Word: brightest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...States Military Academy's 24th Annual Students Conference on United States Affairs, and for the four days of the conference, he was excused from all regular West Point duties. Like everything else at West Point, participation in the conference involved competitive selection. The Academy wanted outsiders to see its brightest and best. The Cadets at SCUSA were chosen for their interest and ability in the social sciences, and for their congeniality and outgoingness...
Would you trust must an historian to tell this story? Fortunately, you don't have to. For almost respected reporters and a former Crimson managing editor has been compiling a Chronicle of the destroys that created the war. His book, The Best and the Brightest, is the finest sort of reporting. Stuffed with anecdotes, charged with drama, this book will still be read when all the half-baked histories of stories and quotations that Halberstam includes are so wonderful you feel compelled to repeat them all to your friends. There was the time, for example, that Richard Goodwin returned...
Halberstam helps expose this nexus between interests, principles and actions. The best and the Brightest begins with a meeting between President-elect Kennedy and Robert Lovett, the torchbearer of the Establishment. Kennedy had run as a liberal, Halberstam writes, and he knew the liberal had nowhere else to go. So he turned his back on the liberal stevensonian, Chester Bowies, and cultivated the Lovetts and the Luces. Lovett impressed upon Kennedy the importance of choosing a professional Cabinet of "the right people"--people like Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Douglas Dillon. When Kennedy, the Irish Catholic from Boston, replied that...
...Best and the Brightest provides an extraordinary view of bureaucratic evil in the making It explores the way historical events like the McCarthy repression influence the treatment of subsequent situations. It shows how blunders are compounded and options are closed off; Halberstam has substitued the metaphor "tar baby" for his previous "quagmire" to indicate that the process is not a passive one, even after the first misguided step. Perhaps because the scope of the book is so ambitious, some readers will expect it to solve all the problems of the Cold War, to furnish an analytic framework for all Americans...
...psychiatry, talking about things like machismo-if that's what he does-is nonsense." Walt Rostow, former Kennedy and Johnson aide and now a professor of history at the University of Texas, has an article in the December Esquire replying to an excerpt from The Best and the Brightest. "From 1961 to 1968," he writes, "I believed the war could only be materially shortened by putting substantial U.S. forces on the ground." But he denies Halberstam's charge that he ever said the war would end in six months...