Word: halberstam
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...THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT PEOPLE, specifically, about those powerful men who ran America in the Sixties. With remarkable clarity, Halberstam details the ways that decisions are made. Already we have seen a truckload of books which posit economic, political, psychological or altruistic motivations for American involvement in Vietnam. This book is different, Halberstam reveals how men operating in an institutional context turn theoretical considerations into hard-nosed policy...
...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...
...TRAGEDY of Lyndon Johnson fascinates Halberstam, so it fascinates us as well. Too easily we can forget that the far vaster tragedy was suffered--and is still being suffered--by the Vietnamese. Their tragedy was not, like Johnson's in the classical mold. Their own flaws and hubris (a word which threatens to repeat the rise of "chairman") did not cause their undoing. Like the antagonist in a twentieth-century novel by Kafka or Camus, their enemy is faceless, irrational and overpowering. The Vietnamese are the real-life counterparts of Joseph K. and Meursault; they attain nobility by resisting oppression...
...world contains millions of other victims whose struggle is less dramatic than the Vietnam War. And while David Halberstam may be right to say that John Kennedy was too skeptical and shrewd over to permit such a disastrous escalation of the conflict, we cannot blame Lyndon Johnson for every repressive American-supported regime throughout the world. The personality of Lyndon Bolnas Johnson is one reason for the criminal blunder in Vietnam. But the Vietnam War is anomalous only in its failure...
Similarity, the personality of Johnson is only the most colorful and powerful of many. When reading Halberstam's book, we should not permit Johnson's gaudy figure to obscure the Image of his staff. Sam Rayburn described than best. When his good friend Lyndon came to him after the 1960 election, gushing over the brilliance of the new Cabinet, the shrowd old Speaker said, "Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole let better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff...