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tbauman 's review for:
The Best and the Brightest
by David Halberstam
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.