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

by David Halberstam

His political base, always narrow, became over the years narrower than ever.

John McCone, an extremely conservative, almost reactionary California Republican millionaire to head the CIA.

Claire Booth Luce,

Averell Harriman,

quite ambitious socially, perhaps too ambitious.

Not that giving a party for a lion in order to enhance your own standing was particularly unusual or gauche in Cambridge, or,

Georgetown,

Kennedy, on the make for an intellectual think tank of his own ...

particularl...

lathanh' s stock index, lathanh's think tank

eggheads

perhaps Rostow did not know who he was, that in the eagerness of the poor Jewish immigrant’s son to make it, in the big leagues and with the Establishment, he had lost

“You know, you don’t sleep quite so well any more when you know some of the people going to Washington.”

As in China, it was a modern army against a feudal one,

the United States had created an army in its own image, an army which existed primarily on paper, and which was linked to U.S. aims and ambitions and in no way reflected its own society.

answered Ellsberg, “but there are very few countries in the world where the bright young officer class

has the unique distinction of having fought against its own country’s independence and alongside the colonial army.”

They were bandits and outlaws (the same words Chiang Kai-shek had used to describe the Red Chinese armies,

he maximized the risks and minimized the benefits; now Taylor was maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks.

The aid did not come without American military bodies, and the military bodies did not come without journalistic bodies, so by expanding the number of Americans, Kennedy was in every

way expanding the importance of Vietnam, making his own country more aware of it. From two full-time American correspondents, the number jumped to eight,

dangerous of all, American reporters with television cameras who roamed around discovering things tha...

American commitment also meant that there would be an inevitable rise in the pace of domestic Vietnamese turbulence

the presence of American reporters tended to open up an otherwise closed country; this was the price Diem paid for getting American aid.

While the President had the illusion that he had held off the military, the reality was that he had let them in.

Dealing with the military, once their foot was in the door, both Kennedy and Johnson would learn, was an awesome thing.

be an inexorable pressure for more—more men, more hardware, more targets—and that with the military, short of nuclear weapons, the

due bills went only one way, civilian to military.

that once in, even partially, everything began to work in their favor.

Once activated, even in a small way at first, they would soon dominate the play.

Hill and with hawkish journalists, their stronger hold on patriotic-machismo arguments (in decision making they proposed the manhood position...

The illusion would always be of civilian control; the reality would be of a relentlessly growing

military domination of policy, intelligence, aims, objectives and means, with the civilians, the very ones who thought they could control the military (and who were often in private quite

contemptuous of the military mind), conceding step by step, without even kn...

major advisory and support team to Vietnam was the activation of a new player, a major military player,

Kennedy was sending one more potential

player against him,

figure who would represent the primacy of Sai...

because in effect the Administration had created a situation where it lied to itself.