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

by David Halberstam

If there was a lack of modesty in the Kennedy beginnings, there were intellectuals who felt a more modest, limited sense about their own nation and its possibilities. In 1957, at a special symposium of American scholars, Walt Rostow, who would come to symbolize during both the Kennedy and the Johnson years the aggressive, combative liberal nationalism of the era, had made his case for an American national interest earlier in the symposium. Then David Riesman, the Harvard sociologist, quietly warned against the dangers implicit in much of what Rostow had suggested (the Rostow idea that the American perspective of the world had not kept pace with American power in it and over it), which struck Riesman as jingoism. The Civil War, Riesman said, was “deadly serious as an omen of bellicosity and bigotry,” and he thought a humbler and more modest view of American society and its potential role in a diverse world was called for, as well as recognition of the failure of American culture here at home, the failure of the quality of American life, an understanding that not all indices of American life could be found in the booming statistics of the GNP. He felt that something was desperately missing. Commenting on “a kind of blandness that I somehow see as inhuman,” he noted that “when I see a French or Italian movie, the faces seem more alive and expressive than American faces in equivalent films. The very rich are perhaps unhappy in all countries. Their faces are often sour, fearful...