The Best and the Brightest
by David Halberstam
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Book Summary Information
Author: David HalberstamEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1993-10-26
ISBN: 0449908704
Number of pages: 720
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of The Best and the Brightest
Book Review: Lessons Yet to be Learned
Summary: 5 Stars
Among the many lessons of this great and wise book--a book that is all the more unsettling because of its wisdom--is that the timidity and indecisiveness in our planning for escalation in Vietnam reflected a recognition that the cause was neither just nor noble. No such qualm existed in WWII or the American Revolution, and that it did exist in the Vietnam war rooms and more recently in Iraq, where we again deployed forces too small to meet the unforeseen immensity of the task (sound familiar?), should have told the planners something about the wisdom of the war.
When faced with a decision to go to war, we should either go with absolutely everything we've got to ensure as swift and decisive a victory as possible or we should not go at all. While Curtis LeMay's military instincts were correct when he continually called for massive force as debate over the nature of the anticipated escalation ensued, he was wrong on 'Nam because the war was wrong. If any one golden rule is to be taken from this book and its disturbingly contemporary relevance, it is this: whenever there is reticence to deploy, it is because the cause is questionable, and when the cause is questionable, there should be no war.
The sad pattern Halberstam's book illuminates is this: when we screw up with the increasingly popular but inherently contradictory notion of "limited war"--a concept that is always doomed to failure and has not once succeeded in any conflict during or since Vietnam--it wounds the pride of very proud men, necessitating even more disastrous escalation when it is too late and on grounds that have become even more irrational. General Ridgway understood this as early as 1954, and General Taylor continued to advise this even as Westmoreland took command and hardly anyone was listening. There is a lot of talk about hurt pride in this book: France's hurt pride after it failed in its colonial exploits in 'Nam, Mac Bundy's hurt pride after the Vietcong bombed Pleiku, JFK's hurt pride after his first disastrous meeting with Khrushchev, encouraging Kennedy to seriously consider escalation in 'Nam just so that we would not look "weak". The saga of wounded pride went on and on, and took many lives with it along the way.
"These things, set in motion, were much harder to stop and turn around than anyone had imagined," Halberstam writes. It is a lesson we're learning all over again. This has nothing to do with whether one supports or abhors the war in Iraq; this is about the disturbing precision with which the ambiguity of the exit strategy in Iraq resembles the failures, naivete and arrogance that turned Vietnam into such an international shame. Many are convinced that Iraq has already become that kind of shame, but I prefer to refrain from such judgments here lest political diatribe distract from the significance of this book, which is its abundance of lessons from a recent and eerily similar episode in American history that we are still yet to learn. How long will it take?
The similarities are endless. How can one read Halberstam's conclusion that "the civilians were naive about what the military could accomplish" and not recall Cheney and Rumsfeld assuring audiences that Iraqis would greet us with flowers and homage of appreciation for liberating them? How can one read that "Hanoi would never capitulate, never negotiate in the face of bombing pressure" and not consider the unrelenting insurgency in Iraq that continues to kill American troops despite ongoing American military operations? (I am writing this review shortly after learning that 5 more Marines have died in Iraq within the past 24 hours). How can one read that the American military "tended to underestimate . . . the resilience and the political dynamic which fed the indigenous force they were fighting" without again considering that same insurgency?
Time and again in Halberstam's book we learn that what happened then is happening now: the military's infiltration of American media with false optimism that fails to accurately portray sobering realities, the arrogant belief in American might that blinded us to the ability and commitment of an unorganized and surreptitious insurgency, the Johnson administration's public preference for the phrase "victory strategy" that resurfaced in response to journalists who asked about an "exit strategy", the calculated drum beat of fear assuring the American people that a threatening political ideology will sweep across the globe if we do not act now in a country thousands of miles away, a country which, as Halberstam reports, was viewed as "a land with vital resources" in Washington at the time. The list of similarities is seemingly endless.
It is easier to hear that Vietnam was fought for all the wrong reasons and nod your head in agreement than it is to read it in this book, which confirms in often infuriating detail that many of the decisions that led to escalation in 'Nam were made out of political expediency with little regard for the human tragedy involved. Late in the book, Halberstam's "good example of how the Army system worked" portrays a "staff intuitively protecting the commander from things he didn't want to see and din't want to hear, never coming up with information which might challenge what a commander wanted to do at a given moment." Exactly the opposite ought to be true when thousands of lives are on the line, but "the best and the brightest" chose their egos and their careers over concerns for the families of strangers whose lives they willingly sacrificed for a cause that is as poorly defined today as it was in 1965. I've got a bridge in San Francisco to sell to anyone who denies that history is repeating itself right before our eyes.
[...]
Summary of The Best and the Brightest
"A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience." -- The New York Times"[The] most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation's search for its idealistic soul. THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller." -- The Boston Globe
"Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative . . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance." -- Los Angeles Times
"Most impressive, superb -- perceptive, literary, multidimensional." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A story which every American should read." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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