The Best and the Brightest,   ISBN:9780449908709

Customer Rating: 

I first read this book when I was in high school and rereading this book again really was an interesting experience. First of all Halberstam correctly notes that the US essentially wondered into Vietnam after destroying all of its expertise in an auto de fe of its Asian experts leaving the sort of simplistic view of the world of monlithic communism to govern the decision making process.

With the exception of possibly George Ball, most of the Best and the Brightest are the typical men on the make and many of the decsions made seemed to revolve around the desire not to screw up too badly. No one wanted to lose Southeast Asia and deal with the consequences that an earlier generation of Democratic policy makers faced over the loss of China.

What Vietnam did was to shake the establishment by absolutely turning its assumptions upside down. These men may have been the Best and the Brightest of their day, but the failure to question the basic assumptions of the Cold War showed an essential intellectual laziness which is ultimately the most tragic consequence.

Customer Rating: 

A hard to put down classic book by a great writer who certainly did his homework.... Kennedy's so called bright bunch along with a narrow focused McNamara and the military morons in the Pentagon. For those interested in accurate history of how we screwed up in Vietnam (and doing it all over again) a must read.

Customer Rating: 

Please contact me in about two weeks after I've finished reading
this great book from a very good and excellent author. Thanks

HurdreyAngus Jordan

Customer Rating: 

First for the dirty parts: this is a book just crying for an editor. Typos, grammar, strange sentence fragments left dangling in space, repetition, it's all there.

As for the substance of the book, an excellent example can be found on page 44: "...if there was anything that bound the men {Kennedy's administration}, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything."

Halberstam worked an abundance of detailed research into his work, but I think his objectivity was tainted by his proximity to the events and the players, men he clearly detested, involved in them. He wields his pen a bit too ferociously, never giving the Best even the smallest benefit of the doubt; heaping scorn on them, again and again, for not realizing what few realized in the early years of the war - that communism was not a monolithic movement and that, consequently, the domino theory was deeply flawed. This may have been obvious to Halberstam in 1972, but I think one can forgive the Kennedy administration for seeing things differently in 1961.

On a less obvious level, it seems to me that Halberstam is not so much writing history as he is a Greek Tragedy. He begins by stating, and then relentlessly repeating, that the war was unwinnable no matter what, and that the Best knew that, or should have known it. From that starting point, it's a simple matter to portray them all as arrogant, power-mad imperialists...after all, if the outcome of the war was predetermined, what else could they be? How could they not have seen what Halberstam, the sermonizing moralist, writing at the end of the war, so clearly saw?

How not indeed? Simple, really, because like all True Believers, once Halberstam drank the Kool-Aid, his perspective narrowed dramatically. He seems never to have heard of the Ho Chi Ming regime's own genocidal atrocities against those North Vietnamese who didn't see things their way; of the Viet Cong's less than stellar record in the area of human rights; and he is seemingly innocent of the fact that not every South Vietnamese relished the prospect of living under a Northern totalitarian order, communist or otherwise. And how could a man with so much experience in Vietnam fail to write even a single word about the profound cultural differences between the people of South and North Vietnam?

It may also be fruitful to know a tad about Halberstam the reporter. As a young NYT newspaperman in the early 1960s, Halberstam was not the beacon of anti-war sanity that he would have one believe in B&B. Indeed, his mounting, fiery anger with the American mission in South Vietnam was against the "how," and not the "why" of the war. Mark Moyar, Associate Professor at the Marine Corps University (I know, the words "Marine Corps" and "University" in the same breath jangle the nerves) and author of two histories on the war, accuses Halberstam and two other young reporters, Karnow and Sheehan, of actually precipitating the overthrow of the Diem regime by sending misleading reports back to the States. Other scholars dismiss the bulk of Moyar's argument, but with the interesting caveat that there is at least some truth in it.

This isn't my attempt to defend the indefensible, rabid dogs like McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara are hardly worthy of it, but I think it's fair to say that had we not lost the war, had we not been humiliated by backward little Vietnam, this would have been an entirely different kind of book.


All that said, for anyone who wants to understand the American Indochina war from start to finish, this one should come first. There's no other book like it. Follow it up with "A Bright Shinning Lie," by Sheehan and "Dereliction of Duty," by McMasters. Although there are dozens of worthwhile books from which to choose, these three are all you really need.

And if you want to understand the French Indochina War, add "Street Without Joy," by Bernard Fall, the French historian who Kennedy should have invited to the White House for a chat early on.

Richard Vidaurri
Americal Division
1970-72
Author of The Gates of the Shadow.

Customer Rating: 

I recommend this book to any of us who served in the lost cause in Vietman. Well written and informative. One of the best books I have ever read. A must reading for our Presidents and leader in the future.