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Authors: David Halberstam
Tags: #History, #Military, #Vietnam War, #United States, #20th Century, #General
The Best and the Brightest
David Halberstam
The Best and the Brightest
Foreword by Senator John McCain
THE MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
Table of Contents
For Dorothy deSantillana
Foreword
Senator John McCain
At the time of the Tet offensive, the propaganda machine of the North Vietnamese government obstructed my access to the reporting of a free press. I did not learn of Tet from Walter Cronkite or the
New York Times.
Hanoi Hannah brought me the news, as she always did, sandwiching it between atonal patriotic hymns intended to crush our resolve—rousing renditions of “Springtime in the Liberated Zone” and “I Asked My Mother How Many Air Pirates She Shot Down Today.”
Of course, the Vietnamese hyped the story to a fare-thee-well, using all the usual hyperbole that makes propaganda so colorful. For many days, American prisoners of war were informed that Khe San was within moments of falling, and then, suddenly, Hannah ceased updating us on the people’s heroic success. The Vietnamese never informed us that the Marines defending Khe San proved more heroic than the people’s liberation forces. That we learned, to our great relief, from POWs captured after Tet.
Any accurate information about the war was brought to us by newly arrived POWs. Whatever else you might think of them, North Vietnamese leaders certainly lacked an idealistic regard for the truth. Anything that did not directly benefit their war effort was dispensable—including truth and justice. They kept us well informed on the growing antiwar movement back home, regularly broadcasting news about peace marches and statements made by notable opponents to the war. News about their military setbacks or the means Hanoi employed in prosecuting the war was rather harder to come by.
Of all the privations and injustices suffered in undemocratic nations, lack of a free press is among the worst. In prison, I missed all the staples of my comfortable life in the States. But I missed most the free, uncensored, abundant flow of information. Arriving at Clark Air Force Base on the day we were released from prison, I was as hungry for information as I was for food. As I sat down to enjoy my first decent meal in a long while, I asked a steward if he would also provide me with any newspapers and magazines he could find. I was desperate to fill in the blanks about what I knew was going on in the world, and I trusted Western journalists, particularly American journalists, to enlighten me.
Soon after I came home, the Navy allowed me to attend the National War College for a year. There I arranged sort of a private tutorial on the war, choosing all the texts myself, in the hope that I might better understand how we came to be involved in the war and why, after paying such a terrible cost, we lost. The most enlightening of all those texts, and the book that reaffirmed my high regard for American journalism and, relatedly, my faith in freedom, was David Halberstam’s landmark study of the men who sent us to war,
The Best and the Brightest.
No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the cost to fight it by half measures. War is far too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily. It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.
No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone. In the end, the men whose characters, motivation, and reasoning Halberstam reveals so convincingly lacked the necessary resolve to succeed because they misjudged the enemy’s resolve. They misjudged American power. They misjudged our South Vietnamese allies. They misjudged the Soviets and the Chinese. They misjudged the world. And, most of all, they misjudged themselves. Or so it seems to many who lost good years or their health or happiness as a consequence of their monumental misjudgments, to say nothing of those who lost their lives.
I have often seen this book’s title described as ironic. I don’t think it is. The men who sent Americans to war in Vietnam were, by many standards, the best and the brightest. They were extraordinarily intelligent, well-educated, informed, experienced, patriotic, and capable leaders. They were elegant and persuasive. They seemed born to govern, and America once had as much confidence in them as they so abundantly had in themselves. But, in the end, they had more confidence than vision, and that failing bred in them a fateful hubris. No irony here, but a classic tragedy.
I very much doubt that Americans will ever again believe that our country has a native governing class. That’s one of the lessons of our war in Vietnam, and of the book that best explains how we got there. That’s not a bad thing. I believe Americans still love their country, believe in its ideals, but wisely prefer to judge the merits of their government on its policies. That’s a fair standard and better for the health of a democracy than romantic notions about the superiority of a natural elite.
For anyone who aspires to a position of national leadership, no matter the circumstances of his or her birth, this book should be mandatory reading. And anyone who feels a need, as a confused former prisoner of war once felt the need, for insights into how a great and good nation can lose a war and see its worthy purposes and principles destroyed by self-delusion can do no better than to read and reread David Halberstam’s
The Best and the Brightest.
Introduction
I remember the moment when I first began to understand why I felt so driven on this particular book. I was one year into the legwork and had gone to a party for a friend's book. Teddy White, who had been an important role model for me—his
Fire in the Ashes
had come out when I was a sophomore in college—was off in a corner, I had joined him, and we were talking about American politics. Suddenly another colleague wandered over, turned to Teddy, and asked—I was stunned by the bluntness of the question, it was the kind of thing you might think but did not dare
ask
—“What is it that makes a bestseller, anyway?”
Teddy, whose first book about the collapse of China
(Thunder Out of China)
had reflected much of his pessimism about Chiang’s forces which had been suppressed by his employer, Harry Luce, had surprised us both with his answer: “A book that burns in your belly—something that has to be written before you can go on to anything else.” He had, I realized in the weeks and months to come, defined not just one of his earlier books, but the one I was working on as well, an account of the origins of the war in Vietnam.
That book had its roots in a trip I made to Vietnam for
Harper’s Magazine
in the fall of 1967. I had been appalled and disillusioned by what I found in my three months there. The war, despite the optimism of the Saigon command, was a stalemate: our total military superiority checked by their total political superiority. In effect this meant we could win any set-piece battle we wanted, but the other side could easily replenish their battlefield losses whenever
they
wanted. What was even more depressing was the optimism I found among the top Americans in Saigon, which struck me as essentially self-deception. There was much heady talk implying that we were on the very edge of a final victory and that the other side was ready to crack. Invitations were even sent out that December by some high-ranking diplomats asking friends to come to the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel Christmas party.
It was the same old false optimism I had first witnessed there five years earlier as a young reporter for the
Times,
when the stakes were so much smaller. It reflected once again the immense difference between what people in the field thought was happening and what people in the Saigon command, responding to intense political pressure from Washington, wanted to think was happening. One night near the end of my tour in 1967 I was invited to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s house for dinner. At the end of the dinner, Barry Zorthian, then the chief public affairs officer, who was himself in the process of turning from hawk to dove and who was trying to dampen Bunker’s seemingly unshakable optimism about the progress of events, had set me up with a planted question.
“Mister Ambassador,” he had said near the end of the evening, “David Halberstam has been away from Vietnam for four years, and he’s been back traveling around the countryside for the last three months. Perhaps he would share some of his impressions with us.”
Thus cued, I suggested that we were fighting the birthrate of the nation, that the war was essentially a stalemate—but a stalemate which favored the other side, since eventually we would have to go home. What our military did not understand, I added, was that Hanoi controlled the pace of the war, and it could either initiate contact and raise the level of violence or hold back, lick its wounds, and lower it, depending on its needs at a given moment.