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

by David Halberstam

If the Kennedy people privately mocked the bombast and rigidity of the Eisenhower and Dulles years (years in which Dulles had made his own separate peace with the Republican right) they did not lightly reverse Dulles’s policies, particularly where they were most irrational and dangerous, in an emerging post-colonial Asia. McCarthyism still lingered: a McCarthyism that was broader than the wild outrages of the Senator himself, something that even men as fine as Bob Taft were caught up in. 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 Republicans’ long, arid period out of office, accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was go...