The Best and the Brightest

A Little Free Library around the corner yielded a paperback of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. I was interested to find it in a "quality" paperback format; fifty years ago I saw it in mass-market format, more or less cubical, with a badly curved spine and the pages tending to fan out, worn at the edges--a housemate's copy, I suppose. I was not surprised that a couple of young acquaintances who came along had never heard of it. But in the 1970s it was much talked of.Halberstam gives his account of the way that the Kennedy and then the Johnson Administrations found their involvement in Vietnam increasing, helped along the way by the stars that Kennedy had recruited to his administration, the "best and the brightest". Most had good to excellent credentials: McGeorge Bundy was Dean of Harvard College, Robert McNamara the head of the Ford Motor Company; Maxwell Taylor had been Army Chief of Staff during the Eisenhower Administration, and so on. Yet somehow events controlled…