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

by David Halberstam

You did not accept what life handed you and then

just tried to make the best of it; instead you fought ferociously for your chance, you pushed aside what stood in your way, the civilized law of the jungle prevailed.

Joe Kennedy was a restless, rough genius anxious to shed his semi-immigrant s...

old snubs and hurts; having failed to do so despite his enormous wealth, he was determined to gain his fin...

What better proof of Americanization than a son in the White House, a son running the...

son in the Senate (the last triumph would become somewhat unsettling to the elder boys, who thought perhaps the family was overdoing it, though the patriarch himself knew the code b...

his sons had been educated exactly for the opposite reasons—to shed it. There would be no Holy Cross, or Fordham, or Georgetown Law School in their lives.

best Eastern Protestant schools, where the British upper-class values were still in vogue.

For Jack it had been Choate, not Groton or St. Paul’s perhaps, but sti...

who understand duty and obligation, and...

Eventually, after the service in World War II, a ...

pursuing the obligatory career.

became a remarkable American specimen, carrying in him an immigrant family’s rage to get their due,

but carefully concealed behind a cool and ...

Metropolitan Club, Washington’s most elite social and political meeting place,

belonged to clubs which did not have many Jews and Negroes, such as the Links in New York.

humanism

untrammeled

that the real action was in determining the role America played in the world,

It was where the excitement was,

went to Mississippi to redefine America in 1964, but in the 1950s they had gone into the CIA and into the State Department, and even in 1961 they went into the Peace Corps and the Defense Department.

wanted only State or Defense, that was where the power was.

the new American empire, in bringing proof that our system was better than theirs.

too many crises, each crowding the others, demanding to be taken care of in that instant.

There was too little time to plan, to think;

one could only confront the most immediate problems and get rid of them piecemeal bu...

Long-range solutions, thoughtful changes, would have to wait, at least ...

that Ho, although a Communist, might also be primarily Vietnamese and under no orders from Moscow.)

the big investment and banking houses, or lawyers for them; they and their class had long harbored an abiding suspicion not so much of Russia as of Communism.

ahead. Forrestal made the Kennan reports available to friends throughout Washington, and Kennan’s

as a book which became the primer of postwar American diplomacy and was read by almost every college student at every great university, one of the most influential books of an entire generation. Kennan became known as the author of the containment policy,

demonology.

de-emphasizing the issue of nationalism and exploiting the issue of Communism.

Then a major event took place in 1949 which meant that a French victory in Indochina was impossible,

The event was the fall of China

World War I had taken a decaying feudal Russian regime and finally destroyed it,

so Japan’s aggression against China, the first step in what was to become World War II, did the same thing to China: a fledgling semidemocratic government was trying to emerge from a dark and feudal past and was pushed beyond the point

of cohesion, the Japanese catching Chiang Kai-shek when he might have moved into the modern era and frightening him back into the past, revealing more his weaknesses than his strengths. The ...

would not be that of Chiang and the Western powers, but of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists, a powerful modern antifeudal force touching the peasants and the age-old resentment against foreign intrus...

of Chiang, as would later be true for many years of Diem, it would be said that he was too weak to rule and too strong to be overthrown.

His forces were corrupt, his generals held title on the basis of nepotism and loyalty, his best troops never fought; faced by mounting terrible pressures, he turned

inward to listen to the gentle words of trusted family and sycophants. It was th...

Raymond Ludden, one of the ablest of the young foreign service officers

Joseph Alsop, well connected in Washington with Harry Hopkins, and a distant cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt.

the blame was placed on the State Department. The title is worth remembering: “Why We Lost China.” China was ours, and it was something to lose; it

Countries were ours, we could lose them; a President was faced with the blackmail of losing

a cou...

articles took the issue from the radical fringe and gave it a respectability where it

What rises must converge; what goes up quickly comes down even more quickly.

“McCarthyism”;