The best and the brightest

“This is David Halberstam’s long-awaited book on America in the last decade - the story of what happened when the best and the brightest men in the country came to Washington, to serve the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and exercised, or failed to exercise, their power in office. Already famous through publication in HARPER’S of the chapters on McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, in ESQUIRE of the material on President Johnson, and in the ATLANTIC on the economics of the war, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is the result of more than three years of work - extensive research and over four hundred interviews - by David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is the author of one of the first and best analyses of our Asian commitment, THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE. His dispatches from Vietnam, which resulted in enormous pressure from Washington to report the war more optimistically, were read by the highest officers of our government for an accurate picture of what was happening in Vietnam. In the same way he now illuminates our own country. He has drawn brilliant, in-depth portraits of the men who came to power in the Kennedy era: Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, William P. Bundy, Dean Rusk, George Ball, William Westmoreland, Maxwell Taylor and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson themselves. The modern, activist, contemporary men - the best and the brightest - who came to Washington to build us a Camelot and left behind them a country divided by war, torn by dissent. Who were these men? What kind of men were they? What was their legacy to America? This book is far more than a volume of portraits. Above all it is a narrative of the decision-making process by which we arrived at our present position in Vietnam. Throughout the 1960s, the overriding question was Vietnam - all the way in or all the way out? - and that question controlled not only the lives of these men but the future of America. How did they react at crucial moments? Who pulled the levers, and in what