Big, Muddy

In a concluding author’s note, David Halberstam tells us that he started to write a piece on McGeorge Bundy, “the most glistening of the Kennedy-Johnson intellectuals.” It became a twenty-thousand-word profile. “I realized,” he continues, “I had only begun to scratch the surface and I wanted to find out the full reasons why it [the war in Vietnam] had all happened, I wanted to know the full context of the decisions, as well as how they were made. Why had they crossed the Rubicon? . . . So I set out to study the men [of the Kennedy-Johnson era, the “architects of a war”] and their decisions, . . . attitudes, the country, its institutions, and, above all, the era which allowed this tragedy to take place. . . . Why had it happened?”

Thus we have The Best and the Brightest: some 665 pages, no table of contents, with an incomplete index, a brief, tendentious bibliography, almost six hundred words to the page containing the results of “some five hundred interviews” (unreferenced because of the allegedly inhibiting “political climate”), “seeing some people as many as ten times,” careful reading—the author’s phrase, not mine—of the literature of the period (but not a single footnote). All this and the author’s apologia pro vita sua: A reporter for the New York Times in Saigon in 1962, he believed “in the value of the effort … it seemed to be a test of two political systems . . . I thought our system the better . . . [but] affected primarily by Neil Sheehan . . . and Bernard Fall … in the fall of 1963 I came to the conclusion that it [the U.S. involvement in Vietnam] was doomed and that we were on the wrong side of history. . . . Like almost everyone I know who has been involved in Vietnam, I am haunted by it, by the fact that somehow I was not better, that somehow it was all able to happen.”

FT

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Frank N. Trager

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In a concluding author’s note, David Halberstam tells us that he started to write a piece on McGeorge Bundy, “the most glistening of the Kennedy-Johnson intellectuals.” It became a twenty-thousand-word profile. “I realized,” he continues, “I had only begun to scratch the surface and I wanted to find out the full reasons why it [the war in Vietnam] had all happened, I wanted to know the full context of the decisions, as well as how they were made. Why had they crossed the Rubicon? . . . So I set out to study the men [of the Kennedy-Johnson era, the “architects of a war”] and their decisions, . . . attitudes, the country, its institutions, and, above all, the era which allowed this tragedy to take place. . . . Why had it happened?”

Thus we have The Best and the Brightest: some 665 pages, no table of contents, with an incomplete index, a brief, tendentious bibliography, almost six hundred words to the page containing the results of “some five hundred interviews” (unreferenced because of the allegedly inhibiting “political climate”), “seeing some people as many as ten times,” careful reading—the author’s phrase, not mine—of the literature of the period (but not a single footnote). All this and the author’s apologia pro vita sua: A reporter for the New York Times in Saigon in 1962, he believed “in the value of the effort … it seemed to be a test of two political systems . . . I thought our system the better . . . [but] affected primarily by Neil Sheehan . . . and Bernard Fall … in the fall of 1963 I came to the conclusion that it [the U.S. involvement in Vietnam] was doomed and that we were on the wrong side of history. . . . Like almost everyone I know who has been involved in Vietnam, I am haunted by it, by the fact that somehow I was not better, that somehow it was all able to happen.”