The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  A Final Word

  Author's Note

  Bibliography

  The Modern Library Editorial Board

  About the Author

  Other Books by David Halberstam

  Copyright Page

  For Dorothy deSantillana

  Foreword

  Senator John McCain

  At the time of the Tet offensive, the propaganda machine of the North Vietnamese government obstructed my access to the reporting of a free press. I did not learn of Tet from Walter Cronkite or the New York Times. Hanoi Hannah brought me the news, as she always did, sandwiching it between atonal patriotic hymns intended to crush our resolve—rousing renditions of “Springtime in the Liberated Zone” and “I Asked My Mother How Many Air Pirates She Shot Down Today.”

  Of course, the Vietnamese hyped the story to a fare-thee-well, using all the usual hyperbole that makes propaganda so colorful. For many days, American prisoners of war were informed that Khe San was within moments of falling, and then, suddenly, Hannah ceased updating us on the people’s heroic success. The Vietnamese never informed us that the Marines defending Khe San proved more heroic than the people’s liberation forces. That we learned, to our great relief, from POWs captured after Tet.

  Any accurate information about the war was brought to us by newly arrived POWs. Whatever else you might think of them, North Vietnamese leaders certainly lacked an idealistic regard for the truth. Anything that did not directly benefit their war effort was dispensable—including truth and justice. They kept us well informed on the growing antiwar movement back home, regularly broadcasting news about peace marches and statements made by notable opponents to the war. News about their military setbacks or the means Hanoi employed in prosecuting the war was rather harder to come by.

  Of all the privations and injustices suffered in undemocratic nations, lack of a free press is among the worst. In prison, I missed all the staples of my comfortable life in the States. But I missed most the free, uncensored, abundant flow of information. Arriving at Clark Air Force Base on the day we were released from prison, I was as hungry for information as I was for food. As I sat down to enjoy my first decent meal in a long while, I asked a steward if he would also provide me with any newspapers and magazines he could find. I was desperate to fill in the blanks about what I knew was going on in the world, and I trusted Western journalists, particularly American journalists, to enlighten me.

  Soon after I came home, the Navy allowed me to attend the National War College for a year. There I arranged sort of a private tutorial on the war, choosing all the texts myself, in the hope that I might better understand how we came to be involved in the war and why, after paying such a terrible cost, we lost. The most enlightening of all those texts, and the book that reaffirmed my high regard for American journalism and, relatedly, my faith in freedom, was David Halberstam’s landmark study of the men who sent us to war, The Best and the Brightest.

  No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the cost to fight it by half measures. War is far too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily. 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.

  No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone. In the end, the men whose characters, motivation, and reasoning Halberstam reveals so convincingly lacked the necessary resolve to succeed because they misjudged the enemy’s resolve. They misjudged American power. They misjudged our South Vietnamese allies. They misjudged the Soviets and the Chinese. They misjudged the world. And, most of all, they misjudged themselves. Or so it seems to many who lost good years or their health or happiness as a consequence of their monumental misjudgments, to say nothing of those who lost their lives.

  I have often seen this book’s title described as ironic. I don’t think it is. The men who sent Americans to war in Vietnam were, by many standards, the best and the brightest. They were extraordinarily intelligent, well-educated, informed, experienced, patriotic, and capable leaders. They were elegant and persuasive. They seemed born to govern, and America once had as much confidence in them as they so abundantly had in themselves. But, in the end, they had more confidence than vision, and that failing bred in them a fateful hubris. No irony here, but a classic tragedy.

  I very much doubt that Americans will ever again believe that our country has a native governing class. That’s one of the lessons of our war in Vietnam, and of the book that best explains how we got there. That’s not a bad thing. I believe Americans still love their country, believe in its ideals, but wisely prefer to judge the merits of their government on its policies. That’s a fair standard and better for the health of a democracy than romantic notions about the superiority of a natural elite.

  For anyone who aspires to a position of national leadership, no matter the circumstances of his or her birth, this book should be mandatory reading. And anyone who feels a need, as a confused former prisoner of war once felt the need, for insights into how a great and good nation can lose a war and see its worthy purposes and principles destroyed by self-delusion can do no better than to read and reread David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.

  Introduction

  I remember the moment when I first began to understand why I felt so driven on this particular book. I was one year into the legwork and had gone to a party for a friend's book. Teddy White, who had been an important role model for me—his Fire in the Ashes had come out when I was a sophomore in college—was off in a corner, I had joined him, and we were talking about American politics. Suddenly another colleague wandered over, turned to Teddy, and asked—I was stunned by the bluntness of the question, it was the kind of thing you might think but did not dare ask—“What is it that makes a bestseller, anyway?”

  Teddy, whose first book about the collapse of China (Thunder Out of China) had reflected much of his pessimism about Chiang’s forces which had been suppressed by his employer, Harry Luce, had surprised us both with his answer: “A book that burns in your belly—something that has to be written before you can go on to anything else.” He had, I realized in the weeks and months to come, defined not just one of his earlier books, but the one I was working on as well, an account of the origins of the war in Vietnam.

  That book had its roots in a trip I made to Vietnam for Harper’s Magazine in the fall of 1967. I had been appalled and disillusioned by what I found in my three months there. The war, despite the optimism of the Saigon command, was a stalemate: our total mili
tary superiority checked by their total political superiority. In effect this meant we could win any set-piece battle we wanted, but the other side could easily replenish their battlefield losses whenever they wanted. What was even more depressing was the optimism I found among the top Americans in Saigon, which struck me as essentially self-deception. There was much heady talk implying that we were on the very edge of a final victory and that the other side was ready to crack. Invitations were even sent out that December by some high-ranking diplomats asking friends to come to the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel Christmas party.

  It was the same old false optimism I had first witnessed there five years earlier as a young reporter for the Times, when the stakes were so much smaller. It reflected once again the immense difference between what people in the field thought was happening and what people in the Saigon command, responding to intense political pressure from Washington, wanted to think was happening. One night near the end of my tour in 1967 I was invited to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s house for dinner. At the end of the dinner, Barry Zorthian, then the chief public affairs officer, who was himself in the process of turning from hawk to dove and who was trying to dampen Bunker’s seemingly unshakable optimism about the progress of events, had set me up with a planted question.

  “Mister Ambassador,” he had said near the end of the evening, “David Halberstam has been away from Vietnam for four years, and he’s been back traveling around the countryside for the last three months. Perhaps he would share some of his impressions with us.”

  Thus cued, I suggested that we were fighting the birthrate of the nation, that the war was essentially a stalemate—but a stalemate which favored the other side, since eventually we would have to go home. What our military did not understand, I added, was that Hanoi controlled the pace of the war, and it could either initiate contact and raise the level of violence or hold back, lick its wounds, and lower it, depending on its needs at a given moment.

  Bunker was considered one of the ablest and least conventional men in the foreign service at that moment, although his years in Vietnam did not add luster to his reputation. His was a graceful and courteous presence, and I think this last assignment, with the steadily mounting bitterness which it provoked, must have been one of diminishing pleasure for him. He listened politely to what I said (which was more than one of his predecessors had done—four years earlier an American ambassador had literally thrown me out of his office when I had expressed reservations about an extremely dubious ARVN success). He had, Bunker said, spoken with his generals—he named several of them—all fine men, and they had assured him that, contrary to what I said, everything was on schedule and that there was an inevitability to the victory we sought, given the awesome force we had mounted against the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong.

  That evening was not the place for a confrontation, and Ellsworth Bunker, with his old-fashioned, almost courtly New England manner, was certainly not a man anyone wanted to be in a confrontation with. As such, what followed was rather mild. His generals, I suggested, were like all Western generals before them, starting with the French: not so much in the wrong war, but on the wrong planet. Their ability to calibrate this war was limited, their skills were tied to other wars in other places, and with very few exceptions they, like the French before them, tended to underestimate the bravery, strength, resilience, and the political dynamic which fed the indigenous force they were fighting. In addition, the briefings they received from subordinates were always tied to career and promotion.

  As I spoke I thought of one of my favorite generals, Bob York, a rugged, craggy-faced ex-boxer whom I had known in my earlier tour and who had always gotten things right—had gotten them right because when he went into the countryside he unpinned his stars; with his rough looks he seemed more like an enlisted man than the West Pointer he was, and people told him the truth. At the dinner Ambassador Bunker reiterated his confidence, Zorthian, having hit a wall—and not for the first time, one suspected—changed the subject and the party soon ended. I left the ambassador’s residence more depressed than ever; the embassy was isolated, it still did not understand the roots and therefore the strength of its adversary, it was once again telling Washington what Washington wanted to hear without even knowing. A few months later the Tet offensive caught the American mission, both military and civilian, largely by surprise and undermined the legitimacy of almost everything it was reporting about Vietnam, most particularly its relentless military optimism. What the American army at the highest levels lost in Vietnam, my close friend and colleague Charlie Mohr told me years later, in the best summation of that time, was its intellectual integrity.

  I returned back from Vietnam to America properly depressed. A war which was not winnable was going to play itself out, with, I thought, terrible consequences for both America and Vietnam. I had little time to ruminate on this, for I spent the coming year covering the growing domestic turbulence caused by the war. Nineteen sixty-eight was one of those landmark years in which everything came to a head—or, as in this case, seemed to come apart, marked as it was by the withdrawal of the sitting President from the race, by two tragic assassinations, and by a political process which began in the snows of New Hampshire just as the Tet offensive took place and ended in violence in the streets of Chicago. That year I covered many of those events, and in addition I wrote a small book about Robert Kennedy’s campaign. When the year was over, I felt like someone who had been living for too long on the edge of events. I was exhausted, and I had no sense of what I wanted to do next. What about an article on McGeorge Bundy? suggested our executive editor at Harper’s, Midge Decter (not yet identifiably in her neoconservative incarnation). A light went on immediately. It was a chance to look at perhaps the most luminescent of the Kennedy people, all of whom had seemed so dazzling when they had first taken office, a chance to look at the Kennedy years themselves from a certain distance, and finally, and perhaps most important, a chance to look at the decision making on the war itself. Suddenly all my energies were fused. It was exactly what I wanted to do, and I spent the next three months working on it. The article, “The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy,” ran three times the normal magazine length and caused something of a storm. The general power of print and of a magazine like Harper’s was a good deal greater twenty years ago in relationship to television than it is today, and this was regarded as an important article. It marked the first time anyone in any major centrist magazine, let alone a presumably liberal one, had been so critical of a member of the Kennedy Administration; far more important, it was the first time a writer in the liberal center had suggested that the Kennedy Administration might be overrated and that its decision making on Vietnam was significantly flawed. Up to then there had been something of a gentleman’s agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things. The Kennedy charm and skill and ability to manipulate events was not inconsiderable. I had been viewed by some in the inner Kennedy circle as a hostile journalist because of the pessimistic quality of my early reporting from Saigon, and had angered some people even more when I had told in an earlier book of the President’s frustration with me, and his attempts to have the publisher of the Times transfer me from my Saigon beat.

  Now with the publication of the Bundy article the stakes were about to go up. Bundy was a dual icon. He had been a dean of Harvard at an unspeakably young age, portrayed constantly in the press as the most cerebral member of the Kennedy Administration other than the President himself, and at the same time the leader of the next generation of the American Establishment. “You have begun,” my friend Tom Wicker, who still lived in Washington, told me when the article was published, “to take on most of the icons in a city that does not like to see its icons criticized.” The outcry upon publicati
on was immediate. My clearest memory of the many attacks on me, some overt, some covert, is of that by Archibald MacLeish, the poet and former librarian of Congress, and an absolute paragon of the Establishment. MacLeish was a man with very close ties to the Bundy family, and to Dean Acheson, and to the Cowles family, which by chance then happened to own Harper’s. He wrote a long, very angry letter (albeit not for publication) taking great umbrage at what I had done, and wondering how I dared do it. He sent one copy to Cass Canfield, then the head of Harper Brothers publishing house who wisely simply passed it on without comment to Willie Morris our editor, and another to John Cowles, Jr., who was the overall owner of Harper’s Magazine. John Cowles, not by a long shot as good at this game as Cass Canfield, not only sent it on to Willie, but unwisely added his own letter, addressed not to me, but to Willie, and far more sympathetic, it seemed to me and my colleagues, to Bundy than to me. Cowles seemed to be suggesting that a considerable injustice had been done. His letter was not without its clubby overtones—he constantly referred to me as Halberstam and to Bundy as Mac. Those were edgy times. Cowles and I had a heated exchange of letters in which I suggested that if he did not like what I wrote, he could call me up, or he could write me directly.

  That article, however, gave me not merely a book idea, but a sense of purpose. I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War. In another time I might have hesitated before setting out on a task so ambitious. It was a major jump in terms of what I had attempted in the past—my previous books were an extension of the daily and monthly journalism I had already completed, and this was a book more likely to fall into the category of contemporary history. But from the moment I thought of extending the magazine article into a book, I had no doubts. Done properly, it would take four years, and if I gave roughly two and a half years to the legwork and a year and a half to the writing, I could do it. In fact that proved to be a surprisingly close approximation of what was required. Looking back, I think of myself as working on it in a kind of prolonged fever. If there was a formula to doing the book, I thought, it would be one of input. If I went out and did two interviews each day, I was sure I would not fail. I did the two a day with ease. Sometimes I did three. If I found someone who was helpful, I would see him not once, but two or three or four or five times. There was, I found, always more to learn.