Writers are Heroes. David Halberstam wrote his groundbreaking The Best and the Brightest in 1972 but won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for reporting on Vietnam. Did Halberstam reveal the deep mistakes (in Vietnam) that are visible today in Iraq? There are probably just a few books regarding Vietnam that can actually upset you, the reader after 40 years. David’s writing does just that.
Clearly conveyed by very bright men in President Kennedy‘s Administration, they looked past the expected failures; lack of leadership of the South Vietnamese government, an empty South Vietnamese military, a war against colonialism not communism and even falsified reports by the US military on the progress of the war. That almost documentation-like writing proved US interests in Vietnam would fail in Kennedy’s Administration.
Was our continued commitment a combination of China falling to the communists, the effects of the Korean War, McCarthyism and a view that Democrats were actually soft on communism? Clearly Kennedy surrounded himself with the best, smartest and successful cabinet members. Halberstam’s detailed writing provides the type of deep background on all who served in both Kennedy and Johnson’s Administration exploring how talented they all were, including Adlai Stevenson.
It was a bit of a surprised to learn outgoing President Eisenhower suggested in his first meeting with then President-elect Kennedy that the country would indeed fight communism in Southeast Asia…but in Cambodia.
It was also very interesting to see Daniel Ellsburg mentioned — prior to his Pentagon Papers leak. Very bright men thinking they could win a war by freeing people who viewed America not as liberators but as colonial invaders.
If you were a young adult or college student during Vietnam — why are you allowing a “Vietnam 2.0” today? His book, released two years before I was born upsets me today. All this loss … for the Domino Theory? Against all the members of the US military who gave their lives for our country?
President Johnson announced his “Great Society” three months before the Gulf of Tonkin provocation and Robert McNamara knew South Vietnam would fail no matter what level of commitment the US gave to the South Vietnamese. The writing was on the wall and Johnson ignored it anyway. Halberstam already wrote about the loose facts regarding the Tonkin provocation. There are plenty of opportunities in the book to read paragraphs — and substitute Iraq for Vietnam and we have today’s history lesson staring us right in the face:
If we allow Vietnam to fall, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week in San Francisco.
President Johnson 1968
Sound familiar? I would like to hope President Bush has the brightest people working on Iraq. We are losing our soldiers everyday to lessons from Vietnam we could be avoiding.
4 replies on “Latest read: The Best and The Brightest”
I was in Vietnam and during the reading of that book I realized I had been sacrificed merely because we couldn’t accept the idea that we could be beaten, by those little brown people, as Johnson said.
It infuriates me to know how many people died because, both us and the Vietnamese, because we are so weak minded as to think what we think about ourselves is actually true.
We are the strongest, the most powerful country in the world, so we say, yet we were beaten then and we are being beaten now. You are right.
What we are doing in Iraq is a carbon copy of what we did in Vietnam. We just can’t get it that big guns are just that, big guns. Bully’s never prevail. We are not the policemen of the world, we are the bullies of the world.
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