---
title: The Best and the Brightest
type: Book
date: 2026-05-30
rating: 5
year: 1972
author: David Halberstam
status: Finished
image: the-best-and-the-brightest.jpg
tags:
  - book
colorSortKey: [1, -99, 3]
---

I started this book on the recommendation of [Scholar's Stage](https://scholars-stage.org/), who I would describe as one of the few deeply interesting and serious conservative historians on X, the Everything App — someone whose recommendations and commentary I find uniformly interesting. His was a rapturous recommendation, albeit one prefaced with a caveat: that the book is deeply liberal, to the point of some small amount of bias.

As a leftist I didn't expect to have a problem with this _except_ for the fact that I find the truly great works of non-fiction — those of Caro, or [[postwar|Tony Judt]] — to be *non-ideological*: not centrist, exactly, but focused on a discourse that cannot be reduced to one side of the political axis. 

(As an aside, I agree with Scholar's Stage that this kind of book is the new great American novel; I have waxed and waned online and offline about Caro's work long enough to make my opinion clear in that regard. The downside of this kind of book, however, can be worse than the downside of overwrought fiction. Most recently, I failed to make it through *Nixonland* for reasons along these lines: partisan, scattered, poorly researched, and above all else, incoherent.)

*The Best and the Brightest* does not share this problem. First and foremost, this is clearly a well-researched book, full of individual reportage and fact-finding. And unlike Nixonland, it has a clear and specific thesis it aims to espouse. I think you could argue that the thesis — even if it's old hat by now, thanks to works like [[the-fog-of-war|The Fog of War]] — is arguably non-partisan. The author spends much of his critique on Kennedy for being a centrist rather than the liberal he campaigned on. But that is more of an ancillary concern relative to the main one: that the centrism itself, rather than being inherently problematic, was *indicative* of Kennedy's lack of a coherent platform or ideal besides competence and intelligence.

Where I find the book wanting — and where, around a third of the way through, I discovered that it was simply not my kind of book, nor did it live up to the admittedly lofty bar of works like [[postwar|Postwar]] and *The Power Broker* — is in its plotting and structure. Reading Caro sometimes feels like reading Will and Ariel Durant: slow and meticulous, but rewarding patience. *The Best and the Brightest* gives a sense, more than anything else, of unpleasant déjà vu. You are constantly bouncing between Eisenhower and Truman and Kennedy and LBJ, from the '40s into the '50s into the '60s, as the author redoubles and re-triples his points about fatalism and poor appointments and poor choices — often under the auspices of a micro-biography of an undersecretary or erstwhile diplomat.

---

There are two things I appreciate about this book. One is that the author really does spend the time to capably and exhaustively illustrate the people in the room, transforming the Kennedy administration from a homogenous blob of former executives for Dow Chemical into a realistic, albeit samey, cast of characters with subtly competing agendas, ideologies, and win conditions. The second is that he successfully makes the point that there was not one single thing that *caused* Vietnam. It was a preponderance of own goals and blunders, all stemming from a couple of poor base assumptions during the early days of the Kennedy administration — assumptions that themselves had echoes in the final, waning days of the Eisenhower administration.

But the book is slow and repetitive, and given its immense size and length, does not wield its heft to full advantage.

All of this is to say: I'm happy for having read it. I do feel like I learned much — not just about the preconditions of the Vietnam War, but about the true inner workings of power within the executive branch. But I have to keep this book at arm's length from the glittering gems to which it might otherwise be compared.