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

by David Halberstam

It was a very good liberal name to have, Chester Bowles. In the eyes of the liberals, he was one of the few who was without a stain. He was, in fact, the definitive liberal-humanist at a time when those particular values had been on the defensive and had been made to seem naÏve. Politicians who professed the old liberalism of the thirties in this harsher postwar era were considered too trusting and unrealistic, men who did not understand the dangers of the contemporary world, where Communists constantly lurked to exploit any and all do-good organizations and intentions. This Cold War realism had touched many of the liberal politicians, who had been put on the defensive about their past, but it had not necessarily touched the liberal voters, and in 1960 Bowles was unique among politicians in that he refused to adapt to contemporary pressures. To him, it was as if the Cold War had never taken place. He was markedly untouched by it; he believed that the problems America encountered were its own, what it did at home and in the world, not what the Soviet Union did. He was, it seemed at the moment, somewhat behind the times; a few long years later it would seem that he had been ahead of them.