You can read my review of 'The Powers That Be.' Everything I said there applies to this work as well, and for exactly the same reasons. 'The Best and The Brightest' is not history. It isn't even good journalism, though it has been widely hailed a triumph. The best you can say of this book is that the writing is great, and the writer tells a great story. Other than that specific praise, it is a collection of unsourced rumors that might or might not be true. It is likely that many of the rumors are in fact true, but we have no way to figure out which rumors those might be. The book crashes on that rock because, for all practical purposes, it is completely unsourced. The problem here is a failed method, and the failure of journalism to call it such. Were publishers/editors/critics and other gatekeepers doing the job they get paid for, nobody would ever have seen this book in its present manifestation. Read it and enjoy it and take what it teaches with two grains of salt. ( )

1281, The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam (17 Aug 1974) A searing and disturbing book: the story of how we sunk into the Vietnam war. It is unfootnoted and filled with opinion, yet it is obvious there is much truth in it. It does not show Kennedy in too good a light, but one cannot hope but think that if he had lived he would not have sunk into the quagmire the way Johnson did. But both were willing to deceive the people--LBJ much more so. It was due to Joe McCarthy. The horror he put the country thru over China caused everybody to think we simply had to prevent Vietnam from being lost. In hindsight it all looks awful, but I lived thru the time and while of course there was much I did not know, I can appreciate the hawk position. But the book is sobering and, liberally-biased though it is, cannot help but be instructive to the future. ( )

"Contemporary history," Halberstam calls it. A surprisingly easy read -- I knocked it out in three days flat. Everyone knows what this one is about: how a group of policy makers in successive US governments lost their collective minds over a small Asian nation. I could not go more than three pages without thinking, "Can you believe we're going through the exact same shit again?" The similarities between the JFK/LBJ approach to Vietnam and Bush's adventures in Afganistan and Iraq are arresting. And depressing. It seems we really are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors. ( )

If you want to understand the Iraq War, read this. Past as prelude, indeed. ( )

This book changed my world view. One of the greatest books I have read. ( )