The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

What our military did not understand, I added, was that Hanoi controlled the pace of the war, and it could either initiate contact and raise the level of violence or hold back, lick its wounds, and lower it, depending on its needs at a given moment.

favorite generals, Bob York,

What the American army at the highest levels lost in Vietnam, my close friend and colleague Charlie Mohr told me years later, in the best summation of that time, was its intellectual integrity.

“The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy,”

“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.”

It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between

quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-...

Wisdom for a few of them came af...

An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of

it should be noted that he significantly escalated the number of Americans there, and the number of American deaths; that his public rhetoric was often considerably more aggressive than his more private doubts; and that he gave over to Lyndon Johnson that famous can-do aggressive team of top advisers.

“Events,” wrote George Ball, paraphrasing Emerson “are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

what we were going to do if the North Vietnamese matched our escalation with their escalation, as they were likely to. It was an ill-defined commitment, one made in stealth and in considerable secrecy, because those making it were uneasy about their path and feared an open debate, feared exposing the policy to any serious scrutiny.

The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit: it was an odd amalgam of the traditional isolationism of the Midwest (cheered on greatly by Colonel McCormick of Chicago);

the anxiety of a nation living in a period of new and edgy atomic tensions and no longer protected from adversaries by the buffer of its two adjoining

Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders.

the excitement of the job, and Kennedy’s oft-quoted comment was that the most surprising thing about coming to office was that everything was just as bad as they had said in the campaign. A less quoted remark, underscoring

invasion or at the very least were uneasy with it, and to a degree, they were the same men who would later oppose the Vietnam commitment. One was General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps. When talk about invading

The great crisis, Eisenhower said, was in Southeast Asia, Laos was the key to it. If we let Laos fall, we have to write off the whole area. We must

Marshall, as Roosevelt before him, saw a more diverse and pluralistic world, but their successors in the world of national security would not be quite so tolerant of the world’s instincts to go

But Rusk was resistant; he still saw it as a military, not a political problem.

typical of a generation of public officials who had come out of World War II and who saw State serving as the lawyers for the Defense Department; if there was a military involvement

The American policy was to trust Diem and not to cross him; thus the American military mission saw its job as getting along with Diem, so his reporting became our reporting, his statistics our statistics, finally his lies our lies.