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

by David Halberstam

John Kennedy was dead. His legacy was a mixed one. He had come in at the latter part of the Cold War; at the beginning he had not challenged it, though he had, in the last part of his Administration, begun to temper it. On Vietnam his record was more than cloudy. More than any other member of his Administration, he knew the dangers of a deep U.S. involvement, the limits of what Caucasian troops could achieve on Vietnamese soil, and yet he had significantly deepened that involvement. He had escalated the number of Americans there to 16,900 at the time of his death, with more than 70 dead (each dead American became one more rationale for more dead Americans); more important, he had markedly escalated the rhetoric and the rationale for being there. Although he seriously questioned the wisdom of a combat commitment, and at the end had grave doubts about the viability of the counterinsurgency program, whether we should be there at all, he had never shown those doubts in public, from the rostrum of the bully pulpit. The only thing he had expressed doubts about was the Diem regime, that and little more. His successor had to deal not so much with Kennedy’s inner doubts so carefully and cautiously expressed, but with his public statements, all supportive of the importance and significance of Vietnam. In addition, his speeches and programs had raised the importance of Vietnam in American minds; his commitment had, by the publicity his Administration gave it, become that much more vi...