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

by David Halberstam

The important thing is how easy it all was for him;

distinguished public servant.

He was bright, but he was also so incredibly well connected that things came to him much more readily than

(like a girl who is both prettier than the other bright girls and brighter than the other pretty ...

somewhat revealing about the way things are done for those who have a certain head start in life.

the election was a formality,

Bundy never ran for public office again, nor did he ever make himself answerable to public controls and public checks again

Although American elective politics is often an imperfect thing, sometimes cheap and degrading, perhaps too much for men who lack the fiber, it is at the same time a great humanizing force, particularly for the strong, for those who already have advantages and resources.

instead turned to using power in the private, elitist sense, ignoring public pressures. (When he finally decided to talk about his role in Vietnam he did it, significantly, at the Council on Foreign Relations, off the record, with no question-and-answer period.)

he managed to memorize the eye charts, and he ended up serving as an aide to Vice-Admiral Alan Kirk, a family friend.

Peter Solbert

William Bundy

General Omar Bradley

Marshall Plan,

John Foster Dulles

Allen Dulles

CIA needed the right people on the right campuses to find the right young men with both muscular Christianity and brains who also knew the rules of the game.)

Carl Friedrich and William Yandell Elliott

Its proponents believed that they were tough, that they knew what the world was really like, and that force must be accepted as a basic element of diplomacy. Toughness bred toughness;

The Communists legitimized us; force met force.

John Kenneth Ga...

his breeding and traditions

at the advanced age of thirty-four,

Dean Rusk,

to go after special men and give them special privileges,

less aristocratic,

the training in classics and math,

one the old Boston Brahmin, the other the new Irish Brahmin,

Mark Raskin,

example of a special elite, a certain breed of men whose continuity is among themselves.

mostly a product of social background and a certain kind of education, and that they were men who had not traveled around the world and knew nothing of this country and the world.

Douglas Dillon

Suddenly everyone would be working off Bundy’s memos, and thus his memos guided the action, guided what the President

Every encounter was like a mini Ph.D. exam.”

But pragmatic thinking is also short-range thinking, and too often panic thinking.

Vietnam had begun as the most peripheral of problems to the United States,

the periphery of the periphery.

part of his State Department team, a China and Asian

expert, John Carter Vincent, chief of the China division of the State Department.

Having spent a large part of his career in Asia, he felt a distinct empathy for Asian nationalism,

had a rather realistic view of the future. By early 1945 he had come to the conclusion that the President in particular believed in indigenous nationalism in Asia and was moving in that direction.

would be the high-water mark of American support for nationalism in Vietnam, with Roosevelt talking abo...

It would end with the trip Vincent was on at that moment, t...

think a great deal about Vietnam at Potsdam because it was not on the agenda, and because it was not su...

But a decision was made at Potsda...

without any real consultation. It concerned the surrender; the British would accept the Japanese surrender below the 16th parallel, the Chinese above it. It appeared quite...

who accepts a surrender is a vital one; it determines who will control the turf and who will decide future legitimacy. The British, uneasy about questions that Roosevelt had...

worried about what it might mean for Burma and Malaya, since they were anxious to control future colonial questions in Asia; the British, after all, were not eager to see ...

by his military advisers who were wary of what anticolonialism might mean as far as the future of U.S. naval and air bases in Asia was concerned, urged that we go along with...

among the Americans (though later evidence would show that there had been a good deal of collusion beforehand between the French and the British on this issue)...