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

by David Halberstam

Rusk’s speech gave vital insight into his thinking; here was a man who believed in his origins and experiences—the democracies were ipso facto good and the totalitarians were ipso facto bad, and this helped explain the force of his positions. But it also explained some of the danger of his tenets because they were held by a man so wedded to certain concepts and truths that he did not reckon with the whimsical quality of history, that the forces of history can just as easily make the democracies aggressive, that to some small states, large democracies look tyrannical, that justice and decency have various definitions in different parts of the world. These were the words of a man who advocated his own concepts, whether the world was ready for them or not. The world would have to adapt to him. Yet the steadfastness of his beliefs was also his greatest asset; he believed, he was not ambivalent. He believed in both the might and the decency of America (having never dealt in the domestic processes, he was uncritical of them; he was willing to accept the high school civics class theory of their reality). If America was both honorable and strong, and turned that strength in the right directions—which had been charted in the postwar years as containment of the totalitarians—then our side would triumph. Perhaps not easily, perhaps the struggle would be long, but eventually quality and class would tell. In 1965 and 1966, as the Vietnam war began to look more and more difficult and Ge...