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

by David Halberstam

two major organs of government, the State Department and the Democratic party.

The country would in particular pay the price for this in Vietnam. The

these three events, the fall of China, the rise of McCarthy and the outbreak of the Korean War, would have a profound effect on American domestic

The Democratic Administration was on the defensive; a country could not be lost without serious political consequences; each new Administration became increasingly susceptible to

blackmail from any small oligarchy which proclaimed itse...

There was now less of a disposition to see the French war as a colonial war, more of a disposition to see it as

Western war against the Communists, a war which sought to bestow freedom upon Vietnam.

Each time the question of the domino theory was sent to intelligence experts for evaluation, they would send back answers which reflected their doubts about its validity, but the highest level of government left the domino theory alone.

the U.S. Army Special Forces. They were all uncommon men, extraordinary physical specimens and intellectual Ph.D.s swinging from trees, speaking Russian and

The first warning on Vietnam had been sounded in January 1961, by one of the most unusual members of the United States government.

General Edward Lansdale

He was a former advertising man, a former Air Force officer, a CIA agent now, a man deeply interested in doing t...

The Ugly American;

For he was a CIA agent, and not just an intelligence officer, he was an operational functional man, a man of programs and a man who was there to manipulate.

under French rule for a hundred years,

insisted upon receiving 98 percent of the vote.

it did not help to seem too bright.

he was the rarest of Americans overseas, a listener.

1960, that the new version of the Vietminh, named the Vietcong, were near victory by fighting guerrilla style in the countryside while the American military mission continued to train the Vietnamese army for a Korean-style invasion. President Diem was almost totally isolated from his former friends and allies, and increasingly dependent on his egomaniacal brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu; Diem and the American ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow, virtually did not speak to each other.

Elbridge Durbrow was replaced by Frederick E. Nolting, Jr.

regard the foreign service as a gentleman’s calling,

overt attack

covert aggression.

On the next leg of the trip Stan Karnow,

Texas cowboy had overdone it in his exuberance, that he had, unlike the Kennedys, no subtlety, that he did not know foreign affairs.

from being a colonial war, to a war fought by the West against international Communism.

The creation of South Vietnam, a fragile country in which few had any real hopes, followed Geneva, more as an afterthought than anything else.

early 1954 devised a trap which it intended to spring on an unsuspecting

The idea was to use a French garrison as bait at an outpost in the

highlands, have the Vietminh seize on it for a set-piece battle and mass their forces around it. Then when the Vietminh forces were massed, the French would strike, crush the enemy who had so long eluded them, and gain a major political and psychological victory, just

The name of the post where the trap was to be sprung...

a move which violated the first cardinal rule of warfare: always take the high ground.

On the first night of the battle the French artillery

commander, shouting “It is all my fault, it is all my fault,” committed suicide by throwing himself on a grenade.

when there were white men trapped in that garrison, about to be

overrun by yellow men.

so Dulles decided that the rest of the country, below the 17th parallel, would be a Western bastion against the Communists—exactly,

despite the fact that we had been on the wrong side of a long and bitter colonial war.

on the sidelines without helping the nationalists in their fight for freedom; we could help the colonial power and somehow not pay a heavy price.

The Vietminh were supremely confident that they could

gain ascendancy in the South either through elections or through subversion and guerrilla warfare. They were a modern force, and the one opposing them in the South was feudal. By now they were the heroes of their people: they had driven out the French and stirred

the powerful feelings of nationalism in the country. During the war the Vietminh had done more than expel the French. They had taken Vietnamese society, which under colonial rule had been so fra...

they had either fought side by side with the French or profiteered on the war, or, as in the case of Ngo Dinh Diem,

stayed outside the country, unable to choose between the two sides.

The tradition of the old Vietnam had been loyalty to family alone; symbolically the Ngo Dinh Diem government was a family government, and by the time of his downfall Diem trusted only his family.

The North was led by a man who had expelled the foreigners, the South by a man who had been installed by foreigners.

he was an American creation which fit American political needs and desires, not Vietnamese ones.

he was a mandarin, a member of the feudal aristocracy in a country swept by revolution.

In 1954, right after Geneva, no one really believed there was such a thing as South Vietnam.

Despite French and British protestations, Dulles encouraged Diem in his instinct not to hold the requisite elections, and slowly the idea of viability began to grow.