The Best And The Brightest

Published in 1972, The Best and the Brightest is an account of the causes and context of the Vietnam War by acclaimed journalist David Halberstam. Focusing on the lead-up to the conflict, Halberstam takes his readers through the flawed decision-making process that allowed a group of intellectuals known as the “whiz kids” to fundamentally misunderstand key aspects of how to effectively handle the civil war in Vietnam. By chronicling groupthink and painting detailed profiles of the policy advisers involved, the book forms a convincing argument for why the Vietnam War became the defining event for an era of American history.

The book begins with the historical context leading up to the crisis, situating the unchecked French colonial oppression of Vietnam as a motivating cause for the eventual revolution and civil war. After WWII, the rebuilding efforts were so focused on Europe that France was allowed to retain its interests in Indochina. French troops returning to the area sparked conflict almost immediately. Meanwhile, spurred by worries over the growing unrest in China, the United States decided to intervene in the region – but its intervention came too late to stop Mao Zedong and his Communist regime from deposing the more West-friendly Chiang Kai Shek.

The scene was thus set for the coming Vietnam War. As Halberstam writes of the period between 1960 and 1965, the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were hampered on all sides by preexisting prejudices, thirst for power and winning elections, and a lack of experience dealing with this part of the world. This meant that although the cabinet and advisory positions were staffed with people who had been brilliant leaders of industry or highly regarded academics, nevertheless, their solutions and attempts to solve what was happening were naïve and against common sense.



For Kennedy and the Democratic Party, the loss of China to the communists was a foreign policy disaster that meant no other country could be allowed to follow. Compounding this fear that more communist countries would mean electoral losses was the “domino theory” of how communism spreads: that if one country in Southeast Asia became communist, others would quickly fall under its influence. This belief meant looking at an enormous region of different ethnic, racial, and national peoples as one homogenous group – an oversimplification that ignored the specifics of the Vietnamese people. For instance, the majority of the administration was convinced that strategically bombing industrial targets would precipitate peace talks, ignoring warnings that this kind of bombing campaign would simply unite the population against the aggressor and strengthen Vietnam’s war effort.

At the same time, the political witch hunts of the McCarthy era and its anti-Communist focus meant that anyone familiar with the functioning of this political system or with insight into how to combat or understand it was no longer part of the high levels of government. Anyone who expressed disagreement with aggressive policy ideas, anyone who questioned the results that escalating the war would have, and anyone who tried to make accurate projections about what level of resources a war in Vietnam would require was immediately transferred to a lower position and deprived of power and influence. For example, the original plans for winning the war called for almost one million troops to be deployed. This number was seen as politically impossible, and so the realistic plan was scrapped in favor of an incremental strategy that ended up simply matching Vietnam’s “birth rate” – each year the U.S. added the same number of troops to the fighting that the Vietnamese could.

The more the U.S. invested in the war effort, the more the sunk costs fallacy kicked in and prevented any drawdown or de-escalation. Instead, the only acceptable opinion in the Kennedy administration, and in the Johnson administration that followed, was hawkish and implacable. Even though the American military was entirely unprepared for an extended guerrilla campaign of the kind waged by the Viet Cong, the U.S. refused to “lose face” by either curtailing its bombing raids or decreasing its ground troops. Politically, the inertia of simply continuing to send more and more soldiers to Vietnam was easier than admitting that the structure of the conflict was fundamentally flawed and that whatever resources had already been expended were essentially pointlessly wasted.



Halberstam’s main theme throughout the book is that simply hiring “the best and the brightest” is not a solution in and of itself. No matter how talented people like Robert McNamara had been in their previous positions, it meant nothing about their ability to avoid the internecine fighting and self-interested manipulation and, instead, generate useful policy.

The Best and the Brightest remains an influential and highly acclaimed account of the Vietnam War to this day. When it was first published, Victor Saul Navasky wrote in The New York Times that the “compelling and persuasively presented thesis” made this “Halberstam’s most important and impressive book.”