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

by David Halberstam

There were several qualities which set him apart from others in office. The first was total confidence in his relationship with the President. The second was an almost absolute insistence on being well and honestly briefed. The third was a capacity, indeed an instinct, to see world events not so much in terms of a great global chess game, but in human terms. As such he retained his common sense, it was at least as strong as his ideology (when others were talking about a surgical air strike against Cuba during the missile crisis, he said very simply that he did not want his brother to be the Tojo of the 1960s). Out of all of this came the final characteristic, the capacity to grow and change and to admit error. In 1962 he had stopped at the Saigon airport long enough to say that we would stay in Vietnam until we won, but he had also learned a very important lesson: that most of the official reporting was mythological. He was supposed to be briefed at the airport terminal by the top members of the mission, all of whom, in one another’s presence, assured him that everything was just fine, everything was on target. “Do you have any problems?” he asked. No, said everyone in unison, there were no problems. He looked at them somewhat shocked by the response. “No problems,” he said, “you’ve really got no problems? Does anyone here want to speak to me in private about his problems?” And then one by one they talked to him at length and it all came pouring out, a brief and instructiv...