“The Best and the Brightest”
In 1972 masterpiece, “The Best and the Brightest”, the journalist David Halberstam asked the central question about America’s war in Vietnam:
“What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place?”
They were “the best and the brightest”, after all. Why did it happen?
Halberstam’s answer, repeated by countless authors since, contained two parts: hubris and ignorance.
Robert McNamara, who as secretary of defence was one of the architects of the war, later offered substantial endorsement of Halberstam’s thesis. Writing in his 1995 memoir, “In Retrospect”, he lamented that he and other leaders were ignorant of Vietnamese history and of Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist motivations. They saw a monolithic communist threat where none existed
From the time then-Congressman Kennedy visited Vietnam in 1951, during the height of the French-Indochina War, until his death in Dallas in 1963, he expressed doubts that Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary nationalist cause could be subdued by military means.
This brings us back to Halberstam’s question: why did these men “allow the tragedy to take place”?
Why did Kennedy, though he drew the line on ground troops, expand American military involvement in Vietnam substantially during his thousand days in the White House?
A key part of the answer is that for both men, maintaining the course, through escalation if necessary, offered the path of least immediate resistance.
Not until 1973, under President Richard Nixon—who maintained his own pattern of public bullishness and private foreboding—would America’s war in Vietnam finally draw to a close.
More than 58,000 Americans lay dead, along with an estimated 3m Vietnamese, 2m of them civilians.
Fredrik Logevall professor of international affairs and history at Harvard University The Economist 5 ay 2026
The Domino Theory
Att madam Binh kallar FNL-rörelsen för Viet Cong kanske förvånar många gamla FNL-are. Fokus September 19-26 2008
Madame Binh var utrikesminister i det som kallades PRR. Hon ingick 1973 ett fredsavtal i Paris med USA:s Henry Kissinger, under den tid som Nixon var president.
För detta tilldelades de båda Nobels Fredspris.
Nixon inte bara lämnade guldmyntfonten. Han lämnade också Vietnam.
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