Reading Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest in a Time of Trump

What a strange experience it was to read a book like David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest in a time of Trump. This book reveals how monumentally hard it is to run the federal government. If a bunch of highly educated, well-credential men could lead us to disaster in the 1960s, imagine what the clowns working in the Trump Administration are leading us toward. I’d say the worst is yet to come, and I type this as the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic has eclipsed 100,000 in this country.

I’ve had this book on my shelf for more than 25 years, but only now, in this time of stay-at-home orders did I finally get around to reading it. For the longest time, I thought the title, The Best and the Brightest, referred to the the soldiers who the United States sent to fight and die in a disastrous war in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of men plucked from their lives and sent to fight when they could have been dong great things at home. Of course, I was wrong

Halberstam’s title is ironic. It refers to the men who flocked to Washington, DC in 1961 to serve in John F. Kennedy's administration and who stayed to serve Lyndon Johnson after JFK was murdered. These were the so-called best and brightest. They were the elite of the elite in our country.

There were upper class “Establishment” types — WASPy, highly educated, and well connected. There were working class men who had trudged their way to the top with PhDs, MBAs, and law degrees. And there were career public servants, men who had served in previous administrations as ambassadors and undersecretaries, who were now ready to take cabinet-level positions. And yes, they were all men. The only women mentioned in the book are wives.

They came to Washington because they saw JFK as a transformative leader and they wanted to be part of that transformation.

They encountered a bureaucracy that itself was staffed by its own breed of brilliant men, experts and lifers in the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the CIA. There were men in these bureaucracies who had good ideas. And there were men who had bad ideas. There were men who were realists, who saw the futility of propping up a failed state in South Vietnam. And there were others who believe that the United States could conjure a thriving democracy there by killing communist guerrillas and pouring money into Saigon.

The "Best and the Brightest" who came to DC to serve JFK had to do one thing in that moment. They had to figure out which ideas were good and which ones were bad. They had to confront reality. They had to smell bullshit and recognize it for what it was. They had to listen to experts and comprehend complex subjects.

These men were prepared for the job. Before the Kennedy years, these “Best and Brightest” had led massive companies, taught at elite universities, negotiated international treaties, and crushed the Nazis in Europe as generals.

Outside of Vietnam, they did get the job done in many ways. They solved the Cuban Missile Crisis. They pushed the Civil Rights Act. They laid the groundwork to getting us to the Moon and spawn a technology revolution. But when it came to Vietnam, too many of them listened to the wrong people. They ignored inconvenient facts. They tried to please Lyndon Johnson, who wanted simple answers to complex questions. They were afraid to confront him with hard truths. The result was tragic. Blood and treasure wasted. A nation divided. Scars that still haven’t healed.

The book’s lesson is that governing a nation as large and powerful as the United States is extremely difficult. There are millions of moving parts. From the Oval Office to the White House switchboard, the people who work in a presidential administrative must possess wisdom, patience, humility, and humanity. It was hard in the 1960s. It’s even more daunting today. There is a reason why every two-term president over the last century has left office looking 20 years old than the day he first took office.

As I read this book, I often found myself thinking of Trump and the people he has surrounded himself with, those he hasn’t fired or driven away. They are all so mediocre, petty, and cowardly. It truly astounds me, how unfit and unworthy they all are.

We don’t need overly educated, upper-class elites in the White House, like those Best and Brightest who failed us in Vietnam. But we do need smart, decent, hard-working people who can face facts, tell the truth, and lead us. Just lead us.

We have none of that today. We have a conspiracy theorist who sees enemies everywhere, who is a slave to his endless craving for adulation. He doesn’t want the job. He isn’t trying to do the job. There is no administration. There is no president. The million moving parts of this government are useless without a leader, and we have none. We deserve better.