years later we saw Powell lie and "Vice" have boys killed looking for WMD which did not exist. Et Cetera! Truly thankful that this book was written. Thanks, David--you RIP

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.

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.

I found this book a fascinating. While having a basic understanding of the early years of the US effort in Vietnam, this book served as an in-depth introduction and then some. I did find it slow-going, with my having to refer to past pages or Google to keep a handle on the names & personalities, but just couldn’t put it down. It features a great deal of background to the US role in Vietnam as well as the machinations underway in the White House throughout this. I came away shaking my head at McNamara’s “data-led” approach, parsing the events into data - often misleading - and using that to make assumptions or increase efforts.In particular I really liked the background on the ‘loss of China’, and its ramifications on the State Departnent, McCarthyism and US strategy towards communism - and the erroneous belief that all SE Asian communist nations were extended arms of Moscow, rather than each separate movement being indigenous.

You don't buy this for an easy read but the subject is fascinating for those of us of a certain age, when Vietnam dominated the news. It is reassuring to learn that the most intelligent people are sometimes, or in some ways, pretty thick

It's good but it's about two hundred pages too long and the author gets lost in his own verbal verbosity. Every character has the same bio which Halberstam takes ages on: they were godlike in their youth (which he describes in wildly poetic terms) then Vietnam bought them to their knees (which he describes with a King Lear like Shakespearean flourish). It gets slightly laborious. Read it by all means but prepare for a good yawn three quarters of the way through.

Sadly the book that arrived was not as the picture or as described (an Easton press leather bound English language copy) and was a second hand German language copy of the standard hardback version - unfortunatley I don't speak German so couldn't even enjoy reading it!