The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  So I set out to study the men and their decisions. What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place? The question which intrigued me the most was why, why had it happened. So it became very quickly not a book about Vietnam, but a book about America, and in particular about power and success in America, what the country was, who the leadership was, how they got ahead, what their perceptions were about themselves, about the country and about their mission. The men intrigued me because they were fascinating; they had been heralded as the ablest men to serve this country in this century—certainly their biographies seemed to confirm that judgment—and yet very little had been written about them; the existing journalistic definition of them and what they represented was strikingly similar to their own definition of themselves. So I felt that if I could learn something about them, I would learn something about the country, the era and about power in America. (When I began my legwork, friends of some of the principals told me that it was a mistake to dwell too much on individuals, that the thrust of something like the pressure for this war went beyond individual men. Perhaps, perhaps, but in 1961 no group of men would have argued more vehemently against that very conception, the inability of able, rational men to control irrational events, than the group of men taking power.)

  The book is largely the product of my own interviews. For more than two and a half years I worked full time interviewing people who might be knowledgeable about the men, the events, the decisions. On the decisions themselves it was people primarily in the second, third and fourth tier of government who were helpful in piecing together the play and the action, although finally several of the principals themselves began to cooperate. Gradually, as I got into the book, I began to work backward in time, trying to find out how the earliest decisions on Vietnam had been made, how the trap was set long before anyone realized it was a trap. In all I did some five hundred interviews for the book, seeing some people as many as ten times, checking and cross-checking as carefully as I could. The interviews produced about two thousand pages of single-spaced notes for the book. In addition, I carefully read the literature of the Kennedy-Johnson period (the Kennedy literature either totally admiring or bitterly hostile, the Johnson literature more critical and analytical; it was clearly easier to stand back and analyze Lyndon Johnson than it was Jack Kennedy). I went through the magazines and newspapers of the period, and I also read on the fall of China, on the earlier decisions on Vietnam, and then went back to some of the literature on the early days of the Cold War, trying to judge the decisions in the context of the era, with the perceptions which existed then. I had begun the writing on the book in the late spring of 1971; shortly afterward the Pentagon Papers were published: if anything, they confirmed the direction in which I was going and they were rich in the bureaucratic by-play of the era. They were a very real aid; they set out time and place and direction during those years. They were for me invaluable and for anyone else trying to trace the origins and the decisions on Vietnam (the clarity of John McNaughton’s insights into the American dilemma by January 1966 when he realizes that the United States is locked in a hopeless war is by itself absolutely fascinating). In addition, long before the papers were published, Dan Ellsberg himself had been extremely generous with his time in helping to analyze what had happened during the crucial years of 1964 and 1965.

  Originally I had intended to list at the end of the book the names of all the people I had interviewed. However, I recently changed my mind because of circumstances: the political climate is somewhat sensitive these days, and the relationship of reporter to source is very much under attack. The right of a reporter to withhold the name of a source, and equally important, the substance of an interview, is very much under challenge, and the latest Supreme Court decision has cast considerable doubt about what were assumed to be journalistic rights. Even on this book my rights as a reporter have been diminished; I was subpoenaed by a grand jury in the Ellsberg case, although I made it clear to the government that I knew nothing of the passing of the papers. My freedom as a reporter was impaired by the very subpoena of the grand jury and the need to appear there. I will therefore list no names here.

  Earlier on in the book I discussed the reporters who were in Vietnam during the 1962­64 period, saying that while their political and military assessments had been quite accurate (an accuracy ironically acknowledged by the Pentagon’s own analysts in the Pentagon Papers history), I felt that they too had failed in part, particularly in comparison with the young State Department China officers of an earlier period, with whom they were in some ways comparable. To a considerable degree I was writing about myself. Some of us who have been critics of the war for a long time were probably ahead of the society as a whole and our profession as a whole, but in our hearts I think we wish we had done a better job. My own attitudes on Vietnam developed over a period of time. In September 1962 I arrived in Saigon as a reporter for the New York Times, believing at first in the value of the effort, not questioning the reality of a country called South Vietnam. It was a small war then, the Americans were only advisers, and it seemed to be a test of two political systems in a political war. I thought our system the better, our values exportable, and thought perhaps with luck and skill our side might win, but events soon disabused me. The American optimism of the period was clearly mindless; the Vietcong were infinitely stronger and more subtle than the government, their sense of the people far truer. For dissenting this much from the requisite optimism we became of course prime targets of the Administration and the embassy. At first my journalistic colleagues and I traced most of the faults to the Diem regime itself; however, the more I reported, the longer I stayed and the deeper I probed, the more I felt that despite the self-evident failings of the Ngo family regime, the sickness went far deeper, that all the failings of the American-Diem side grew out of the French Indochina war, in which the other side had captured the nationalism of the country and become a genuinely revolutionary force. In coming to this conclusion I was affected primarily by two men, my colleague Neil Sheehan, then with UPI, and my friend and colleague Bernard Fall. Thus, instead of believing that there was a right way of handling our involvement in Vietnam, in the fall of 1963 I came to the conclusion that it was doomed and that we were on the wrong side of history. My first book on Vietnam, The Making of a Quagmire, written in 1964 and published in April 1965, was extremely pessimistic and cast grave doubts about escalation; the North, I wrote, was essentially invulnerable to bombing, and combat troops would bring the same political problems encountered by the French. I felt then that after the long years of supporting the Diem regime, we owed it to the Vietnamese to stay a little longer and continue the mission as long as they felt they could continue the fight, that the signs would have to come first from them (when those signs did come, in late 1964, they became the justification not for withdrawal and cutting back, as George Ball was then pleading in the government, but rather for the American government to switch policies and take over the war). I watched the escalation with mounting disbelief and sadness. It seems the saddest story possible, with one more sad chapter following another. Like almost everyone else I know who has been involved in Vietnam, I am haunted by it, by the fact that somehow I was not better, that somehow it was all able to happen.

  In a book like this, which took so long to write, I am indebted to many people. I am particularly grateful to my three editors then at Harper’s Magazine, Willie Morris, Bob Kotlowitz and Midge Decter. In the years I worked there they were a writer’s delight. They had the capacity to invoke the best in you; they encouraged you to reach for more and the editing was intelligent and careful; in addition, they all encouraged me to take on this book. John Cowles, the publisher of Harper’s, was particularly generous to me and the other writers on the staff. James Silberman at Random House has been strong in support of this book, and wise in his sense of conception of it. Bill Polk and Peter Diamandopoulos at the Adlai
Stevenson Institute have been extremely generous; after I resigned from Harper’s in the spring of 1971 they were quick to offer me a fellowship, and in addition to enjoying the particularly warm and pleasant association of the Institute and its fellows, I am grateful on a more basic level—without their help I could not have finished the book on the projected schedule. Edmund Gullion, dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy and an old friend from Congo days, was also quick to offer me a place on his staff after the Harper’s bust and I taught there in the summer of 1971 mostly on the subject of Vietnam, though the dean and I could not disagree more about the subject.

  I have mentioned that Dan Ellsberg was generous with his time. There are two others whose professional help I would like to acknowledge. James Thomson, a lecturer in American-East Asian relations at Harvard and now curator of the Nieman Fellows as well, was particularly helpful in making the crucial connection for me between what had happened to the China experts and the impact of this upon the bureaucracy during the Kennedy-Johnson years. In effect, he opened doors which, when I began the book, I did not know existed. He was also extremely generous in showing me his own work on the subject, and his article for the Atlantic Monthly on the anatomy of decision making on Vietnam is by far the best single analysis of what happened. With Leslie Gelb, who edited the study which became known as the Pentagon Papers, I had many fruitful discussions about the era. He made available to me his own as yet unpublished chapters on the Roosevelt and Truman era, which were of great value. I am very appreciative of his kindness, particularly in the light of the fact that what I was writing was in effect competitive with his own work.

  Among others who have helped me are Richard Merritt, who was quick and fast in checking factual material; Barbara Willson at Random House, firm, tenacious and very effective in editing what was a very long manuscript which came in piece by piece; Julia Kayan, Elaine Cohen and Ann Lowe were also generous with their time at Random House; my lawyer Marshall Perlin was generous and conscientious when I was subpoenaed. Karen Witte was kind enough to Xerox much of the manuscript for me—no small job; Jean Halloran and Avery Rome, both of them Harper’s exiles, typed the manuscript and occasionally edited it as they typed. Others who were helpful were the staff at Claridge’s in Washington, my favorite hotel where I often stayed during long weeks of interviewing; Sam Sylvia of Nantucket was particularly generous on a personal level; and Rhonas A. McGhee of Washington made helpful suggestions from time to time.

  Besides listing the usual bibliography, I would like to mention some of the sources which were particularly valuable and upon which I was more than normally dependent. They include Milton Viorst’s article on Dean Rusk, originally published in Esquire and then reprinted in his collection Hustlers and Heroes; John Finney’s magazine article “The Long Trial of John Paton Davies,” New York Times Magazine, August 31, 1969; E. J. Kahn’s profile of Averell Harriman in The New Yorker, May 3 and May 10, 1952; Pat Furgurson’s biography of Westmoreland, entitled Westmoreland: The Inevitable General, which saved my doing a good deal of legwork on the general’s boyhood; the books on Lyndon Johnson by Hugh Sidey, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, and also Phil Geyelin’s book; Joe Goulden’s book on the Tonkin Gulf incident; Chalmers Roberts’ article on the decision not to intervene in Indochina in 1954, “The Day We Didn’t Go to War,” The Reporter, September 14, 1956; Leslie Gelb’s chapters from his as yet unpublished book on the origins of the war in Vietnam dealing specifically with the Truman and Roosevelt eras; Don Oberdorfer for what happened in the latter stages of the Johnson Administration in his book Tet, and Townsend Hoopes’s book The Limits of Intervention on the same general period. Ed Dale of the New York Times suggested that I spend some time finding out about the economic policies of the Administration during the escalation and was helpful in trying to guide me through it. In addition, the interviews given for the Kennedy Library by Robert Lovett, Henry Luce, Joe Rauh, Dean Acheson, George Kennan and John Seigenthaler were unusually valuable, particularly the Luce interview. It dealt with his 1960 dinner with Joseph Kennedy when they discussed how Jack Kennedy should run as a presidential candidate, and it closely parallels material that Luce gave to John Jessup for Jessup’s book on him.

  Bibliography

  BOOKS ON JOHN F. KENNEDY HIMSELF, AS WELL AS THE KENNEDY CIRCLE AND THE KENNEDY STYLE AND CULTURE:

  Abel, Elie, The Missile Crisis. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1966.

  Bowles, Chester, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life 1941­1969. New York, Harper, 1971.

  Bradlee, Benjamin, That Special Grace. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1964.

  Burns, James MacGregor, John Kennedy: A Political Profile. New York, Harcourt, 1959.

  Doyle, Edward P., ed., As We Knew Adlai. New York, Harper, 1966.

  Fay, Paul B., Jr., The Pleasure of His Company. New York, Harper, 1966.

  Galbraith, John K., Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

  ———, The Triumph. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

  Hilsman, Roger, To Move a Nation. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1967.

  Jessup, John K., ed., Ideas of Henry Luce. New York, Atheneum, 1969.

  Lansdale, Edward Geary, In the Midst of War: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia. New York, Harper, 1972.

  McNamara, Robert S., The Essence of Security: Reflections in Office. New York, Harper, 1968.

  Morison, Elting, ed., The American Style. New York, Harper, 1958.

  Rostow, Walt W., The Stages of Economic Growth. 2nd ed. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1971.

  Salinger, Pierre, With Kennedy. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1966.

  Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make a Difference? New York, Macmillan, 1960.

  ———, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

  Sorensen, Theodore, Kennedy. New York, Harper, 1965.

  Stein, Jean, and Plimpton, George, American Journey: The Times of Robert F. Kennedy. New York, Harcourt, 1970.

  Tanzer, Lester, ed., The Kennedy Circle. Washington, D.C., Luce, 1961.

  Taylor, Maxwell, The Uncertain Trumpet. New York, Harper, 1960.

  Walton, Richard J., The Remnants of Power: The Tragic Last Years of Adlai Stevenson. New York, Coward-McCann, 1968.

  Whalen, Richard J., The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy. New York, New American Library, 1964.

  White, Theodore H., The Making of the President 1960. New York, Atheneum, 1961.

  Wise, David, and Ross, Thomas B., The Invisible Government. New York, Random House, 1964.

  JOHNSON AND THE JOHNSON PEOPLE AND STYLE:

  Anderson, Patrick, The President’s Men: White House Assistants from FDR through LBJ. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1968.

  Brammer, William, The Gay Place. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

  Evans, Rowland, and Novak, Robert, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power. New York, New American Library, 1966.

  Furgurson, Ernest B., Westmoreland: The Inevitable General. Boston, Little, Brown, 1968.

  Goldman, Eric F., The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. New York, Knopf, 1969.

  Hayes, Harold, ed., Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties. New York, McCall’s, 1970.

  Johnson, Haynes Bonner, and Gwerztman, Bernard M., Fulbright: The Dissenter. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1968.

  Johnson, Lyndon B., The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency. New York, Holt, 1971.

  Johnson, Sam Houston, My Brother Lyndon Johnson. New York, Cowles, 1970.

  McPherson, Harry, A Political Education. Boston, Little, Brown, 1972.

  O’Neill, William L., Coming Apart. Chicago, Quadrangle, 1971.

  Reedy, George E., The Twilight of the Presidency. New York, Norton, 1970.

  Sidey, Hugh, A Very Personal Presidency: Lyndon Johnson in the White House. New York, Atheneum, 1968.

  Steinberg, Alfred, Sam Johnson’s Boy. N
ew York, Macmillan, 1968.

  Trewhitt, Henry L., McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon. New York, Harper, 1971.

  Viorst, Milton, Hustlers and Heroes: An American Political Panorama. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1971.