Books › The best and the brightest
The best and the brightest
831 pages
A sweeping, tragic autopsy of how brilliant men engineered a catastrophic war through sheer arrogance.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like watching a slow-motion train crash orchestrated by the smartest people in the room. It is a weighty, deeply immersive experience that wraps you in the glittering optimism of early 1960s Washington before slowly suffocating you in the bureaucratic dread of the Vietnam War. Halberstam’s prose is expansive and authoritative, building a sweeping, almost Shakespearean tragedy out of memos, meetings, and monumental hubris. The mood is foreboding and somber, driven by an incisive, critical tone that strips away the mythos of American exceptionalism. It is a steady, demanding read that will utterly captivate history buffs, political junkies, and anyone fascinated by how towering intellect can so easily divorce itself from basic wisdom.
- Mood
- foreboding
- weighty
- disillusioning
- somber
- Tone
- authoritative
- critical
- incisive
- tragic
- analytical
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- hubris of power · bureaucratic inertia · limits of intellect · tragedy of good intentions · political arrogance
- The writing
- Expansive, deeply textured, and relentlessly detailed, combining journalistic clarity with the sweeping cadence of a classical tragedy.
- The arc
- Moves from the glittering, optimistic promise of a new intellectual elite to the crushing, inevitable weight of a catastrophic quagmire.
- Who it's for
- Readers fascinated by the psychology of leadership, political history, and the mechanics of monumental, systemic failure.
Content notes
- war
- political corruption
- mass casualties (historical context)
About the book
“This is David Halberstam’s long-awaited book on America in the last decade - the story of what happened when the best and the brightest men in the country came to Washington, to serve the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and exercised, or failed to exercise, their power in office. Already famous through publication in HARPER’S of the chapters on McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, in ESQUIRE of the material on President Johnson, and in the ATLANTIC on the economics of the war, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is the result of more than three years of work - extensive research and over four hundred interviews - by David Halberstam, the journalist who is the author of one of the first and best analyses of our Asian commitment, THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE. His dispatches from Vietnam, which resulted in enormous pressure from Washington to report the war more optimistically, were read by the highest officers of our government for an accurate picture of what was happening in Vietnam. In the same way he now illuminates our own country. He has drawn brilliant, in-depth portraits of the men who came to power in the Kennedy era: Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, William P. Bundy, Dean Rusk, George Ball, William Westmoreland, Maxwell Taylor and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson themselves. The modern, activist, contemporary men - the best and the brightest - who came to Washington to build us a Camelot and left behind them a country divided by war, torn by dissent. Who were these men? What kind of men were they? What was their legacy to America? This book is far more than a volume of portraits. Above all it is a narrative of the decision-making process by which we arrived at our present position in Vietnam. Throughout the 1960s, the overriding question was Vietnam - all the way in or all the way out? - and that question controlled not only the lives of these men but the future of America. How did they react at crucial moments? Who pulled the levers, and in what order? What was the effect of their day-to-day decisions on the war? On the domestic policies of this country? On America’s future? The BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST answers these questions more directly and more completely than any other book written on America in the last decade. From the self-doubting of the post-McCarthy era to the phenomenal hubris of the mid-sixties, America is captured within these pages with a lucidity and intelligence that is fascinating. THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is an enormously important book.” BOOK JACKET
Description from Open Library.
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