The Best and the Brightest
ISBN:9780449908709 read summary

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!

Halberstam's magnum opus will give you the best inside story on the main characters who led us down the path to humiliating tragedy. Reading this in hindsight, who couldn't see that simple hubris led Mac Bundy, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Ellsworth Bunker, Maxwell Taylor, Walt Rostow, Earl Wheeler and William Westmoreland to advise LBJ to repeat the mistakes the French made only 10 years prior to major escalation in Vietnam? The "best and the brightest" had ideological blinders on due to the "China problem" as well as the pressures of the Cold War and the Korea debacle. A good, more recent book LESSONS IN DISASTER by Gordon M. Goldstein elaborates on Mac Bundy's role and IN RETROSPECT by McNamara gives us his own belated memoir but both are a bit biased obviously. So this is still the one to go to and having been written 40 years ago it's still fresh.

The sheer amount of reporting that went into this book is awesome. Halberstam packs in a ton of information about the period and the huge cast of characters he writes about. He's not afraid to voice his own opinions, and the main points he makes are fascinating. Among them:

- The US armed forces have an inherent bias toward military escalation and will tip the scales any way they can to get the wars they want. This means hiding critical information from the President, submitting misleadingly optimistic reports, squelching any evidence that escalation may not be a great idea. I really hope President Obama and Robert Gates have read this book, because it shows how during the Vietnam War, the executive branch was frequently played as suckers by the top military brass. I hope it doesn't happen again with Afghanistan. And as Halberstam points out, once wars really get rolling, the generals in the field invariably earn the aura of wartime commanders, and at that point, their advice trumps anyone else's, including the President's.

- Despite the common perception that the fall of McCarthy put an end to his influence on this country, Halberstam convincingly writes of the lingering influence he had on US foreign policy years later. LBJ and JFK constantly felt the need to prove their anti-communist, military credentials out of fear that Democrats were viewed as "soft". Although McCarthy himself fell from grace, the hysterical, bravado-filled anti-communist obsession he encouraged has lived on in US politics. It's amazing to read these sections and see how this dynamic remains true thirty years after this book came out.

- LBJ, all of his "best and brightest" cabinet members, and the US military leaders all missed an incredibly important point about Vietnam: the Vietcong were a nationalist, anti-imperialist force with broad-based popular support. They were not the puppet of some imagined monolithic global communist conspiracy led by the Soviet Union and China--the simplistic world view that grew out of the McCarthy era. The President and his men could not grasp this point even though they had the unhappy French experience in Vietnam to learn from as well as reports from informed American observers who had lived in Vietnam and who understood the complexities of the situation.

- The Vietnam era marked the high watermark of influence of the WASP elite in this country. The implicit assumption in the assembling of the cabinets of JFK and LBJ was that if you took a bunch of Ivy-educated, ultra-intelligent WASP men from eminent families, they could surely do no wrong. The Vietnam experience demonstrated that pedigree, intellectual firepower, and Harvard degrees can still add up to dog crap if the people involved refuse to understand basic realities.

Apart from these arguments, Halberstam throws in numerous in-depth portraits of the men involved in the decision-making at the time. So we get riveting descriptions of outsize personalities like LBJ, MacGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and the rest. It's amazing stuff to read.

One interesting aspect of Halberstam's writing is that he often just presents his descriptions like they were facts, with little attribution or attention to alternate interpretations. So we read that so-and-so was a mediocre administrator, another man was not very intelligent, another one very insecure, and so on. At times, you think that such descriptions would surely be questioned by people with different perspectives. It doesn't make the book any less enjoyable, but you sometimes you wonder if Halberstam's descriptions are as undeniably accurate as they are presented to be

All in all, this is a great book. Read it to understand what was a huge turning point in American history, but also to help you understand the risks of American involvement in foreign wars and the games that the military plays to manipulate the executive branch. In the end, Vietnam was a horrific waste of American lives brought on by flawed critical thinking by our country's leadership and a misguided desire of an American president to prove to his detractors that he was "tough". Let's hope we don't walk down this same path again in the coming years.

Every American should read The Best and the Brightest because of the alarmingly sharp parallels between the arguments that lead the US to war in Vietnam, and the arguments one reads in contemporary news articles, making the case for escalating the US occupation of Afghanistan. The Best and the Brightest is by far the most unsettling book I've read in the last ten years.

I finally got around to reading this classic work, and I was both enthalled and disappointed.

Enthralled by the energy, prescience, and prescription with what's wrong with American foreign policy, a preview of our never ending mistakes of hubris and conviction that as a country we still are the best and the brightest and know what is best for the world.

The parallel with Iraq and Afghanistan today is eerie. Poor Obama, making the same mistakes, coddling the conservatives and the Establishment, oh well.

On the other hand, the books suffers from rambling, free association, and repetiveness. It really needed a better editor and better organization. It flips back and forth from its own past and present with confusing effect. It's portraits have a taint of predisposed bias, a desire to pigeonhole its characters in one dimensional anti-Communist baitin, true enough perhaps, but also suspect.

As a liberal, I suppose, I have always resented our country's penchant for wanting to fix whatever is wrong with the world, but the author's obvious bias against that preconception often gets in the way of the objective reporting he so proudly proclaims. Also, as a study in power run amok, I think Caro's Johnson trilogy (and of course his bio of that New York meglogmaniac, Moses) is far superior in thematic relevance and cogent analysis, to say nothing about the power of literary non fiction and plain powerful language and description.

I think Halberstrom never made up his analytical mind about war and policy(read The Coldest Winter.)

Still in all, as a vivid document of our country's too many mistakes, it will stick with you. Read it for valuable lessons about our past and still more valuable lessons for the future.

Kennedy wasn't so great, after all, and Johnson was only half bad, and so typically American. On the other hand, how bad can anyone be compared to Acheson, Dulles (both of them) Rostow, Bundy, and the rest. I always had wanted to attend Yale and Harvard, but now I think I was better off just going to Brandeis, putting up with John Roche's Vietnam hawkish views and retaining my independent bent of mind.

We have translated our anti-Communist fanatic atitutes for our anti-Terrorist paranoia. A fair trade, I suppose, if you are of a frame of mind that we live in a world of enemies, but this book is a good object lesson that after all we're just not that smart.

A final word. Halberstrom's work is seminal, readable, and bright. Hey, that's the best or close to the best, for all its disorganization.