Or Harvard. Or West Point. Texas State. But the point remains: this book is about how liberal elites got us into an imperial war.
I don’t know how you write a history text better than this. It has exactly what I look for in its subject’s great works: to be good, thorough, and damning. By the end of reading this, I was relieved to be done but thoroughly exhausted at the week-long endeavor, which I was only able to finish in seven days thanks to being off of work.
Halberstam writes niche, detailed profiles of the war mongers in the Kennedy-Johnson administrations with a focus on their education and socio-cultural background. All of them are white and male, the vast majority being Ivy educated. They were the new breed of intellectuals, the post-WWII generation ready to take the order handed to them by their predecessors and mold it in their image.
The problem they faced was reality. The Vietnamese era had presented a dilemma for American foreign policy since the end of WWII. Thanks to sentiments stoked at home, anti-communism was a political necessity. Thus the domestic concern of communism made an international policy of anti-communism a requirement. Hence the concern about communism spreading from Russia, to China, to Vietnam.
Halberstam lays out clearly the many mistakes involved here: China and Russia had different communistic practices, much of the revolutionary fervor in southeast Asia was driven by nationalism. The Kennedy people knew this but because of political pressures and a toxically masculine tendency towards hawkishness, they still leaned towards armed engagement. Halberstam strongly implies that if not for the Bay of Pigs disaster, we would have been in Vietnam much, much sooner.
While Kennedy tried to take a somewhat cautious approach*, Johnson was pro-confrontation from the moment he got into office. The second half of the book covers how he pushed his own views on the Kennedy people, who were mostly hawks, preparing for an armed engagement despite the warning signs that it would not work.
This book is an exhausting read. Halberstam is a first rate scribe but there is a lot of attention to detail and some redundancy. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re curious, patient, and have time to invest. But if you are, the investment will pay off. This is a necessary work. And a sad reminder that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
*Though it should not win him any platitudes. The whole thing about how Kennedy was a great President who didn’t want a war while LBJ was a lousy one who did is a myth the book dispels.
