2024 the besth review

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David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.

"A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience.”—The New York Times

Using portraits of America’ s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’ s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic.

Praise for The Best and the Brightest

“The most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. . . . It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation’s search for its idealistic soul. The Best and the Brightest is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.”—The Boston Globe

“Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative. . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance.”—Los Angeles Times

“A fascinating tale of folly and self-deception . . . [An] absorbing, detailed, and devastatingly caustic tale of Washington in the days of the Caesars.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Seductively readable . . . It is a staggeringly ambitious undertaking that is fully matched by Halberstam’s performance. . . . This is in all ways an admirable and necessary book.”—Newsweek

“A story every American should read.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FC1GV0
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Modern Library; 20th edition (March 26, 2002)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 26, 2002
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1540 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 832 pages
Reviewer: A. John Valois
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: For book lovers
Review: Good read.

Reviewer: soldiernofortune
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Were you a Pawn in their game?
Review: If you were drafted and had to serve under LBJ and wondered how naive Americanswere in the 60's, you may want to read this book. What a Croc of Stuff--people with years of experience and knowledge of Vietnam were purged from group of advisors if they did not know how to "go alongto get along." This book is half biographies of about a dozen men and half historical matter; makes generals look dumb and proven liars (yes, we had them back then too). Group think of Military men helped to kill over 58,000 Americans. Unless you believed in Colonization (Saigon leaders spoke French and had been educated by French), or believed in "saving face," or bit on the crap about "dominoes," this War was not for you. A great investigative book about a pathetic War. Purely Pathetic Time in America. It was a page turner in that I learned so much about personalities and who stood for what and who had backbone and who did not. The book was NOT a page turner because it was exciting. Time issuppose to heal but Vietnam is a running sore for me. What is additionally sad is that we did not learn much from our involvement--30 years later we saw Powell lie and "Vice" have boys killed looking for WMD which did not exist. Et Cetera! Truly thankful that this book was written. Thanks, David--you RIP

Reviewer: ELECTRIC EARL
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Thorough history (though full of parenthetical interruptions) of the Viet Nam War
Review: Overall, a very thorough history of how America got into the Viet Nam War. [The Vietnamese language is based on Chinese, which is all one-syllable words. "Vietnam" is an Americanization.] My main complaint about this book is the repeated interruptions in the middle of a sentence for a sentence-long parenthetical comment. I've never seen this in a book before, and hope I never will again. I don't understand how the editor let the author get away with that stuff. I also can't imagine how such a text could work as an audio book - the narrator speaking half a sentence, then a very long parenthetical comment, followed by the rest of the original sentence. No no no! I do, however, give the publisher credit for the Kindle edition being remarkably free of OCR errors, something that is very common in older books of this kind. The only thing I noticed was "naïve" repeatedly appearing as "naÏve" - something that might simply be because of limitations in the fonts available in Kindle. Another Kindle oddity is the equivalent page numbers don't match the percent tally. Once you get to around 91%, it says "Page 695 of 695." You'd expect that to be the end of the main body of the text, and the remainder would be bibliography, acknowledgments, notes, index, etc. But no, there's a very long "Epilogue." At the end of that section, a screen pops up where you can rate the book. But you haven't finished reading the book yet. If you wipe that off your screen, there comes "A Final Word," followed by "Author's Note," "Dedication" and "Bibliography." At last you've reached the end. NOW is where the book rating screen should pop up.

Reviewer: David Gibson
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: How Did it Happen?
Review: Just under two months ago, a friend recommended a book that I had seen when it was first published. I have just completed it.The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam is about the Vietnam War, and about how many of the most important American civilian officials and military officers made it turn out the way it did. The book is centered primarily on the time frame from early 1961 though 1968, but there is sufficient coverage of prior decades, of the involvements of prior administrations, of the French post-war colonial experience, and of the broader story of the civil war in China to give it very broad perspective.The Best and the Brightest is a relic of an extinct life form: journalism. Today, there is neither the supply nor the demand to sustain real journalism. A reader may detect a few signs of some of Halberstam's biases, but they are well controlled. They do not make the book, or detract from it.What Halberstam has done is to develop a few dozen well-documented biographies of the principals and to weave them into a tapestry that gives us a coherent history of the whole Vietnam debacle.Those who were around at the time will remember when the newly-elected President John Kennedy put together an Administration of highly educated, very intellectual persons, many of whom had at least some arguably relevant experience from their careers during WWII. Halberstam covers that in great detail,Those who were around at the time will probably also recall how just about every other speech made by JFK from the fifties on contained some reference to the threat of world communism. And some, if not many, will remember how Kennedy had become enamored with the idea of waging limited "brushfire" wars to combat communist aggression wherever it may rear its ugly head. Halberstam aggresses that latter point well.We may compartmentalize our memories and think of Berlin, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis as subjects separate from Vietnam. Halberstam corrects us on that--to the US Administration, it was all part of a global chess game.Of course, most of what we read and hear today about JFK paints a picture of some kind of idealistic, fictional, and mythical Hollywood royalty described as "Camelot".And then there was Johnson, who inherited US participation in the conflict in Southeast Asia and who surely made it much worse in every possible way.Reading the words of the principal actors today reveals some surprises. Some whom I had thought of as "doves" were anything but.The book is much more than an ccount of gross misunderstandings, bad strategy, failures of comprehension, and so on. To me, there are two really shocking things that come out.First, quite a number of highly qualified professional people who were sent to Vietnam to evaluate the situation first-hand became persona non grata when their honest evaluations for the facts as they saw them differed from the Administration party line. The careers were ruined, as others lied and many others died.The other is the abject dishonesty exhibited by more than a few of the top players. Generals falsified reports. LBJ told different people different and conflicting things on the same day, kept communications compartmentalized, and bullied everyone he could, including his own Vice President.And it is convincingly revealed that the Exalted High Priest of the Numbers Men, upon whose analyses the entire war strategy had been based, thought nothing of making up numbers from whole cloth during meetings as he went along, for the sole purpose of discrediting others.A handful of people are seen in good light.Most of the bad ones ultimately got their comeuppance, albeit at the great expense of so many others.

Reviewer: AB
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Finally reading this. Love it.

Reviewer: Thomé Madeira
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: When the best and the brightest gather , we expect the finest , but sometimes the results are less than pity... that is what I've seen , in the greatest and dreadful mistake in American History

Reviewer: Mr J OBrien
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: As I write this review, the Taliban have entered Kabul with little apparent resistance. 20 years after going in after 9/11, all guns and modern technology blazing, the modern armies the the west (principally the USA) are staring ignominious defeat in the face, once again to a 3rd World rag-tag force. Eerily, the situation in Afghanistan looks like the fall of Saigon all over again.This book describes brilliantly how a group of exceptionally talented individuals at the highest level of the US government got Vietnam so terribly wrong. Intelligence, however, is not everything. As these individuals took power after Kennedy’s election in 1960, they looked an impressive bunch. However, as one seasoned political hack observed, he would have felt much happier if they had “ever actually run something”. Intelligence brings baggage with it, namely arrogance and hubris. LBJ decided, after JFKs death, to keep the ‘best and the brightest’ in place. This would prove a pivotal decision.This book analyses the fundamental mistakes made as the Vietnam conflict escalated. The Democrats, wounded by the apparent charge that they had ‘lost China’ a decade before, were terrified that they would forever be seen as weak in the face of communism. This fear helped shape their future decisions.Their strategy was based on a number of flawed assumptions. Firstly, that a 3rd world army was no match for a modern one, that AirPower was decisive, the South Vietnamese government would get better and win local support, and that in the short term Ho Chi Minh would be forced to negotiate. Lets consider each in turn.The Generals were trained and had experience of fighting conventional European style wars. The Vietcong could just melt away, strike at will and then disappear. Hanoi could also reinforce battalions with ease and send them down the Ho Chi Minh trail. The US, thousands of miles from home, had Congress and the public to deal with. Also, Ho Chi Minh was fighting for an idea- they were in it to change their country. The southern government was corrupt, repressive and unpopular, with coups a normal occurrence. No wonder the natives flocked to Ho Chi Minh. The ‘best’ also had a condescending view of the Vietnamese- surely these people, simple as they are, will see what we are doing for them? However, this book explains that the conflict owes at least as much to Nationalism as it did to Communism. The French Indo-China war had done for the colonial power, enhancing the growing sense of Vietnamese nationhood, which was further developed by subsequent US involvement. The fact that the French, a decent army, was beaten should have sounded alarm bells for the US, but again this apparent contempt for all this not American seems incredible in retrospect. AirPower alone, was never enough to force Hanoi, fighting in their own backyard and knowledgable of the terrain, able to replenish losses at will, to the negotiating table. It was a fantasy. The author describes Vietnam as a ‘tar-baby’ the more you struggle the more you get stuck.Finally, the US simply underestimated Ho Chi Minh as an adversary. Also, the book describes how the ‘reports’ that reached the desks of the Pentagon were always hopelessness optimistic - a lesson to all about the dangers of subordinates telling you what you want to hear rather than the truth.The best and the brightest is a seminal work that everyone who aspires to office should read. What’s clear is how few people appear to have done so.One haunting section has proven to be eerily prescient as the Talibon, today, enter Kabul with little apparent resistance. In the mid 60’s Robert McNamara was asked by a question by a subordinate. What, he asked, was to stop the Vietcong just waiting for the day when inevitably we would have to go home? Would they not just take over? McNamara paused, and replied that he had not thought of that. And so in 2021, over 40 years since the fall of Saigon, we see the exact same playing out again in Kabul.The Best and the Brightest is an important lesson for all of those who believe to much in themselves.

Reviewer: Charles de Talhouet
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: excellent

Reviewer: Oscar Puerto
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Un detalladisimo ensayo de como los hombres mas brillantes y mejores pudieron llevar a Estados Unidos a perder una guerra. Muy recomendable.