The Best and the Brightest

Rating:
Summary: Forest for the trees--Time for Clearer View!
Review: The problem with a book that was written as far back as this is that new events hadn't come to light and those who knew what they were talking about didn't get a chance to say it. Do you ask an American journalist living safely back in the US whether communism was bad. Or do you ask a refugee who just escaped from Vietnam whether Americans fighting in Vietnam was wortwhile. Or even better yet, how about asking an American teenager from California who lived in Vietnam from the Tet Offensive of 1968 until the pull out of troops in 1972, who later became a fledglin photojournalist who sneaked into Vietnam to find out the truth of what happened, something those well paid journalists like Halberstam would never risk doing once they got famous. Read stories about Vietnam from very unfamous journalists who were held for 11 months ONLY because they were American, and then you've got the story of what really happened in Vietnam.

It's called "The Bamboo Chest: An Adventure in Healing the Trauma of War". Maybe Halberstam should interview Cork Graham about his memoir. Maybe many more journalist should get out of their "good old boy" network and see what the world has offered and then "The Best And Brightest" would be a lot more accurate and there wouldn't be such an avoidance of noting sources. I guess it's all perspective. One American journalist pals around with generals and officers speculatingon the communist threat and then there were those who really believed in what they were doing because they'd seen what had happened in North Vietnam, Africa, and Cuba. And then when we lost, they saw what many never saw except those who paying attention in countries like Nicaragua, Poland, El Salvador.

Sure get "The Best and Brightest" if you want to know about what people guessed about Vietnam before 1975, and then IN ORDER TO KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED in Vietnam read "The Bamboo Chest: An Adventure in Healing the Trauma of War" by Cork Graham and you'll get what was missed by us over here. You'll get an American's personal perspective of what only a Vietnamese political prisoner could know. And then you can follow along with Graham as he continues reporting in Central America and gets so disgusted with how it was turning into another Vietnam debacle through the assistance of continued inaccurate reporting that he became the second American trained by the US Navy SEALs and participated in that war as a corpsman. Sure refreshing than rehashing reason for why we lost, instead of seeing how we could have won as evidenced by the American victory in Central America--only the ignorant or those who've never left the US on anything other than a "fact finding junket" would say that there wasn't a Domino Theory. What do you call what happened Central America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia? No domino theory, then why were American weapons lost in Vietnam in 1975 turning up as arms of the communist FLMN in El Salvador, having been shipped to Nicaragua and smuggled across the Gulf of Fonseca. Cold War. . .right! How about HOT WAR!

Rating:
Summary: Reads as if it were written yesterday.
Review: When I read "The Best and the Brightest" I could not believe how fresh it was, despite the fact that it was written in 1972 it feels as if it were written yesterday. I am amazed at how much information Halberstam was able to collect in the late 1960s, before the Freedom of Information Act, and while the war was still raging, about the Vietnam War and the decisions that led up to it. If Halberstam were to sit down today to write this book, with another 30 years of historical documentation available he might write a different book but I cannot see how he could write a better one. Halberstam shows how bad decisions, dishonesty, an unwillingness to face facts and sheer basic stupidity got America into a war that was lost from the start. The amazing thing that this book reveals is how so many smart, well-accomplished people, the best and the brightest of the American foreign policy and military were so incredibly wrong for so incredibly long. I wish that I had read this book a long time ago, I'm glad that I've read it now.