Latest Reading

The journalist and writer David Halberstam died last year. It was in the news although I’m sure many people didn’t know who he was and didn’t care. He is probably most famous for writing about the Vietnam War. He wasn’t very supportive of the American efforts in Southeast Asia. His book The Best and the Brightest is a classic work about the Vietnam War. For someone like me who studies modern American history, it’s as close to mandatory reading as books get. It’s been on my list of books to read for quite some time. Since he recently died, I bumped it to near the top. Last week I finished it. Here are my thoughts:

David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest is a study of the American political failure surrounding the Vietnam War. The policymakers of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were among the best in history yet their work on Vietnam was misguided. Their sense of destiny and power was unrivaled but this only led to blinding overconfidence. Never before had a set of men so fervently believed America could solve the world’s problems with rational intelligence. Yet they misjudged the situation from the beginning and only compounded their mistakes.

The book begins with the construction of the Kennedy cabinet, a process of choosing insiders that might fuel any conspiracy theorist’s fires. Indeed, the Establishment seems a shadowy underworld of politics. When in place, the Kennedy administration largely failed in Vietnam because they failed to understand Asia and did not care to see the world in terms other than Western. The role of McCarthyism also influenced them to see the world in more concrete terms than useful, especially after the fall of China to communism. With the onset of the Korean War, the lessons of Munich became more ingrained in their minds. You must stop a bully as soon as he begins his rampage, they believed, as South Vietnam faced a threat from communism.

As Johnson took power, dissenters had one by one been phased out of the government. A pattern of deceit was established as the administration fooled itself and then the people. Johnson wanted to avoid the issue until after the election and until after he could implement his domestic agenda. Yet keeping it under the table only ensured that bad options spiraled out of control. By the time Johnson realized how encroaching Vietnam had become it was too late to turn back. Johnson was also less able than Kennedy to curb his administration. Halberstam concludes, “The men around Johnson served him poorly, but they served him poorly because he wanted them to.”

Halberstam is thorough, sometime overbearingly so. Not a single stone is left uncovered which makes the work arguably exhaustive, though footnotes would be necessary to make the book a truly useful tool for researchers. Halberstam is opinionated and it is hard to tell whether his harsh treatment is always justified, especially, for example, when he calls McNamara a “fool.” Still, The Best and the Brightest is an excellent example of how American government truly works and often fails, a lesson still valid today.

Latest Reading

Lately I’ve been rereading a lot of the classics I read in high school and during my undergraduate years. I read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies when I was younger. Back then I couldn’t get enough of allegorical works about the evils of unchecked humanity. I suppose I still enjoy the same type of books. Lord of the Flies might not be the best one of them but it’s still an excellent book. It seems choppy at first, both in the plot and language, but it builds to a rhythmic pulse. Exploring the “possibilities of irresponsible authority,” it paints a scary picture of what the world can quickly become.

This Semester

I’m not taking any classes this semester. I suppose it should be obvious since it’s February and I have yet to mention it. I couldn’t find any to take. The one I needed to take was full. The few that I might have been interested in taking were ones I had already taken in previous semesters. The ones that were open and fit my schedule I had no interest in taking. I can think of better things to do than, for example, taking a class on Medieval English textiles and what they say about the culture. So I’m sitting this one out. But I’m not being idle. I’m learning Spanish. We have to learn one language for a PhD in history and there is no obvious choice for me since I’m studying modern America. I’m not studying German history, for example, so I don’t need to learn German to read the primary sources in the original. So Spanish seems the most useful to learn in today’s America. Hopefully I’ll know it well enough to pass a basic test in the fall. And I’m also doing background reading for my dissertation. I have a topic in mind and I’ll write about it sometime soon. In the meantime, I need to read pretty much everything ever written on the subject.