The Best and the Brightest [Paperback]

Halberstam spent 750+ pages on information he could have covered VERY adequately in 600-650 pages. There is a lot of bloat here. One example: page 622 of the Modern Library hardback he describes how McNamara loved to dress in uniforms from early childhood; then on page 629 (seven pages later) he repeats the same exact sentence in a different form. It provides no additional emphasis to the point - just bloat. These examples are too numerous to mention and appear throughout the book.

TBATB could have a much better structure. It moves somewhat chronologically (from early Kennedy to mid-Nixon), but jumps around so much as to make one dizzy. There are no chapter titles and no table of contents. You dive in and hold on. Often he will change decades in mid-paragraph for no reason at all. His flow and logic are in there, but he makes you work for it too hard.

I got the impression while reading it that Halberstam was so immersed in his Vietnam project, that he had lost perspective - that is probably a characteristic of writers who do groundbreaking work - and badly needed an honest editor. Halberstam was so impassioned in his search for the causes of Vietnam (he had over 2,000 pages of single-spaced notes from interviews alone) that at the end of the years of research, he couldn't quite trim the fat down to make it as coherent as it could have been for the reader.

On the positive, this is clearly a watershed book that was exhaustively researched, insightful, and honest. I learned a great deal about Vietnam and am glad I gutted it out through a pithy read.

Just wanted to warn other Amazon readers what they are in for if they punch this one up. If you're looking for an intro book, I recommend that you read "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan" FIRST and decide if you want to venture further.

Halberstam, who has never written a bad book, gives us a fascinating look at the brilliant people who made up the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and shows us how these brilliant people made some horrible errors to get us deeper and deeper into the war. The book is filled with great anecdotes about these people, but it's not just about how the brilliant people screwed up. It also includes some heroic figures, like George Ball, who often found himself fighting against all of the others to try to convince the president to get out of Vietnam.

If you've never read anything by Halberstam do yourself a favor and buy this book. This was the first book I read by him, and ever since the first time I read this one, I've been buying everything I can find by him. I've never been disappointed yet.

David Halberstam is a genious at introducing us to the people of history, not just the events. This approach is perfectly suited for a study of the key citizen and military leaders who were central to the war in Vietnam.

Each chapter presents fascinating sketches of people like Harvard whiz kid McGeorge Bundy, former Ford superstar and Defense Secretary Robert McNamera, General Westmoreland, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and many others. Amazingly, these character sketches do not digress from the recounting of the events, instead they provide a valuable context.

In the end you understand the events of Vietnam because you understand the people that were making the decisions on Vietnam.

A consuming read for anyone who wants to understand a tragic moment in our past.