The Best and the Brightest

An incredible book. Very well researched and written. Having lived through this I find it incredible how many lies were being told in the upper levels of government and to the American people. I see too many parallels to what is happening in Iraq. A must read.

Proof positive that the possession of power does not imply the presence of wisdom. The giddy expansiveness of the American spirit which had served us so we'll in our first 200 years clouded our vision to the subtleties of Asia.

What a brilliant writer, I highly recommend this book to any student of the Vietnam War. This man by the power of the pen shows us just how flawed the military was in its thinking, and how so wrong they were but were too ignorant to change.

I read this book when it was first published and then found it to be an excellent description of the failures of the Kennedy-Johnson administration as it incrementally entered a war with North Vietnam. I have read it again after I read of Mr. Halberstam's death a few weeks ago.

I had been very bothered by the actions of the US in Iraq. After reading The Best and Brightest I know what was bothering me. It is a repeat although with different characters, different enemies, different locale but the same thinking process and lack of thought for the many "what ifs" that war produces. It would have been nice if a few of the planners of the Iraq fiasco could have read Halberstam's book and taken note of the mistakes that were made in 1963 before launching the war in Iraq in 2003.

Halberstam quotes Henry Kissenger as saying something to the effect of "we won't make the same mistakes . . . we'll make our own mistakes." It looks like the current planners and executors of Iraq strategy are making the same ones that were made in 1963 - and learning the same lessons about a counterinsurgency war being fought with traditional troops, equipment and strategy.

The Iraqi insurgency in Iraq will go the same way as the insurgency in Vietnam - they will wait us out but without the large scale battles that took place in Vietnam once the army of North Vietnam entered the action in large numbers.

Vietnam was disaster and tragedy for the Vietnamese as well as the Americans. What seems to be preventing the same level of disaster in the US is the fact that this war is being fought by non-draftees. That is one dissimilarity with Vietnam which has prevented the large scale protests across the nation which were seen as the presidency of Lyndon Johnson unraveled.

I recommend this book to all students of political and military strategy. It is an exceptional read and I would predict you won't come away angry - just saddened that so much talent brought forth so little in the way of return for Vietnam and the United States.

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.

Even though I voluntarily served in Vietnam, I was sadly ignorant of my purpose, which was basically cannon fodder for the United States' military-industrial complex. My eyes were opened by the incredible waste of money and systematic destruction of a country I witnessed while there. But I remained basically uninformed about the politics that sent me half way round the world. For anyone who still is interested in that story, "The Best and the Brightest" is a must read.

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.

Halberstam is one of my favorite authors and I have read many of his books. I just hadn't read this one yet. It is an excellent account of the mistakes that created the disaster that was our involvement in Vietnam. Halberstam covers both the political and military players. He really shows you who these people are and why they acted as they did.

the store! You own Audible! You must know how important this book is, how it shaped American policy in Vietnam (at least Halberstam's reporting did). The book was immortalized by inclusion into Modern Library hardcover. And yet! Some puny 2 hour abridgement on Audible?! "A Bright Shining Lie" got fully read. It's time for this other famous Pulitzer prize winner to get an unabridged reading (by someone other than Scott Brick or Robertson Dean!!)

this book is a national treasure, an honest unflinching look at one of the most one of the most controversial events in u.s. history, the vietnam war. what sets halberstam's book above so many others are the insightful finely wrought portraits of american leaders at the time, ranging from kennedy to lbj to mcnamara and others.

This is a sobering narrative when we debate the war on terrorism today and debate which of the Presidential candidates we want to lead our country over the next four years. The American political system gave extraordinarily broad powers to the head of the executive branch (the POTUS), and the Congress, at least in the Vietnam War era, sat back and appeared ineffectual in its opposition to the war after LBJ "Americanized" it in 1965 and 1966.

As a Vietnam vet I was amazed and dismayed at the same time to learn about the origins of the war and how our leaders made decisions that affected so many lives. Santayana once remarked that unless we learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. My prayer is that this book, with its tremendous insights into the pitfalls of ego and political expediency, allow us to make better decisions as a nation going forward from here.

The author writes in clear, well organized language, and the events he describes are very well documented. One gets a different point of view (the author's) of the Vietnam War and how it developed under the guidance of "The Best and the Brightest" most who whom were brought into the administration from the inteligencia or academia by President Kennedy; but one gets a clear sense that they lacked much pratical experience, if any, as far as international affairs and conflicts were concerned. His is one way of interpreting the events; I suspect there are others which differ much from his and are probably as well documented. Still, it's a book well worth reading.

Rudy

As a Vietnam vet I was amazed and dismayed at the same time to learn about the origins of the war and how our leaders made decisions that affected so many lives. Santayana once remarked that unless we learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. My prayer is that this book, with its tremendous insights into the pitfalls of ego and political expediency, allow us to make better decisions as a nation going forward from here.

The author writes in clear, well organized language, and the events he describes are very well documented. One gets a different point of view (the author's) of the Vietnam War and how it developed under the guidance of "The Best and the Brightest" most who whom were brought into the administration from the inteligencia or academia by President Kennedy; but one gets a clear sense that they lacked much pratical experience, if any, as far as international affairs and conflicts were concerned. His is one way of interpreting the events; I suspect there are others which differ much from his and are probably as well documented. Still, it's a book well worth reading.

Rudy

A real classic. A must-read for any serious student of history and management. Only four stars because Halberstam's writing style here (unlike his later work) tended to be a bit verbose, and consequently taxed my attention span.

Other than that, it's a great book.

Very clear documentation of the slippery slope involvement in Vietnam driven by personal pride and self-delusion by the players in Washington. Having lived through the tragedy and having two years of my life consumed in Vietnam this work helps to explain the schizophrenic feeling many of us had at the time. Should be required reading for every student and also for every politician and bureaucrat. We all to often repeat out mistakes out of audacity and arrogance .

Although written 40 years ago it still provides the insights into how we managed to get mired into Vietnam. The book goes into the backgrounds of all involved and how these backgrounds led the country to where it did. I was just in High School during the early 60. and Engineering School in th second half. It is amazing to learn how and who took us to Vietnam.

Hey the store! The excellent author, David Halberstam does not live in New York as your site indicates. HE IS DEAD and has been since 2007. Granted he was negligent in not reporting his death to your author page, but he had a good excuse - HE'S DEAD.

great. shows how the people that supported the Vietnam war agenda even though they were wrong are promote.
And the people who were against the Vietnam war for the correct reasons were bypassed for promotions.

It was very interesting to read how decisions were made by filtering the information to one point of view. How the decisions were made to benefit the individuals not what may have been best for the country.

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.

This well written but at the same time a lot words were used to fully describe all the Vietnam players in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Very slow reading for me. Also, as a Vietnam army veteran, I learned the military and political leadership lied to the public and themselves. The analysis was flawed and mostly self serving.

This at the cost of 55,000+ lives.

Was hoping this was a good a read as Daniel Ellsberg's book about how we got into Vietnam. However, it spent an enormous amount of prose on almost each individual of the Kennedy/Johnson administrations. One great point was providing info on how the military and administrations lied or prevented the Congress or public know what was going on in the South Vietnam struggle against the Vietcong.

Halberstam does a thorough analysis of the key players. The sad truth is that the ancient Greek warning against Hubris went unheeded. I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to learn about how Washington functions.

Well researched history of how the United States got sucked into the war in Vietnam. Explains how some of the brightest stars from some of the best schools arrogantly believed they were so much smarter than people knowledgeable about Southeast Asia and the French experience there. How Lyndon Johnson's political gamesmanship determined our involvement and how his some of his senior advisers who were against the war went along to get along instead of resigning. Overly detailed and analytic but well worth reading.

The author over describes the prinicipals charactistics. Often repeating them in describing how the government and military led the country into an ever escalating Vietnam war. The book does a good job how government officials made decisions.

This is an important book. It lets us in on complex policy decisions at a time when the kennedy administration was in its heyday. I am struck at the ennormous political infighting which occured. I an also struck at how easily good opionions were thrown on the trash heap because they advised aganist getting into a land war with Asia. There was certainly no dearth of people who could foresee the enormous undertaking sending american troops to Vietnam would become. The administration arongantly demissed all the warning of knowledgable people because it conflicted with the grand americian skeem. We must never forget that intelligent, well meaning people can get us into the most ill fated circumstances that turn out to have horendous and unforseen consequences that destroy lives, Cost incredable amounts of money, and do not seem to add any intelligent conclusions to lessions learned. We have a great propensity to repeat our most costly mistakes.

The author’s writing style makes this book unreadable. I wanted to read this book because of my interest in war history and the book’s high ratings. But the excessive, cumbersome use of commas, colons, semicolons, dashes and paragraph long sentences are so distracting, that it is totally unreadable. I realize my low rating is a minority opinion. Borrow this book from the library or read an excerpt before you buy it.

Its all everyone says it is, and too much. The last 200 pages are like moving thru Vietnam jungles in the rain. By page 600 you got the idea that LBJ and friends were dummies and cowards, and just want the book to end.

Harvard really is America's Clown College; West point is where you go to learn how to use a slap-stick.

Good book but too long.

A staggering work of journalism. I felt like a fly on the wall of the White House. I also felt an endlessly mounting wave of frustration over these misguided people lying to themselves at the expense of thousands of lives. Lessons: learn from the past, listen to the experts, let go of your pride.

Halberstam peppers this early history of the Vietnam war with exceptionally long diversions into cradle-to-grave biographies of the principals. These can span many tens of pages and seems largely superfluous. The book is about 200 pages too long, but if you enjoy reading about historical documents, biographies of the elite, and the constraints and pressures in high government decision-making, then you will enjoy most of this book.

I expected to like this, given its reputation, but I really don't think Halberstam writes that well. I couldn't get through it even though I almost always finish books. I've read other Vietnam war histories, and this one didn't add enough to make it worth slogging through the irritating writing style.

I was expecting to be captivated by an insightful analysis of decision-making under pressure at the highest levels. However, almost as if the book attempted to recreate the experience of imperfect information coming at various speeds from different angles for the reader, it was confusingly recursive both temporally and in subject-matter, leaving the reader disoriented at to who knew or did what, when, under what circumstances, etc.

I was actually really looking forward to reading "The Best and the Brightest," but only a few pages into it I became annoyed and frustrated with Halberstam's verbose, ponderous, pretentious writing. Halfway into the book, I felt like I was mired in my own Vietnam War, devoting tremendous time and resources to winning it, and the more invested I became the more trapped I became in this pointless endeavor.

"The Best and the Brightest" is ostensibly about how shining intellectuals -- primarily McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk -- of the Kennedy White House trapped America in Vietnam. And while there was some biographical detail of the three, I didn't feel that there was enough nuanced understanding (ironically, the richest psychological profile was of Lyndon B. Johnson, who was definitely not one of "the best and the brightest") of any of these three. In fact, I came away from the book with the keen sense that these "intellectuals" were just arrogant and shallow, self-serving and power-hungry individuals. The major point of the book comes from the Pentagon Papers -- that the American government is a self-serving bureaucracy only interested in the entrenchment and expansion of its own power, and that each President, no matter what his political affiliation or ideology, eventually subscribes to this bureaucratic mindset as his primary religion. This is something that was true of Johnson, and something that's still true of Obama.

There really was no reason why "The Best and the Brightest" had to be 665 pages long (in fact, even the self-righteous introduction felt too long). The best book on the Vietnam War remains "Fire in the Lake."

Written at a time before a complete set of the official record was available (ie at the Office of the Historian for example https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v04) so understandably there are important omissions. For example, no reference is made to JFK's October 1963 foreign policy as set out in NSAM 263 that the plan was for US personnel to be removed from Vietnam by end 1965, after operations had been transferred to South Vietnam forces.
Consequently this text cannot be used as a primary historical reference.

The recently released tapes and transcripts of JFK and LBJ White House discussions add further substantial insight.

Another detailed review discusses other issues with this text: https://consortiumnews.com/2011/05/17/halberstams-best-brightest-blunder/

I just started the book but so far it has been all that I thought it would be, which is very good. I am a bit of a novice Vietnam War historian and a big fan of David Halberstam, so I figured I couldn't go wrong. I was correct.

I am reading this book and wanted a version to listen along with while I drive to work. I was in a hurry when I purchased it and didn't realize that it was abridged. The book is fantastic, but this version is not.

I managed to plow through one of Halberstam's other works, The Coldest Winter. I could only manage to get about 40 pages into this book. I agree with another reviewer who found the preface, written by the author, to be long-winded and self-serving. The author practically drools over Jack Kennedy, as if he was one of Kennedy's female staffers (that's as far as I'll take that analysis) I don't know if this view of Kennedy changes later in the book. Unfortunately, I found it too insufferable to continue.

The paperback edition (I could not find a kindle edition of this book on the store)

This is an absolutely riveting account of the lead up to the Vietnam War and the decision-making process that took place with the Jack Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. Right from the start the American involvement in Vietnam was doomed to failure, given the failure of the French to put down the Indochina anti-colonial movement. Both Presidents were faced with pressure from their advisers to seek a military option rather than a political one and all along these self-same advisers failed to appreciate the strength of the Viet Cong that was absolutely committed under Ho Chi Minh to removing all foreigners from Vietnamese soil.

What is sad on reflection is that the advice of the highly experienced Asian experts in the US was ignored. These were the men who really understood the situation in Asia but they were either ousted during the McCarthy era for being pro-communist sympathisers or later for being too pacifist or 'wet'. Instead the two Presidents - even thought they sat on the fence for much of the time - opted to listen to the advice of those men whom they considered 'doers' and 'men of action', who were in effect hawks on US policy towards Vietnam.

Halberstam undertook a huge amount of research and provides illuminating insights into the characters of the leading men of the time - Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, General William Westmoreland, Max Taylor, Lyndon B. Johnson, McGeorge Bundy et al. If you really want to find out how a US administration operates according to its own precepts and initiatives, convinced that it is in the right (similar in some ways to the George W. Bush administration and Iraq) then this is the book for you.

When the Vietnam War finally ended with the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the eventual collapse of South Vietnam, I told myself I never again wanted to read another word about this conflict which resulted in the tragic loss of 58,000 Americans. However, my curiosity eventually got the better of me when I started on a mission to read the biographies of each U.S. president. I have great respect for David Halberstam as one of the great journalists of our age. I knew I had to confront the war story at least one more time to get a complete picture of how such a tragedy was allowed to occur with so many bright, capable well-intentioned leaders.
Halberstam has done a wonderful job of giving readers a very complete picture of each of the major players in this drama. The way he tells this compelling story with excellent research and in-debth interviews convinced me this is the single best book every written about the Vietnam War.
Unfortunately it also illuminated how quickly Washington leaders including President Kennedy knew full well that the Vietnam War was going to end in defeat very early in his administration. Despite this knowledge we persisted in sending more and more young soldiers there each year through the terms of two more presidents resulting in more and more senseless deaths both military and civilian. Adding to this tragedy was the traumatic stress the war placed on U.S. domestic politics and the tearing apart of communities split by the emotions of unneeded deaths and a false sense of national commitment.
The tragedy becomes even starker today as we see the previously demonized Communist Vietnam becoming a major trading partner of the United States. The dreaded domino theory was nothing more than a mistaken belief of leaders who misinterpret the war and the country. Halberstam does a brilliant job of illustrating this tragic process.
One can only hope that the mistakes made during the Vietnam War will never again be committed in some other land in an effort to stop what is perceived to be a threatening ideology.

I was a teenager in these years. I knew what was going on but had NO idea what was really going on. Now almost 50 years later the deceptions and out right lies echo those of our curent “President”, the most unworthy of them all — trump.

But this is an extraordinary book. I wish I’d read it before but now am glad I did not. With age comes ..... something. I loved the set piece biographies, among the best I’ve ever read. As a result I’m now reading China Hand by John Paton Davies, Jr., and it’s great -- and there are so many more to follow! I haven’t read the other reviews but Halberstam was/is a writer for all time.

This book has become a relic to declassification. Almost all of its major tenets have gone by the boards as a result of new information.
Halberstam made a major error in trusting his interview subjects after the fact of major escalation by LBJ and the expansion of the war into Cambodia by Nixon. Clearly everyone wanted to blame the futile war on someone else.

Halberstam hides the fact that he was a hawk as late as 1965. And he wrote a book at the time The Making of a Quagmire which faults Kennedy for not inserting combat troops and carrying the war to the north. But when he wrote this book he never notes that he was wrong back then and JFK was correct in not following his advice. With what we know about the war through the new files, this book is pretty much useless. Other books like David Kaiser's American Tragedy are much better.

It was a glittering array of talent. Vice president Lyndon Johnson was deeply impressed. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was “that fellow with the Stacomb hair from the Ford Motor Company” (Robert McNamara). “Well, Lyndon,” said Rayburn, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” This was, of course the Cabinet hand-picked by President John F. Kennedy, men who reflected his coolly rational style; correct, confident, not one of them with a flabby belly or less than impeccably dressed; from the best Eastern schools--Groton, Yale, Harvard, with all the right social connections. The only one who looked out of placed was, well, Lyndon Johnson, in his off-the-rack Sears and Roebuck suit. For David Halberstam, the author of “The Best and the Brightest,” this is his favorite story in the book, for “it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between abstract quickness and verbal facility which they exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won and often bitter experience.”

These are the people who led the United States into its disastrous war with North Vietnam, a group of highly-intelligent men who lacked the common sense to get out of the rain. None of them had ever experienced failure or ever been forced to admit they were wrong. The very brightest—and most arrogant—were the two Macs: Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. As Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor, respectively, they also were (unfortunately for the Nation) the most influential with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

McNamara, the master statistician who supplied President Johnson with endless reams of statistics showing America was winning the war, based all of his data on assumptions that were inherently wrong. Indeed, information that conflicted with his core beliefs, he simply ignored. Two examples (1) strategic bombing: after World War II, the "U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey" conducted by the government proved conclusively that the strategic bombing of Germany had not worked; on the contrary, it had intensified the will of the German population to resist (which is exactly what happened in North Vietnam, binding the population to the Hanoi regime), and (2) the graduated pressure McNamara favored didn't work either; the JCS organized a war game (called SIGMA I-64) to test McNamara's assumption that graduated pressure on North Vietnam would turn the tide. In fact, it showed the opposite was true. No matter how the game was played, or who the players were, the outcome always favored North Vietnam. McNamara was given these results but refused to believe them. His fact-finding missions to Vietnam were anything but. They were highly-scripted trips in which the decisions about how the war was proceeding had already been decided. As Halberstam points out, McNamara never actually journeyed into the field to see for himself what was taking place on the battlefields, nor did he query soldiers who were actually doing the fighting. His mind was made up before he departed Washington. Meanwhile he blithely collected data of the enemy killed as an indicator that the war was being won which, in a country of 30 million people, is meaningless. After the war, it was learned that Hanoi rarely committed more than half of draft-age North Vietnamese.

McGeorge Bundy was equally as blind. Writes Halberstam: “In early March of 1965, Emmet Hughes, a former White House aid under Eisenhower, a man who had always been at loggerheads with (John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense) and who was now terrified that the Johnson Administration was taking a course in Southeast Asia that Dulles had wanted and Ike had avoided, went to see Mac Bundy, an old friend. Hughes was worried about how much control there was, and he would find little reassurance at the White House. He talked for some time with Bundy, and his questions clearly reflected the enormity of his doubts. ‘We’re just not as pessimistic as you are,’ Bundy told him. But what, Hughes asked, if the North Vietnamese retaliate by matching the American air escalation, with their own ground escalation? Hughes would long remember the answer and the cool smile: ‘We just don’t think that’s going to happen.’ Just suppose it does happen, Hughes persisted, just make an assumption of the worst thing that could happen. ‘We can’t assume what we don’t believe,’ Bundy answered.” In fact, North Vietnam did exactly that, increasing ground escalation as American forces increased air escalation, matching U.S. graduated pressure with Vietcong graduated pressure.

The simple fact was the Kennedy/Johnson administration did not believe it necessary to understand (or even to respect) what motived the Hanoi regime, which was independence. Halberstam’s book is well written and I would also say highly entertaining, if the subject weren’t so terribly tragic.

Kennedy came into office committed to greater defense spending and closing a non-existent missile gap. By 1950 we were increasingly caught up in anti-Communism and failed to see the war in Indochina as primarily a colonial/anti-colonial war. We then began to underwrite most of the French costs, and then picked up the cause after they withdrew. The Kennedy-Johnson team never defined the war properly, what our role was, and what we were going to do if the NVN matched our escalation. All the government's China experts had had their careers destroyed with the fall of China - and this included expertise regarding VN.

Kennedy's team brought no expertise to the VN War akin to the expertise of Kennan, Bohlen, and Harriman at the end of WWII. Further, they made the most critical decisions without input from anyone with expertise on the recent history in that part of the world, and their Bay of Pigs blunder (April, 1961) was a very serious error, leading to bullying by Khrushchev in 6/1961 Vienna and the 10/1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (Kennedy receives praise for working our way out of that - but without his initial errors the missile crisis probably wouldn't have occurred to start with.)

The Vienna conference with Khrushchev was so soon afterwards that even holding it was dubious. The outcome increased tensions - the Russian's bullying had been foretold by Harriman to Kennedy, along with the suggestion that Kennedy simply ignore it. New York Times reporter James Reston, granted a private audience with Kennedy afterwards, became convinced that this bullying was a crucial factor in Kennedy's decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to VN. Berlin was the focus at the time, with VN given very little attention - 'We have 30 Vietnams a day here,' Robert Kennedy, when asked why it was given so little time. Vietnam became a major problem because it had received so little attention.

At Potsdam it was decided the British would accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel in Indochina, and the Chinese above that line. The British then allowed the French to return, and they ignored U.S. requests to deal with the indigenous population. Eisenhower refused to have the U.S. take up France's battle in 1954, after 4 years of $.5 billion/year in U.S. aid. France had set out to fool the Vietnamese, believing they were not sophisticated and would end up in a losing set-piece battle. They set up a garrison in the highlands as bait - in Dienbienphu, intending to gain a major victory just as peace talks began. The French position was in the valley, leaving the high ground to the Vietminh and violating the first rule of warfare - take the high ground. The French believed the Vietminh had no artillery, and even if they did, they wouldn't know how to use it. Eisenhower did, however, send 200 advisors.

Kennedy sent a number of fact-finding teams to V.N. Rostow was a member of the first, and had an almost mystic belief in air power. He was the one member of the administration enthusiastic about a guerilla confrontation in V.N. During WWII he'd helped pick bombing targets in Europe.

General Maxwell Taylor, the other leader of the first fact-finding team, saw Korea in comparison to VN, and concluded their terrains were comparable. (Actually, Korea's terrain is much easier to manage - allowing advantageous use of tanks and airpower. Further, Korea was a conventional war with a uniformed enemy massing his troops. In VN the enemy was primarily political and required support of the population. Taylor should have used the French Indochina experience or the Philippine insurgency for comparison. He saw 1962 as a likely date for the U.S. to withdraw - after victory. He recommended 8,000 U.S. troops, and no reform of the Diem regime was seen needed. McNamara, estimated 205,000 - without going. Kennedy went with 15,000, with no combat troops.

Almost immediately the lying to ourselves began - by both civilian and military leaders. Diem refused any reforms, stating he was not the enemy. American military leaders saw their job as getting along with Diem. The fact that the French had used body counts as a measure of progress - up to the very end, made no impression on us, and we continued the practice. Lt. General Harkins was soon in charge, and told everyone he was an optimist and was going to have optimists on his staff. Reports from his office sent to D.C. were titled, 'The Headway Report.' He served nearly 2.5 years. Enemy capability was always downgraded - eg. battalion-sized attacks became company-sized attacks in his reports, etc.

The ARNV soon learned to use pre-attack shelling to warn the VC, who then escaped. The only tangible result of the American build-up was that the V.C. captured better weapons from the ARVN. Harkin went on to ruin the career of some of the Army's best after they insisted on reporting the truth. He was later labeled as 'lacking intelligence' by McNamara.

November 1963 President Diem, along with his brother/advisor Ngo Dinh Nhu, were executed in a coup led by General Duong Van Minh. Dissidents, both communist and nationalist, had been jailed and executed in the thousands, and elections routinely rigged. Opposition candidates were threatened with being charged with conspiring with the V.C. ARVN promotions were given on the basis of loyalty. South Vietnam's Buddhist majority had long been upset with Diem's strong favoritism towards Roman Catholics; the Catholic church was the country's largest landowner and exempt from land reform in the countryside, and Catholics were exempt from performing free labor. In May 1963, a law against flying religious flags was selectively enforced. Mid-1963 nine Buddhists died at the hands of Diem's army and police on that year's Buddha birthday. A key turning point came August 21 when Nhu's forces raided and vandalized Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands of monks and killing hundreds. Hanoi initially did not comment on the coup, as they had not been prepared.

Major Mistakes: Some war games showed that gradual escalation by the U.S. could be matched by NVN - every year, 200,000 NVN came of draft age and could be sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Most of those involved wrongly believed NVN prized its industrial base so much it would not risk destruction and would negotiate peace after experiencing limited bombing.

Under-the-surface messages: Halberstam believed the very brilliance of the men Kennedy appointed to his cabinet and senior advisory roles was responsible for epic failure in Vietnam. Kennedy had chosen his men based on general intelligence, rather than specific knowledge. McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, knew nothing about Asia, poverty, people, American domestic politics. Trump may have made the same error by elevating Steve Bannon (former Goldman Sachs banker, film producer) to the top level 'principals committee' of the National Security Council. Halberstam's proposed alternative is expertise, not ideology (aka Bannon).

Bottom-Line: The book took from 1969-72 to write, addressing the question of why men said to be the ablest had been the architects as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War. Per Richard Holbrooke, "Halberstam changed war reporting forever - making it possible to write that your own side was misleading the public.'

"The Best and the Brightest" is a masterpiece of journalism. Almost 700 pages long, it tells the story of how two Democratic administrations, gripped by the fear of "losing" Vietnam to communism, tried to prop up an unpopular, corrupt regime in Saigon, only to lead America step by step into a full-blown land war in Asia. At every turning point, the bright men in DC dropped just enough bombs or deployed just enough troops to stave off the collapse of their client, but they never understood that Hanoi and the Viet Cong had a far greater stake in victory than the U.S. ever did (or could). The result was a cycle of escalation and counter-escalation that led to a battlefield stalemate between the U.S. and the North. America's will broke first. At least two million people (mostly Vietnamese) died before America woke up to the fact that it had no important interests at stake in Vietnam. The Vietnamese paid for America's illusions.

The book has been in print for 40 years for good reason: it is superbly reported and written (if a bit repetitive). It is also very wise about the nature of the national security leadership in Washington in the 1960s. In those years serious thought was paralyzed by hubris, cliches ("the domino theory," "the fall of China," "monolithic communism"), the fear of being Red-baited, and, perhaps most importantly, by the bureaucratic impulse to marginalize dissenting views and to suppress inconvenient information. Anyone who thinks that generals and statesmen are well-informed or selfless needs to read this book right away. The same goes for anyone who thinks that George Bush was an unusually clueless and out-of-touch President.

I gave the book four stars instead of five only because the narrative is so fixated on big egos in Washington that it distorts the full meaning of the Vietnam War. Ordinary Americans (let alone Vietnamese) hardly appear in the story, leaving the reader uninformed about the horrific human consequences in Indochina of the idiotic decisions in Washington. "Great Man" histories -- even debunking ones -- do everyone a disservice if they fail to teach the lesson that Great Men often kill little men.

Everybody knows that governments play fast and loose with the truth when they speak to the people they govern. Some might say they ‘massage’ or ‘manage’ the truth. Some might say they do as parents do, selectively exposing what needs to be known at the appropriate times. Others would say, no, they outright lie, for a variety of reasons. Whatever your interpretation, we generally understand the situation, even if we don’t like it. But the beauty of Halberstam’s book is not to address how information is presented to the public – that’s barely an issue in the 25 or so years he covers (generally 1945 to 1970). Rather, it’s to address how various members of the government and military lied to each other.

The sheer weight of the lying and half-truths and false reporting inside State, the Pentagon and the White House with regard to Vietnam is staggering. Even worse is the fact that so many people on the inside knew very well that the farce was developing a life of its own and would end very, very badly, but they said nothing. Or if they dared speak up, they found themselves shunted to Timbuktu.

What a tragedy. Over two million Vietnamese dead, and hundreds of thousands wounded, the economy devastated, families destroyed, villages destroyed, whole villages roasted with napalm, populations relocated, their ancestors’ bones uncovered and scattered by bombs. And all because the best and the brightest at State, the Pentagon and the White House found it far easier to save face and lie to each other and themselves, hoping somehow that…. what? McNamara (the ablest man anyone had ever met, apparently) would somehow find a way to pull it out of the bag?

The most depressing thing, however, is that Halberstam never really makes this point – that the tragedy occurred in Vietnam. His book presents the whole mess as an American tragedy. The failure of American government, the breach of trust, the deep divisions between the military and the White House, the shunting away of dissenting voices like John Paton Davies. It seems to me that in a 700-page book detailing the tragedy of Vietnam, fifty pages should be devoted to US foolishness and 650 to Vietnamese suffering. Sure, it’s easy to say, well, that’s not the goal of this particular book, but it’s never the goal. Even a book like Christian Appy’s Patriots, which is an oral history of the war, and which purports to set forth the story from all sides, leans so heavily in favor of US voices that you’d swear the real tragedy was the fight between US hawks and US doves that divided the nation.

Anyway, a fascinating account of the inner workings at State, White House and Pentagon, if that’s where your interests lie.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST chronicles a pivotal point for Twentieth Century American hegemony. David Halberstam's masterpiece history of boneheaded leadership from the best educated men in America describes how the nation found itself in Vietnam, how its leaders escalated a war in Vietnam, and how utterly unaccountable these leaders were. It is Shakespearean tragedy, with multiple Hamlets.

Every major player from FDR & Henry Stimson to Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger are held to task for the disaster that was Vietnam, but the special portraits of shortcomings, pathos, and catharsis are reserved for those closest to the decision making during the war years. John Kennedy brought to Washington an intelligentsia like no other. Educated in top-shelf prep schools and Ivy league halls, the Kennedy inner circle weren't "yes-men" all, but they were supremely confident. They had never lost at any endeavor in their lives, and were accustomed to power. In-depth looks at Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Dean Rusk, George Ball, William Westmoreland, Maxwell Taylor and others serve to explain how American decision making went so awry, and to inculcate these brilliant individuals who each played a part. From incessant number-crunching of the whiz-kid from Ford Motor Company, Robert McNamara to State Department careerist Dean Rusk, to the disagreeing Generals Taylor and Westmoreland, author Halberstam shines a spotlight on the strengths and weaknesses of each. Readers can only be abhorred by the constant lies, innuendo and false facts spread by all participants from Military Command in Saigon, to press secretaries of all agencies in Washington. Body Counts as positive publicity? Hard to imagine the public's taste for such today.

Ultimately, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson are the stops in the decision chain. While Halberstam paints each as backward-focused on politics from an earlier era, (too hell-bent on stopping Communism and the fall of additional dominoes,) he saves special poison for LBJ. The second half of the tale narrates the demise, battle-by-battle, decision-by-decision, of this President who had hoped to become the nation's greatest domestic President through his Great Society program. Clearly the strategy of these Johnson years, 1964-1967, was to have no strategy. Instead, LBJ "sliced the salami thin" escalating the conflict in Southeast Asia little by little, so as to escape the notice of the nation. To keep generals happy, to avoid conflict with the Chinese or Russians, to show success with little cost, these were the reasons for initiating massive bombing in North Vietnam. Never was an end-game discussed. Never were limits set on troop involvements until after half a million US soldiers were in Vietnam.

And while the blame for the miserable failure in Vietnam lies squarely with these best and the brightest men, that inner circle of the JFK/LBJ era, Halberstam's book provides much more than just blame assignment. The first 150 pages are perspective-lending prologue. The reader is provided deep geo-political background and learns how the mindsets of those who came to power with JFK & LBJ were formed. From FDR commenting "the Indochinese are people of small stature and are not warlike," and his concern "about the brown people in the East," Halberstam describes U.S. political attitudes towards Southeast Asia in detail. Through the Forties and Fifties, we get the sense of falling dominoes, and the careers in Washington that were wrecked as first China and later Korea fell to the communists. John Foster Dulles, Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, William Fulbright, Joseph McCarthy...all play roles in shaping American policy leading to the importance of Saigon as last bastion. The domino theory, the spread of communism, the failures of the French colonialists, the rise of "the organization man," all influenced the culture of a 1960s Washington that lost its way. Leaders were mired in old foreign political realities. They failed to see emerging domestic national desires.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is as much a quagmire as the jungles of Vietnam proved to be. The original hardcover, at 672 pages, is a cumbersome, page-by-page slog. Detail-rich, this is not light reading. It is fascinating analysis, almost mesmerizing. Only by trudging though the muddy mess does one appreciate fully the perplexities, the dilemmas, the life-changing and nation-altering story of Vietnam, and the men who were at the controls. This should be a must-read for every politician before staff appointments can be made. THE B&B is pertinent reading for any era, as are all Shakespeare's tragedies.

I read this work with the reality of nine friends, including one Lt. General, having been lost in this huge mistake of a war. Its initial buildup, apex, and the start of its wind-down and resolution spanned my HS and college years.

David details a large part of the Vietnam Era, 1961-1969, to the point when the Nixon Administration fully assumed a reduction and withdrawal mode. He does so with a high and effective degree of specificity. This allows the reader to participate in the painful and disturbing events that resulted in the loss of almost 60,000 US and Allied lives.

Included are the protagonists in all the events, individuals termed by many as "the best and the brightest"; those of high intelligence and wisdom. In theory, they would always know the best course of action, whether in the public or private sector. Sadly, the theory is soundly disproven at a huge cost in lives, careers, and resources. The macro result was only to postpone and delay South Vietnam falling to Communists factions.

The reader is given an inside-view of the flawed and often corrupt decision-making that allowed the US to become hopelessly immersed in a war it could not win. One is shown all the "red flags" that were ignored or discounted along the way, including tragic frailties and consuming biases on the part of powerful and inlfuencial leaders. Seemingly prudent decision-making is compromised by ego, political ambition, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. The true best interest of the nation and major lessons from history ceased to be priority. Our "best and brightest" knew best, right?

HS and college-age students should consume this work as must reading, and others should do the same as part of neglected but essential reading of major history. No matter the decade or century, the lessons of this work and the Vietnam Era mandate a chronic cynicism on the part of any voter, citizen, because a detrimental level of trust and confidence allowed even the "best and the brightest" to lead the country into a disaster.

David performs a great service to the country and all readers, by allowing each to rightfully cry, "Never Again".

Kennedy came into office committed to greater defense spending and closing a non-existent missile gap. By 1950 we were increasingly caught up in anti-Communism and failed to see the war in Indochina as primarily a colonial/anti-colonial war. We then began to underwrite most of the French costs, and then picked up the cause after they withdrew. The Kennedy-Johnson team never defined the war properly, what our role was, and what we were going to do if the NVN matched our escalation. All the government's China experts had had their careers destroyed with the fall of China - and this included expertise regarding VN.

Kennedy's team brought no expertise to the VN War akin to the expertise of Kennan, Bohlen, and Harriman at the end of WWII. Further, they made the most critical decisions without input from anyone with expertise on the recent history in that part of the world, and their Bay of Pigs blunder (April, 1961) was a very serious error, leading to bullying by Khrushchev in 6/1961 Vienna and the 10/1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (Kennedy receives praise for working our way out of that - but without his initial errors the missile crisis probably wouldn't have occurred to start with.)

The Vienna conference with Khrushchev was so soon afterwards that even holding it was dubious. The outcome increased tensions - the Russian's bullying had been foretold by Harriman to Kennedy, along with the suggestion that Kennedy simply ignore it. New York Times reporter James Reston, granted a private audience with Kennedy afterwards, became convinced that this bullying was a crucial factor in Kennedy's decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to VN. Berlin was the focus at the time, with VN given very little attention - 'We have 30 Vietnams a day here,' Robert Kennedy, when asked why it was given so little time. Vietnam became a major problem because it had received so little attention.

At Potsdam it was decided the British would accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel in Indochina, and the Chinese above that line. The British then allowed the French to return, and they ignored U.S. requests to deal with the indigenous population. Eisenhower refused to have the U.S. take up France's battle in 1954, after 4 years of $.5 billion/year in U.S. aid. France had set out to fool the Vietnamese, believing they were not sophisticated and would end up in a losing set-piece battle. They set up a garrison in the highlands as bait - in Dienbienphu, intending to gain a major victory just as peace talks began. The French position was in the valley, leaving the high ground to the Vietminh and violating the first rule of warfare - take the high ground. The French believed the Vietminh had no artillery, and even if they did, they wouldn't know how to use it. Eisenhower did, however, send 200 advisors.

Kennedy sent a number of fact-finding teams to V.N. Rostow was a member of the first, and had an almost mystic belief in air power. He was the one member of the administration enthusiastic about a guerilla confrontation in V.N. During WWII he'd helped pick bombing targets in Europe.

General Maxwell Taylor, the other leader of the first fact-finding team, saw Korea in comparison to VN, and concluded their terrains were comparable. (Actually, Korea's terrain is much easier to manage - allowing advantageous use of tanks and airpower. Further, Korea was a conventional war with a uniformed enemy massing his troops. In VN the enemy was primarily political and required support of the population. Taylor should have used the French Indochina experience or the Philippine insurgency for comparison. He saw 1962 as a likely date for the U.S. to withdraw - after victory. He recommended 8,000 U.S. troops, and no reform of the Diem regime was seen needed. McNamara, estimated 205,000 - without going. Kennedy went with 15,000, with no combat troops.

Almost immediately the lying to ourselves began - by both civilian and military leaders. Diem refused any reforms, stating he was not the enemy. American military leaders saw their job as getting along with Diem. The fact that the French had used body counts as a measure of progress - up to the very end, made no impression on us, and we continued the practice. Lt. General Harkins was soon in charge, and told everyone he was an optimist and was going to have optimists on his staff. Reports from his office sent to D.C. were titled, 'The Headway Report.' He served nearly 2.5 years. Enemy capability was always downgraded - eg. battalion-sized attacks became company-sized attacks in his reports, etc.

The ARNV soon learned to use pre-attack shelling to warn the VC, who then escaped. The only tangible result of the American build-up was that the V.C. captured better weapons from the ARVN. Harkin went on to ruin the career of some of the Army's best after they insisted on reporting the truth. He was later labeled as 'lacking intelligence' by McNamara.

November 1963 President Diem, along with his brother/advisor Ngo Dinh Nhu, were executed in a coup led by General Duong Van Minh. Dissidents, both communist and nationalist, had been jailed and executed in the thousands, and elections routinely rigged. Opposition candidates were threatened with being charged with conspiring with the V.C. ARVN promotions were given on the basis of loyalty. South Vietnam's Buddhist majority had long been upset with Diem's strong favoritism towards Roman Catholics; the Catholic church was the country's largest landowner and exempt from land reform in the countryside, and Catholics were exempt from performing free labor. In May 1963, a law against flying religious flags was selectively enforced. Mid-1963 nine Buddhists died at the hands of Diem's army and police on that year's Buddha birthday. A key turning point came August 21 when Nhu's forces raided and vandalized Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands of monks and killing hundreds. Hanoi initially did not comment on the coup, as they had not been prepared.

Major Mistakes: Some war games showed that gradual escalation by the U.S. could be matched by NVN - every year, 200,000 NVN came of draft age and could be sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Most of those involved wrongly believed NVN prized its industrial base so much it would not risk destruction and would negotiate peace after experiencing limited bombing.

Under-the-surface messages: Halberstam believed the very brilliance of the men Kennedy appointed to his cabinet and senior advisory roles was responsible for epic failure in Vietnam. Kennedy had chosen his men based on general intelligence, rather than specific knowledge. McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, knew nothing about Asia, poverty, people, American domestic politics. Trump may have made the same error by elevating Steve Bannon (former Goldman Sachs banker, film producer) to the top level 'principals committee' of the National Security Council. Halberstam's proposed alternative is expertise, not ideology (aka Bannon).

Bottom-Line: The book took from 1969-72 to write, addressing the question of why men said to be the ablest had been the architects as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War. Per Richard Holbrooke, "Halberstam changed war reporting forever - making it possible to write that your own side was misleading the public.'

"The Best and the Brightest" is a masterpiece of journalism. Almost 700 pages long, it tells the story of how two Democratic administrations, gripped by the fear of "losing" Vietnam to communism, tried to prop up an unpopular, corrupt regime in Saigon, only to lead America step by step into a full-blown land war in Asia. At every turning point, the bright men in DC dropped just enough bombs or deployed just enough troops to stave off the collapse of their client, but they never understood that Hanoi and the Viet Cong had a far greater stake in victory than the U.S. ever did (or could). The result was a cycle of escalation and counter-escalation that led to a battlefield stalemate between the U.S. and the North. America's will broke first. At least two million people (mostly Vietnamese) died before America woke up to the fact that it had no important interests at stake in Vietnam. The Vietnamese paid for America's illusions.

The book has been in print for 40 years for good reason: it is superbly reported and written (if a bit repetitive). It is also very wise about the nature of the national security leadership in Washington in the 1960s. In those years serious thought was paralyzed by hubris, cliches ("the domino theory," "the fall of China," "monolithic communism"), the fear of being Red-baited, and, perhaps most importantly, by the bureaucratic impulse to marginalize dissenting views and to suppress inconvenient information. Anyone who thinks that generals and statesmen are well-informed or selfless needs to read this book right away. The same goes for anyone who thinks that George Bush was an unusually clueless and out-of-touch President.

I gave the book four stars instead of five only because the narrative is so fixated on big egos in Washington that it distorts the full meaning of the Vietnam War. Ordinary Americans (let alone Vietnamese) hardly appear in the story, leaving the reader uninformed about the horrific human consequences in Indochina of the idiotic decisions in Washington. "Great Man" histories -- even debunking ones -- do everyone a disservice if they fail to teach the lesson that Great Men often kill little men.

Everybody knows that governments play fast and loose with the truth when they speak to the people they govern. Some might say they ‘massage’ or ‘manage’ the truth. Some might say they do as parents do, selectively exposing what needs to be known at the appropriate times. Others would say, no, they outright lie, for a variety of reasons. Whatever your interpretation, we generally understand the situation, even if we don’t like it. But the beauty of Halberstam’s book is not to address how information is presented to the public – that’s barely an issue in the 25 or so years he covers (generally 1945 to 1970). Rather, it’s to address how various members of the government and military lied to each other.

The sheer weight of the lying and half-truths and false reporting inside State, the Pentagon and the White House with regard to Vietnam is staggering. Even worse is the fact that so many people on the inside knew very well that the farce was developing a life of its own and would end very, very badly, but they said nothing. Or if they dared speak up, they found themselves shunted to Timbuktu.

What a tragedy. Over two million Vietnamese dead, and hundreds of thousands wounded, the economy devastated, families destroyed, villages destroyed, whole villages roasted with napalm, populations relocated, their ancestors’ bones uncovered and scattered by bombs. And all because the best and the brightest at State, the Pentagon and the White House found it far easier to save face and lie to each other and themselves, hoping somehow that…. what? McNamara (the ablest man anyone had ever met, apparently) would somehow find a way to pull it out of the bag?

The most depressing thing, however, is that Halberstam never really makes this point – that the tragedy occurred in Vietnam. His book presents the whole mess as an American tragedy. The failure of American government, the breach of trust, the deep divisions between the military and the White House, the shunting away of dissenting voices like John Paton Davies. It seems to me that in a 700-page book detailing the tragedy of Vietnam, fifty pages should be devoted to US foolishness and 650 to Vietnamese suffering. Sure, it’s easy to say, well, that’s not the goal of this particular book, but it’s never the goal. Even a book like Christian Appy’s Patriots, which is an oral history of the war, and which purports to set forth the story from all sides, leans so heavily in favor of US voices that you’d swear the real tragedy was the fight between US hawks and US doves that divided the nation.

Anyway, a fascinating account of the inner workings at State, White House and Pentagon, if that’s where your interests lie.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST chronicles a pivotal point for Twentieth Century American hegemony. David Halberstam's masterpiece history of boneheaded leadership from the best educated men in America describes how the nation found itself in Vietnam, how its leaders escalated a war in Vietnam, and how utterly unaccountable these leaders were. It is Shakespearean tragedy, with multiple Hamlets.

Every major player from FDR & Henry Stimson to Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger are held to task for the disaster that was Vietnam, but the special portraits of shortcomings, pathos, and catharsis are reserved for those closest to the decision making during the war years. John Kennedy brought to Washington an intelligentsia like no other. Educated in top-shelf prep schools and Ivy league halls, the Kennedy inner circle weren't "yes-men" all, but they were supremely confident. They had never lost at any endeavor in their lives, and were accustomed to power. In-depth looks at Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Dean Rusk, George Ball, William Westmoreland, Maxwell Taylor and others serve to explain how American decision making went so awry, and to inculcate these brilliant individuals who each played a part. From incessant number-crunching of the whiz-kid from Ford Motor Company, Robert McNamara to State Department careerist Dean Rusk, to the disagreeing Generals Taylor and Westmoreland, author Halberstam shines a spotlight on the strengths and weaknesses of each. Readers can only be abhorred by the constant lies, innuendo and false facts spread by all participants from Military Command in Saigon, to press secretaries of all agencies in Washington. Body Counts as positive publicity? Hard to imagine the public's taste for such today.

Ultimately, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson are the stops in the decision chain. While Halberstam paints each as backward-focused on politics from an earlier era, (too hell-bent on stopping Communism and the fall of additional dominoes,) he saves special poison for LBJ. The second half of the tale narrates the demise, battle-by-battle, decision-by-decision, of this President who had hoped to become the nation's greatest domestic President through his Great Society program. Clearly the strategy of these Johnson years, 1964-1967, was to have no strategy. Instead, LBJ "sliced the salami thin" escalating the conflict in Southeast Asia little by little, so as to escape the notice of the nation. To keep generals happy, to avoid conflict with the Chinese or Russians, to show success with little cost, these were the reasons for initiating massive bombing in North Vietnam. Never was an end-game discussed. Never were limits set on troop involvements until after half a million US soldiers were in Vietnam.

And while the blame for the miserable failure in Vietnam lies squarely with these best and the brightest men, that inner circle of the JFK/LBJ era, Halberstam's book provides much more than just blame assignment. The first 150 pages are perspective-lending prologue. The reader is provided deep geo-political background and learns how the mindsets of those who came to power with JFK & LBJ were formed. From FDR commenting "the Indochinese are people of small stature and are not warlike," and his concern "about the brown people in the East," Halberstam describes U.S. political attitudes towards Southeast Asia in detail. Through the Forties and Fifties, we get the sense of falling dominoes, and the careers in Washington that were wrecked as first China and later Korea fell to the communists. John Foster Dulles, Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, William Fulbright, Joseph McCarthy...all play roles in shaping American policy leading to the importance of Saigon as last bastion. The domino theory, the spread of communism, the failures of the French colonialists, the rise of "the organization man," all influenced the culture of a 1960s Washington that lost its way. Leaders were mired in old foreign political realities. They failed to see emerging domestic national desires.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is as much a quagmire as the jungles of Vietnam proved to be. The original hardcover, at 672 pages, is a cumbersome, page-by-page slog. Detail-rich, this is not light reading. It is fascinating analysis, almost mesmerizing. Only by trudging though the muddy mess does one appreciate fully the perplexities, the dilemmas, the life-changing and nation-altering story of Vietnam, and the men who were at the controls. This should be a must-read for every politician before staff appointments can be made. THE B&B is pertinent reading for any era, as are all Shakespeare's tragedies.

I read this work with the reality of nine friends, including one Lt. General, having been lost in this huge mistake of a war. Its initial buildup, apex, and the start of its wind-down and resolution spanned my HS and college years.

David details a large part of the Vietnam Era, 1961-1969, to the point when the Nixon Administration fully assumed a reduction and withdrawal mode. He does so with a high and effective degree of specificity. This allows the reader to participate in the painful and disturbing events that resulted in the loss of almost 60,000 US and Allied lives.

Included are the protagonists in all the events, individuals termed by many as "the best and the brightest"; those of high intelligence and wisdom. In theory, they would always know the best course of action, whether in the public or private sector. Sadly, the theory is soundly disproven at a huge cost in lives, careers, and resources. The macro result was only to postpone and delay South Vietnam falling to Communists factions.

The reader is given an inside-view of the flawed and often corrupt decision-making that allowed the US to become hopelessly immersed in a war it could not win. One is shown all the "red flags" that were ignored or discounted along the way, including tragic frailties and consuming biases on the part of powerful and inlfuencial leaders. Seemingly prudent decision-making is compromised by ego, political ambition, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. The true best interest of the nation and major lessons from history ceased to be priority. Our "best and brightest" knew best, right?

HS and college-age students should consume this work as must reading, and others should do the same as part of neglected but essential reading of major history. No matter the decade or century, the lessons of this work and the Vietnam Era mandate a chronic cynicism on the part of any voter, citizen, because a detrimental level of trust and confidence allowed even the "best and the brightest" to lead the country into a disaster.

David performs a great service to the country and all readers, by allowing each to rightfully cry, "Never Again".

How could America, THE superpower of the 20th century, fall into the trap of Vietnam?

Young journalist David Halberstam told the detailed story of this tragedy from its roots in WWII and the Cold War through the end of the American involvement. Fifty years later, his account shapes the perspective of both the elites and common Americans. Published when the polarization of the war was still fresh, this book was considered countercultural, anti-establishment and unpatriotic by many. Others thought that it glossed over the guilt and incompetence of the key players.

In essence, this is the story of the end of innocence for America. More pointedly, the author painstakingly documents the end of the self-confident idealist, rationalist, progressive strain of American politics and thought. America won the second world war, defeated fascism, stalemated communism, determined the peace, lead the post-war prosperity, declined the spoils, claimed victory for its institutions and took the moral high road towards the future. Its denouement was triggered by a hubristic view of American exceptionalism. Lacking historical perspective, America denied its imperialist role in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Exhausted after the war, America rehabilitated its European allies, German and Japanese enemies, but was lured into a zero-sum game of chicken with the new communist enemy. Comforted by two decades of New Deal momentum, industrial and populist interests in both parties transformed the political stage into a Manichean battle of light and dark focused on communism in Russia, China, Cuba and the State Department.

Within this context, post-war Indochina was a French colonial possession of little importance to the US. France ran out of money and interest, but needed an exit strategy. France and its client state played the game well, transforming the nationalist, anti-colonialist forces into a communist enemy and first domino in the US war with communism. America increased its involvement and commitment without any other goals or exit strategy. Halberstam highlights the purge of the State Department after the China revolution as a critical factor in eliminating competent advice to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Money, political support, advisors, military advisors, intelligence officers, troops, bombing, defoliation, coups, peace talks, incursions, naval support, POW camps, peace with honor, etc. followed.

Halberstam documents the tragic failure of individuals and institutions. There are no heroes or great men in the Vietnam story; perhaps Daniel Ellsberg. Self-interest, egos, self-confidence, careers, cowardice, conformity, ignorance, pettiness, class and political calculation undermined the key players (including JFK) in spite of their knowledge, experience and good will.

In addition to the State Department and bureaucratic government organizations, other institutions failed in their roles. Halberstam apologizes for himself and the media for allowing the political and military cover-ups to continue for far too long. Political leaders failed to lead or play their loyal opposition roles. Academics failed to provide context or effective influence. The latest management tools were misapplied. The military eagerly pursued war and manipulated reports. American allies failed to influence policies or provide support.

The Vietnam experiences lead to the countercultural revolution of the 1960's. Extreme individualism continues in various leftist and libertarian guises. A distrust of institutions, especially government institutions after the Reagan revolution, continues. A distrust of experts and elites, Reagan amplified, continues. Vietnam was escalated due to Democratic fears of being soft on communism, stimulated by politicians like Dick Nixon. The Vietnam snake later bit Nixon, releasing his paranoid side, leading to Watergate, his resignation and further distrust of government, politicians and institutions.

The US has not recovered from the Vietnam experience. Centrist Democrats Carter, Clinton and Obama have been unable to reassemble the New Deal coalition. Establishment Republicans Ford and Bush, Sr. have been unable to re-establish a Wilson-Hoover-Eisenhower period of compromise. Reagan stands out as the breakthrough politician of the last five decades, seeking a return to the 19th century McKinley-Harding-Garfield-Hanna Ohio era preceding Teddy Roosevelt!

Five decades later, from a classic liberal perspective, which Halberstam exemplifies, things are even worse. The State Department no longer attracts high potential individuals to public service. Politicians are more venal and slippery. Academics have retreated to the safety of their institutions and journals with almost no influence on the general public or public policy. Eisenhower's military-industrial complex is more powerful. Business and industry rarely contribute their talented members to serve in national, state or local governments. Basic standards of journalistic objectivity are considered quaint and irrelevant.

The "best and brightest" failed for various reasons in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's. The path to recovery in 2012 remains unclear. This book is a sobering reminder of the limits to collective human achievement.

Halberstam, in this masterful story of how America got tangled in Vietnam, reveals that at some point an unnamed staff assistant told McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson's National Security Adviser, after looking at the planning for the escalation of the war: "The thing that bothers me is that no matter what we do to them, they live there and we don't, and they know someday we'll go away and thus they know they can outlast us".

This summarizes not only the quandary that the Kennedy-Johnson White House faced during the 60s in Vietnam, it summarizes pretty much the problem of intervening in guerilla-style or civil war conflicts whether it be Vietnam, Iraq, or modern-day Afghanistan: you don't belong here. The enemy knows it. They simply need to bide their time and have a higher pain threshold than you have. No amount of superior technology will ever compensate these simple facts unless you're willing to utterly exterminate the whole population which is simply unpalatable to a modern, liberal democracy such as the U.S.

The Best and the Brightest is not for the faint of heart. Tightly written over 720 pages, it is a massive, richly detailed history of the Vietnam conflict and the American decision-making process about it, starting at the end of World War II up to end of the Lyndon Johnson presidency. Reading it in 2012, 40 years after it has been written, it still resonates at every page. Events are covered in details, but as the title says, it is also at times a psychological study of the main protagonists.

Halberstam's thesis is that the root causes of America's involvement in Vietnam were two-fold: first, a fixation on the threat of Communism linked with the fear of "losing" another Asian country after China went communist in 1949, and second, hubris about America's manifest destiny and global responsibility, linked with a blind faith and confidence in America's superiority that meant that when America committed to something, it could only succeed. As it happened, even with 500,000 men, dozens of billions of 1960s dollars, and its best and brightest minds, the U.S. could not solve the Vietnam "issue". In the final analysis, Vietnam was not so much a Communist takeover than a national war of liberation. The U.S. was thus fighting History on the march, and in retrospect it seems rather obvious that it could only spell trouble. Still, you have to wonder if South Vietnam would have had a democratic, efficient and legitimate government (think about Western vs Eastern Germany), how much it could have turn the war around but of course we'll never know.

A lot of people have blamed the media coverage of the war for the increasing public opposition to it, but in no small way the opposition was also greatly helped by the appalling behavior of Johnson's White House, with its deliberate deceit of the American people to the extent of the American involvement, and the gross manipulation and distortion of facts to fit an optimistic storyline about the war's progress. This lack of transparency and outright lying was arguably for noble reasons: Johnson wanted to keep a "low profile" on the war so that it could move forward with the Great Society programs. But America's political institutions, American democracy in general, paid a tremendous price as a result of this Johnsonian trade-off: it shattered a lot of citizens' faith in its government and provoked deep, resilient social conflicts.

There isn't many bads to say about the Best and the Brightest, apart from the fact that the story does sometimes wander on tangents that I felt did not add much value. I also felt Halberstam not very forgiving on his judgment of some players who did try to limit the U.S. involvement. Case in point is General-Ambassador Maxwell Taylor: although certainly guilty of having proposed an escalation of the war during the Kennedy era, he was still one of the few high positioned people in 1964-1965 that really tried hard to put the brakes on the escalation. Halberstam recognizes this and illustrates it quite well, however for him ultimately Taylor is as guilty as the hawks as he did not challenge the main premise of the involvement logic: that a Vietnam unification under Ho Chi Minh would be a catastrophe of incommensurable proportions for the strategic interests of the U.S.

But all in all, the Best and the Brightest remains a most powerful and illuminating story about the Vietnam tragedy. Highly recommended, 5 stars.

Halberstam's work is a technical policy examination of the policies that led to our involvement in Vietnam. Its historical value is that it was written in the last part of the Nixon administration using interviews from the people who crafted the steps that led to our bloody war.

Its central thesis is that the war arose out of our strident anticommunist politics and a rift between the diplomats on the ground in China and Asia in general who saw the world pragmatically and the political advisors of Presidents starting with Truman who pushed for a Cold War confrontation.

It is an academic work that seeks to expose and reveal, not blame. For someone my age who was too young to understand the war that I was being sucked into, it is clear explanation of how rhetoric can lead national leaders to create unnecessary war.

This is a pretentious book even before it begins. The long-winded preface written by Halberstam was self-serving and vain, and rubbed me the wrong way. After getting that behind me, I tried plowing through the main body, but gave up. I was born in the early 60s, so I'm not as familiar with some of the characters or politics of that era (hence my desire to read the book), and I found myself getting lost by some of the tangents, complex sentences, and ancillary information. He was trying to cram too much information and too many diverse thoughts into each sentence. Despite my effort, I was not getting much insight into the characters.

I read his book "The Fifties" a while ago and remembered it as a good book. Likewise, I had high hopes for this book, but in the end, I gave up.

Halberstam reveals how a group of the smartest and most dedicated individuals can make a mess of things. None of the major players in Washington really understood the Vietnamese-- not even Kennedy. Nobody realized that Ho Chi Minh's greatest asset was his patience-- a virtue most Americans don't have. I found the book to be an excellent source for studying the Vietnam conflict. My only complaint is that I was never sure exactly which year things were happening. The author takes each player and goes through his experience. I would have liked to know if the events were in 1963, 64, 65, etc.
A time-line of events would have been helpful.
If you are researching the Vietnam conflict, I would also recommend Robert Schulzinger's book, "A Time for War."

If you are looking for an overview of the Vietnam War, you'd probably do better to look elsewhere. And if you are still emotionally wrapped up in the war, you aren't going to like this book. It's 800 pages of detailed character portraits of the people who shaped US policy and sent 500,000 men to fight in Vietnam, for better or for worse. It seeks to answer one question: How did we get so deeply involved in a land war in Southeast Asia? The answer is more complex than the glib sound bites usually offered in response to this question, but it really does boil down to this: The Pentagon wanted a war, Robert McNamara thought we would win it easily, and President Johnson didn't want to appear weak going into the 1964 election against Barry Goldwater.

The 800 pages that Halberstam devotes to the subject are fascinating and readable. I read this book in paperback for the second time a few years ago, and I am about to get the Kindle edition to read it again. What keeps drawing me back is the fact that Halberstam wrote this book in 1972, while the war was still going on. He does a remarkable job of maintaining a distance from his subject that normally comes only with the passage of decades.

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.

Wow, this book was heavy going, but well worth the trip.
I read this book a few months after I read Halberstam's book on Korea. The two books are much different, I kind of wish they were more alike.

But I realize that is an unfair comparison to make. This book was written while the war was still being fought.

There can be no sense of perspective, nor access to all sorts of data from this war that a historian could use now.

This is not a 1-volume history of the Vietnam war. Halberstam's Korea book fit that definition. This book looks at a specific aspect of the US involvement there, the decisions and the decision-makers that put the US into this quagmire, spending billions of dollars and killing millions of people in the process.

This narrow focus is the strength and weakness of the book. You get a superb idea of many of these people, Kennedy & Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, the Bundys, Harriman, Westmoreland, Taylor and many others. You get a strong telling of the events that led to the coup that deposed Diem.

But you get little of the other side of the story. I was hoping to get something about Ho Chi Minh, Giap and the others. Nor is there any insight into the Saigon people, other than they are corrupt.

This was a great starting point for learning about the war there (including why war was never declared). But this is not a 1-volume history book.

Is there anyone who can suggest complementary reading to this fine book?

I read this book way back in 1974 when an old Army buddy Lt. Tom Couch told me to read it.
I am a Veteran of the War in Southeast Asia. I can attest to the happenings during my tour of South Vietnam. I quickly learned that the War as it was being played out during the years of 1971-1972 was a losing proposition. We were wasting all our assets for a Country who in truth wanted to be left alone.
Halberstam has set in cement his views of a conflict that was invented in the minds of the powers to be in Washington. LBJ was the actual catalyst in the venture. In retrospect LBJ reminds me of a fellow Texan George Bush who reacts the same way 30 years later. Think about that, it is a true comparison.
Although JFK had ventured into this Southeast Asian scenario, Halberstam feels that JFK would not have escalated this conflict. Maybe Yes, Maybe No!!
The hubris of McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara would rush LBJ into the War to end Communism in Southeast Asia. This is what LBJ wanted to hear. Damn the torpedoes, full ahead!!!!!!
In the meantime General Harkins was perpetuating a fraud on the U.S.A. in stating we controlled all the aspects of the Vietnam Conflict. He indeed did not tell the truth of the happenings in the fields of South Vietnam. We indeed were not winning.
Later General Westmorland continued this masquerade. The U.S. sent over 500,000 troops into the quagmire of Vietnam. These governing Whiz Kids in Washington were indeed wrong. So now Old Friend, please learn from this ignorance. The beat goes on. Do we ever really learn.
Halberstam understood way back in the 1960's, we also should learn that the best and the brightest really knew nothing!! They were wrong!!!
This is a great read and I rate it 5 Stars. If I could I would rate it 6 Stars. Bloody Good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.

Few events have divided America as the Vietnam War. One of the most nagging questions regarding this topic is how and why America became involved in it. David Halberstam gives us his answer in this comprehensive and well written book; "The Best and the Brightest". The title of this book refers to the various officials in the executive branch of the US federal government that came to office with JFK, but stayed on after his death. This group of officials played major roles in LBJ's administration, and in fits and starts, convinced the Texan to devote more and more of his efforts and the nation's blood and treasure to a little country called Vietnam. LBJ, like Nixon after him, was perpetually haunted of the Kennedy name and legacy, and reacted by wholeheartedly following the advice of Kennedy's advisers regarding Vietnam against his own better judgement. These advisers included Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Dean Acheson, etc... All of them had more foreign policy experience than LBJ, and all were associated with the Kennedy name. Yet none of them had every won elected office.

By listening to their advice instead of his own hard-earned experience and judgement, LBJ would slowly lead America, step by step, into the Vietnam War, to the point that he did not or could not extract this nation from it. The author, David Halberstam, was a young reporter at this time, and worked both in Vietnam and at the home front, reporting on the conflict. His inside view, and later his connections with those higher up, allowed him to write this insightful book on the most controversial of wars. After reading it, I got the impression that LBJ never quite had the confidence to stand on his own two feet when it came to foreign policy. The buck is supposed to stop with him, as commander-in-chief, yet he allowed members of the Best and the Brightest, to make decisions for him. If there is one moral to take out of this book, it is to stand up for yourself and make your own decisions.

All in all, a great book. I highly recommend it for any fan or student of history.

Inside the exhaustive research, the gripping narative, and the insightful biographies is a powerful statement on the use and abuse of political power. This book is an essential read for the history students of the Viet Nam era, but it should also be required of anybody who seeks to undertand politcal power. Inside the title, "The Best and the Brightest" is the suggestion that something more is required to be successful in politics, and the book uncovers it well. In trying to explain how the best intentions of the Kennedy administration got the Bay of Pigs so wrong Chester Bowles wrote in his diary how the rational intellect performed so poorly under stress without a moral center. It was insightful to point out how the anti-communist fever left over from the McCarthy inquisitions impacted the situation by causing the exit of many of the Asian State Department people who truly knew what was going on. It had the effect of insulating the White House from the truth. But what made the book was the details into the profiles of the people in power who made the decisions; what made the intelligent leaders with such great intentions make such regrettable decisions. There are great and unique lessons in leadership here. While Halberstam clearly displays the dammage done to the presidency, the Democratic party, the economy and to the country; I only wish he had mentioned the body count of the young Americans (and the Vietnamese of both sides) of my generation who died in that miserable war. That was the real tragedy. Those who have political power and those who delegate it with their vote should understand these consequences of the misuse of power. It is that lesson which makes Halberstam's in depth study of this period of history timeless.

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.

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.

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

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)
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (the 1968 election)

As a view into the making of the Americn elite that got us into the Vietnam mess, the depth of this book is simply unsurpassed. They were so convinced of their brilliance and competence that they could not imagine they could make really big mistakes. And much of that arrogance came from Harvard and old money.
What makes this book tower above the rest is the way that you get to know the major players, from McGeorge Bundy to McNamara to Lyndon Johnson. THey are real people in this book, which brims with the most vivid mini-biographies, fascinating details that make the reader - or at least me - want to dig much much deeper. The details are often incredible, such as the way that McNamara threw himself so deeply into his work that he nearly had a car accident while thinking about re-making Ford or how Bundy faked, brilliantly, having written a paper in prep school by speaking aloud. It all feeds into the portrait of a self-satisfied elite that failed. There is wisdom in the ability to doubt oneself.
While one can quibble with many of Halberstams's points and assertions, as historians are now doing, this is a great place to start to learn about modern American history and government. Its lessons can stimulate a lifetime of study, which it did for me. This book made such a deep impresion on me that it changed my life.
THere is no doubt that this is Halbertam's greatest work. Highest recommendation.

The Best and the Brightest is an incredible read about a politically and ideologically confused America. Halberstam makes an outstanding attempt at uncluttering the mess that was the U.S. government during the 60s. He also demythifizes the Kennedy team; a team that was comprised of the best and the brightest our country had to offer. Or were they? As described by Halberstam, though many were bright, they obviously weren't the best for the job. Even McNamara, who Halberstam glorifies for his ability to put together a sound system, seems to not be the right man for the job. The generals, particularly Westmoreland, were caught up in their own political/career minded shenaningans, that ultimately brought them down.

Halberstam's description of the Johnson administration is just down right scary. How any man could lead a nation such as the United States in such a foolhearty way, is unbelievable. According to Halberstam, Johnson didn't know which way was up, and like a fool, he could only fall down. And fall he did, like a drunk to a bar room floor.

The best part of the book is the in depth analysis of all the character's involved, and Halberstam pulls no punches. According to the generals, the South Vietnamese were cowards. Is that true? Or is it more likely that they were no more eager to kill their own country men than Union/Confederate soldiers were eager to kill their own countrymen? According to Halberstam Kennedy knew practically nothing about what was going on in South Vietnam, and worried continuously about what he was hearing. Is that true? All evidence as presented in the book, says it is. According to Halberstam, the entire war effort was no more than a sham put on by virtually everybody involved. Is that true? I am afraid that I believe that it is.

I highly recommend this book. I read the 20th Anniversary Edition, and I found it to be compelling and irressistable reading.

David Halberstam's "The Best And The Brightest" stands the test of time as a superbly readable account of how the United States involvement in Vietnam was transformed from a limited engagement into a major war that threatened to unravel not only the U.S. committment to the Cold War but also U.S. society itself. The Vietnam War experience continues to overshadow U.S. foreign policy to this day.

Completed in 1969, this now dated book is not the last word in scholarship on the subject, but it is an account of almost literary quality of a profound human tragedy in which bright and well-intentioned American public servants implemented poor policy by half-measures, not least as a result of the personalties of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Halberstam's account is exhausting if not exhaustive. With the good jouralist's gift for capturing the moment, Halberstam profiles the series of U.S. actors who as members of the Cold War foreign policy "establishment" misunderstood what was essentially a civil war in Vietnam as a showdown between communism and capitalism. The narrative is also an exploration of how the conflict with Communism framed and often warped policy choices outside Southeast Asia.

Looming over the narrative is the outsized figure of President Lyndon Johnson, driven by his need for power and control and a series of poor choices in both advisors and policy into a seemingly endless war. Halberstam illustrates how Johnson's dominant personality tended to smother legitimate doubts on Vietnam policy and avoid crucial honest discussions of ends versus means in the conflict.

This book is highly recommended to students of the era and for those looking for a cautionary tale on the limits of policy and policy-making.

The author tells us about the Vietnam War. This book is not about the battles or the people in the front lines, but about the people behind the war. Primarily he covers the American political actions that help create and expand the war. The book was completed in the early 1970s, so the war had not ended yet. The Pentagon Papers had been published, and the author uses them to good effect to solidify the understanding of the process put forth in the book.

There's a lot of good information in the book, with many short biographies of significant people in the decisions (as well as some with seemingly peripheral connections). While the general flow of the book is linear with respect to time, the continual interruption of the flow by the biographies (which go back and forth in time without regard to the general flow of the book) is somewhat annoying. The primary source for the book is a large number of interviews the author did with many of the people directly involved in the decisions.

If you enjoy books about politics, or the back office "whys" about how large enterprises come to pass, you will like this book.

Along with Michael Herr's "Dispatches" (the unsurpased grunt's-eye view of Vietnam) and Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History," "The Best and the Brightest" is one of the handful of truly essential works for people who want to understand American involvement in Vietnam.
Halberstam's focus is on the foreign policy-makers of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, "the best and brightest" thinkers who had come to Washington prominence in the optimistic flush of the New Frontier: Rhodes Scholar Dean Rusk; Ford Motors "whiz kid" ringleader and chief number-cruncher Robert McNamara; protean politician Lyndon Johnson. Halberstam shows, in devasting, nearly heart-wrenching detail, how bureaucratic duplicity, fear of political repurcussions, and plain old hubris conspired to set American foreign policy on its misguided course in southeast Asia.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Halberstam brilliantly details the good intentions of many of the key players and power brokers of the 60's, often through extneded biographical sketches. By broadening his sights, Halberstam doesn't lose focus, but instead lends an epic proportion to his work that previous comentators have noted--and to which Halberstam has returned in his later work, with somtimes less effecting results. The second or third time you hit one of these biographical stretches, you may think, oh no, not again; soon you'll be anticipating them with relish.
Halberstam briliantly orchestrates his material into an epic tragedy. The fact that he could see so clearly into the dark, cynical heart of high-level government decision-making from such an early vantage point (1972!) only makes his achievement that much more extraordinary. Probably the best book he's written, and surely the most important.

Definitive parable of hubris leading to apocalypse. Whiz kids from the ivy-league encounter a Big Texas Democrat as their new boss; tragedy ensues in a companion piece to Halberstam's earlier "The Making of a Quagmire" but which is wider in scope. Larded with mean detail, such as when LBJ enthuses to Sam Rayburn how brilliant all the new kids are, to which the paterfamilias of Congress replies that Lyndon might be right "but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once."

In my humble opinion this is the single best book I have ever read about the Vietnam War. David Halberstam spends much of the book giving biographical and psychological background about the key players in the decision making process. He gives insights into what "made them tick" and thereby makes clear why such learned, brilliant and experienced men made what were obvious, even at the time, to be unwise decisions. He explores the motivations which were often founded in pride, political or professional self interest, unwillingness to see reality, dishonesty and self delusion.

I found myself continually making comparisons to the more recent war in Iraq. The parallels are eerie. Santayana's warning about the dangers of failing to remember history were never more true.

The Best and the Brightest looks at the decision making process from World War II until 1972 when the book was published. I would also recommend, for those interested, Fredrik Logeval's "Choosing War" for a more in depth and current look at the critical 18 months from August 1963 to February 1965, when the fateful decision to escalate the war was made.

To reiterate and reinforce some others' comments: this is as fresh today as when it was written in 1972. If you could get this book in electronic form and just do a quick word substitute - "Rumsfeld" for "McNamara", "Powell" for "Rusk", "Bush" for "Johnson" and "Iraq" for "Vietnam" - incredibly, there is nothing else you would need to change in the book to understand - and believe - that it was written specifically about Iraq. Sadly, it clearly demonstrates that the US government - and the public that votes and gives power to this government - has learned absolutely nothing from the debacle of Vietnam. As is oft-said, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Read this book! It's a page turning tragi-comedy to see the mistakes of another 1960s generation now in Hi-Def TV every night during the21st Century Iraq war. See how the government propaganda and phraseology from Vietnam was repeated to the American public -literally verbatim - and a new generation swallowed it again. See how Rumsfeld resurrected the "body count" concept from Vietnam and used it again for Iraq. You won't believe how you were duped. If only the voting American public had read this book so they would all have recognized the lies that were put forth by the Bush administration as just retreads of the Johnson administration about Vietnam some 40 years earlier. Read this book! If you supported the Iraq war, then you should have the courage to read this book on Vietnam.

For a variety of reasons I thought it might be a good idea to pull my old copy of The Best and the Brightest from the bookshelf, dust it off and re-read it. A few things I had forgotten since reading this book in college. This is a big book, not only in length but also in breadth and scope, tracking U.S. foreign policy back to "losing" China to communism, the Korean Conflict, and the French Indo-China War -all leading to the first tentative steps of US involvement in Southeast Asia to finally the escalation of the 1960's. I was also surprised by the underlying contempt, (too strong a word?), the author had for the continuing set of decisions, (and decision makers), made to solve the Vietnam "problem" while only further compounding it. On my re-reading I was struck by the fact that many of the issues addressed in this book, (national security interests and intelligence, military technology, insurgency, imposed democracy, nationalism, leadership qualities) are still extremely relevant in today's world and in some cases still unresolved. This book was also a not so gentle reminder of what a capable journalist can synthesize during turbulent times.

Four and one-half stars...easy to see that although this book came out in 1972, it is the standard by which all other accounts of the Vietnam conflict are measured. I can only second some of the conclusions that other reviewers have (everything that really can be said about this book has been said...). The personal accounts of McNamara, Rusk, Bundy...etc are excellent and all encompassing. The chronology is relatively easy to follow, but Halberstam does get bogged down in details (it seemed to me) and that slowed the narrative down for me. I wholeheartedly agree with the reviewer who concluded that this book had this level of detail without the benefit of references and still tells the story authoritatively. It will take you a while to get through this, but it's worth it and you'll essentially just read re-hashes of this in most other Vietnam accounts. Highly recommended.

Brilliant work. I have always recommended this book to foreigners interested in American foreign policy. Halberstam, however, forgets one important point. The Vietnam War was a "liberal" war in the Wilsonian tradition of liberal internationalism. It was concerned with state building and "making the world safe for democracy." Halberstam instead explain the Democrats initial hawkish stance toward the war as a response to congressional Republican attacke on their party as being soft on communism. In truth, it was within the North American liberal internationalist tradition to enter Vietnam and fight the war as it was fought. From the strategic hamlets to "winning the hearts and minds" it clearly was a liberal war. Conservatives were traditionally isolationist, with a more liberal, eastern section (mentioned in the book) supportive of agressive internationalism. For more thoughts on this subject see "Promised Land, Crusader State" by Walter Macdougal.

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.

This is probably one of the most masterful non-fiction books written in America in the past thirty-five years. It is also the best book I have read on Washington power, with the possible exception of Hedrick Smith's "The Power Game".
What makes this book so distinctive is Halberstam's passion for his subject: The quagmire known as Vietnam. Rarely does one come across a writer who has not only a strong intellect, but a keen sensitivity and insight into the people who are portrayed in his pages.
Since I was born in 1963, the Vietnam War to me is just a vague memory of school classmates wearing POW/MIA bracelets on their wrists. Since I lived near a major air force base, some of the bracelets worn were of the children's own fathers and uncles. This book captures an era I knew nothing about. And it shows the truly sad confluence of stale policies, rigid mindsets, blind ambition, and cruel truths of history that came together in a little known country in Southeast Asia.

The title of Halberstam's book should clue the reader in to his focus. The Best and the Brightest's focus is on the the American Political and Military Leadership in the 1960's. The backdrop of the book is the Vietnam war and it is against this particularly tumultous backdrop that Halberstam weaves his story about the men of the American political establishment. This book should not really be counted as a history book, for the focus is less on the events than on the people who made the decisions which led to these events. Perhaps better classified as political science, the book is most valuable in providing an insight to the personalities, aspirations, fears and humanity of the leaders who are often presented in cardboard fashion by the news media.

In fact I would recommend against reading this book as a first primer on Vietnam. Halberstam leaps from place to place and he casually mentions events and names that the reader must be familiar with as to not be lost. However, once a solid understanding of the history is in place, Halberstam's book provides a deeper analysis of the decisions that led to the war. Often times, history describes what has happened, but rarely is the answer of why something happened answered or even approached. We all know that America became involved in Vietnam, but why? What were the policy makers thinking when they decided to escalate the war?

Halberstam's book is a insicive look at the operation and function of the government beauracracy that runs our nation. Behind the idealism, the proclaimations, the showy patriotism, lies men with the failings of frailties of each and everyone of us. The fear of rejection, the need to please a superior drove the decisions that led to Vietnam more than policy or strategy. It is scary to know and realize that in our day of computers, technology and trillion dollar defense budgets, that the decisions made on war and peace are still up to only a few men controled by the same human tendencies as the rest of us. Even the most rational man of the Kennedy era were not beyond human fears and hopes.

In summary, read this book not to understand the history of the Vietnam war, but to understand the America political system.

My favorite review of this book was by Mary McCarthy, a novelist who had visited both halves of the geopolitically split country now universally known as Vietnam, when American policy was a major reason for considering that country split in two. American interest in the story which Halberstam tells in this book will always be greater than anything that Mary McCarthy might tell us about what any of the Vietnamese thought. For me this book was my first glimpse at the explicit nature of the thinking at the top, which definitely trickled down to the Americans out in the field in Vietnam, though none of them may have used it in the presence of a great American novelist like Mary McCarthy, who possessed an elite, upper-crust quality which made her defense of her own thinking on the topic as easy to dismiss as the superfluous usually are. Like a perverse philosopher viewing the comedy of mayhem, she would like to know "to what end all these excited words were assembled, . . . studded, like a ham, with anecdotes and gossip about historic decisions and high-status personalities, syrupy with compassionate insights into the gamesmanship of power?" That would be like asking why I review books, and particularly, this one.

This is a truly excellent book on American policy making in Vietnam.

I first read it in 1973 or 1974. It blew my mind that 'the best and the brightest' could act as they did, whether from honest but gross misjudgments to outright lies, most often bound with incredible arrogance.

Some of the material is found in the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's own study of the war. Another reviewer commented that they had not yet been published, but Halberstam, ace that he was, apparently had access to them.

This book provided another, and large, nail in the coffin of my naive idealism of someone growing up in post WWII America (college, class of 1966) with respect to the US government.

I was totally absorbed when reading it. Halberstam does occasionally overuse some of his pet phrasings,e.g. 'rare ability'.

Among the many lessons of this great and wise book--a book that is all the more unsettling because of its wisdom--is that the timidity and indecisiveness in our planning for escalation in Vietnam reflected a recognition that the cause was neither just nor noble. No such qualm existed in WWII or the American Revolution, and that it did exist in the Vietnam war rooms and more recently in Iraq, where we again deployed forces too small to meet the unforeseen immensity of the task (sound familiar?), should have told the planners something about the wisdom of the war.

When faced with a decision to go to war, we should either go with absolutely everything we've got to ensure as swift and decisive a victory as possible or we should not go at all. While Curtis LeMay's military instincts were correct when he continually called for massive force as debate over the nature of the anticipated escalation ensued, he was wrong on 'Nam because the war was wrong. If any one golden rule is to be taken from this book and its disturbingly contemporary relevance, it is this: whenever there is reticence to deploy, it is because the cause is questionable, and when the cause is questionable, there should be no war.

The sad pattern Halberstam's book illuminates is this: when we screw up with the increasingly popular but inherently contradictory notion of "limited war"--a concept that is always doomed to failure and has not once succeeded in any conflict during or since Vietnam--it wounds the pride of very proud men, necessitating even more disastrous escalation when it is too late and on grounds that have become even more irrational. General Ridgway understood this as early as 1954, and General Taylor continued to advise this even as Westmoreland took command and hardly anyone was listening. There is a lot of talk about hurt pride in this book: France's hurt pride after it failed in its colonial exploits in 'Nam, Mac Bundy's hurt pride after the Vietcong bombed Pleiku, JFK's hurt pride after his first disastrous meeting with Khrushchev, encouraging Kennedy to seriously consider escalation in 'Nam just so that we would not look "weak". The saga of wounded pride went on and on, and took many lives with it along the way.

"These things, set in motion, were much harder to stop and turn around than anyone had imagined," Halberstam writes. It is a lesson we're learning all over again. This has nothing to do with whether one supports or abhors the war in Iraq; this is about the disturbing precision with which the ambiguity of the exit strategy in Iraq resembles the failures, naivete and arrogance that turned Vietnam into such an international shame. Many are convinced that Iraq has already become that kind of shame, but I prefer to refrain from such judgments here lest political diatribe distract from the significance of this book, which is its abundance of lessons from a recent and eerily similar episode in American history that we are still yet to learn. How long will it take?

The similarities are endless. How can one read Halberstam's conclusion that "the civilians were naive about what the military could accomplish" and not recall Cheney and Rumsfeld assuring audiences that Iraqis would greet us with flowers and homage of appreciation for liberating them? How can one read that "Hanoi would never capitulate, never negotiate in the face of bombing pressure" and not consider the unrelenting insurgency in Iraq that continues to kill American troops despite ongoing American military operations? (I am writing this review shortly after learning that 5 more Marines have died in Iraq within the past 24 hours). How can one read that the American military "tended to underestimate . . . the resilience and the political dynamic which fed the indigenous force they were fighting" without again considering that same insurgency?

Time and again in Halberstam's book we learn that what happened then is happening now: the military's infiltration of American media with false optimism that fails to accurately portray sobering realities, the arrogant belief in American might that blinded us to the ability and commitment of an unorganized and surreptitious insurgency, the Johnson administration's public preference for the phrase "victory strategy" that resurfaced in response to journalists who asked about an "exit strategy", the calculated drum beat of fear assuring the American people that a threatening political ideology will sweep across the globe if we do not act now in a country thousands of miles away, a country which, as Halberstam reports, was viewed as "a land with vital resources" in Washington at the time. The list of similarities is seemingly endless.

It is easier to hear that Vietnam was fought for all the wrong reasons and nod your head in agreement than it is to read it in this book, which confirms in often infuriating detail that many of the decisions that led to escalation in 'Nam were made out of political expediency with little regard for the human tragedy involved. Late in the book, Halberstam's "good example of how the Army system worked" portrays a "staff intuitively protecting the commander from things he didn't want to see and din't want to hear, never coming up with information which might challenge what a commander wanted to do at a given moment." Exactly the opposite ought to be true when thousands of lives are on the line, but "the best and the brightest" chose their egos and their careers over concerns for the families of strangers whose lives they willingly sacrificed for a cause that is as poorly defined today as it was in 1965. I've got a bridge in San Francisco to sell to anyone who denies that history is repeating itself right before our eyes.

[...]

This book is about the Vietnam war. But it is not just about Vietnam.

This is a book about the US political system and how it can be highjacked by a President wanting to do so. It shows how McCarthy made Washington scared of truth. And so started the delusions about China and then Vietnam. And the President could take the nation to war without sharing it with the Congress, Senate, and the people. This book is about how fragile the US presidential form of Government is, and how few checks and balance actually work.

This is also a book about careerists, blinded by success in the 'system', devoid of moral compasses. There are many in that era who had doubts. But they refused to sacrifice their careers for the sake of their doubts. This book shows how dangerous rationalists like McNamara and Bundy, the 'best and brightest' can be, if devoid of an anchor of values and ethics.

This is also a book about how narrow the US Government perspective was. Narrow in space where Vietnam was 'no match' to the superiority of American soldiers and technology. Narrow also in time where lessons from history were brushed aside.

This is also a book about lack of humility. It is full of 'can-do' characters full of optimism. And anyone who wants to think of contingencies is considered soft at best, at worst a traitor. Halberstam shows how lack of humility leads to final humiliation.

And finally, this book is about today, about another country in Asia. While reading this I almost felt that I was reading about the Iraq war. Doubtful basis for entry. Faith in limited, short term war, and then a tiger that is easy to mount but tough to get off. If we do not learn from History, we are doomed to repeat it. And we are doing it.

This may sound contradictory but: David writes with a beautiful, opinionated objectivity. He distills the pre-war accomplishments and connections of the elitist leftovers from the Kennedy administration with a remarkable deftness. He even flashes a rapier wit now and then.
Linguistically, Lyndon is the class clown, and David does well to step aside and let him speak his riotous argot for himself--talk about your potty-mouthed mover and shaker!
I love that Mr. Halberstam fearlessly calls a spade a spade, i.e. a moron a moron, no matter their stellar accomplishments or superhuman work ethic. The brothers Bundy are well revealed herein; as is the "MacBeth" of the Vietnam war: Robert McNamara.
David unspins the mountains of governmental hooey into fine threads of truth that he reweaves into a tale of unparalled hubris.
If you need to see how disconnected, how Strangelovian our military was, how absurdist the upper echelons of government were; from Dwight D. on--read this book.
It proves that for decades the lunatics were indeed in charge of that asylum called South Vietnam; they also ran the Pentagon, the Whitehouse and, very very much, the Department of State.
Step right up, folks! Buy this book! Read in awe as Mr. Dean Rusk does his uncanny impersonation of the Exxon Valdez.

"The Best and the Brightest"
By David Halberstam (1934-2007)
Reviewed by Philip Henry

David Halberstam survived wars, literal and figurative landmines, popular acclaim, political opponents and the Fifties and Vietnam. Ironically, after all of that he was killed in a car crash near San Francisco April 23, 2007. Characteristically, he was on his way to an interview for a new book.
Halberstam was one of the pioneers in Vietnam reporting (along with Neil Sheehan)--posted there several times in the `60's by The Times. His `The Making of a Quagmire " accurately forecast the course of an unwinnable war. "The Best and the Brightest" focused on the irony of well-qualified but ill-advised policy makers in a thicket of foreign policy.

Halberstam didn't confine himself to one area or one period: he was equally at home with major league baseball and high-level foreign policy debates. Like George Will, his ideological antithesis, he appreciated a good story, a good ballgame, and had an infallible nose for lies and evasion.

Halberstam received 20 Honorary degrees, spoke at many college commencements, and received the Pulitzer in 1964 at the age of 30 for his Vietnam reporting for the Times. Five of his 15 bestsellers have been about sports, and it reflects the breadth of his work and the public's response to it that both The Best and The Brightest and Summer of '49 (on an epic pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox), were #1 New York Times bestsellers.
If one were to replace "Vietnam" with "Iraq"; "President Lyndon Johnson" with "George Bush'; and Robert McNamara with Donald Rumsfeld, one would read exactly the same facts into the current fiasco in Iraq. If there is one book that all Presidents and Candidates should be required to read, it's "The Best and The Brightest." That would be Halberstam's greatest tribute.

In the 1970's, I was an enlisted man serving with American Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN). One of my assignments was to record and report on the daily briefings by MACOI ( Military Assistance Command Vietnam/ Office of Information) Briefers. The idea was to give the troops the Pablum from the Command; not the truth, which would have been counter-productive to the political objectives of the administration.
Thankfully, Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, George Esper (AP Saigon Bureau Chief);
John Laurence (CBS News) and others were there to refute the official line. David
Halberstam was a role model, a true professional, and an American Institution.
*I nominate Halberstam for the Baseball Writers' Hall of Fame. That would be appropriate.

*****

David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" is a mostly angry, but occasionally sympathetic book about the can-do activists of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. I think this is one of the best books written about the Vietnam War. If you read it today, you will think about Iraq and feel very sad.

In a way, this is a book in search of a hero and there was perhaps no one in the country with more power than Kennedy to influence the way Americans saw Vietnam and Communism. He had made a speech at American University where he asked Americans and Soviets alike to reexamine their attitude towards each other, but that kind of talk was rare, and it was a speech, Halberstam suggests, that would not have happened had Kennedy not proven his toughness during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy, of course had enormous doubts about Vietnam; they were based in large part on his reading of history and his own experiences. But those doubts existed during a time of unreal pressures. The culprit is the Korean War and the fall of China to Communism. The fall of China, in particular, would have a profound effect on the American people. It would spark a great debate about who had lost China, and while there was no consensus (some believed that China was never ours to lose and that those events were beyond our control), the State Department and the Democratic Party would take most of the blame. According to Halberstam, the result of all of this was devastating. From then on, U.S. Presidents would find themselves under enormous pressure to not lose any more countries.

"If there were problems", writes Halberstam "the Administration would somehow glide around them, letting time rather than political candor or courage do the healing. It was a belief that if there were scars from the period (and both the Democratic party and the Department of State were deeply scarred), they were by now secret scars, and if there were victims, they were invisible victims. If one looked away and did not talk about them, somehow they would go away. Yet the truth was altogether different: the scars and victims were real and the McCarthy period had frozen American policies on China and Asia. The Kennedy administration would in no way come to terms with the aberrations of those policies; it had not created them, as its advocates pointed out, but it did not undo them, either."

I had heard great things about this book, but after beginning my copy I wasn't sure what to think. The first few dozen pages are very slippery. The acts are dim, the messages subtle. Halberstam uses odd language here and there, slipping between hard-nosed reporting and glossy editorializing. The first act in the book revolves around a conversation that by itself seems only one of thousands at the national governing level, a chat that gently draws us into a cloudy and cloudier picture, which Halberstam to his credit clears for us page after page after page.

Halberstam gives us characterizations that clearly define the players we are dealing with. In so many instances it feels like we are back in 1960s America, speaking with the principals, knowing their psyches and professional backgrounds and the probable reasons for their decisions. A long book indeed, but lean, actually concise, painting a picture that never fails to amaze, puzzle and anger. Halberstam roots out the subtleties and sustains a very complicated chronology in a very readable text. Of all the sustained histories I have ever read, especially one in a single volume, this has to get my vote for one of America's best examples.

Nothing so brilliantly crystallized and clarified the epic true story of how the American people were led into the tragedy of Vietnam better than did this classic book by David Halberstam. Already famous for his journalistic overview in "The Making of a Quagmire", Halberstam riveted the nation with his absorbing, literate, and very detailed account of how the arrogant, insular, technocratically well educated, and affluent sons and daughters of the Power Elite in this country led us into the unholy miasma of Vietnam. This is a classic story superbly told by a journalist with impeccable credentials.

Halberstam already had a wealth of personal experience as a correspondent in Vietnam before initiating the research for this book, and he draws a number of fascinating, intimate, and quite absorbing in-depth portraits of the major figures involved in this fool's errand formerly referred to as French Indochina. From the feckless and perhaps clueless Robert McNamara to McGeorge Bundy, brother William Bundy, former Oxford Scholar Dean Rusk, George Ball, William Westmoreland, Maxwell Taylor, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, all these alumni of the best schools and best families (with the single exception of LBJ, an accidental president) pranced their pseudo-macho way toward the single most disastrous series of military decisions this side of Pearl Harbor.

Unlike those of us who actually saw the jungles of Vietnam up close and personal, these men were neither ignorant, nor provincial (at least not in the ordinary use of that term), nor poorly informed; rather, they both considered themselves and were considered by others to be the most outstanding, capable, and effective members of the contemporary "Power Elite" i.e. the best of the then contemporary ivy League graduates Kennedy could lure from the bastions of the academic, business, and corporate world into the magic and presumptuous world of Camelot. In essence, these guys were seen as the best and the brightest of their generation. Just how their elite educations, presumptuous world-views, and de-facto actual ignorance and lack of what we would now refer to as "street-smarts" led them to conclude it was in the nation's interests to fight what others have called "the wrong war in the wrong place with the wrong foes at the wrong time" is an epic tale of arrogance, insular thinking, and mutually sustained delusions.

Through their efforts they embroiled us in an unwinnable war, a conflict that the rest of us paid so dearly for in blood, sweat and tears. They led a nation then so singularly blessed with affluence and peace into a bottomless cauldron of dissent, inter-generational strife, and almost pitched us off the precipice of social and political revolution. It is important to better understand what kind of men they were, and why they led us so carelessly into such sustained disaster. Why did they react to defeats by escalating, even when the evidence clearly indicated (as McNamara has recently admitted) doing so was futile? Who led whom down the primrose path in the meetings in which these decisions were repeatedly argued, hammered out and finally refined?

All these questions and many more are answered in this wonderfully documented and exhaustively detailed account of how it is that so few individuals engaged in a series of such disastrous policy decisions that led America into the quagmire of Vietnam. By the way, after carefully re-reading the book I am more convinced than ever that McNamara and Westmoreland (among others) should be indicted and tried as war criminals. Let them spend their dotage in federal prison. After all, there is no statute of limitations on conspiracy to commit murder, and I have dozens of friends gone too soon based on nothing more than the deliberately callous and reckless decisions made by these men as outlined in this book. I highly recommend it.

While a little dry sometimes this is Halberstam's definitive book. It really shows how the years of McCarthyism leading up to Kennedy's administration led to many terrible decisions about supporting Diem and trying to not look weak to the Russians. After the fiasco that was the Bay of Pigs Kennedy became even more determined to show strength. However the first tragedy among many was the assasination which while horrible in itself also came at a critical time in the course of the Vietnam policy. Halberstam theorizes that Kennedy was nearly ready to pull the plug on Vietnam when he died. Well written, incredibly well researched and an important book.

The book--revelatory and shattering in its day--about how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations led the US into war in Vietnam, step by step. On the slow, seductive sinking into a war commitment, there's nothing here I hadn't already learned from Karnow's "Vietnam: a history" or Tuchman's "March of Folly"--but then, Halberstam's book came first, my bad for getting to him late. But then, Halberstam was writing *journalism* while Karnow and Tuchman were writing *history*--this book is the *stuff* of history, the raw material, not a history book in itself. (Also, connected with his book being first, he stops at 1968 and gives a mere cursory postscript to the whole Nixon phase of the war.) What was new and different to me here was the tremendous influence of domestic politics in the decision-making process: aftereffects of McCarthyism, fear of Republican backlash, balancing with domestic agendas. That stuff wasn't covered in those other sources.

I find Halberstam's writing style too annoying, too easy to parody (he has a real penchant for parenthetical phrases. Long parenthetical phrases--several sentences, sometimes paragraphs, long--with the period of the preceding sentence following the closing parenthesis). Also, he includes much more personal information about the protagonists than seems relevant 36 years later, beyond "journalism" to the level of gossip.

But back on the good side, reading the book these days suggests strong parallels with the way the Bush administration got the country into war in Iraq. The mindsets were very different, but so much else is so familiar: the tensions and distrust between State and Defence, the overconfident reliance on air power, the refusal to listen to (or even to tolerate) dissent or doubt, the paranoia about the press, the haunting fears of past mistakes. So, relevant enough reading to partly compensate for the bad writing.

The Best and the Brightest has been the most illuminating and trenchant work I've found yet on American political and foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s. For those people, like me, who were too young to have grown up during the period, it provides a thrilling narrative of the events and the people of that time. Although based on meticulous journalistic effort, the book reads more like a political thriller novel - with the catch that it is all true, that every twist and turn actually happened in our government. Most importantly, it shows clearly how the history of the 1940s and 1950s was so critical to decisions made in the 1960s; the accompanying implication that the history of the last 50 years matters enormously to our current policy-makers should not be lost on anyone. Read it for the wisdom that ultimately arises from failure, for the history of a great nation wrestling with its own hubris, and for the lessons it so clearly has for us in the present and in the future - read it.

This profoundly dishonest book remains a must-read for students of the Vietnam War and American politics because of its widespread and continuing influence. Halberstam's basic thesis is (1) that Republicans in the McCarthy Era purged the State Department of people who understood Asia, and frightened the Democratic Party into supporting mindless anti-Communist politics in the U.S., (2) when the Kennedy Administration came to power, brutal incompetents in the military, abetted by a gutted State Department, somehow hi-jacked the Vietnam process from underneath Kennedy and McNamara's noses, and (3) succeeded, with the connivance of dim-witted or cravenly career-oriented Ambassadors, Generals, and mostly Republican hotheads lamentably brought into the Kennedy Administration, in escalating the U.S. into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.
The overt moral of "The Best and the Brightest", underlined by its clever title, is that the supposed rationalists and pragmatists of the Kennedy Administration were too clever by half in their belief that they could co-exist with the military and Cold Warrior Republicans, who ultimately bent them to their will and forced the U.S. into the Vietnam War.
Just one example of how preposterously distorted Halberstam's thesis is: Robert A. Lovett, who Halberstam portrays as an old-fashioned, courtly Democrat who was elbowed out of the way by Kennedy and his team of hard-charging pragmatists eager to appease the Republicans, was in fact the biggest support of Curtis Lemay during World War II, when LeMay pioneered the horrifically deadly fire-bombing strategy which killed more Japanese civilians than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Lovett fits right in with the Democratic establishment that blundered and deceived its way in to the fiasco of the Vietnam War, he was just a generation older than Kennedy and his guys.
Halberstam's attempt to stick Republicans with the blame for the Vietnam War is pretty thin gruel, disguised with lots of hearty chunks of chewy anecdotes produced by Halberstam's brilliant reporting. It's his over-arching thesis that is flawed. Today, it is clear that it was not the military but the civilians in the Kennedy Administration who were the bullies--willing to sick the U.S. Army onto the Vietnamese, willing to encourage the assassination of President Diem of South Vietnam, willing to do whatever it took to physically intimidate and kill any Vietnamese who got in their way. America now knows all too well that you don't call the military into a political or social situation until it is time to fight. Ironically, the major breaches of this doctrine have been under the Clinton Administration. Halberstam's account of the most politically motivated and controlled war the U.S. has ever fought brilliantly inverts the Vietnam War into a war caused by Republican and military control of a Democratic Administration. It is a fine, scintillitating performance by Halberstam, but it isn't history.
Halberstam and the many similar Vietnam era war correspondents never seem to be able to reconcile the fact that much of their information came from majors, LTCs, Colonels, and even the odd Brigadier General with their thesis that the War was the fault of the military, not two Democratic administrations in a row. The real issue with the military, which is now being examined, is how physically courageous 4 star Generals were so morally craven that they did not speak out or resign when their political masters gave them orders that they new to be fatally flawed strategically, and unconscionable morally.
Highlights of the book include much fine reporting and interesting Kennedy and Johnson-era gossip on figures in the establishment, a blizzard of details that disguises the mendacity and special pleading of the book's over-arching thesis. Finally, one reads the book and recalls the dictum that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The parallels between the Kennedy Administration and the Clinton Administration are astounding.

As the current Bush Administration-directed quagmire continues in Iraq it is rather timely to look at a previous bout of American imperialist madness in Vietnam if only in order to demonstrate the similar mindsets, then and now, of the American political establishment and their hangers-on. This book, unintentionally I am sure, is a prima facie argument, against those who see Iraq (or saw Vietnam) as merely an erroneous policy of the American government that can be `fixed' by a change to a more rational imperialist policy guided by a different elite. Undeniably there are many differences between the current war and the struggle in Vietnam. Not the least of which is that in Vietnam there was a Communist-led insurgency that leftists throughout the world could identify with and were duty-bound to support.

Mr. Halberstam's well-informed study of the long history of struggle in Vietnam against outsiders, near and far, is a more than adequate primer about the history and the political issues, from the American side at least, as they came to a head in Vietnam in the early 1960's. This book is the work of a long time journalist who covered Southeast Asia from close quarters. Although over thirty years have passed since the book's publication it appears to me that he has covered all the essential elements of the dispute as well as the wrangling, again mainly on the American side , of policy makers big and small. While everyone should look at more recent material that material appears to me to be essentially more specialized analysis of the general themes presented in Halberstam's book. Or are the inevitably self-serving memoirs by those, like former Secretary of War Robert McNamara, looking to refurbish they images for the historical record.

The bulk of the book and the central story line is a study of the hubris of American imperialist policy-makers in attempting to define their powers, prerogatives and interests in the post-World War II period. The sub-text of the book, which the current inhabitants of the Bush Administration obviously have not read and in any case would willfully misunderstand, is how not to subordinate primary interests to momentary secondary interests in the scramble to preserve the Empire. Be clear that Halberstam was no vocal opponent of the war but rather sought to see it successfully completed by a more rational approach. However, apparently, commonsense and simple rationality are in short supply when one goes inside the Washington Beltway. Taking into account the differences in personality among the three main villains of the piece- Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon- the similarities of response and need to defend some sense of honor, American honor, are amazingly similar, individual rhetoric aside. There thus can be little wonder that the North Vietnamese went about their business of revolution and independence pretty much according to their plans and with little regard to the `subtleties' in American foreign policy (or military doctrine, for that matter). But, read the book and judge for yourselves. Do not be surprised if something feels awfully, awfully familiar.

June, 1969, I arrive in Bangkok, Thailand for a 9 month TOD at
Ramasun Station---a small, high tech ASA listening post.

Barhopping in Bangkok that night before I'm to be flown to
my duty station in NE Thailand I come across some happy
Orientals who invite me to their table.

Turns out the 'Happy Orientals' say they're NVA and VC
and are taking a well deserved vacation from war.???

We talk and drink and have a good time.

One of the younger 'VC' says: "You good Joe. We friends
in Bangkok. Why not be friends in Vietnam? Stop war.
Do business. Have fun. Make love, not war."

"You not going to win in Vietnam. You take village,
then you leave, we come back, you take village, you
leave...Unless you stay in village, you going to lose.
Why your leaders make you do this?" said another older
'VC'.

Since I had a 'TOP SECRET' clearance, I reported my
conversations to my superiors before I was to leave
for Ramasun.

'Ho hum' was the attitude of the debriefing officer.
He wouldn't even let me write down my experience.???

Was this a test? Or was this so common that more
data was just extra icing.

Anyway, after 9 months in Thailand, talking with locals,
talking with fellow troopies who'd been in Vietnam,
most of us came to the conclusion that we were losing
tactically and strategically and the best thing to do
was to let Vietnam be free before more US troops were
killed in a Vietnamese War of Independence because
the longer we were there, the bigger the bloodbath
as the new nation would stabilize.

We Intel Grunts often wondered if the real 'hot poop' got to our
leaders. Reading the Pentagon Papers and Best and Brightest
tell me that they were getting the straight dope from the
field; but, just couldn't believe it and progressed with
the war as if the Vietnamese were Americans and that
we were doing God's work to stop Godless Communism, etc...

I was disgusted then and got out of the Army in 1970.
I am disgusted now that our Fearless Leaders like Bush and
friends and our moronic tactics in Iraq.

The similarities to our Vietnam are eerie.

We can have victory over the Islamic fanatics that makes
the US strong, uses fewer lives of our young, etc...but,
our leaders aren't listening.

Good read. Just solidifies my longtime beliefs.

Bill Bryan

Excellent book covering all the personalties of Presidential staff members and advisers during the Vietnam era. Helps explain reasons for the errors in judgement that resulted in mismanagement of the Vietnam War.

I found this book, simply, to be a fantastic read. It represents the antithesis of today's instant news - instant analysis world. The people, places, thoughts and finally decisions made are completely fleshed out. Most importantly, the book shows how the key players were influenced by their times (Korea,China,McArthy,etc.) and how their decisions influenced an entire country and its people.

This book ranks as one of the best I have read. David deserves every accolade for painting charcters so rich and complex in such vivid detail you almost feel like you are family. The way these people found themselves driving USA to a war that was doomed to fail reminds the reader technology may change but human qualities are eternal (Hello Iraq, Afpak, Iran?) and it is this HUMAN angle David has examined in such loving detail using great prose.
This book is not a beachside read but I personally feel every student of Business and maybe the Military should read this book before assuming a big role.

Buy the book.

This is a well written epic that chronicles in great detail the American decision to go to war in S.E. Asia. One thing that strikes me is that this is a non-partisan work which is refereshing given the recent series of books (left and right)on Iraq. I have read about 20 books on the subject of Vietnam and this is by far the best.

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 the store 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 the store 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.

p.s. Covering a Halberstam article on my blog [...] reminded me of this review. I wanted to add that David Halberstam passed away on April 23, 2007. We have lost one of the great writers and reports of the post-War era. RIP.

This is a wonderful and scary book. It is wonderful because Halberstam writes thoroughly and with great prose. It is scary because I could see myself making the same decisions with the same data as many in the Johnson administration.

Despite the logorrhea, the fragments, the absolute structures, and the never-ending repetition, this book is worthwhile as the explication of a man who surrounded himself with sycophants. Americans, in general, paid a high price.

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.

I wasn't a great fan of Mr. Halberstam's reporting from Vietnam. It seemed to be at the time to be more than a little biased. Perhaps that put the idea into my head, but when I read this book it seemed in part to be an effort to justify the anti-war bias that marred his work as a reporter--a retroactive proof of his own superior judgment--rather than groundbreaking history

This is a wonderful study of the dreadful people who committed the crime of aggression against Vietnam. It shows how they fooled themselves, and others too, that theirs was some noble mission, to save other nations from communism. In fact, it was a crime, resulting in the killing of three million innocent Vietnamese, who were killed trying to save their country from a savage, unjustified and illegal assault. So, not the best, nor the brightest.

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!

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.

Have enjoyed later books by author and enjoyed them immensely. Historical perspective from this book was excellent, but, I found it tremendously laborious to read. Author went into overabundant detail in what I thought were insignificant areas. Just one man's opinion.

I know that this will appear to be a strange review, since I bought the book but refused to read it. I have read three other books on the Vietnam War and was looking forward to reading Halberstam's version of it, since he's such a good writer.

Recent books about Vietnam have access to documents not previously available to writers. Now, with a more factual rendering of the Vietnam War, it is easier to understand what was going on during that time. One of the things I learned was that David Halberstam, a reporter for the NY Times during the Diem period, was one of the contributors to the mess we called the Vietnam quagmire.

His reporting was far from objective, and he painted such a distorted picture of Diem because of his personal dislike of the man, that it helped in the November removal/murder of Diem. After that event, the war went downhill, and eventually US troops were injected into the war.

Basically, it seems that Halberstam was part of the problem to the point that the NY Times was going to remove him from Vietnam until Kennedy requested the removal. The Times refused, then, not wanting to appear to do something forced on them by the President.

So, why can't I read the book? If Halberstam was not objective during the war, how can I expect him to be objective after the war. He's not going to tell us how wrong he was about removing Diem, etc., and how he misreported battle results to make Diem look bad. Now available North Vietnam/Communist documents disprove most of Halberstam's battle assessments. They freely admitted to themselves that Diem's military was beating them, and that Diem was a strong President who they, the Communists, would like to see gone. Unfortunately, the US Gov't helped do that for North Vietnam...and Halberstam was one of the reporters who helped in that process. Check out President Kennedy's remarks about Halberstam if you don't believe me.

That is why I can't read his book. If anyone has read the book, agrees with my assessment, but says that Halberstam admitted his mistakes, please let me know. I'll read the book then and only then.

In my humble opinion this is the single best book I have ever read about the Vietnam War. David Halberstam spends much of the book giving biographical and psychological background about the key players in the decision making process. He gives insights into what "made them tick" and thereby makes clear why such learned, brilliant and experienced men made what were obvious, even at the time, to be unwise decisions. He explores the motivations which were often founded in pride, political or professional self interest, unwillingness to see reality, dishonesty and self delusion.

I found myself continually making comparisons to the more recent war in Iraq. The parallels are eerie. Santayana's warning about the dangers of failing to remember history were never more true.

The Best and the Brightest looks at the decision making process from World War II until 1972 when the book was published. I would also recommend, for those interested, Fredrik Logeval's "Choosing War" for a more in depth and current look at the critical 18 months from August 1963 to February 1965, when the fateful decision to escalate the war was made.