The Best and the Brightest

"I started off doing tribal massacres in Nigeria. Then in early 1967 I went to Vietnam and was back there in 1972. David Halberstam was the main New York Times correspondent in Vietnam during that time. Lyndon Johnson lent very heavily on the newspaper’s editor to get him withdrawn because he didn’t like his reports. Halberstam was very truthful about what he found. The Best and the Brightest is an account of how the Americans got into this war. How brilliant people devised schemes that went against all common sense. One of them of course was [Secretary of State for Defence, Robert] McNamara who had been president of the Ford Motor Company. They thought that simply by the application of force and intelligence they could make things happen on the ground. But they didn’t understand. It’s much the same as what I was saying about Bosnia – if you don’t understand the people or the place nothing is going to work. I saw in 1967 and 1972 this massive application of fire power. But you don’t change people’s minds with fire power. You can, in fact, just alienate them. What Halberstam delivers is an account of how this happened. In the end, Robert McNamara, who was the architect of the Vietnam War, came to agree with him. In the early 1990s, when he was then a man in his eighties, he wrote a book called In Retrospect, in which he said very bravely that they had been wrong, terribly wrong, and that “we didn’t understand the nature of them and what they were doing”. One of the reasons I have chosen Halberstam is because I think it applies today to what the western powers are trying to do in Afghanistan . There are so many parallel structures – the massive application of fire power and not much understanding of the people. To the Afghans, we tend to be just another foreign invader, however well-intentioned. Which is why, like Vietnam, I think it’s an unwinnable war. Yes, it was written when the war was going on around him. It’s very interesting but I remember that there were definitely two categories of American war reporters out there. One were the “Pentagon correspondents” who tended to believe what they were told at the official briefings, the “five o’clock followers” as we called them. The others were the younger correspondents – David Halberstam was one, Jack Laurence of CBS was another. Because of the amazing access they had – the press accreditation card meant you could get a helicopter anywhere so long as there was space – they got out to see what was actually happening on the ground and that the war really wasn’t working. The younger correspondents saw this and a real rift developed between them and the old hands who thought they were reliving the Second World War – a fight for survival, good guys against bad guys and so on. We didn’t go straight from full access to embedding. There was an intermediate phase when there was no access at all. The officers who had been majors and colonels in Vietnam went on to be generals and because I think they needed a scapegoat, they blamed the press. The American defeat was all laid at the door of the press. And so when the Americans invaded Grenada in 1983, there was no press access whatsoever. They did the same in Panama with the overthrow of General Noriega, where there was a tiny press pool. When the British task force went to the Falkland Islands in 1982, there was a strong faction in the Ministry of Defence who wanted to have no reporters there at all. They were overruled by Margaret Thatcher and there was a degree of access but not much. After that the Ministry of Defence worked out embedding. I have claimed to be the father of embedding because I had an authorisation card to accompany a British operational force in February 1991, in the first Gulf War, which had the serial number 001. All it is, is the trade-off of freedom for access. You go where they let you go, but on the other hand you’re up there with the front line troops. So it is vivid, it is fragmentary, but if it is not supplemented by any other source of reporting I think it is very misleading."

"Halberstam was a New York Times reporter, one of the first members of the American press to report in-depth from Vietnam itself. He arrived in South Vietnam during mid-1962, in the middle of the Kennedy administration. Initially, he believed in the cause, believed it important for the United States to help the South Vietnamese prevail against the insurgency. Over time, he began to doubt this belief. As problems plagued the war effort, he reported the fact, much to the annoyance of the White House, including Kennedy himself. That’s the background. It’s a sprawling, mesmerizing work. It belongs on any short shelf of essential Vietnam War books. Halberstam looks at the Kennedy years and the Johnson years, asking the question: What brought the so-called ‘best and the brightest,’ referred to in the somewhat ironic title, to undertake this large-scale war in Vietnam? Halberstam doesn’t get everything right. For example, to my mind he exaggerates the amount of hubris in American decision-making in these years; my research and that of others indicates that US officials were more pessimistic, more gloomily realistic, than Halberstam lets on. Still, The Best and The Brightest is altogether an extraordinary work—vivid, incisive, engrossing. Reading it as an undergraduate helped convince me to go to grad school and become a historian. I believe they should. I’m one of those historians who believes that asking ‘what if’ questions, beyond whatever parlour-game fascination it may hold, has historical utility. We can better understand what happened in history if we consider what might’ve happened, if we consider the plausible unrealized alternatives. I’ve written about the question of what might have happened in Vietnam if Kennedy had lived, if Lyndon Johnson remained Vice President and Kennedy had to make the decisions regarding whether to send in more troops in 1964-65 when South Vietnam was on the brink of defeat. I’ll consider it anew as I research and write Volume 2."

"I read this book when I was living in Asia, and it was my first memorable encounter with investigative journalism in the service of creating a historical narrative. It’s a book that is not only very compelling, and staggering in its scope and its conclusions, but the perfect example of a revisionist history. It was contrary to everything I thought I knew about the events that it accounted for, which was basically the Kennedy years and early Johnson administration and how they dealt with Vietnam. It also introduced me to the personalities who are not well known to most Americans, but who became, as a result of Halberstam’s telling, real heroes to me. These are the China experts who worked for the US State Department, who were in China in the 1940s and 1950s. They worked with both the communist Chinese and the nationalist Chinese and cabled back, very courageously, that the nationalists were corrupt and that though the communists were communist, they had a greater legitimacy in the eyes of the people and therefore we should work with them. For me, reading this in my late 20s/early 30s was quite a revelation, and it’s why I hold the book very close to my heart. Rereading it when researching my own book, State vs. Defense , was a real pleasure, because I was reading it with the benefit of 20 years of experience as a correspondent. It shows how a president, however reluctant to engage militarily or to militarise foreign policy, finds himself getting swept along by events or political imperatives that he can’t control. Kennedy did not want to escalate the US presence in Vietnam – he was very clear on that score. But he was concerned that if he did not make some kind of gesture – perhaps by sending slightly less than half what the generals were insisting he send – he would be portrayed as being soft on communism, and that that would compromise some of his other initiatives, like civil rights. It’s interesting how every time the US had a crisis on its hands, or a foreign policy challenge, the heads of state were reluctant to get involved, but gave way to political pressure, usually from the right. That pressure was either well intentioned and sincere or simply a political tactic to put the president on the defensive. Obviously this was not the case with the most recent President Bush’s rush to war, which was very much his own inspiration. On the campaign trail he said Afghanistan was the good war. He may have believed that. He almost certainly understood that he would have a better chance to be elected if he established his credibility as someone who is prepared to intensify the conflict in Afghanistan. It’s another specimen of how this pressure works, just a more subtle one."