The Best and the Brightest

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Summary: A large and superb book focused on the origins of the war
Review: A large-scale work focused on the origins of the war, this book was the first of its kind by far -- published in 1972, it was written without the benefit of the Pentagon Papers. It's also entirely unreferenced, which would be troubling except for the fact that its conclusions have mostly stood up to the test of time. The depth is impressive, one of the results of its large size; at about 400,000 words, it is larger than any Vietnam War history I know of. (Karnow's "Vietnam: A History," for example, is about 330,000 words.) Especially good are the unusually detailed portraits of the principal figures involved in the origins, including Bob McNamara, President Johnson, Dean Rusk, President Kennedy, Mac Bundy, and Max Taylor. It ends with Nixon's 1968 election.

Besides being a great historical resource, this book shows the amazing degree to which the problems and deceptions surrounding Vietnam were known in the late 1960's. Although many useful Vietnam histories have been published in the last five years, they add only marginally to what was known and written by Halberstam and others thirty years ago.

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Summary: "The Emperors Who Had No Clothes!"
Review: David Halberstam's, "The Best and the Brightest," provides an inside look at the political situation and the sociological background of our national leaders that made going to Vietnam seem a necessity. He shows how they deluded themselves on some issues and ignored others in drawing up a plan for victory that would have won against any industrialized nation in the world. It simply did not work in a small, underdeveloped country called Vietnam.

Halberstam lists the impressive educational credentials of each of the key players who led us into Vietnam. These exceptionally gifted men all agreed on the following assumptions:

1. Communism was evil.
2. The only thing the Soviets respected was force.
3. Fighting the Red threat was the right thing to do morally.
4. Failing to stand up to the Soviets would only invite more aggression. No one wanted to be another Neville Chamberlain.
5. Failing to stop the Communists in Vietnam would start the dominos falling. Where they would stop could not be predicted.

Halberstam severely indicts the military system that consistently reported, "All is well," when it was apparent that Saigon teetered on the brink of defeat. The Diem/Ngo regime had no legitimacy. No amount of American firepower could provide it. Such reports were sent because the military and political establishments in Washington demanded them. In effect, LBJ and Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara were kept blissfully ignorant of the real situation because they demanded to be. Messengers, such as John Paul Vann et al., who delivered realistic reports, were shot professionally, clearly, a recipe for disaster.

Another contributing factor was the national trauma inflicted upon America by the fall of China leading to Senator Joe McCarthy's purge of the State Department. Virtually the entire Far East Directorate was exiled or emasculated by security investigations. This left only those with conventional European backgrounds unscathed politically to formulate a strategy for a highly unconventional war in Asia. The combination of refusing to hear bad news, and applying a conventional, military strategy in an unconventional, political, war led to the quagmire that was Vietnam.

Halberstam's work provides a clear view of the thought processes of the men in the decision-making arena. By hearing only optimistic reports, they deluded themselves into thinking real progress was being made. Thus, "The Best and the Brightest," became, "The Emperors Who Had No Clothes." His research is impressive however his anti-war, anti-military bias clearly shows through. Readers should note this work was completed in 1972, at the height of the anti-war movement, in which he boasts he was a prominent member. On page 250 he calls McNamara a, "fool," and in the Author's Notes (page 671) he apologizes for not, "having been better." Thus, his title, "The Best and the Brightest," reeks of sarcasm. Read his work with this in mind


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Summary: Halberstam favoritism, critism, and views reflect his biases
Review: Halberstam "Best and Brightest" book would raise sharp critism of military reporting, chain of command, and the ability to quantify "win or loss" progress reports; blistering critisms of the theory of containment and late recognition of western warfare tactics. Halberstam provided a bias favoritism of the Kennedy Administration protraying them as intellectual rationalist who recruited some of the most brillant academic minds to the team: McNamara, Bundy, and Rusk. Halberstam claims internal Intelligence battles would cause strong mistrust as he elaborates on state department visit to viet nam to gather accurate information relating to the Ma kong valley. Halberstam protrays Lyndon Johnson as the Vice President who assumed command of a group of brillant Kennedy staffers after Kennedy's assassination. Johnson would continue the war in Vietnam. Nixon would face political pressure to reduce America's military commitment and eventual return soldiers home.

The philosophy of mutal destruction was starting to materialize. Nuclear weapon build up after the "Bay of Pigs" and the Cubian missile crisis caused increased military spending in long range and submarine mobile capability. Deterence through first strike destruction and strength caused the Russians to back down. Diem was not popular in America or Vietnam. The miltary would send advisors to train southern vietnam officers in western counter guerilla fighting tactics. Halberstam shared insight into the coup the killed Diem. Military Advisors increase from 3000 to 16000 increasing the inherit danger of becoming involved.

Kennian strategy of containment of communism became popular with the Kennedy Administration following an Berlin era of the Cold war. The communist had taken China. Kennedy would feel Vietnam symbolized a stand against communism expansion. There was already a series of tensions or conflicts against communism: Berlin airlift, Korean War, China, and Yugoslavic Europe.

General Max Taylor, Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believe a war in Vietnam could be won using Ariel bombing. Drawing from experiences from the Korean war Taylor hoped to gain a victory within a year. The Vietcong did not rely on resource associated with Petroleum. They could blend in with the local population, remain mobile, and converge in massive shock force. The effectiveness of the bombing campaign in weaken the enemy was ineffective.

General Taylor curtailed the usage of nuclear tactical weapons because he felt the could not be limited to a specific area and nuclear strike estimates of 300 million killed in one day caused him to fear the obliterative potential. At the end of the book, Nixon would start his ABM and Strategic reduction of global missile counts.

Airstrikes required ground troop keeping bases open to attack the enemy. Airbases were key to continue the air offensive. As a result the philosophy of containment would be replace with "search and destroy" tactics. Weaken the enemy before they could attack. Special Forces would seek out strong hold pockets where the Vietcong resided an destroy them.

Nixon launching operation Rolling Thunder would suggest a continued believe in the air offensive effectivenes but the "Tet Offensive" would demostrate remaining the strength of the Vietcong. Its surprising three administrations would struggle with foreign policy, political battles interfering with military campaigns, and confusion about western warfare tactics and objectives. A ground war was need with 500,000 fighting and more than 200,000 increase being requested. Traditional western warfare shock tactics and complete destruction strategies coming to late in the war. Conclusions, limited fighting could never work. Abandonment of the war took longer than the American public expected. Closure of the war was political regardless of military accessments of "wins". Military doctrine would never again believe in the philosophy of containment or political handcuffing. The Military commanders would seek better planning and design and freedom to fight a military war an not a political war.

Rating:
Summary: Has "Best and Brightest" lost its luster?
Review: Halberstam is obviously a very talented writer. He's one of the best in the business at character and personality descriptions. His portrayal of LBJ here is excellent. Johnson was a hilarious man.

But there are some problems here. This book reads like a first draft, not a final one. Halberstam didn't have a good editor to clean this up. Some passages meander way too long, the narrative is a little disorganized, and entire sections could have been removed. I'd say about one-third of the material here is unneccesary.

Also, Halberstam's hero worship of Ho is plain wierd. Ho was a terrible man who for example, executed over 100,000 without trial, but that's not the way he's portrayed here. My question for Halberstam would be if Uncle Ho was such a great leader, why did two million boat people try to escape from his rule?

And for Halberstam, there are no shades of grey when comparing the North and South Vietamese armies. The northern army is made up of heroes and patriots. The southern army is incompetent and corrupt. The Vietnam War was more complicated than that, but Halberstam doesn't want to hear any of that. The North are the "good guys," and the South are the "bad guys," and that's that.

Also, Halberstam's description of Westmoreland's strategy of the war is off target. He calls Westmoreland a conventional man who used conventional stategy in an unconventional war. Actually, Westmoreland was conventional man who used unconventional stategy. In Vietnam, he abandoned classic military doctrine of seizing territory in favor of attrition. Westmoreland's critics contend that a more conventional military strategy may have been more successful in Vietnam.

A fascinating, but flawed book. Basically, if you like communism and dictators, and despise freedom and democracy, this book is for you.

Rating:
Summary: Required Reading
Review: Halberstam's book's most illuminating quote is attributed to one of Walt Rostow's (the chief architect of the US bombing of North Vietnam) Harvard colleagues. After his friend departed Cambridge, to take up his position the Kennedy administration, this colleague walked into a roomful of students, and said, more or less, "you never sleep as well at night when you actually know people running the country."

This book is all about the men (the best and the brightest) who mired this nation in Vietnam. It's also about other men, men like John Peyton Davies, perhaps the State Department's best Asian expert, purged from public service after the McCarthy juggernaut swept through the country. It's also about applying the wrong lessons of history to wrong problems: Kennedy and Johnson learned from Munich that nations shrink from "tyranny" at their own peril, and therefore decided to confront the "tyranny" of North Vietnam communism, which, according to Halberstam, was simply nationalism -- the extension of their colonial wars of the 1950s. Men like Davies would have realized this, and then warned against intervention; but men like Davies, ostensibly "soft" on communism, had already been run out of Washington (during the Vietnam War, Davies, the man Halberstam uses to personify the flight of those who really understood the intentions of North Vietnam, was making furniture in Peru). Men like McNamara, the Bundys, and Dean Rusk, despite their rationalism and considerable mental horsepower, didn't get this. Nor did they understand how to bring themselves (and the country) back once they'd stepped beyond the brink.

For all its quality and insight, the book makes a little much of the "establishment" credentials of the war's architects. It's as if Halberstam believes that, since these men came from storied Atlantic families, they were somehow doomed to err. It's likely that these credentials made these men arrogant; but I also believe that an administration filled with men self-made men, men who'd never known any family privilege, might easily have made the same mistakes as the McGeorge Bundys of the world.

Still, this is a remarkable book. A side note: I think this book should be required reading for the business executives of today. This is where today's best and brightest operate, and they are capable of making the same sorts of mistakes. Look at the executives of Enron and WorldCom: Just like the men of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, they're capable of believing in their own infallibility just because everyone around them says it's so.

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Summary: Excellent Book on Vietnam War
Review: I had to read this book for a history class I took in college. We only had two weeks to get through it, and I remember thinking it was such a great book that I'd like to read it again when I had more time, so I could enjoy it. I've read it a few more times since then, and it is probably the best non-fiction book I've ever read.

Halberstam, who has never written a bad book, gives us a fascinating look at the brilliant people who made up the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and shows us how these brilliant people made some horrible errors to get us deeper and deeper into the war. The book is filled with great anecdotes about these people, but it's not just about how the brilliant people screwed up. It also includes some heroic figures, like George Ball, who often found himself fighting against all of the others to try to convince the president to get out of Vietnam.

If you've never read anything by Halberstam do yourself a favor and buy this book. This was the first book I read by him, and ever since the first time I read this one, I've been buying everything I can find by him. I've never been disappointed yet.

Some of his best other books are:

October 1964 (baseball)
The Powers That Be (journalism)
The Children (Civil Rights)
The Teammates (baseball)
The Fifties (history)
Summer of '49 (baseball)
Breaks of the Game (basketball)
The Reckoning (the auto industry)

Rating:
Summary: a few warnings for younger readers
Review: If you are looking for a good intro to Vietnam history, it is hard to miss the glowing reviews given to TBATB by David Halberstam. I read the 750+ page text from cover to cover over the last month and finished yesterday. I was disappointed that none of the Amazon reviewers stopped praising Halberstam's genius long enough to critique his writing. It seems that someone enshrined this book as a classic some time ago, and nobody has noticed what I did - this guy is not a great writer.

Halberstam spent 750+ pages on information he could have covered VERY adequately in 600-650 pages. There is a lot of bloat here. One example: page 622 of the Modern Library hardback he describes how McNamara loved to dress in uniforms from early childhood; then on page 629 (seven pages later) he repeats the same exact sentence in a different form. It provides no additional emphasis to the point - just bloat. These examples are too numerous to mention and appear throughout the book.

TBATB could have a much better structure. It moves somewhat chronologically (from early Kennedy to mid-Nixon), but jumps around so much as to make one dizzy. There are no chapter titles and no table of contents. You dive in and hold on. Often he will change decades in mid-paragraph for no reason at all. His flow and logic are in there, but he makes you work for it too hard.

I got the impression while reading it that Halberstam was so immersed in his Vietnam project, that he had lost perspective - that is probably a characteristic of writers who do groundbreaking work - and badly needed an honest editor. Halberstam was so impassioned in his search for the causes of Vietnam (he had over 2,000 pages of single-spaced notes from interviews alone) that at the end of the years of research, he couldn't quite trim the fat down to make it as coherent as it could have been for the reader.

On the positive, this is clearly a watershed book that was exhaustively researched, insightful, and honest. I learned a great deal about Vietnam and am glad I gutted it out through a pithy read.

Just wanted to warn other Amazon readers what they are in for if they punch this one up. If you're looking for an intro book, I recommend that you read "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan" FIRST and decide if you want to venture further.

Rating:
Summary: a few warnings for younger readers
Review: Judging by the reviews, this book appears to have seriously struck a chord with people who lived through the Vietnam era. I can imagine how in '72 when this first came out it must have been groundbreaking. But a few warnings for people who did not live through Nam reading this in the 21st century:

- This is not a history of the Vietnam war. This is a profile and a criticism of the people who got us into the war.

- No footnotes, no attribution of sources. Always a disturbing sign.

- I found his narrative style extremely annoying. He comes back to the history (events & dates) just long enough to introduce a new character and then shoots off onto a 20 page profile of said character. Again and again he does this, until I found myself going "Oh God, not another profile..."

This book is very good but I can't help but feel that Halberstam's style of writing (the moral superiority and lack of sourcing) helped plant the seeds for self-righteous liberal hacks like Michael Moore. Halberstam had the skill and intellect to pull it off, but he paved the way for a lot of the arrogant political writers we see today.

Rating:
Summary: powerful lessons still relevant 30 years later
Review: The Best and the Brightest is an 816-page tome about the men who came to power under Kennedy and continued to serve under Johnson. The men who were supposedly the brightest and most able men ever assembled by a President. The men who led their country into the disastrous Vietnam war.

Halberstam spent over two years interviewing people to write this book and he clearly did his research. His writing shows a clear understanding of the region, history, politics and players. Despite some repetitive or dry sections, most of the book is surprisingly fast-moving and well written.

In an effort to portray a complete picture of the players, there are a lot of men covered, not all of whom seem critical. I felt I could use an organizational chart or a quick reference section at the end to remember who was who and what their role was.

Though written over 30 years ago, this book's lessons are still relevant today. Halberstam teaches readers about the restrictions on speaking up against China policy, then Vietnam. He tells of how the officials demanded patriotism, opposing viewpoints were closed off, considered non-patriotic, their proponents excluded from access to power. The lesson is the importance of debate, of being open to information (bad news as well as good), of the difficulty many people have in holding on to their principles when power is at stake.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the book is that "best and brightest" is a relative term. Even the seemingly most perfect people have flaws that can have disastrous consequences, especially in situations where dissent is discouraged and problems are papered over. And also, that best and the brightest in the 1960s was an exclusive word, limited to ambitious white men, most of whom craved power and were afraid to make mistakes. If the definition of best and brightest had been more inclusive, if different types of intelligent and thoughtful people had been allowed access to decision-making, the results might have been different.

For those interested in how decisions were made from the American side, in how a group of smart men could make such serious mistakes, this is a book worth reading.


Rating:
Summary: Who were the Best and the Brightest
Review: The Best and the Brightest is the signature work from an author who has perfected a literary style that is unique and unequaled in the recounting of history.

David Halberstam is a genious at introducing us to the people of history, not just the events. This approach is perfectly suited for a study of the key citizen and military leaders who were central to the war in Vietnam.

Each chapter presents fascinating sketches of people like Harvard whiz kid McGeorge Bundy, former Ford superstar and Defense Secretary Robert McNamera, General Westmoreland, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and many others. Amazingly, these character sketches do not digress from the recounting of the events, instead they provide a valuable context.

In the end you understand the events of Vietnam because you understand the people that were making the decisions on Vietnam.

A consuming read for anyone who wants to understand a tragic moment in our past.