A Little Free Library around the corner yielded a paperback of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. I was interested to find it in a "quality" paperback format; fifty years ago I saw it in mass-market format, more or less cubical, with a badly curved spine and the pages tending to fan out, worn at the edges--a housemate's copy, I suppose. I was not surprised that a couple of young acquaintances who came along had never heard of it. But in the 1970s it was much talked of.
Halberstam gives his account of the way that the Kennedy and then the Johnson Administrations found their involvement in Vietnam increasing, helped along the way by the stars that Kennedy had recruited to his administration, the "best and the brightest". Most had good to excellent credentials: McGeorge Bundy was Dean of Harvard College, Robert McNamara the head of the Ford Motor Company; Maxwell Taylor had been Army Chief of Staff during the Eisenhower Administration, and so on. Yet somehow events controlled them, and they oversaw an increase in military commitment, from advisers, to bombing, to the commitment of US ground forces.
The book is very readable, but very long: 665 pages to the end matter in this printing. The biographical sketches, though interesting, might have been spared or at least pared: Dean Rusk's childhood in Georgia and education at Davidson College; the schooling of innumerable (well, five or six) men at Groton; William Westmoreland's time at the Citadel and West Point. A bit of trimming there might have shortened the book by thirty pages.
I wonder about some of the interpretations. The Kuomintang forces that faced the Red Army in 1948 had been through a very hard ten years. Did they lose because they were a feudal army, or because the best of their divisions had been chewed up by the Japanese? Would the portrayal of the People's Republic of China have been as neutral ten years later, when the effects of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc., was known? Is Stilwell's reputation still what it was in the 1970s?
I also wonder about the author's confidence, expressed in a foreword for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, that his book had been not just purchased but read, "did not just sit on coffee tables." It is, as I say, a very long book, and the likely audience consisted largely of very busy people (students perhaps apart). When Michael Kinsley was editor of The New Republic, he developed a skepticism about the extent to which the most talked-of books were in fact read, and he would slip into bookstore copies notes redeemable for $20 at The New Republic office. He never had to pay up.
