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

by David Halberstam

most enlightening of all those texts, and the book that reaffirmed my high regard for American journalism and, relatedly, my faith in freedom, was David Halberstam’s landmark study of the men who sent us to war, The Best and the Brightest.

lacked the necessary resolve to succeed because they misjudged the enemy’s resolve.

The men who sent Americans to war in Vietnam were, by many standards, the best and the brightest. They were extraordinarily intelligent, well-educated, informed, experienced, patriotic,

and capable leaders. They were elegant and persuasive. They seemed born to govern, and America once had as much confidence in them as they so abundantly had in themselves. But, in the end, they had more confidence than vision, and that failing bred in

Americans will ever again believe that our country has a native governing class.

For anyone who aspires to a position of national leadership, no matter the circumstances of his or her birth, this book should be mandatory reading.

the need, for insights into how a great and good nation can lose a war and see its worthy purposes and principles destroyed by self-delusion can do no better than to read and reread David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.

Teddy White,

Harry Luce,

an account of the origins of the war in Vietnam.

Ellsworth Bunker’s

were like all Western generals before them, starting with the French: not so much in the wrong war, but on the wrong planet.

In addition, the briefings they received from subordinates were always tied to career and promotion.

Charlie Mohr

McGeorge Bundy?

most luminescent of the Kennedy people,

the most cerebral member

other than the President himself,

paragon of

Bundy family,

Cowles f...

I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War. In another time

come up with a portrait of the time, of the men, the era, and the process which had led to this war.

Daniel Ellsberg

The Pentagon Papers—the documented history of the war—came

McNamara.

weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

accomplished men like Kennan, Bohlen, and Harriman,

An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War.

but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men;

The truth was that history—and in Indochina we were on the wrong side of it—was a hard taskmaster and from the early to the middle sixties, when we were making those fateful decisions, we had almost no choices left. Our options had been steadily closing down since 1946, when the French Indochina War began. That was when we had the most options, and the greatest element of choice. But

granted, however reluctantly, the French the right to return and impose their will on the Vietnamese by force; and by 1950, caught up increasingly in our own global vision of anti-Communism, we chose not to see this war as primarily a colonial/anticolonial war, and we had begun to underwrite most of the French costs. Where our money went our rhetoric soon followed. We adjusted our public statements, and much of our journalism, to make it seem as if this was a war of Communists against anti-Communists, instead, as the people of Vietnam might have seen it, a war of a colonial power against an indigenous nationalist force.

He attended Groton, the greatest prep school in the nation, where the American upper class sends its sons to instill the classic values: discipline, honor,

Cui servire est regnare is Groton’s motto. “To serve is to rule.” The overt teaching was that the finest life is service to God, your family and your state, but the covert teaching, far more subtle and insidious, was somewhat different: ultimately, strength is more important; there is a ruling clique; there is a thing called privilege and you might as well use it. That is the real world and it is going to remain that way, so you might as well get used to it. If not, you can rebel, but only within the prescribed rules. Groton is a school more than a little short on Catholics, Negroes, Jews and hyphenated Americans, and it reflected in its real values what some students there called “a muscular Christianity.”

has said that Bundy was ready to be dean of the school at the age of twelve. Richard

“Didn’t you know?” said the student. “He was unprepared. He was reading from a blank piece of paper.”

he marked down Bundy’s English score: 100.

since Bostonians usually sent their children to Harvard after Groton,

so much intelligence harnessed to so much breeding, all that and the competitive urge as well.

“This week passed without Mahatma Bundy making a speech.”

Sti...

the sureness of his upbringing and the values instilled in him,

I believe in the dignity of the individual, in government by law, in respect for the truth, and in a good God; these beliefs are worth my life

and more; they are not shared by A...

select Society of Fellows, the chosen of the chosen.

A. Lawrence Lowell,

“You will practice the virtues and avoid the snares of the scholar. You will be courteous to your elders, who have explored to the point from which you may advance; and helpful to your juniors, who will pro...

knowledge and wisdom, not the reflected glamour of fame. You will not accept credit that is due another, or harbor jealousy of an explorer who is more fortunate . . .” The Society was a special program at Harvard designed to spare s...

Bundy is not Dr. Bundy. Of course, anyone can get a Ph.D., but very few c...

Dean Acheson. The Stimson biography is a good and serious book, and perhaps in a way more reflective of that elitist viewpoint than it intended to be, but it is hardly pioneer work. It is a subject about which Bundy retains some sensitivity, and recently, when a magazine article