Word: brightest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST...
Like Viet Nam itself, The Best and the Brightest starts with a thread and leads into a labyrinth. The beginning is the simple question: "Why, why had it happened?" Before David (The Making of a Quagmire) Halberstam, one of the pre-eminent war correspondents of that undeclared war, can contain his question, he is deep in his own maze, wrestling with his own minotaur. It is an awesomely pretentious and yet unavoidable monster, which he describes as "a book about America, and in particular about power and success in America, what the country was, who the leadership was, how they...
Like all proper tragedies, The Best and the Brightest begins with hubris: the certainty of a young and ebullient President Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen that they constituted an elite, "a new breed of thinkers-doers" who could handle the world, to say nothing of what President Johnson was to refer to as "a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country." Halberstam's satirical passion is to discount Camelot mercilessly-all the famous "pragmatists," the zesty lovers of power, the "lean, swift young men who thought it quite acceptable to have idealistic thoughts and dreams just so long...
...solid virtues of The Best and the Brightest is the way Halberstam breaks down the tragedy of Viet Nam policy, showing it in slow motion. In fact, at first it all went deceptively slowly, a careless drift into a game of "counterinsurgency and special forces." To support a policy that was no policy, only a momentum, the Kennedy Administration, Halberstam charges, "invented Diem and his country," then became captive to its own myth. Escalation was only the logical extension of an original departure from reality. Perhaps the most sobering Halberstam homily concludes thus: "The best way for civilians to harness...
Wynn said the coaches consider freshman Peter Havens of Philadelphia "One of the brightest prospects." "He and Harvard several other players have come to Harvard with lots of competitive experience," Wynn said We'll have a team with a lot more depth than usual, which should really improve our chances for victory this coming spring...