The Best and the Brightest

"The Best and the Brightest" (1972) is an account by journalist David Halberstam of the origins of the Vietnam War. The focus of the book is on the foreign policy crafted by the academics and intellectuals who were in John F. Kennedy's administration, and the consequences of those policies in Vietnam.

ummary

The book offers a great deal of detail on how the decisions were made in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that led to the war, focusing on a period from 1960 to 1965 but also covering earlier and later years up to the publication year of the book.

Many different influential factors are examined in the book:

*The Democratic party was still haunted by claims that it had 'lost China' to Communists, and did not want to be said to have lost Vietnam also
*The McCarthy era had rid the government of experts in Vietnam and surrounding Far-East countries
*Early studies called for close to a million US troops in order to completely defeat the Viet Cong, but it would be impossible to convince congress or the US public to deploy that many soldiers
*Declarations of war, and excessive shows of force, including bombing too close to China or too many US troops might have triggered the entry of Chinese ground forces into the war, and greater Soviet involvement (and perhaps repair the growing Sino-Soviet rift)
*Some war games showed that a gradual escalation by the United States could be evenly matched by North Vietnam: every year 200,000 North Vietnamese came of drafting age and potentially could be sent down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to replace any losses against the US: the US would be 'fighting the birthrate'
*Any show of force by the US in the form of bombing or ground forces would signal the US interest in defending South Vietnam and therefore cause the US greater shame if they were to withdraw
*LBJ's belief that too much attention given to the war effort would jeopardize his Great Society domestic programs
*The effects of strategic bombing: most people wrongly believed that North Vietnam prized its industrial base so much it would not risk its destruction by US air power and would negotiate peace after experiencing some limited bombing, but others saw that even in World War II strategic bombing united the victim population against the aggressor and did little to hinder industrial output.
*The simplistic Domino Theory rationales are mentioned.
*After placing a few thousand Americans in harm's way, it became politically easier to send hundreds of thousands over with the promise that with enough numbers they could protect themselves, and that to abandon Vietnam now would mean the earlier investment in money and blood would be thrown away.

The book shows that the gradual escalation chosen allowed the LBJ Administration to initially avoid negative publicity and criticism from Congress as well as to avoid a direct war against the Chinese, but simultaneously removed the possibility of either victory or withdrawal.

Origins of the title

The title may have come from a line by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his work "To Jane: The Invitation" (1822):

:"Best and brightest, come away!" Shelley's line may have originated from English bishop and hymn writer Reginald Heber in his 1811 work, "Hymns. Epiphany":

:"Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,":"Dawn on our darkness, and lend us thine aid."

In the introduction to the 1992 edition, Halberstam states that he had used the title in an article for Harper's magazine, and that Mary McCarthy criticized him in a book review for incorrectly referencing the line in the hymn. Halberstam claims he had no knowledge of that earlier usage. Halberstam also observed regarding the "best and the brightest" phrase, that "...hymn or no, it went into the language, although it is often misused, failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended." In a 2001 interview Halberstam claims that the title came from a line in an article he had written about the Kennedy Administration. The phrase referred to President John F. Kennedy's "whiz kids" -- leaders of industry and academia brought into his administration -- whom Halberstam characterized as arrogantly insisting on "brilliant policies that defied common sense" in Vietnam, often against the advice of career US Department of State employees.

Trivia

Over 500 interviews were conducted by the author in order to write the book, although Halberstam desired to protect the confidentiality of his sources as a journalist so did not print the names of any of those interviewed.

John McCain wrote the foreword to "The Best and the Brightest"'s 20th Edition. In it McCain wrote: "It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn't support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay." [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505E1DA143EF932A2575BC0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=]

Individuals mentioned

The Americans

Presidents

*Franklin Delano Roosevelt
*Harry Truman
*Dwight D. Eisenhower
*John F. Kennedy (JFK)
*Lyndon Johnson (LBJ)
*Richard Nixon

Cabinet

*Dean Rusk - Secretary of State
*Robert McNamara - Secretary of Defense
*Clark Clifford - Secretary of Defense
*Dean Acheson - Secretary of State under Henry Truman
*John Foster Dulles - Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower

Advisors

*John Kenneth Galbraith
*George Ball - Undersecretary of State
*Chester Bowles - Undersecretary of State for part of 1961
*McGeorge Bundy - Special Assistant for National Security Affairs
*Nicholas Katzenbach - Undersecretary of State
*Walt Whitman Rostow - deputy to McGeorge Bundy
*Maxwell Taylor - military advisor to JFK
*John Theodore McNaughton - Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs
*William Bundy - foreign affairs advisor to JFK and LBJ

Military

*General Maxwell Taylor - Consultant to the President and Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
*William Westmoreland - deputy commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV)
*Matthew Ridgway - Chief of Staff
*Earle Wheeler - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
*Edward G. Lansdale - Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations

Others

*Barry Goldwater - Republican contender for president in 1964
*W. Averell Harriman - Ambassador, Under Secretary of State
*Roger Hilsman - Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs
*Hubert Humphrey - Vice president to LBJ
*Robert Kennedy
*Joseph McCarthy
*Frederick E. Nolting, Jr. - Ambassador
*Eugene Rostow - Under Secretary for Political Affairs (Dept. of State)
*Arthur Schlesinger Jr - Special Assistant to the President in the JFK administration
*Adlai Stevenson - Ambassador to the United Nations

The Vietnamese

*Ho Chi Minh
*Ngo Dinh Diem

The Soviets

*Nikita Khruschev
*Alexey Kosygin----"The Best and the Brightest" is also the name of a 1998 Star Trek novel.