Halberstam’s ‘Best-Brightest’ Blunder is a very interesting article from Consortium News.

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam shaped the American narrative of the Vietnam War, making it a cautionary tale about the folly of action-oriented intellectuals who surrounded President John F. Kennedy and whose hubris supposedly plunged the nation into a destructive war. But is Halberstam’s widely embraced storyline correct? In this analysis of the 1972 book, James DiEugenio argues that Halberstam got the history fundamentally wrong, missing Kennedy’s resistance to a wider war and ignoring the fateful change in U.S. policy after JFK’s assassination in 1963.

This article really makes you wonder about what we really know and what we don’t.  Either this guy is right and I was horn-swoggled by Halberstam’s book or the exact opposite.

This has tremendous importance even to this day.  When Obama touted his intellectual prowess over the village idiot that preceded him, I always had the nagging questions in the back of my mind, “but what about the people in the Kennedy/Johnson administration as described in The Best and The Brightest? If these smart people could have been so wrong, how do we know that Obama’s smart people will do better?”

This article does not completely negate some of those questions.  After all, some of the smart people in the Kennedy/Johnson administration did make some awful decisions.  The “fact” that Kennedy was smart enough to try to get around these people at least makes the case some educated people can figure out how to use their knowledge of history to the world’s advantage.  If I were a prejudiced person, I would gladly lay all the blame on that darn Texan, Lyndon Johnson, instead of the Cantabridgian Kennedy.

May 20, 2011

I just found Part 2 of the article. The closing paragraphs of the article say:

Halberstam’s book covers up this fact: that while the powers-that-be are indeed often overrated, Kennedy was not one of them. That was a truth too radical for someone like Halberstam, who was never the kind of writer who pushed the envelope.

Yet, what makes his iconic book even a worse travesty is that he never tried to amend it, even after more declassified documents revealed that Kennedy was intent on withdrawing and that Johnson reversed that policy. That failure, I think, speaks to Halberstam’s intent.

In my view, Halberstam’s deception was purposeful. Therefore, this is not just an obsolete book. It is an intentionally misleading one.

The closing sentence about the author of this article reads:

James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era.

I leave it up to you to decide if this description has any bearing on the credibility of the article.