Word: halberstam
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...times, for all his series of painstakingly individual biographies, Halberstam seems to be in the process of inventing a sort of composite Kennedy man: Walt McNamara Rostow-Bundy. A man with "impeccable credentials" (the phrase occurs again and again) and the small withering smile that confirms them. A man less liberal than he might try to look. A superclerk, the "supreme mover of papers," possessed by "the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything...
Camelot ignored all this and went blithely into the quagmire-"a war," writes Halberstam, "which no one wanted, but which the rhetoric seemed to necessitate." Not only the rhetoric of ritualistic anti-Communism but the rhetoric of machismo: the compensatory swagger of the liberal, the intellectual, to demonstrate he was a Realpolitik he-man by the American code. Here Halberstam simplifies in his zeal to give history a firm story line. He is more thoroughly convincing when he depicts what might be called the debacle of drift...
...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...
...moralist, Halberstam tends to paint his villains monochromatic black. The distinctions between tormented, self-divided men like McNamara and a hyperoptimist like Rostow get blurred by the author's urge to define a single Viet Nam type. Halberstam's heroes seem more varied, more living. His few heroes are the men who said...
...Averell Harriman, described by an aide as "the only ambitious seventy-seven-year-old I've ever met," fighting optimists like General Maxwell Taylor ("the key military figure," Halberstam thinks, "in all the estimates...