Word: halberstam
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...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 to the White House as a speechwriter and informed Hugh Sidey of Life that he was back. Siidey visited President Johnson and asked if Goodwin would...
What lessons in hindsight does Halberstam learn? The "national security" policymakers, he concludes, have constituted a club, a dangerously self-perpetuating Establishment, an inner Government confident of its expertise and zealous to guard itself by secrecy and quick retaliation from the democratic uses of criticism...
What is the solution next time? Halberstam is a bold, even reckless generalizer. He has not hesitated to indict an entire political generation. But even he falters at this point. Rather weakly he waves the flag of the new populism-an alliance of "Negroes, women, workers" that will somehow transfer power from the elite to the grass roots. He hopes vaguely that an excess of bloody rationalism will produce a rekindled "need for political humanism...
...Halberstam's nearly 700 pages of doom dwarf his tentative footnote on salvation. Can there be a cure for a disease to which there is no diagnosis? An American tragedy, the war deserves, like this book about it, the summary of the Greek tragedy Antigone: "The pains that men will take to come to pain." The only comfort may lie in the usual hangover from hubris. A nation that never doubted its invincibility and its innocence, as if those two were one, should never be that awfully certain of itself again. Who can quarrel with Halberstam here? The danger...
...four men above bear the brunt of David Halberstam's criticism. Two of them, Robert McNamara, who left the Defense Department in 1968 to become president of the World Bank, and ex-Presidential Adviser McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, refused to comment on the book. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, now professor of international law at the University of Georgia, had not read the book but told TIME: "I suspect Halberstam's biggest problem was that we didn't base our policy on his reporting from Viet Nam. This amateur psychiatry, talking about things...