James Thurber once remarked that “we live in a time when in the moth-proof closet dwells the moth.” It is a good lesson and could easily be the text for Halberstam’s dazzling account of how some of the best and brightest men of our time—John F. Kennedy, Walt Whitman Rostow, the Bundy brothers, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, numerous other political illuminati of the ’60’s—were chewed up, some beyond mending, by a little moth named Vietnam. It’s a moth who ate so much so voraciously and so sneakily that he grew to be an unmanageable creature of monstrous proportions, capable of toppling presidents, visiting holocaust on an entire area of the world, and sucking dry the moral viscera of the great nation Amurrica. How did the moth do it? How was he able to chomp up and ingest everything in the Washington closet right under the collective perspicacity of the brainiest individuals to serve in government since the New Deal? Weren’t these men educated at the swellest schools? Wasn’t Rusk a Rhodes Scholar? Didn’t Rostow write books which set even the Cambridge elite on its fabulous behind? Didn’t such an oracle as Walter Lippmann him-self recommend McGeorge Bundy as Secretary of State? Hadn’t they all learned at Groton and other Ivy way stations “what washes and what does not wash”? And, yes, wasn’t it also true that even Lyndon B. Johnson, who became the hungry moth’s favorite dish, was one of the nouveau best and brightest, notwithstanding Pedernales origins and San Marcos State Teachers College vita? All true, but the bug continued to gnaw the fabric—relentlessly. “Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past…swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism (and the dangers of not paying sufficient homage to it).” Halberstam’s conclusions are not original—see Daniel Ellsberg’s “Stalemate Machine” fueled by the “lesson of China” in Papers on the War—but his ability to interrelate the decisions and the policy-making processes with the makers’ personalities and intellectual biases results in a tour de force of contemporary political journalism. — Kirkus Reviews
This book was long on providing a bio for all the players but short on some history. The Domican Republic insurgency merited one page with no explanation for why or how the US got involved. Tet was mentioned but was not explained, most people today would not know what Tet 1968 was all about.
These quotes could just as easily have been taken from the current NEWS, just change the name Diem to Zelensky.
There could be no one to blame but the President himself, and those who had applauded the idea of the weak Secretary of State had gotten what they wanted and deserved. Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.
The American policy was to trust Diem and not to cross him; thus the American military mission saw its job as getting along with Diem, so his reporting became our reporting, his statistics our statistics, finally his lies our lies. What we did now was, on a large scale, accept his view of the war, and of the society. Also, because we had gotten in so much deeper, we wanted to see commensurate results to justify the commitment. Since nothing changed, which meant there was little in the way of results, the American Administration would have to justify the decision it had made by manipulating the facts, by press agentry, by trying to manage the news and events.
[O]ne of the problems of the people in the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations; they always thought that no one else was quite as smart as they were, that they could play games, and that no one else knew the score. They were, it was a failing of the group, too smart by half; for example, the idea that by bombing they would refute the charge that they had not done everything possible for Vietnam; clearly, by bombing and not sending troops they would be doing far less than the maximum, and the military and the Vietnamese knew it;…
“Probably the only people who have the historical sense of inevitable victory are the Americans.” — Denis Brogan, for The Best and Brightest
I have lost the use of my laptop and put most of the last two postings together using my 8 ” tablet. The onscreen keyboard is adequate for short emails but I’m having my problems using it for postings. The laptop has a boot problem – it doesn’t. Until I get it fixed, or replaced, my postings could be curtailed. I have a Support Ticket filed with System 76 but don’t expect to have any action for a few days. Then if I need to send it in for repair it could be a few weeks; we will see.