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

by David Halberstam

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