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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
challenging
informative
sad
slow-paced
reflective
slow-paced
Read this for university 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
The Best and the Brightest cover the term given to the cabinet of JFK. The title is used ironically as David Halberstam, famous as a journalist during the Vietnam War Era in the US, uses the entire long book analyzing the decisions of the "best and brightest" cabinet and to show how Vietnam ended being a disaster.
The book was written in 1972 so it's right after the Pentagon Papers which showed how the Johnson administration lied to the public about the Vietnam War but before the Nixon Watergate scandal. It's a really long book that starts from the very beginning and by the very beginning, I mean the Second World War and the independence movements that started right after. Halberstam goes into detail of the American strategy for Vietnam. Then he gets into the meat of it by providing a biography of every single person in the administration of JFK and the key players in what was then the Vietnam conflict. He covers the personalities of people like JFK, McNamara, Westmoreland and the battle between the hawks and doves who would push and pull the US towards direct intervention in Vietnam. It's a good book and a very long one too! The portrayals of the key players are very fascinating and while I think Halberstam could have condensed it a lot, the length and breadth does add to an overall image of the various people.
I can't really recommend it as it requires a lot of mental effort to read. This book was written as a passion project of Halberstam's and he is not really being objective at all. Written while the war was still ongoing it does not have enough distance to really be a good history book and is more of a source for a history book. Overall interesting and should be read critically.
The book was written in 1972 so it's right after the Pentagon Papers which showed how the Johnson administration lied to the public about the Vietnam War but before the Nixon Watergate scandal. It's a really long book that starts from the very beginning and by the very beginning, I mean the Second World War and the independence movements that started right after. Halberstam goes into detail of the American strategy for Vietnam. Then he gets into the meat of it by providing a biography of every single person in the administration of JFK and the key players in what was then the Vietnam conflict. He covers the personalities of people like JFK, McNamara, Westmoreland and the battle between the hawks and doves who would push and pull the US towards direct intervention in Vietnam. It's a good book and a very long one too! The portrayals of the key players are very fascinating and while I think Halberstam could have condensed it a lot, the length and breadth does add to an overall image of the various people.
I can't really recommend it as it requires a lot of mental effort to read. This book was written as a passion project of Halberstam's and he is not really being objective at all. Written while the war was still ongoing it does not have enough distance to really be a good history book and is more of a source for a history book. Overall interesting and should be read critically.
This book is an incredibly thorough study of American foreign affairs, human error, bureaucracy, and power. If this happens to be exactly the cross-section of your interests, this might be a page-turner as one of the jacket quotes says. If you have only a passing familiarity with Vietnam, though, you may have a hard time finishing this book. The book was also written for a 1972 audience, when the war was still fresh in the public's memory, so you may find yourself looking up details about the war periodically.
If you've read anything else by David Halberstam, this book is very Halberstam. Every character in the book is a larger-than-life male figure. There are brave men, cowardly men, wise men, foolish men, kind men, and mean men. Every man, no matter how minor, gets at least several pages of biography. There are no women who get the biographical treatment, though. There are only a handful of women ever mentioned in the book, in fact. This might just be a result of the topic and time period, but I don't think any of the other Halberstam books I've read (The Amateurs, The Breaks of the Game) ever profiled a woman, either.
The final few hundred pages drag as the author repeats the same morals he'd already spelled out a few dozen times in the book: putting off a decision is making a decision (often the wrong one), bureaucracies designed to reduce dissent lead to bad decision-making, the military has an incentive to increase the size of its own involvement, and so on. The Wikipedia article has a pretty good summary of the book's theses, if you would rather not read 700 pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest
A mistake as enormous as the Vietnam War is the result of dozens of misguided decisions. The Best and the Brightest gives insights into exactly why each of these decisions were made, and how they might have been changed. As a study of this mistake and how mistakes are made in complex bureaucracies, this book is excellent. It's not a quick or easy read, though, and it can take some work to get through.
If you've read anything else by David Halberstam, this book is very Halberstam. Every character in the book is a larger-than-life male figure. There are brave men, cowardly men, wise men, foolish men, kind men, and mean men. Every man, no matter how minor, gets at least several pages of biography. There are no women who get the biographical treatment, though. There are only a handful of women ever mentioned in the book, in fact. This might just be a result of the topic and time period, but I don't think any of the other Halberstam books I've read (The Amateurs, The Breaks of the Game) ever profiled a woman, either.
The final few hundred pages drag as the author repeats the same morals he'd already spelled out a few dozen times in the book: putting off a decision is making a decision (often the wrong one), bureaucracies designed to reduce dissent lead to bad decision-making, the military has an incentive to increase the size of its own involvement, and so on. The Wikipedia article has a pretty good summary of the book's theses, if you would rather not read 700 pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest
A mistake as enormous as the Vietnam War is the result of dozens of misguided decisions. The Best and the Brightest gives insights into exactly why each of these decisions were made, and how they might have been changed. As a study of this mistake and how mistakes are made in complex bureaucracies, this book is excellent. It's not a quick or easy read, though, and it can take some work to get through.
informative
tense
slow-paced
The premise of the book is good and interesting but it drags on only to be cut short for the last 3 years of the war, with key decisions and events not being mentioned at all.
Brilliantly written, Halberstam's account of the men who made the key political and military decisions on Vietnam is a graphic warning for our times. The military, focused as it is on the benefits of war to advancement of military careers (more budget $$, more officers, more troops, more equipment), tells its own lies about how the war is going and will go; the politicians, focused on the need to appear sufficiently "tough" and "anti-Communist" (read "anti-terrorist" for today), ignore their own doubts and reporting chains because they are afraid to face off with the military; and the American people are forced to either believe the lies they are being fed about the dangers and/or the great progress being made on their behalf against the bad guys, or to "unpatriotically" oppose more of the same absurdities.
This is how we got into Iraq and Afghanistan. This is how we are being urged to get into Syria and Libya. The lessons of history are out there for anyone who is listening. Is anyone listening?
This is how we got into Iraq and Afghanistan. This is how we are being urged to get into Syria and Libya. The lessons of history are out there for anyone who is listening. Is anyone listening?
Outstanding group biography of the members of the Kennedy (and later Johnson) administration involved in the run up in the Vietnam War.
It's not the first book you should read on the war—only really covering the administration's internal perspective, and even then only written from the view of 1972—but it's still one of the best books to understand what happened. Halberstam builds up a picture of the Establishment of the era, and the ways that liberals at the time acceded to a picture of China and Communism that ended up backfiring spectacularly.
Since the book focuses on the internal decision-making dynamics at play, I would say it overrates those specifics as the cause of entry and escalation into Vietnam. Young's The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 lays out a much more complete picture of the war, and lays out a case that the larger ideological framework (and severe misunderstandings of vietcong political economy) of the US at the time made war inevitable. It's also why I underrate speculation that Kennedy would have backed out of Vietnam.
I really, really hope Caro is able to finish the last LBJ volume properly—because some of the shit he pulled was WILD. Take, for example, the polarity flip from "I can't be seen as backing down on the war because they'll think I'm weak and take away my Great Society," to "I can't be seen as escalating too much on the war because they'll think I'm expensive and take away my Great Society."
It's not the first book you should read on the war—only really covering the administration's internal perspective, and even then only written from the view of 1972—but it's still one of the best books to understand what happened. Halberstam builds up a picture of the Establishment of the era, and the ways that liberals at the time acceded to a picture of China and Communism that ended up backfiring spectacularly.
Since the book focuses on the internal decision-making dynamics at play, I would say it overrates those specifics as the cause of entry and escalation into Vietnam. Young's The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 lays out a much more complete picture of the war, and lays out a case that the larger ideological framework (and severe misunderstandings of vietcong political economy) of the US at the time made war inevitable. It's also why I underrate speculation that Kennedy would have backed out of Vietnam.
I really, really hope Caro is able to finish the last LBJ volume properly—because some of the shit he pulled was WILD. Take, for example, the polarity flip from "I can't be seen as backing down on the war because they'll think I'm weak and take away my Great Society," to "I can't be seen as escalating too much on the war because they'll think I'm expensive and take away my Great Society."
painfully slow, but I finished. I was never excited to read this book, something just wasn't that good about it.