The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

  That was the terrible shadow of the McCarthy period. It hung heavily albeit secretly over the internal calculation of Democratic leaders of the period. But of course it was never discussed in the major newspapers and magazine articles that analyzed policy making in Vietnam. It was a secret subject, reflecting secret fears. Nor did the men who made the policy have any regional expertise as they made their estimates about what the other side would do if we escalated and sent American combat troops. All of the China experts, the Asia hands who were the counterparts of Bohlen and Kennan, had had their careers destroyed with the fall of China. The men who gave advice on Asia were either Europeanists or men transferred from the Pentagon. When my book was finally done and accepted by my publisher, I realized I had not made this point strongly enough. So I added another chapter, the story of John Paton Davies, one of the most distinguished of the China hands who had had his career savaged during the McCarthy years. The section reflected my belief that in a better and healthier society he or someone like him might have been sitting in as Assistant Secretary of State during the Vietnam decisions. I think adding the chapter strengthened the book, but years later as I ponder the importance of the McCarthy era on both our domestic and foreign policy, I am convinced that this flaw in the society was even greater than I portrayed it, and that if I were to do the book over, I might expand the entire section. It was one of the great myths of that time that foreign policy was this pure and uncontaminated area which was never touched by domestic politics, and that domestic politics ended at the water’s edge. The truth, in sharp contrast, was that all those critical decisions were primarily driven by considerations of domestic politics, and by political fears of the consequences of looking weak in a forthcoming domestic election.

  Writing the book was the most intellectually exciting quest of my life. Each day for the three and a half years the book took to write, I simply could not wait to get to work. Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing, but I was caught up in something else, the actual doing. The legwork became for me infinitely more interesting than the writing, and in fact for a time that became something of a problem in my work, a tendency to pursue certain aspects of a book for too long and to seek too much detail. Some two years into the project, I became convinced that I was on to something special, not necessarily something special commercially, for it never really occurred to me that the book would have a particularly large audience, but something special in terms of its validity, its truth, and that to the degree I could bring a moment alive, I was doing so. (That was something else I owed Teddy White. I and others of my generation, who went from newspaper and magazine reporting to writing books, owed him a far greater debt of gratitude than most people realized. As much as anyone he changed the nature of nonfiction political reporting. By taking the 1960 campaign, a subject about which everyone knew the outcome, and writing a book which proved wondrously exciting to read, he had given a younger generation a marvelous example of the expanded possibilities of writing nonfiction journalism. As I worked on my own book, I remembered his example and tried to write it as a detective novel.)

  In 1972, as I was finishing the book, I became unusually nervous. I kept a duplicate set of notes and a duplicate manuscript outside my apartment. (These were, after all, days when strange things were taking place on orders from the White House.)

  Right up until publication we were unsure about the title. I had liked the phrase “best and brightest,” which I had used in the original Harper’s piece on Bundy to describe the entire group as it swept so confidently into Washington. But others did not like it. Ken Galbraith, who was unusually generous to me in those years, offering advice and guidance, did not like it. “Call it The Establishment’s War, Halberstam,” he said. I was not excited by that. My backup title was Guardians at the Gate, which came from a speech of Johnson’s saying that we had not chosen to be the guardians at the gate but that, if need be, we would honor that role. But I still liked The Best and the Brightest, and in the end I went with it.

  Most people who liked the book liked the title, except the writer Mary McCarthy, who seemed not to like me, the book, or the title. I could not even get the title right, she claimed in a violent attack on me and the book in The New York Review of Books. In the Protestant hymn, she pointed out, the phrase is “brightest and best.” I was never very strong on hymns and knew nothing of the one she cited. I was much cheered by a letter from Graham Greene, who thanked me for sending him a copy and said that he was quite puzzled by the vicious attack Mary McCarthy had written in The New York Review: “I couldn’t understand the ferocious attack by Mary McCarthy, who is not one of my favourite writers,” he wrote to me. “I suppose she resented your not having quoted anything from her account of a weekend in Hanoi,” he said. As for the title, she was wrong about that; hymn or no, it went into the language, although it is often misused, failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.

  It did not occur to me that the book would be a major commercial success. For years others had assured me that I was wasting my time, that no one was interested in a book about the origins of the Vietnam War, and that it would have little commercial appeal. My editor Jim Silberman and I agreed that if it cleared 50,000 in hard cover, it would be a significant success. The print order for the book was originally 25,000, by far the largest for anything I had ever written. A few weeks before publication we began to have a sense that the book was going to move. Excerpts in both Harper’s and Esquire had helped greatly. The publishing order was increased to 50,000. By the date of publication it was 75,000. In the first two weeks it sold some 60,000 copies, almost unheard-of for a book that serious. Eventually it sold around 180,000 copies in hard cover, which was considered astonishing, and an estimated 1.5 million in paperback. The reviews were almost uniformly good; it was that rarest of successes, a book which was both a critical success and a commercial success. More, it got out there. It did not just sit on coffee tables. People read it and took it seriously; to this day I still hear from people who like to tell me how old they were and where they were when they read it and the name of the person who encouraged them to read it, and how it reshaped their thinking on Vietnam.

  The great pleasure for me was an inner pleasure: it was very simply the best I could do. In my own mind, I had reached above myself. There were no skills I possessed which were wasted, and there were skills which I found in doing it which I had never known of before, of patience and endurance. If a reporter’s life is, at its best, an ongoing education, then this had been in the personal sense a stunning experience, and it had changed the way I looked not just at Vietnam, but at every other subject I took on from then on. I had loved working away from the pack, enjoyed the solitude of this more different, lonelier kind of journalism which I was now doing. I had gotten not just a book which I greatly valued from the experience, but a chance to grow.

  Chapter One

  A cold day in December. Long afterward, after the assassination and all the pain, the older man would remember with great clarity the young man’s grace, his good manners, his capacity to put a visitor at ease. He was concerned about the weather, that the old man not be exposed to the cold or to the probing questions of freezing newspapermen, that he not have to wait for a cab. Instead he had guided h
is guest to his own car and driver. The older man would remember the young man’s good manners almost as clearly as the substance of their talk, though it was an important meeting.

  In just a few weeks the young man would become President of the United States, and to the newspapermen standing outside his Georgetown house, there was an air of excitement about every small act, every gesture, every word, every visitor to his temporary headquarters. They complained less than usual, the bitter cold notwithstanding; they felt themselves a part of history: the old was going out and the new was coming in, and the new seemed exciting, promising.

  On the threshold of great power and great office, the young man seemed to have everything. He was handsome, rich, charming, candid. The candor was part of the charm: he could beguile a visitor by admitting that everything the visitor proposed was right, rational, proper—but he couldn’t do it, not this week, this month, this term. Now he was trying to put together a government, and the candor showed again. He was self-deprecating with the older man. He had spent the last five years, he said ruefully, running for office, and he did not know any real public officials, people to run a government, serious men. The only ones he knew, he admitted, were politicians, and if this seemed a denigration of his own kind, it was not altogether displeasing to the older man. Politicians did need men to serve, to run the government. The implication was obvious. Politicians could run Pennsylvania and Ohio, and if they could not run Chicago they could at least deliver it. But politicians run the world? What did they know about the Germans, the French, the Chinese? He needed experts for that, and now he was summoning them.

  The old man was Robert A. Lovett, the symbolic expert, representative of the best of the breed, a great surviving link to a then unquestioned past, to the wartime and postwar successes of the Stimson-Marshall-Acheson years. He was the very embodiment of the Establishment, a man who had a sense of country rather than party. He was above petty divisions, so he could say of his friends, as so many of that group could, that he did not even know to which political party they belonged. He was a man of impeccable credentials, indeed he passed on other people’s credentials, deciding who was safe and sound, who was ready for advancement and who was not. He was so much a part of that atmosphere that he was immortalized even in the fiction of his class. Louis Auchincloss, who was the unofficial laureate of that particular world, would have one of his great fictional lawyers say: “I’ve got that Washington bug. Ever since I had that job with Bob Lovett . . .”

  He had the confidence of both the financial community and the Congress. He had been good, very good, going up on the Hill in the old days and soothing things over with recalcitrant Midwestern senators; and he was soft on nothing, that above all—no one would accuse Robert Lovett of being soft. He was a witty and graceful man himself, a friend not just of the powerful, the giants of politics and industry, but of people like Robert Benchley and Lillian Hellman and John O’Hara. He had wit and charm. Even in those tense moments in 1950 when he had been at Defense and MacArthur was being MacArthur, Lovett had amused his colleagues at high-level meetings with great imitations of MacArthur’s vanities, MacArthur in Korea trying to comb his few strands of hair from side to side over his pate to hide his baldness, while standing in the blast of prop-plane engines at Kimpo Airfield.

  They got along well, these two men who had barely known each other before. Jack Kennedy the President-elect, who in his campaign had summoned the nation’s idealism, but who was at least as skeptical as he was idealistic, curiously ill at ease with other people’s overt idealism, preferring in private the tart and darker view of the world and of mankind of a skeptic like Lovett.

  In addition to his own misgivings he had constantly been warned by one of his more senior advisers that in order to deal with State effectively, he had to have a real man there, that State was filled with sissies in striped pants and worse. That senior adviser was Joseph Kennedy, Sr., and he had consistently pushed, in discussions with his son, the name of Robert Lovett, who he felt was the best of those old-time Wall Street people. For Robert Lovett understood power, where it resided, how to exercise it. He had exercised it all his life, yet he was curiously little known to the general public. The anonymity was not entirely by chance, for he was the embodiment of the public servant­financier who is so secure in his job, the value of it, his right to do it, that he does not need to seek publicity, to see his face on the cover of a magazine or on television, to feel reassured. Discretion is better, anonymity is safer: his peers know him, know his role, know that he can get things done. Publicity sometimes frightens your superiors, annoys congressional adversaries (when Lovett was at Defense, the senior members of the Armed Services committees never had to read in newspapers and magazines how brilliant Lovett was, how well he handled the Congress; rather they read how much he admired the Congress). He was the private man in the public society par excellence. He did not need to impress people with false images. He knew the rules of the game: to whom you talked, what you said, to whom you did not talk, which journalists were your kind, would, without being told, know what to print for the greater good, which questions to ask, and which questions not to ask. He lived in a world where young men made their way up the ladder by virtue not just of their own brilliance and ability but also of who their parents were, which phone calls from which old friends had preceded their appearance in an office. In a world like this he knew that those whose names were always in print, who were always on the radio and television, were there precisely because they did not have power, that those who did hold or had access to power tried to keep out of sight. He was a twentieth-century man who did not hold press conferences, who never ran for anything. The classic insider’s man.

  He was born in Huntsville, Texas, in 1895, the son of Robert Scott Lovett, a general counsel for Harriman’s Union Pacific Railway, a railroad lawyer, a power man in those rough and heady days, who then became a judge, very much a part of the power structure, the Texas arm of it, and eventually a member of the Union Pacific board of directors and president of the railway. His son Bob would do all the right Eastern things, go to the right schools, join the right clubs (Hill School, Yale, Skull and Bones). He helped form the Yale unit of pilots which flew in World War I, and he commanded the first U.S. Naval Air Squadron. He married well, Adele Brown, the beautiful daughter of James Brown, a senior partner in the great banking firm of Brown Brothers.

  Since those post-college years were a bad time for the railways, he went to work for Brown Brothers, starting at $1,080 a year, a fumbling-fingered young clerk who eventually rose to become a partner and finally helped to arrange the merger of Brown Brothers with the Harriman banking house to form the powerful firm of Brown Bros., Harriman & Co. So he came naturally to power, to running things, to knowing people, and his own marriage had connected him to the great families. His view of the world was a banker’s view, the right men making the right decisions, stability to be preserved. The status quo was good, one did not question it.

  He served overseas in London, gaining experience in foreign affairs, though like most influential Americans who would play a key role in foreign affairs entering government through the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, the group which served as the Establishment’s unofficial club, it was with the eyes of a man with a vested interest in the static world, where business could take place as usual, where the existing order could and should be preserved. He saw the rise of Hitler and the coming military importance of air power; when he returned to America he played a major role in speeding up America’s almost nonexistent air defenses. He served with great distinction during World War II, a member of that small inner group which worked for Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Chief of Staff George C. Marshall (“There are three people I cannot say no to,” Lovett would say when asked back into government in the late forties, “Colonel Stimson, General Marshall and my wife”). That small group of policy makers came from the great banking houses and law firms of New York and Boston. They kne
w one another, were linked to one another, and they guided America’s national security in those years, men like James Forrestal, Douglas Dillon and Allen Dulles. Stimson and then Marshall had been their great leaders, and although they had worked for Roosevelt, it was not because of him, but almost in spite of him; they had been linked more to Stimson than to Roosevelt. And they were linked more to Acheson and Lovett than to Truman; though Acheson was always quick to praise Truman, there were those who believed that there was something unconsciously patronizing in Acheson’s tones, his description of Truman as a great little man, and a sense that Acheson felt that much of Truman’s greatness came from his willingness to listen to Acheson. They were men linked more to one another, their schools, their own social class and their own concerns than they were linked to the country. Indeed, about one of them, Averell Harriman, there would always be a certain taint, as if somehow Averell were a little too partisan and too ambitious (Averell had wanted to be President whereas the rest of them knew that the real power lay in letting the President come to them; the President could take care of rail strikes, minimum wages and farm prices, and they would take care of national security). Averell had, after all—there was no getting around it—run for public office and won; he seemed too much the politician and too much the intriguer for them. Perhaps not as bad as Roosevelt, but not exactly one of them, either.