Book review: The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

"For it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam, it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy."

First published in 1972, Halberstam's wonderful book unpacks the mistaken political estimates over many years that led the U.S. into the Vietnam quagmire. His approach is to follow the men of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, dubbed "the best and the brightest" of their generation, and try to figure out what combination of blind spots, outdated assumptions, arrogance, and stubbornness caused so many bad decisions to accumulate for so long. As we know, it is a tragic story, yet Halberstam tells it so well and with such a feel for the characters that it's an enjoyable, as well as angry, book.

From the perspective of today, a couple of things stand out. One is the total absence of women from any of the decision making in previous decades, and their almost total absence from the book. Occasionally a female writer or a wife appears, but the only American woman mentioned as having a political impact in her own right is Eleanor Roosevelt, unique among First Ladies. This is not a fault of the book, rather a striking fact about how the U.S. has changed in my generation. For that matter, the talent pool from which "the best and the brightest" were chosen was limited in other ways: by race and, for the most part, class background, as well as sex. So right away today's reader can sense that America then had one hand tied behind its back.

Halberstam chooses not to focus on the loss of life and increasing savagery of the war, but on the points at which the U.S. took the wrong course. Going back and forth in time, he effectively shows how one mistake built on another and American involvement took on a life of its own, becoming harder to de-escalate or stop. One of the main points is how much the Joseph McCarthy era, ostensibly over before John Kennedy came on the scene, still affected politicians and especially Democrats in the 1960s. The fear of being "soft on communism" was so strong that it caused a generation of men in power to continue to focus on communism and anti-communism as the sole polarity in the world. ("Softness" in general comes up so often as a fear driving men to make bad decisions that at one point, it feels like the entire story is one of an exclusive boys' club, each man determined to prove that he is more manly than the bureaucrat--or in Lyndon Johnson's case, the president--before him.)

Because of the legitimate concern about Soviet communism, the experts in the government feared that Vietnamese communism would soon spread to one country after another in Asia--the "domino effect." The problem was that they failed to perceive any nuances in communism, any reason why it might mean something different to Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese nationalists than it did to Khruschchev. Something as obvious as the Sino-Soviet split failed to impress upon these experts that communism was not one global monolith. In fact, running all through the period was the determination not to recognize the People's Republic of China because it was communist.

The "Who lost China?" debate was behind much of this irrationality. Having "lost" China to communism in 1949 meant that a country, like China, was ours, and that therefore we could lose it. This determination not to lose Vietnam was behind much of the disaster, but the China policy had other tragic consequences. The "loss" of China upset Washington so much at the time that the government was purged of its Asia experts, since they had warned of the strength of the communists (and were therefore soft on them). As a result, time after time when decisions were made that had crucial impact in Southeast Asia, no one who knew anything about Asia was actually present. So the Europe specialists, those with expertise in a part of the world thought more important than others, based their decisions on the threat of Soviet expansion in Europe. They failed to see that Vietnamese communists might be different, not least that China, Vietnam's invader and enemy for more than a thousand years, was not the threatening ally of North Vietnam that U.S. policy assumed it was.

Having recently traveled in Vietnam and seen the way the American war is portrayed from a Vietnamese communist perspective, I was eager to read Halberstam's account from the U.S. side. It turns out the perspectives are not that different. Franklin Roosevelt was the last president to perceive anti-colonialism as America's historic role; by the time the Truman administration was making decisions, anti-communism was more important. And so, first Truman and then Eisenhower made fateful decisions that favored France in Indochina. Rather than supporting Ho's anti-colonial war, or being neutral (France was after all our oldest ally), the U.S. reluctantly took over the funding of the First Indochina war, and came dangerously close to intervening militarily at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It stayed out because of the honest assessment of General Matthew Ridgway: that American bombing would not turn the tide of the war, that the cost in ground troops would be larger than in the Korean war, and that in fact comparisons with Korea were very unhelpful. The Southeast Asian terrain was very different from Korea's, and the Vietnamese insurgency was closer to a civil war than a "North invades South" scenario. The more the U.S. attacked, Ridgway warned, the more political gain Ho's side would have; the population would turn to it, unlike Korea where the South had been an asset.

Unfortunately, by 1965 the U.S. was not served by a General Ridgway. So it went into and escalated the Vietnam war in spite of everything he'd written in 1954 being right. Halberstam points out that the domino theory proved to be truer of Americans than of Asian countries: officials looked around to see which way things were going in Vietnam decision making, no one wanting to be different or to stand against the tide. 

As tragic as the Vietnam story is, there are further lessons from it on how America went wrong in transforming from underdog to superpower. The evolving view in the government that covert operations were okay for a democracy. The consistent lying by the executive branch, not only to the public but to the Congress and ultimately to itself. Most damaging of all, the pattern of behavior by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their men that cut the American people out of the loop entirely, when it was their war and they who would die in it. A war was fought for more than a decade without ever being declared, without even being acknowledged honestly. It is no wonder that, in these circumstances, "the best and the brightest" of the military could not stomach it, and behavior by the military ceased to be on the higher plane that democracies were said to be.

Halberstam is devastating on this point. The U.S. did not go into Vietnam with the intention of ruling it imperially, like France, and so couldn't understand that the Vietnamese would see it that way. Democracies were different, and so we had to prop up what passed for democracy in South Vietnam. Only it wasn't democratic--just not communist. Over time, the men in the U.S. government had decided that we could do anything because the communists had done it first. So there was nothing restraining Americans from covert operations or even atrocities. The #1 justification for our being there--that democracies were better--failed.

I came away from this book with a deep sense that by the 1960s, it was already too late to ask the right question. That is, Why was it any of America's business what kind of government Vietnam had? Of course this was too radical a question for the time. South Vietnam was an ally and we had to prop it up. We couldn't "let" Vietnam go communist. Except South Vietnam didn't care as much as America did, and it wasn't up to America. You'd think we might have learned this lesson in Vietnam, but we did not. For years afterwards, the U.S. continued to interfere in other countries, backing a government or an insurgency in turn, as long as it was not communist. It could be as violent and totalitarian a movement as you like in other ways.

Finally, although Halberstam doesn't call it racism, there was an element of condescension in all the assumptions about the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. They couldn't possibly beat Americans, because they were a small, underdeveloped country; moreover they were small people, and Asian. Our overwhelming technological superiority was bound to win. Not in guerrilla warfare in a jungle, though. It was their land and they knew it. The war in Vietnam exposed the lie that the U.S. Defense Department was actually about defending our own land.

In 1965 National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy was discussing Vietnam plans with a member of his staff, whom, like other sources Halberstam was protecting in the early '70s, he does not name. Bundy's aide was impressed by the plans for the escalation and bombing, how detailed it all was. He did, however, express a less technical concern: "The thing that bothers me is that no matter what we do to them, they live there and we don't, and they know that someday we'll have to go away and thus they know they can outlast us."

"That's a good point," Bundy said. And then he, and the rest of "the best and the brightest," went right back to what they were doing, as if this critical point had never been made at all.