Spotlight on Books: WFM’S All Time Best: “The Best and the Brightest” by David Halberstam

The Vietnam War had an enormous impact on American culture and society. We were engaged militarily for 15 years. At the peak of our involvement we had 550,000 troops on the ground. Ultimately, 51,000 American soldiers perished and hundreds of thousands were wounded. Depression, mental illness, drug abuse and PTSD impacted thousands of our young men traumatised by their war experience. Over a million Vietnamese citizens died in the conflict. The domestic political landscape deteriorated radically- creating fissures that were slow to heal and still manifest themselves today. Massive demonstrations, riots, troops on the streets, bombings, revolutionary rhetoric were generated by the passionate intellectual and ideological disputes over the wisdom and morality of the war. Families and communities were stressed, universities became cultural hot spots and the political system was stretched to the breaking point. Four Presidents confronted the complexities of Southeast Asia and America’s role in the world. Eisenhower initiated our involvement, but was ultra cautious. Kennedy incrementally increased our military footprint and we had 16,000 advisers on the ground when he was assassinated in 1963. Johnson authorised major escalations with massive bombing campaigns against North Vietnam and huge troop increases. Millions of teenage Americans were drafted. He chose not to run in 1968 because his political support had collapsed because of his management of the war. Nixon promised to end the war and he and Kissinger did execute a “peace” agreement with the Vietnamese in 1973. His term was racked by protests and civil disturbances and he resigned in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. More soldiers died in his term than LBJ's. A bad scorecard for Presidents. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 after challenging Johnson on the war. The war changed the way Americans looked at themselves. We started to question whether we were the good guys. The war literally fractured a previously optimistic, complacent and conventional American society. Public confidence in the leadership class was shattered. Our elite institutions lost their veil of credibility. AND WE LOST! Our South Vietnamese allies collapsed in defeat 2 years after our departure. The Communist Party now rules a unified Vietnam. By any measure, Vietnam is a historic military and political catastrophe for the United States. It is important that the nation learn from the experience. Those who ignore history are destined to repeat it. Unfortunately, the war is off the radar screen of any American born after 1975 and I have no confidence the history programs in high schools or colleges are devoting much attention to the conflict. Luckily, there are outstanding books chronicling the war and we will focus on today on the one literary classic that permanently impacted my world view.

The “hot” war in Vietnam was in my formative adolescence to teenager transition. I was 9 when JFK was assassinated. By 1967, a priest at our 8th grade Catholic retreat encouraged us to be intellectually curious and posed the question “Is America’s war policy in Vietnam moral or immoral?” I vividly recall the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago which spilled into violence after clashes between anti- war protestors and police. I remember the “Days of Rage”, the Kent State shootings in 1970, the SDS bombings and McGovern’s landslide loss to Nixon in 1972. A tumultuous time. When I arrived at Loyola for college, I committed to understanding what the hell had happened to the country because of Vietnam. The first major work I encountered was The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. It was published in 1972 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Halberstam was a young journalist covering Vietnam for the New York Times from 1962 to 1965. He was an early skeptic of the American strategy, highlighting the dysfunction of our South Vietnamese allies and America’s general cluelessness about the country we were trying to “save.” An earlier work, The Making of a Quagmire was uncompromising in its criticism and engendered very hostile backlash from the Johnson administration. He was a firebrand, but also a very disciplined journalist. The Best and the Brightest was bold and ambitious, unmasking the processes at the centre of American political power. No prior journalist had so successfully combined insider information with thematic analysis of how the American elite made foreign policy decisions. It was eye opening.

The book is a classic in the annals of American political and military history. His research effort was comprehensive and thorough- a reporter with incredible access to the actual battlefield and cooperative sources in the political administration. The narrative is crisp and his prose is linear and clear. Halberstam never became a lyrical writer, but he bombards you with facts and does not hesitate to render tough judgments on the major actors. His portraits of Kennedy, Johnson, Bundy and McNamara are compelling, fair and unsparing.

The fundamental theme is that our entire effort in Vietnam was doomed because our leaders were operating in a Cold War straitjacket. There was a collective intellectual certainty that Vietnam was geopolitical challenge- a battle for supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Communists could not be allowed to prevail because a defeat would inevitably result in the rest of Southeast Asia going communist. The famous “domino theory.” Vietnam was seen as one piece on the international chessboard. Our leaders were trapped by their own pre-existing biases. They were creatures of the “Who Lost China” debates and the hangover of the McCarthyism “Red Scare” insanity of the 50’s. They concluded it was unacceptable to be soft on communism anywhere and Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese were certainly Communists. There was no vigorous internal debate. There was no hard nosed analysis of our national interest. The brilliant Ivy League advisors never questioned the basic assumptions. There was rampant viewpoint conformity. State Department specialists on the region were sidelined or exiled. There was no attempt to understand the nationalist impulses behind Ho Chi Minh’s vision. There was no sustained critique of the “legitimacy” of the South Vietnamese leaders. There was no examination of the conditions of the Vietnamese peasantry or urban workers. There was a complete ignorance of Vietnam’s culture and history or its historical enmity with the Chinese. The military reports from the field were routinely sanitised to avoid disappointing military and political leadership. The press briefings were the “Five O Clock Follies.” The Americans in Saigon lived in a bubble. Halberstam is brilliant in describing how the American troops, originally idealistic and mission motivated, became disillusioned and cynical as they recognised the disconnect between what they had been told by their commanders and what they were seeing in real time.

The powerful theme is that American arrogance was overwhelming and self defeating. There was minimal respect for the military prowess of the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army, conveniently forgetting that the same people had crushed the French in the mid 1950’s. There was an underlying racism in the attitude toward Asians. The book also highlights the failure of coordination at the federal level. There was no coordination between State, Defence and CIA and and an unhealthy concentration of influence in the White House. Sound familiar? Basically, a total absence of strategic thinking. Instead, a sustained, unquestioning and continuous expansion of an unwinnable war.

The book title tells the story. The Kennedy White House was staffed with brilliant individuals with first rate academic and corporate credentials. They were confident, polished and certain of their own abilities and moral rectitude. What could go wrong with so many geniuses in the room? As Sam Rayburn famously commented when Johnson told him that the Kennedy team was breathtakingly smart- “That’s great, but I would feel better if one of them had run for Sheriff!” Kennedy is portrayed as cerebral, rational, detached and confident- but privately skeptical of military solutions. However, he didn’t have the courage to slow down the gradual increase in the level of our engagement. As another author later commented about Kennedy and Vietnam- “The author of Profiles in Courage should have displayed More courage and Less profile" in his Vietnam deliberations. He over-reacted to the Bay of Pigs disaster and was committed to being “tough.” Later, confidants said Kennedy would have reversed course after the 1964 election and would never have authorised the huge troop increases ordered by LBJ. We will never know. We do know that Johnson accepted the advice of the team that Kennedy had put in place. The “Kennedy Would have Got Us Out of Vietnam” school is an engrained component of the “Kennedy Could Do No Wrong” post assassination legacy. The bottom line is our Vietnam commitment grew during his Presidency.

LBJ was ill equipped to handle foreign policy. His domestic legislative record was incredible, but his foreign policy chops were weak. He was a strange combination of qualities- an intimidating fellow who could be a bully- but insecure and defensive when discussing issues out of his comfort zone. He lacked intellectual confidence and deferred to the military commanders. He was also macho and determined not to look “weak.” He depended on Bundy and McNamara. Bundy was arrogant, a skilled infighter and brutally dismissive of intellectual inferiors (in his view basically everyone else). He never questioned the broad policy assumptions and actually became more hawkish with the passage of time. McNamara was complex and ultimately a tragic figure Shakespeare would have loved him! But, the real tragedy is the 50,000 young American GI’s who died because of decisions that had McNamara’s fingerprints all over them. He deserves much of the blame for the disastrous course of events. He was too data driven, focusing on weekly casualty reports and bombing results. He totally ignored the human dimensions of the conflict. He is the embodiment of the limits of pure technocratic thinking. Another warning for today as the tech bro elite seeks to expand their political influence. McNamara, like Kennedy had private doubts, but never expressed dissent publicly when it could have mattered.

The book was a history lesson for me then and its message and themes have aged well. It is a primer on how not to make public policy. You should be skeptical of elites, challenge the experts, embrace the practical and prudent. Do reverse engineering and counter histories in every scenario. Know and respect your adversary. Get out of your comfort zone. Be suspicious of conventional wisdom. Question everything and everyone, no matter how well credentialed the expert or how widely accepted the idea. War, in particular, is too important to be left to The Best and the Brightest.

A CLASSIC! READ IT! Thank You David Halberstam- Rest in Peace! You died too young!