Word: halberstam
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...DAVID HALBERSTAM...
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...
Above all, Halberstam's Viet Nam is a disaster made to seem as inexorable as Greek tragedy. Here, in all conceivable detail, is the story of confident men misled by ambition, by pride, by a kind of moral and political blindness into a still incredible catastrophe-one in which a whole nation appeared to lose its innocence along with them...
...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 as you never admitted them...
Robert McNamara, whose bullet-headed manner made him appear an ideal fact-finder, had a fondness for mathematics. David Halberstam has reported that on one Vietnam trip, an edgy McNamara sat through a dull series of fabricated progress reports by American military advisers, but was exhilarated when one clever officer presented his fabricated progress report with elaborate charts, graphs, and computer statistics. Those were facts...