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

by David Halberstam

Of all the privations and injustices suffered in undemocratic nations, lack of a free press is among the worst.

No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the cost to fight it by half measures. War

I very much doubt that Americans will ever again believe that our country has a native governing class.

It reflected once again the immense difference between what people in the field thought was happening and what people in the Saigon command, responding to intense political pressure from Washington, wanted to think was happening.

His generals, I suggested, were like all Western generals before them, starting with the French: not so much in the wrong war, but on the wrong planet. Their ability to calibrate this war was limited, their skills were tied to other wars in other places, and with very few exceptions they, like the French before them, tended to underestimate the bravery, strength, resilience, and the political dynamic which fed the indigenous force they were fighting. In addition, the briefings they received from subordinates were always tied to career and promotion.

The article, “The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy,” ran three times the normal magazine length

The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.

someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist.

if they are always asked to report on the evening news in bites of one minute, fifteen seconds, they will end up thinking in bites of 1:15. The

One of the things which surprised me was how thin most of the newspaper and magazine reporting of the period was, the degree to which journalists accepted the norms of the government and, particularly in the glamorous Kennedy era, the reputation of these new stars at face value.

“Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “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.”

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

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); McCarthy’s own personal recklessness and cruelty; 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 oceans; and the fact that the Republican party had been out of power for so long—twenty years, until Dwight Eisenhower, a kind of hired Republican, was finally elected. The

The truth, in sharp contrast, was that all those critical decisions were primarily driven by considerations of domestic politics, and by political fears of the consequences of looking weak in a forthcoming domestic election.

Kennedy asked what makes a good Secretary of Defense.“A healthy skepticism, a sense of values, and a sense of priorities,” Lovett answered. “That and a good President, and he can’t do much damage.

This he proceeded to do with stunning quickness, depending more on style and grace than policies; nonetheless, when Stevenson died in 1965, a year and a half after Kennedy, he seemed a forlorn and forgotten figure, humiliated by his final years; his people mourned the loss of Kennedy more than of Stevenson. It would only be later, as the full tragedy of the Vietnam war unfolded and a Stevenson disciple named Eugene McCarthy challenged Johnson, as humanist values seemed to be resurgent and regenerative against the rationalist values, and the liberal community looked back to see where it had gone wrong, that Stevenson would regain his constituency. Posthumously.

They were looking for a man to fill the most important Cabinet post, a job requiring infinite qualities of intelligence, wisdom and sophistication, a knowledge of both this country and the world, and they were going at it as presidential candidates had often filled that other most crucial post, the Vice-Presidency, by choosing someone who had offended the fewest people.

Knows the military, knows strategy, plays the game. So, quietly, the campaign for Rusk was put together and his qualifications tallied: not too young, not too old; a Democrat, but not too much of one; a Southerner but not too much so; an intellectual, but not too much so; worked on China, but no problems on that—in fact, good marks from the Luce people, who watch the China thing carefully. The acceptable man.

Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

both logic and cfear

But for foreign policy it is essential to have men who inspire confidence. This liberals do not do. Unless immediately on taking office they allay suspicion by taking an exceptionally strong stand in the Cold War, they will be suspected of a tendency, however subjective, towards appeasement of the Communists. The smallest gesture of conciliation will confirm this mistrust. Accordingly liberal administrations must place conservatives in charge of foreign policy or best of all, nonpolitical experts. Thus their need for men like Worth Campbell . . .

He is not only the handsomest, the best dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; his eye seizes instantly on the crucial point of a long memorandum; he confounds experts with superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipresent; no sleepy staff member can be sure that he will not telephone—or pop in; every hostess at a party can hope that he will. He is omnipotent; he personally bosses and spurs the whole shop; he has no need of Ike’s staff apparatus; he is more than a lion, more than a fox. He’s Superman!

So they carried with them an exciting sense of American elitism, a sense that the best men had been summoned forth from the country to harness this dream to a new American nationalism, bringing a new, strong, dynamic spirit to our historic role in world affairs, not necessarily to bring the American dream to reality here at home, but to bring it to reality elsewhere in the world. It was heady stuff, defining the American dream and giving it a new sense of purpose, taking American life, which had grown too materialistic and complacent, and giving it a new and grander mission.

He was the brightest light in that glittering constellation around the President, for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything.

The overt teaching was that the finest life is service to God, your family and your state, but the covert teaching, far more subtle and insidious, was somewhat different: ultimately, strength is more important; there is a ruling clique; there is a thing called privilege and you might as well use it.

He was bright, but he was also so incredibly well connected that things came to him much more readily than to his contemporaries (like a girl who is both prettier than the other bright girls and brighter than the other pretty girls, it was almost unfair), and along the way he picked up less wisdom, less scar tissue than other men.

But pragmatic thinking is also short-range thinking, and too often panic thinking. A government is collapsing. How do we prop it up? Something is happening; therefore we must move. Thus, in 1965 Bundy was for getting the country into the Dominican mess, because something had to be done, and then very good at extricating us when he realized that extrication had become the problem, though as he and the men around him would learn, not all countries were as easy to get out of as the Dominican Republic.

The question which concerns me most about this new Administration is whether it lacks a genuine sense of conviction about what is right and what is wrong. I realize in posing the question I am raising an extremely serious point. Nevertheless I feel it must be faced. Anyone in public life who has strong convictions about the rights and wrongs of public morality, both domestic and international, has a very great advantage in times of strain, since his instincts on what to do are clear and immediate. Lacking such a framework of moral conviction or sense of what is right and what is wrong, he is forced to lean almost entirely upon his mental processes; he adds up the plusses and minuses of any question and comes up with a conclusion. Under normal conditions, when he is not tired or frustrated, this pragmatic approach should successfully bring him out on the right side of the question. What worries me are the conclusions that such an individual may reach when he is tired, angry, frustrated, or emotionally affected. The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and well intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.

In retrospect, Reston was convinced that the Vienna bullying became a crucial factor in the subsequent decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to Vietnam, and though others around Kennedy retained some doubts about this, it appeared to be part of a derivative link, one more in a chain of events which saw the escalation of the Cold War in Kennedy’s first year. Reston

But a decision was made at Potsdam on Vietnam, without any real consultation. It concerned the surrender; the British would accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel, the Chinese above it. It appeared quite inconsequential at the time, but the matter of who accepts a surrender is a vital one; it determines who will control the turf and who will decide future legitimacy.

The division in the government between its instincts for global power and its brain—a split which would haunt us right through 1965—was spelled out in June 1945 when Colonel Stimson asked the State Department to prepare a paper on the future of Asia. The paper clearly reflected the split between the European peoples and the Asian peoples (“The United States government may properly continue to state the political principle which it has frequently announced, that dependent peoples should be given the opportunity, if necessary after an adequate period of preparation, to achieve an increased measure of self-government, but it should avoid any course of action which would seriously impair the unity of the major United Nations . . .”). The paper then forecast quite accurately that Vietnamese political aspirations and consciousness, which had been increasing sharply in the nineteen-thirties and were more heightened than ever, would lead the Vietnamese to fight the French, and that the French would have “serious difficulty

No one had yet heard of political war, of Mao’s concept of fish swimming in the ocean of the people, of Asian guerrillas giving the European country the cities and strangling them by holding the countryside; of an army losing battle after battle but winning the people and thus the war.

If in March 1946, when the French had signed a preliminary accord with the Vietminh recognizing them as a legitimate authority—an agreement from which they quickly reneged—if then the United States had been wise enough to send a telegram congratulating Paris on its forward-looking leadership and announcing that the United States was sending a minister to Hanoi, all this could have been avoided, all the heartache erased. Perhaps that was too strong, one telegram would have meant little, but the truth was that during the crucial months and years, the U.S. policy, despite all its commitments to freedom, independence and anticolonialism, had permitted an ally to start a bitter and foolish colonial war. Without raising a finger or sending any real telegrams.

The Army still felt itself badly burned by its experience in Korea, where it had fought a war which was immensely frustrating for commanders who felt they were sacrificing their men for limited political objectives, a kind of rationing of men for politics, which was difficult for officers to come to terms with.

They had all been pushing hard, willing to commit troops, in effect go to war if necessary, but they had given little or no thought to what the other side might do. Now they had no answers, nothing to say.)

How could he do this, he was damaging an ally; he was young and inexperienced, he lacked expertise, this was a serious business, criticizing your own country and an ally over foreign policy.

He did not like people who pushed and crowded him, who told him of their cause or their problems. He wanted in his career no one’s problems but his own.

The Kennan experience was not to be the last time that the national security principals would take the intelligence reporting of their own experts and exploit it out of context, de-emphasizing the issue of nationalism and exploiting the issue of Communism. The same thing happened during the Korean War, when the China experts predicted accurately what China would do, not based on Communist intentions but on Chinese history, and the last time would be during the Vietnam war, when again the experts predicted accurately Hanoi’s responses to American escalation. But these were distinctions few were interested in twenty years ago; what was needed was a unity of national purpose against the Communists. Nothing else would suffice.

the Republicans were glad of the difference. In underestimating the political attractiveness of Truman, jaunty, unpretentious, decisive, his faults so obvious, they failed to realize that these were the faults of the common man and that the voter identified every bit as much with Truman’s faults as with his virtues.

It was a campaign where the common man versus big-business interests was still a credible one, and Truman was a marvelous symbol of the average American, the little man.

The State Department knew the crunch was coming; in August 1949 it published its White Paper on China, a document designed to show that the fall of China was the fault of Chiang and that the United States had gone as far as an ally could go. What is remarkable about the White Paper in retrospect is the intelligence and quality of the reporting. It was written by very bright young men putting their assessments on the line; in that sense it would be a high-water mark for the Department. From then on young foreign service officers would learn their lessons and hedge their bets, and muddle their reporting.

China was ours, and it was something to lose; it was an assumption which was to haunt foreign policy makers for years to come. Countries were ours, we could lose them; a President was faced with the blackmail of losing a country.

the American press exploited in its false sense of objectivity (if a high official said something, then it was news, if not fact, and the role of the reporter was to print it straight without commenting, without assaulting the credibility of the incredulous; that was objectivity). It was like a circus;

What rises must converge; what goes up quickly comes down even more quickly. Eisenhower allowed McCarthy to destroy himself. By 1954 McCarthy was finished, he had gone too far, he had long since been repudiated by his early advisers from that Colony dinner, he had shed himself of advisers who urged restraint. He was censured by the Senate, he began to drink heavily; by 1957 he was dead; but the fears he left behind would live long after him. He had contributed a word to the language, “McCarthyism”; and he had, by his presence and by the fears that he had found in the country and exploited, helped damage two major organs of government, the State Department and the Democratic party. He had also made the foreign policy of the United States even more rigid, both then and later. The country would in particular pay the price for this in Vietnam. The legacy of it all was poison.

the real problem was the failure to re-examine the assumptions of the era, particularly in Southeast Asia. There was no real attempt, when the new Administration came in, to analyze Ho Chi Minh’s position in terms of the Vietnamese people and in terms of the larger Communist world, to establish what Diem represented, to determine whether the domino theory was in fact valid.

But the special significance of Fritz Nolting was that in the very choice of him, and his decision that yes, we could make it with Diem, we were binding ourselves into an old and dying commitment, without really coming to terms with what it meant.

So he sent an Army survey team to Indochina to determine the requirements for fighting a ground war there. What he wanted was the basic needs and logistics of it. He sent signalmen, medical men, engineers, logistics experts. What were the port facilities, the rail facilities, the road facilities? What was the climate like, which were the endemic diseases? How many men were needed? The answers were chilling: minimal, five divisions and up to ten divisions if we wanted to clear out the enemy (as opposed to six divisions in Korea), plus fifty-five engineering battalions, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men, plus enormous construction costs.

We assumed that as Western Europe had welcomed our presence there, the South Vietnamese would want us in their country, despite the fact that we had been on the wrong side of a long and bitter colonial war.

During the war the Vietminh had done more than expel the French. They had taken Vietnamese society, which under colonial rule had been so fragmented and distrustful, where only loyalty to family counted, and given it a broader cause and meaning, until that which bound them together was more powerful than that which divided them. This, then, had made them a nation in the true sense.

The trouble was that after seven years, none of the American rhetoric, none of the gestures that the Americans were making to reassure Diem, had had any effect on the most important people in South Vietnam, the peasants.

The resulting Taylor-Rostow report would significantly deepen the American involvement in Vietnam from the low-level (and incompetent) advisory commitment of the Eisenhower years (geared up for a traditional border-crossing war that would never come) to the nearly 20,000 support and advisory troops there at the time President Kennedy was killed. It was one of the crucial turning points in the American involvement, and Kennedy, by his very choice of the two men who had the greatest vested interest in fighting some kind of limited antiguerrilla war, had loaded the dice.