The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam (PDF)

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David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.”A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience.”—The New York Times 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 we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic.Praise for The Best and the Brightest“The most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. . . . It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation’s search for its idealistic soul. The Best and the Brightest is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.”—The Boston Globe“Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative. . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance.”—Los Angeles Times“A fascinating tale of folly and self-deception . . . [An] absorbing, detailed, and devastatingly caustic tale of Washington in the days of the Caesars.”—The Washington Post Book World“Seductively readable . . . It is a staggeringly ambitious undertaking that is fully matched by Halberstam’s performance. . . . This is in all ways an admirable and necessary book.”—Newsweek“A story every American should read.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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Editorial Reviews: Review “A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience.”—The New York Times“The most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. . . . It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation’s search for its idealistic soul. The Best and the Brightest is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.”—The Boston Globe“Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative. . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance.”—Los Angeles Times“A fascinating tale of folly and self-deception . . . [An] absorbing, detailed, and devastatingly caustic tale of Washington in the days of the Caesars.”—The Washington Post Book World“Seductively readable . . . It is a staggeringly ambitious undertaking that is fully matched by Halberstam’s performance. . . . This is in all ways an admirable and necessary book.”—Newsweek “A story every American should read.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch From the Publisher The Vietnam War has seemed more shadowy and cinematic to me than anything else for most of my life. I was born during the Watergate Hearings. My generation was touched by the war in Vietnam, but only in the sense that our parents were part of it–whether they marched for peace or served in the military or fell somewhere in between. But unlike the Baby Boomers, we are not defined by the war–it, literally and figuratively, did not make us. So, as a consequence, when I think of the Vietnam War it is the images that the generations before me created that come to mind–Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon…When I read The Best and the Brightest, that all changed. For the first time, I understood. No matter what your position may have been or may be, this book fully and expertly explores the American foreign policy decisions and actions that led to this war and its execution and paints a clear picture of its catalytic role in the shaping of today’s America.-Kelly Lamb, Marketing Coordinator About the Author David Halberstam is the author of a number of books, including The Powers That Be, The Reckoning, Summer of ’49, Playing for Keeps, and War in a Time of Peace. He lives in New York City. Senator John McCain entered the Naval Academy in June of 1954 and served in the United States Navy until 1981. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Arizona in 1982 and to the Senate in 1986. The Republican Party’s nominee for president in the 2008 election, McCain was also the author of Faith of My Fathers, Worth the Fighting For, Why Courage Matters, Character Is Destiny, Hard Call, Thirteen Soldiers, and The Restless Wave. John McCain died in 2018. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneA cold day in December. Long afterward, after the assassination and all the pain, the older man would remember with great clarity the young man’s grace, his good manners, his capacity to put a visitor at ease. He was concerned about the weather, that the old man not be exposed to the cold or to the probing questions of freezing newspapermen, that he not have to wait for a cab. Instead he had guided his guest to his own car and driver. The older man would remember the young man’s good manners almost as clearly as the substance of their talk, though it was an important meeting.In just a few weeks the young man would become President of the United States, and to the newspapermen standing outside his Georgetown house, there was an air of excitement about every small act, every gesture, every word, every visitor to his temporary headquarters. They complained less than usual, the bitter cold notwithstanding; they felt themselves a part of history: the old was going out and the new was coming in, and the new seemed exciting, promising.On the threshold of great power and great office, the young man seemed to have everything. He was handsome, rich, charming, candid. The candor was part of the charm: he could beguile a visitor by admitting that everything the visitor proposed was right, rational, proper—but he couldn’t do it, not this week, this month, this term. Now he was trying to put together a government, and the candor showed again. He was self-deprecating with the older man. He had spent the last five years, he said ruefully, running for office, and he did not know any real public officials, people to run a government, serious men. The only ones he knew, he admitted, were politicians, and if this seemed a denigration of his own kind, it was not altogether displeasing to the older man. Politicians did need men to serve, to run the government. The implication was obvious. Politicians could run Pennsylvania and Ohio, and if they could not run Chicago they could at least deliver it. But politicians run the world? What did they know about the Germans, the French, the Chinese? He needed experts for that, and now he was summoning them.The old man was Robert A. Lovett, the symbolic expert, representative of the best of the breed, a great surviving link to a then unquestioned past, to the wartime and postwar successes of the Stimson-Marshall-Acheson years. He was the very embodiment of the Establishment, a man who had a sense of country rather than party. He was above petty divisions, so he could say of his friends, as so many of that group could, that he did not even know to which political party they belonged. He was a man of impeccable credentials, indeed he passed on other people’s credentials, deciding who was safe and sound, who was ready for advancement and who was not. He was so much a part of that atmosphere that he was immortalized even in the fiction of his class. Louis Auchincloss, who was the unofficial laureate of that particular world, would have one of his great fictional lawyers say: “I’ve got that Washington bug. Ever since I had that job with Bob Lovett . . .”He had the confidence of both the financial community and the Congress. He had been good, very good, going up on the Hill in the old days and soothing things over with recalcitrant Midwestern senators; and he was soft on nothing, that above all—no one would accuse Robert Lovett of being soft. He was a witty and graceful man himself, a friend not just of the powerful, the giants of politics and industry, but of people like Robert Benchley and Lillian Hellman and John O’Hara. He had wit and charm. Even in those tense moments in 1950 when he had been at Defense and MacArthur was being MacArthur, Lovett had amused his colleagues at high-level meetings with great imitations of MacArthur’s vanities, MacArthur in Korea trying to comb his few strands of hair from side to side over his pate to hide his baldness, while standing in the blast of prop-plane engines at Kimpo Airfield.They got along well, these two men who had barely known each other before. Jack Kennedy the President-elect, who in his campaign had summoned the nation’s idealism, but who was at least as skeptical as he was idealistic, curiously ill at ease with other people’s overt idealism, preferring in private the tart and darker view of the world and of mankind of a skeptic like Lovett.In addition to his own misgivings he had constantly been warned by one of his more senior advisers that in order to deal with State effectively, he had to have a real man there, that State was filled with sissies in striped pants and worse. That senior adviser was Joseph Kennedy, Sr., and he had consistently pushed, in discussions with his son, the name of Robert Lovett, who he felt was the best of those old-time Wall Street people. For Robert Lovett understood power, where it resided, how to exercise it. He had exercised it all his life, yet he was curiously little known to the general public. The anonymity was not entirely by chance, for he was the embodiment of the public servant–financier who is so secure in his job, the value of it, his right to do it, that he does not need to seek publicity, to see his face on the cover of a magazine or on television, to feel reassured. Discretion is better, anonymity is safer: his peers know him, know his role, know that he can get things done. Publicity sometimes frightens your superiors, annoys congressional adversaries (when Lovett was at Defense, the senior members of the Armed Services committees never had to read in newspapers and magazines how brilliant Lovett was, how well he handled the Congress; rather they read how much he admired the Congress). He was the private man in the public society par excellence. He did not need to impress people with false images. He knew the rules of the game: to whom you talked, what you said, to whom you did not talk, which journalists were your kind, would, without being told, know what to print for the greater good, which questions to ask, and which questions not to ask. He lived in a world where young men made their way up the ladder by virtue not just of their own brilliance and ability but also of who their parents were, which phone calls from which old friends had preceded their appearance in an office. In a world like this he knew that those whose names were always in print, who were always on the radio and television, were there precisely because they did not have power, that those who did hold or had access to power tried to keep out of sight. He was a twentieth-century man who did not hold press conferences, who never ran for anything. The classic insider’s man.He was born in Huntsville, Texas, in 1895, the son of Robert Scott Lovett, a general counsel for Harriman’s Union Pacific Railway, a railroad lawyer, a power man in those rough and heady days, who then became a judge, very much a part of the power structure, the Texas arm of it, and eventually a member of the Union Pacific board of directors and president of the railway. His son Bob would do all the right Eastern things, go to the right schools, join the right clubs (Hill School, Yale, Skull and Bones). He helped form the Yale unit of pilots which flew in World War I, and he commanded the first U.S. Naval Air Squadron. He married well, Adele Brown, the beautiful daughter of James Brown, a senior partner in the great banking firm of Brown Brothers.Since those post-college years were a bad time for the railways, he went to work for Brown Brothers, starting at $1,080 a year, a fumbling-fingered young clerk who eventually rose to become a partner and finally helped to arrange the merger of Brown Brothers with the Harriman banking house to form the powerful firm of Brown Bros., Harriman & Co. So he came naturally to power, to running things, to knowing people, and his own marriage had connected him to the great families. His view of the world was a banker’s view, the right men making the right decisions, stability to be preserved. The status quo was good, one did not question it.He served overseas in London, gaining experience in foreign affairs, though like most influential Americans who would play a key role in foreign affairs entering government through the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, the group which served as the Establishment’s unofficial club, it was with the eyes of a man with a vested interest in the static world, where business could take place as usual, where the existing order could and should be preserved. He saw the rise of Hitler and the com- ing military importance of air power; when he returned to America he played a major role in speeding up America’s almost nonexistent air defenses. He served with great distinction during World War II, a member of that small inner group which worked for Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Chief of Staff George C. Marshall (“There are three people I cannot say no to,” Lovett would say when asked back into government in the late forties, “Colonel Stimson, General Marshall and my wife”). That small group of policy makers came from the great banking houses and law firms of New York and Boston. They knew one another, were linked to one another, and they guided America’s national security in those years, men like James Forrestal, Douglas Dillon and Allen Dulles. Stimson and then Marshall had been their great leaders, and although they had worked for Roosevelt, it was not because of him, but almost in spite of him; they had been linked more to Stimson than to Roosevelt. And they were linked more to Acheson and Lovett than to Truman; though Acheson was always quick to praise Truman, there were those who believed that there was something unconsciously patronizing in Acheson’s tones, his description of Truman as a great little man, and a sense that Acheson felt that much of Truman’s greatness came from his willingness to listen to Acheson. They were men linked more to one another, their schools, their own social class and their own concerns than they were linked to the country. Indeed, about one of them, Averell Harriman, there would always be a certain taint, as if somehow Averell were a little too partisan and too ambitious (Averell had wanted to be President whereas the rest of them knew that the real power lay in letting the President come to them; the President could take care of rail strikes, minimum wages and farm prices, and they would take care of national security). Averell had, after all—there was no getting around it—run for public office and won; he seemed too much the politician and too much the intriguer for them. Perhaps not as bad as Roosevelt, but not exactly one of them, either.In 1947, after Acheson had resigned as Undersecretary of State, Marshall (who was then head of State) chose Robert Lovett as his successor, and in 1950 he became Secretary of Defense. If the torch had been passed in earlier years to Elihu Root and Teddy Roosevelt and then to Stim- son and Marshall, by 1960 Lovett was next. He had become, now as the sixties were about to begin, the great link to the Stimson-Marshall era. Acheson was a link too, but somehow Acheson had been scarred dur- ing the McCarthy era; it was not so much that he had done anything wrong as the fact that he had been forced to defend himself. By that very defense, by all the publicity, he had become controversial. He had been in print too often, it was somehow indiscreet of Dean to be attacked by McCarthy. Lovett was cleaner and he seemed to represent a particularly proud and, more important, successful tradition. For the private men felt they had succeeded admirably: they had taken a great dormant democracy, tuned it up for victory over Japan and Germany, stopped the Russian advance in Europe after the war and rebuilt Western Europe under the plan whose very name was more meaningful to them than to most others. The Marshall Plan had stopped the Communists, had brought the European nations back from destruction and decay, had performed an economic miracle; and there was, given the can-do nature of Americans, a tendency on their part to take perhaps more credit than might be proper for the actual operation of the Marshall Plan, a belief that they had done it and controlled it, rather than an admission that it had been the proper prescription for an economically weakened Europe and that it was the Europeans themselves who had worked the wonders. Yet it seemed as if history had come their way: just as they had predicted, the Russians proved untrustworthy and ungentlemanly (by 1944 there had been growing tensions between Roosevelt and some of his national security people over Soviet postwar aims; the national security people had held a view more parallel to that of Churchill) and had tried to expand in Europe, but Western democratic leadership had turned them back. They were not surprised that a cold war ensued; its very existence made their role, their guidance more necessary than ever. Without the Cold War—its dangers, tensions and threats—there might have been considerably less need of them and their wisdom and respectability. The lesson of history from Munich to Berlin was basic, they decided: one had to stand up, to be stern, to be tough. Lovett himself would talk of those years in the late forties as almost miraculous ones, when the American executive branch and the Congress were as one, when the Marshall Plan, the Point Four program and NATO had come about and been approved.The men of that era believed, to an uncommon degree, that their view of history had been confirmed; only a very few questioned it. One of their eggheads, George F. Kennan, became in the fifties increasingly disillusioned with the thrust of American policy, believing that those men had exaggerated Soviet intentions in Western Europe, and had similarly exaggerated their own role and NATO’s role in stopping them. But Kennan was too much of an intellectual; he had been useful to them in the early part of the Cold War, but he became less useful as his own doubts grew; besides, he was not a central member of their group—Lovett was.So that cold December day Kennedy was lunching with a man who not only symbolized a group, the Establishment, and was a power broker who carried the proxies for the great law firms and financial institutions, but was also tied to a great and seemingly awesome era. If Kennedy, as he always did in that period, complained that he knew no experts, that was no problem; the Establishment had long lists and it would be delighted to co-operate with this young President, help him along. It was of course above politics. It feared the right (the Goldwater campaign of 1964 was an assault on the entrenched powerful Eastern money by the new and powerless Southern and Western money; it was not by chance that the principal villain for them at San Francisco had been Nelson Rockefeller), and it feared the left; it held what was proclaimed to be the center. More often than not it was Republican, though it hedged its bets. A few members were nominal if cautious Democrats, and some families were very good about it—the Bundy family had produced William for the Democrats, and McGeorge for the Republicans—and it was believed that every major law firm should have at least one partner who was a Democrat. In fact, on the question of Kennedy and Nixon there had been an element of indecision in the Establishment world. One had a sense of the Establishment in an election year being like a professional athletic scout watching a championship match, emotionally uninvolved with either competitor, waiting until it was over and then descending to the locker room of the winner, to sign him on, to offer him the club’s facilities—in this case the trusted, respectable, sound men of the Establishment. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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.

⭐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!

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