The Best and the Brightest the Best and the Brightest

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The Best and the Brightest the Best and the Brightest

4.25 of 5 stars 4.25 · rating details · 3,576 ratings · 173 reviews

David Halberstam's masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.
Using portraits of America's flawedpolicy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country's recent history: Why didAmerica become mi...more

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Published March 26th 2002 by Modern Library (first published 1969)

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Dec 14, 2008 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more 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.(less)

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Jul 13, 2012 judy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction

Recently Colin Powell answered a NYT book review question by saying that this book is the one he would require President Obama to read . I read Halberstam's master work decades ago--loved it--own it--in hardback no less. However,I couldn't quite pinpoint why Powell thought Obama should read it, so I had no choice but to read it again (joy). Yes, it is a war book (Vietnam) but far more than that it's a fascinating character study of how the flaws of the top people in government got us into Vietna...more Recently Colin Powell answered a NYT book review question by saying that this book is the one he would require President Obama to read . I read Halberstam's master work decades ago--loved it--own it--in hardback no less. However,I couldn't quite pinpoint why Powell thought Obama should read it, so I had no choice but to read it again (joy). Yes, it is a war book (Vietnam) but far more than that it's a fascinating character study of how the flaws of the top people in government got us into Vietnam and kept us there. I confess I'm still not sure what Powell would expect Obama to get out of it but I can take a guess. The book starts with Kennedy's election and how he staffed his administration with "the best and the brightest" men of the time. Their credentials were impeccable but Kennedy had a private definition of that phrase that went beyond demonstrated brilliance. To be on the Kennedy team, you had to be pragmatic, logical and never allow emotions to cloud thinking. The public John Kennedy was an inspiring speaker, just like our current President. On the stump, both connected with people on an gut level. Both were able to elicit from voters an emotional response--the belief that almost anything was possible. In private, Kennedy and his men mocked colleagues who were motivated primarily by idealism or ideology. Their answer to making America great was to approach everything with personal detachment and analyze the situation from a purely pragmatic standpoint. Only minds such as theirs were capable of reaching the right conclusion. They had no use for advice based on previous experience. The past wasn't prologue--it was a waste of time. Arrogance and ego ran rampant. I don't know about the people surrounding Obama but long before the election I was positive that, regardless of the stirring rhetoric, this man functioned from a purely pragmatic base. I think what Powell hoped the President would learn is that pragmatism uncoupled from humanism is a blueprint for failure.
Powell put it more simply in the only other line attributed to him by the NYT. "People-its all about people."(less)

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Aug 08, 2012 Aaron Arnold rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, politics, favorites, read-in-2012, war, biography

The main question about World War 1 that Barbara Tuchmann's seminal The Guns of August was trying to answer was "How did this happen?" How did all these complacent European countries, many of whose leaders were related, with no clear reason to go to war, and with uncounted amounts of wealth in trade and prosperity at stake, end up sending millions of their youth to die in the mud over marginal amounts of land that they didn't even really want? Tuchmann identified a number of cognitive errors tha...more The main question about World War 1 that Barbara Tuchmann's seminal The Guns of August was trying to answer was "How did this happen?" How did all these complacent European countries, many of whose leaders were related, with no clear reason to go to war, and with uncounted amounts of wealth in trade and prosperity at stake, end up sending millions of their youth to die in the mud over marginal amounts of land that they didn't even really want? Tuchmann identified a number of cognitive errors that clouded the minds of the people in charge: overconfidence in their own military prowess, fear of looking weak to domestic constituencies, excessive influence of war hawks in decision making, excessive bureaucratic infighting, the elevation of political considerations over military realities, disregard for negative feedback, and perhaps most crucially, a failure to understand how small moves could irrevocably commit nations to much larger future moves, with much greater consequences than originally anticipated. Being a well-read and perceptive intellectual, John F Kennedy was well aware of Tuchmann's insights, and, after being humbled by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, successful used them to avert nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, in one of those little ironies of history, he was completely unable to avoid following a similar path of small but irreversible escalations in Vietnam, until the full-on war he had been trying to avoid eventually trapped his successors and millions of people in the senseless slaughter of the Vietnam War.

I think Halberstam's book is easily as perceptive, in broad terms, as Tuchmann's classic. Tuchmann is only cited once, briefly, but even though this book, written in 1972, had a much closer vantage point to its still-active subject than The Guns of August, and hence is closer to unusually detailed and eloquent journalism than a straight-up history, Halberstam observes and recounts all the same organizational pathologies that plagued the French General Staff and the Prussian High Command that were still present in the American political and military leadership. One thing above all that this book does, alluded to in its title, is shatter the illusion that the only thing you need to face big problems is to acquire smart people. There are endless sections chronicling the brilliance and acuity of people like Robert McNamara, who could revolutionize vast domains like the auto industry, but were unable to figure out how to get themselves out of the Vietnam trap or even to make anything close to progress in any direction. Even lesser characters, like the legions of assistant deputy sub-under-secretaries who seem to be pretty bright fellows, managed closely and carefully by a White House that rewarded and encouraged cleverness, spend vast quantities of their page time engaged in self-destructive internecine struggles about whether to report bad news and how much, while the country whose destiny they were trying to determine slowly slipped out of their grasp. Men who had gone to the best schools, who had racked up acclaimed careers in industry or finance or the military, who had smoothly ascended through the toughest jungles of the American elite, were unable to conjure a victory against one of the smallest, weakest, and poorest countries in the world.

The struggles of these dramatis personae are told through extended profiles, which are the major highlights of the book due to their length and detail. Halberstam delves deeply into the life stories of all-but-forgotten figures like Averell Harriman, Dean Rusk, or Dean Acheson to show, over and over again, the truth of Yeats' lines about how "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity". It's impossible to overstate the role that McCarthyism specifically, and anti-Communism generally, played in leading the US to the war. People who accurately reported or expressed pessimism about the escalation into war in bother the White House and the military were repeatedly and systematically shunted aside, transferred to worse jobs, or rendered helpless by accusations of being "soft on Communism". For the men whose careers had spanned even "successful" wars like Korea, the traumas of witch hunting made it impossible to back down, like poker players who through pride or fear simply can't fold and cut their losses. And so as the stakes kept getting raised, hawkishness became the only permissible philosophy in the Cabinet throughout both Kennedy's "team of rivals" management style and Johnson's "my way or the highway" style, the war simply got more and more intense with its own peculiar self-reinforcing logic, and each man found himself a prisoner of events beyond his control. All the major players had big incentives to escalate and act tough; no one's career was helped by caution and disagreement. In fairness to Kennedy, book clearly lays out the Truman and Eisenhower-era roots of America's involvement in Vietnam, but as he makes clear, only during the Kennedy era did the Vietnam "conflict", "brush fire", or "quagmire" really start to become a war that we couldn't back out of, despite how smart all of these guys were.

Of course, even to this day, it's somewhat of an open question of which President is most to "blame" for the Vietnam War, depending on which part you're talking about and how you define "blame". Truman, for his inaction when the French were trying to regain control of their colonial empire and he was too distracted with the Korean War? Eisenhower, for his belief that the fight against the Soviets and the Chinese was more important than the Vietnamese desire for self-determination, and who allowed McCarthyism to poison vital parts of the government? Kennedy, for his refusal to look weak on Communism after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, the creation of the team who would oversee Vietnam's transformation into chaos, and for his timidity in taking a real stand one way or the other during crucial years of escalation? Johnson, who, unbriefed, unprepared, and unsure after Kennedy's assassination, publicly vowed that he wouldn't "lose" Vietnam the way that China had been "lost", and thought that if he just had a bit more time and money and men, he could make the issue go away with overwhelming force, salvaging his Great Society? Nixon, who, though his involvement came very late, still managed to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations with his "secret plan"? With the hindsight of 40 years after the book was written, it's clear that the problem went beyond any particular President, both because our goals were unclear, and because in a sense, the tools of government that each man used did not really belong to him. At one point, Vietnam genuinely was a tiny, unimportant country whose wishes could be safely ignored, but even with one of the greatest assemblies of talent the country had ever seen, the problem that they were trying to "solve" by propping up dictators, calculating meaningless body count statistics, and suppressing all dissent, was simply beyond their understanding.

Ho Chi Minh is frequently compared to George Washington; one wonders after reading this book if King George III had his own "best and brightest" ministers who advised analogous strategies like shelling Boston, propping up a puppet government in Georgia, rounding up colonists and settling them into "strategic plantations", or simply sending more and more redcoats. The profile of Lyndon Johnson in particular really brings home the weakness of the "imperial" style of government, as Arthur Schlesinger termed it, especially when not just Johnson but the country lost as the Great Society was upstaged by the war; Halberstam is nearly equal to Robert Caro in his ability to bring forth the drama in a man's soul and connect it to the larger currents of history. His account also prompts the modern reader to silently consider the many parallels to the way the Iraq War was promoted and managed, and its similar effects on the world. I don't know if all wars have their beginnings in the exact same kind of group stupidity recounted here, but if more governments read books like this, the world would certainly be a better place. I feel that this work, in some sense a Greek tragedy, is essential to understanding the Sixties, its war, and its place in our world.(less)

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Dec 17, 2009 John rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A wonderfully written and engaging history of the war in Vietnam from its origins in the 1940s until 1970.

I have read this book and three other histories (Fitzgerald, Sheehan and Mann) over the last month, and the story is remarkably consistent: the unshakable, implacable arrogance and the impenetrable, willful ignorance of civilian politicans and bureaucrats over the period, as well as the malfeasance of the US military, i.e. institutional loyalities, personal vanities and careerism of top bra...more

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Aug 01, 2011 James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The torch was indeed passed-passed from one generation of the wealthy elite to the next.

The book is infinitely enjoyable to a political history junkie like myself. It's impressive in it's coverage of a lot of the most interesting political moments of that time. Sadly, it also helped to drive home a cynical reality I've been avoiding for over twenty years and, for that, I am not grateful. While reading this book current political events compelled me to finally give in to the reality of politics...more The torch was indeed passed-passed from one generation of the wealthy elite to the next.

The book is infinitely enjoyable to a political history junkie like myself. It's impressive in it's coverage of a lot of the most interesting political moments of that time. Sadly, it also helped to drive home a cynical reality I've been avoiding for over twenty years and, for that, I am not grateful. While reading this book current political events compelled me to finally give in to the reality of politics in America which is that, unless you're one of the people from a background similar to the "best and the brightest" reported on in this book, your impact on politics is minimal if indeed you make any impact at all. What I took away from the book was a feeling of cynical remorse for what might have been, for how our political mistakes as a people seem to have taken such a dramatic turn during and after this time period but, also, a feeling that the American public bought into a myth, an idea that seems to have never really existed. The best and the brightest who manned our halls of government were from the same moneyed, upper class, aristocratic families of those who man our halls of government today. The myth, however, was that these then were somehow truly different, that they, as the best and the brightest, heeded what the American public wanted. All we had to do was stay involved. Write our congressmen, our presidents, and keep working. The best and the brightest would act in our best interest and, we assumed, in the world's. We had faith in our government and trusted it. This myth still pervades the politically engaged today. With the internet's vast resources, we get constant information on what our government seems to be doing. We think we are in the halls ourselves. We feel like our leaders are listening to us, that they're reading our comments, our blogs, our status updates and our tweets. They are not. They represent those who helped hoist them into their positions for us to consider them among the best and the brightest.(less)

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Nov 28, 2008 Renee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A big ole nonfiction book that explains the background behind American involvement in Vietnam. It also gave me a new insight into how decisions are made in Washington by walking you through all the people that were influencing JFK during his presidency. It helped me understand more about the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq.

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Sep 15, 2012 Brian rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-history-post-ww2-to-reagan

The Best and the Brightest is one of Halberstam’s most remembered works and explores how one of the most intelligent cabinet and advisers in the history of the Presidency was able to become embroiled in a conflict in Vietnam that so many knew was a bad idea. Was it a case of eggheads looking past the obvious and trying to show intellectual superiority, was it a case of following numbers even when they did not make sense from a logical standpoint despite what the chart says? It is this and much m...more

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May 13, 2012 Rick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest describes America’s inexorable drift into war in Southeast Asia. Reviewing the political players in Washington DC during the slide, Halberstam begins with a focus on the Kennedy years and how JFK emerged on a promise of change after years of disappointment in leadership … much like Barack Obama would come forward 50 years later. The key for JFK, and eventually Lyndon Baines Johnson, was the people he surrounded himself with — the titled The Best and the Br...more

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Feb 26, 2011 Troy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Put this on the wish list after reading Halberstam's "Coldest Winter", a book which I enjoyed very much, and which taught me a lot.

This one was also very insightful, and like Coldest Winter is focused on the political climate, the people at the top, the psychology of international politics as it boiled down to a personal level for the leaders involved. It's not a history of the Vietnam War, so much as it is a history of the Vietnam White House - through two administrations - the Pentagon, and Wa...more Put this on the wish list after reading Halberstam's "Coldest Winter", a book which I enjoyed very much, and which taught me a lot.

This one was also very insightful, and like Coldest Winter is focused on the political climate, the people at the top, the psychology of international politics as it boiled down to a personal level for the leaders involved. It's not a history of the Vietnam War, so much as it is a history of the Vietnam White House - through two administrations - the Pentagon, and Washington, DC as a whole. I learned a lot about Kennedy and LBJ, and for that, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

The only reason I didn't rate it as highly as Halberstam's Korea work - Best and the Brightest was written 25-ish years ago, when the where's and why's of Vietnam were both very close and very familiar to the public mind. It has held up well over the years as far as being a documentary of the decisions and the people that made them, BUT, it tends to make some assumptions of familiarity that may have been valid at the time of its writing, but not so much now, or to me, having been born in 1972 and viewing the War through the filter and bitter memories of those who lived it more personally. Halberstam would often try to make a point about someone's personality and decision making process by jumping back and forth through time to illustrative events. This wasn't so bad - but when those events were mentioned in passing as things the typical reader should have been familiar with (but I'm not), I felt like I was missing something. (For example, paraphrasing, while discussing very early events in 1961 - "Years later, after Macnamara had been forced to deal with the attacks on Phet Lam and failure of the XYZ campaign, he would admit that....") For someone who didn't know (yet) about Phet Lam (which I've made up in this example, BTW) or the XYZ campaign, the revelation they would have caused to Macnamara just weren't as clear to me...

For all that - very well written, very educational, I still very much enjoyed it! 4 stars!(less)

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Apr 24, 2010 A.J. Howard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2010, history

At the very end of his long and thorough work, The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam comments that "the trap was set long before anyone realized it was a trap." This phrase adequately summarizes the main theme of the work. This book isn't designed to give you an understanding of the war in Vietnam. Instead, its an account of extremely decent, brilliant, and well-qualified men slipped into a trap, and how their struggles to break free of this trap only got them more firmly stuck.

My only ot...more

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Mar 28, 2013 Aaron rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Outstanding book, as is anything that I have read by Halberstam. He was such a gifted reporter and writer, able to flesh out the often conflicting motives in people and describe how their personalities significantly impacted policy decisions. Halberstam does focus on personalities as far as history goes - believing that peoples' beliefs, concerns, fears, flaws, and strengths had much more impact on events than the reverse. I recently read "War in a Time of Peace" which definitely seemed like it...more Outstanding book, as is anything that I have read by Halberstam. He was such a gifted reporter and writer, able to flesh out the often conflicting motives in people and describe how their personalities significantly impacted policy decisions. Halberstam does focus on personalities as far as history goes - believing that peoples' beliefs, concerns, fears, flaws, and strengths had much more impact on events than the reverse. I recently read "War in a Time of Peace" which definitely seemed like it was patterned off of this book. Both books are remarkably similar although they deal with different time periods and people.

This book concerns the massive bungling, ineptitude, hubris, and poor policy planning during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations that led to the U.S. getting irrevocably entangled in Vietnam. Halberstam gives a mini-biography of all of the major players, and does a good job of adding background to the story by showing how the conflict started, what the U.S. did/did not do back in the 1940s and 1950s when France was still trying to retain colonial control. He also talks about the Eisenhower/John Foster Dulles foreign policy of the 1950s, and how some aspects of that were a reaction to the Truman Administration's supposed "loss" of China.

It is somewhat disturbing to read how doves were treated then, how they were ostracized, reassigned, shoved aside, or thrown out of government for voicing dissent or - in some cases - not even dissent but rather an alternative viewpoint that did not mesh with the propaganda that some people in the military and the administrations were trying to sell. There were so many culprits who had their hands all over the escalation policy and the lies that were sold to the American people and the Congress: McNamara, Rusk, Johnson, Nolting, Taylor, Rostow, Bundy, Westmoreland. It is amazing how all of these people kept deluding themselves into thinking that the U.S. could just overpower the Vietcong and be seen as heroes throughout most of the world, all the while never taking seriously exactly who the enemy was and what it was capable of doing. They did not seem capable of viewing things from anything other than a United States-is-superior manner. It is so unfortunate that thousands of American servicemen died due to this overconfidence and arrogance. It seems eerily similar to what occurred in Iraq over the past decade. (less)

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Nov 14, 2011 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, history, politics, american-history, vietnam-war

Halberstam's books are always a great read - the man knew how to tell a story with enviable economy, liveliness and clarity. I went into this partly to fill in my knowledge of the Kennedy years as a supplement to reading Caro's LBJ trilogy, and didn't completely realize that this is a full-blown history of the Vietnam conflict from the American side. I also wasn't prepared for the intense anger Halberstam's prose barely contains in places; it's a vivid illustration of the disillusionment that ge...more

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Mar 16, 2009 Billy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century-1960s

Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest

In Short: Policymakers “deluded themselves into thinking they could achieve their goals in Vietnam by ignoring, suppressing, or dismissing the information that might have suggested otherwise” In short, they were so committed to their ideals, they could not even conceive of failure in SE Asia. Their arrogance was at fault.

Was the escalation of war in Vietnam foregone by the Kennedy Administration? Two books argue that, no, escalation was not necessary and t...more Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest

In Short: Policymakers “deluded themselves into thinking they could achieve their goals in Vietnam by ignoring, suppressing, or dismissing the information that might have suggested otherwise” In short, they were so committed to their ideals, they could not even conceive of failure in SE Asia. Their arrogance was at fault.

Was the escalation of war in Vietnam foregone by the Kennedy Administration? Two books argue that, no, escalation was not necessary and that those in the JFK and later LBJ administrations myopically pursued a course of Americanization. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest illustrates the tragic course of policy-making. To Halberstam, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and President Lyndon B. Johnson were flawed characters who for various reasons could not decidedly change the course of escalation in Vietnam. Halberstam, who covered the war as a journalist in the 1960s and who earlier supported increasing American intervention in the war, takes a disappointed look back on the men who sent 58,000 American men to die in SE Asia. Each of these cabinet members came from the upper echelons of American society. Most were academically trained and many participated in World War II. Because of their education, these men were confident in their ability to manage a war. McGeorge Bundy and McNamara best exemplify the “best and brightest” mentality of the Vietnam era. Hand picked by Kennedy, these technocrats’ intellectual acumen did not make-up for their scant experience in conducting foreign policy. Their personal character flaws, however, make up most of Halberstam’s critiques. Rusk, for example, was a Secretary of State with little voice in either JFK’s or LBJ’s administration, an affable yes-man who did acquiesced policy-making to McNamara or others. McNamara, on the other hand, was a manager par excellence, but one who repeatedly input faulty data into his calculations on the feasibility of winning in Vietnam. Later released audio tapes from the LBJ’s White House reveal that McNamara’s was less than certain about American victory in the White House. Nevertheless, his loyalty towards JFK transferred to LBJ; his desire to keep power and prestige also hurt McNamara’s objectivity.

Johnson, in particular, was ill suited to deal with the increasingly difficult situation in SE Asia, and for many reasons. First, Johnson was a consummate domestic politician, a virtual master of the senate. He could cajole or bully most congressmen into his position. His folksy southern upbringing lent him an air of authenticity that conflicted with JFK’s New England elitism and made him an outsider as VP in JFKs White House. His folksy demeanor also led LBJ to take Ho Chi Mihn’s threat to American soldiers in the south in a personal manner; something of a direct challenge, or an affront to his manliness. Johnson, while taking a diplomatic tour of Vietnam in the early 1960s (one of many missions JFK sent his older VP on to keep the restless politician away from DC), made comparisons of the Veitnamese to his own down-trodden southern voters. In short, LBJ felt that if the South Vietnamese could experience progress in democracy, or perhaps if LBJ could incubate the region long enough for democracy, he was sure that these people would embrace democracy. All they needed was time and support. Even if others in the administration were hesitant to openly disagree with Johnson’s assessment of Vietnam, the president remained the primary architect of this conflict, lending credence to the title of a modest Michael Hunt book, Lyndon Johnson’s War.
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Dec 06, 2011 Christopher rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, politics

An incredibly good narrative on how America became so heavily involved in Vietnam. His profiles of the major figures, such as Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and MacGeorge Bundy, are both enlightening and disheartening. It is disheartening because many of these guys were so smart that they should have (and probably did) know better than to make the decisions they made. I guess the moral that anyone who reads this books should take away is that any president and/or administration that misleads and do...more

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Aug 25, 2012 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book should be required reading in all public administration classes - especially ones involving performance metrics. While the book is about Vietnam, it really is about the use of data and rationality to make and defend decisions that are, on the whole in hindsight, irrational. At times, I feel that Halberstam's own viewpoints and negative feelings about the war weigh a bit too heavy in the dialogue. However the central thesis of this book makes it worth the read: people with numbers outwe...more

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Aug 18, 2011 Chris rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I picked this up because it was framed as an analysis on groupthink. Sometimes it is, but the approach is too journalistic for my taste. He offers no general conclusions about the causes of US involvement in Vietnam. He seems to have a separate explanation for every part of the tragedy, though: sometimes it's the Democrat's inability to deal with the aftermath of McCarthyism and "losing" China, sometimes it's personality--Johnson's in particular, sometimes it's other factors. All that combined w...more

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May 19, 2009 John Hawklyn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Spoiler: My favorite passage is a scene in which a presidential avisor, dispatched to Vietnam meets with a buddhist monk, and endeavors to work with him to resolve the problem of the monks immolating themselves.

After some conversation he mentions to the monk that he feels they've made progress, and that they're working on parallel tracks. Realizing that the idiom might not translate well, he asks the monk whether he was acquainted with the idea. The Monk agrees and replies that oh, yes. Parallel...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Dennis Boccippio rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, 20th-century

Whew, finished. That was a slow one.

Before reviewing, I'd recommend that new readers start first with the authors note at the end, it gives a very clear summary of what the book is, and isn't. It is an incredibly well researched and thought out profile of the men in the halls of power who made the decisions driving the war in Vietnam, with emphasis on the Kennedy and Johnson years but reaching back to World War II. It is about the nature of power in America at the time, and the personalities of...more

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Jan 30, 2013 Josh rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-history, history-since-wwii, political-science

When I picked up this book, I thought I was going to read a book about Vietnam. It's not. Vietnam is at the center of the book, it's there throughout, but it's not a book *about* Vietnam. As Halberstam himself says, it's "a book about America, and in particular about power and success in America, what the country was, who the leadership was, how they got ahead, what their perceptions were about themselves, about the country and about their mission."

If you want to know what was going on on the gr...more

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Jun 14, 2012 Samarth rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: own

More of a 2.5.

Pros:
1. The book doesn't seem to have any political bias.
2. There is an amazing amount of information in this book.

Cons:
1. In an effort to explain a butterfly effect, instead of dumbing it down to a simpler problem, the author doesn't really pin down actual causes of the escalation instead cramming with bios and reporting events without clear analysis.

2. The title of the book is faulty. The title hints that the book informs us how the "Best and the Brightest" (I assume mainly McN...more

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Nov 23, 2011 Rishi Prakash rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had always heard about the Vietnam War and how USA got their first taste of defeat in any kind of war so it was that curiosity which finally led me to this book. JFK has always had lot of admirers in India and I am also one of them which also pulled me towards this book.This book is the most detailed account of that war: build-up and progress under 3 different Presidents- JFK, Johnshon and then Nixon. The Best and the Brightest is about the men who came to power under Kennedy and continued to...more

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Sep 22, 2011 Tom rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Well, maybe I just didn't manage my expectations. I had wanted to read this book for a long time but I thought it was about the "best and brightest" young men sent to fight in Viet Nam and I knew several who were killed wor wounded. How naive can I be? I really struggled with this. Each character had several pages of biographical info which I found mostly boring (although Rusk was interesting) between which was the "action" as I'll call it. My take way points are as follows . . . 1] Kennedy's el...more

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Aug 16, 2011 Larry Bassett rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: political, nonfiction, war, history

The short version of the book: Boys will be boys!

This is a baby boomer book. The idealism of the Kennedy presidency seems very much like the idealism of the Obama campaign and early presidency. Some reviewers have compared how the U.S. got into Vietnam with how we got into Iraq: Congressional action based on misinformation. In both places the ‘enemy’ wears no uniform and blends into the people and the countryside.

Learn about Laos. Maybe you have barely heard of it, let alone know anything about...more

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Oct 19, 2012 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Bob by: Seymour Russell

Brilliantly written, Halberstam's account of the men who made the key political and military decisions on Vietnam is a graphic warning for our times. The military, focused as it is on the benefits of war to advancement of military careers (more budget $$, more officers, more troops, more equipment), tells its own lies about how the war is going and will go; the politicians, focused on the need to appear sufficiently "tough" and "anti-Communist" (read "anti-terrorist" for today), ignore their own...more

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Mar 14, 2011 Benjamin Berman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It is amazing how history repeats itself. These quotes from the book could easily be slightly modified to refer to America's recent misadventures in the Middle East and Afghanistan:

"One of the things which surprised me was how thin most of the newspaper and magazine reporting of the period [prior to Kennedy escalation in Vietnam] was, the degree to which journalists accepted the norms of the government"

"We believed in the army, the South Vietnamese did not. We saw it as a real army which needed...more

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Nov 20, 2009 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks

I tend not to read modern history, preferring to let the emotions of events die out before I trust authors to analyze and interpret those events more rationally. This was an exception, partly because I like the work that David Halberstam does in other books I've read like The Teammates A Portrait of a Friendship and The Coldest Winter American and the Korean War. The Best and the Brightest is primarily about the decision making and, even more so, the decision makers, that led to our full militar...more

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Aug 21, 2009 Abby rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Can't remember why I wanted to read this; I might have confused it with A Bright, Shining Lie--two books about Vietnam that have Bright in the title. It's 678 small-print pages; I thought I'd be reading it for months, yet it's compelling. It's largely character driven, and if you're not familiar with the characters, you'll be at something of a loss. I also sensed a smugness on the part of the author that put me off some. The tone is a little odd, yet I could never figure out why I thought that....more

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Oct 02, 2009 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

I bought this book a couple of years ago and finally decided to read it after Robert McNamara's death earlier this year. The Best and the Brightest is a very detailed account of the men behind our nation's involvement in the Vietnam War. Halberstam is especially and justifiably critical of McNamara and Lyndon Johnson. The author makes a pretty convincing case that we actually lost the Vietnam War in 1946.

What I liked most about this book is the way Halberstam shows these men for whom they really...more

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Oct 05, 2007 Louis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history

This is a story of hubris. The U.S. presidential administration of John F. Kennedy came to office in 1961 full of promise. In particular, he assembled some of the brightest people from academia and business to advise and guide the country. This book is document who these men were, where the came from, how they were recruited, and the attidudes and hopes they brought with them.

The book covers the building of the Kennedy cabinet thruough their service under Lyndon Johnson. It looks at the Bay of P...more This is a story of hubris. The U.S. presidential administration of John F. Kennedy came to office in 1961 full of promise. In particular, he assembled some of the brightest people from academia and business to advise and guide the country. This book is document who these men were, where the came from, how they were recruited, and the attidudes and hopes they brought with them.

The book covers the building of the Kennedy cabinet thruough their service under Lyndon Johnson. It looks at the Bay of Pigs, but the book builds up to the decisions that lead to the entry of the U.S. into Vietnam and the escalation.

The book is a critique of ability and intlligence over wisdom. While the Kennedy/Johnson administrations were made up of smart and talented people, these were also people who never bore the long term responsibilty for the results of there beliefs nor have they engaged in the down to earth nature of politics with its interaction with people on a base level.

The team had a bit of arrogance, the sense that they knew what was right for the nation and world and they did not have to listen or consult with others. Many of the stories are of the two administrations determining what was right or needed, then determing a different story for Congress and the public that will lead to them getting the resourses for what they had chosen. In the end, the 'reality gap' set in. All the smarts of Kennedy's 'The Best and the Brightest' the analytical skills of John McNamera's 'Whiz kids' really stopped being relavent when they started ignoring the facts on the ground. When the information about the war that they were getting was being ignored in favor of minutea that was considered encouraging, they ignored the results of the new and lauded Systems Analysis and the advice of the old 'Wise Men' of foreign policy. And in the end, their lies caught up to them. The hidden truths, the low-ball cost estimates and the outright deceits that were made in order to build and maintain support both Johnson's Great Society domestic program and the Vietnam foreign policy came to a head as both programs lacked the resources needed to succede, and both failed.

This book is a study in hubris. Of people who were certain of what needed to be done, and how to do it, which included deception and manipulation of the very people they claimed to have been serving. It does a good job of making these people as humans, not monsters as David could have done, but of people of complex motivations, desires to do the right course, but blinded by belief in their own talent and rightousness to take the advice, information, and warnings of others, or even allowing others of talent and wisdom the information they needed to make good decisions themselves. It is a warning of the effect of hubris on power, and probably would be a parallel to History Of The Peloponnesian War. (less)

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Dec 27, 2009 Beau rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I came to this book late. Having lived through the Kennedy Administration and the Vietnam War, just a bit too young to understand it all at the time, I kind of feel like I missed something.

I enjoyed the sketches of the people in this book. After about 10 or 11 chapters, there were too many of them. I couldn't keep the people straight. Too much of a good thing?

In hindsight, it would seem that the players are divided into the "good guys" and the "bad guys." In real life, it never seems as if the...more

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About David Halberstam

David Halberstam (April 10, 1934–April 23, 2007) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author known for his early work on the Vietnam War and his later sports journalism.

Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955 and started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for...more David Halberstam (April 10, 1934–April 23, 2007) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author known for his early work on the Vietnam War and his later sports journalism.

Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955 and started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee, he covered the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement.

In the mid 1960s, Halberstam covered the Vietnam War for The New York Times. While there, he gathered material for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at the New York Times. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig.

Halberstam put an enormous effort into his book about Kennedy's foreign policy decisions about the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest. Synthesizing material from dozens of books and many dozens of interviews, Halberstam focused on the odd paradox that those who crafted the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, well-connected and self-confident men in America—"the best and the brightest"—and yet those same men were unable to imagine and promote any but a bloody and disastrous course in the Vietnam War.

Thousands of readers began The Best and the Brightest feeling that the U.S. must pursue the war in Vietnam until "victory" was achieved, but became convinced by Halberstam's book that the U.S. could not win and therefore should withdraw from Vietnam.

After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam plunged right into another "big" book and in 1979 published an informative book about some of the major media outlets in America. The Powers That Be gave compelling profiles of men like William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, Phil Graham of The Washington Post—and many others.

Later in his career, Halberstam turned to the subjects of sports, publishing The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at the Bill Walton and the 1978 Portland Trailblazers basketball team; an ambitious book on Michael Jordan in 1999 called Playing for Keeps; and on the pennant race battle between the Yankees and Red Sox called Summer of '49.

After publishing two books in the 1960s, Halberstam published three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He published four books in the 2000s and was on a pace to publish six or more books in that decade before his death. In the wake of 9/11, Halberstam wrote perhaps the most sensitive and insightful book about that tragedy, detailing Engine 40, Ladder 35, in the tome, Firehouse.

In 1980, an escaped convict from New York, Bernard C. Welch, Jr., murdered Halberstam's brother, Michael J. Halberstam, a Washington, D.C. cardiologist.[1] Halberstam refused to comment publicly about this incident.

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The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship

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