In 1963, the notion that a newspaper reporter might challenge the official story of generals and ambassadors in the middle of a war, essentially accusing them of lying, was so improbable that it could have occurred only to someone still in his twenties. The Second World War and the unquestionable prestige that it conferred on men in uniform were only a generation old. David Halberstam, who died in a car accident on April 23rd, at the age of seventy-three, was a product of the Cold War, a self-described “square from the fifties” who went off to cover the obscure conflict in Southeast Asia believing that it was a necessary front in a global struggle. He was a liberal anti-Communist, like the leaders of the war. But Halberstam was also a Jewish kid from the Bronx, big and immodest, with oversized hands, clawing his way into the élite culture into which those leaders had been born; his colleague and friend Neil Sheehan later wrote, “His insecurity showed . . . in his compulsion to be recognized and in his need to test himself.”
When Halberstam applied his enor-mous energy to uncovering the failures of the South Vietnamese Army in the Mekong Delta and was met with denials and disdain from American officials, he responded with a personal, vengeful rage. At a Fourth of July party at the United States Ambassador’s residence in Saigon, he refused to shake hands with General Paul Harkins, the fatuously optimistic commander of the American advisory effort. Halberstam’s wartime work will last not just because of its quality and its importance but because it established a new mode of journalism, one with which Americans are now so familiar that it’s difficult to remember that someone had to invent it. The notion of the reporter as fearless truthteller has become a narcissistic cliché that fits fewer practitioners than would like to claim it. “David changed war reporting forever,” Richard Holbrooke, who had known him in Vietnam, said last week. “He made it not only possible but even romantic to write that your own side was misleading the public about how the war was going. But everything depended on David getting it right, and he did.”
Halberstam went on to write twenty books on almost as many subjects, but historical memory, more ruthless than any of his editors, will eventually cull from them one enduring achievement. “The Best and the Brightest,” which consumed Halberstam from 1969 to 1972, has the feverish atmosphere of an obsession, and if its prose shows the excesses that later subjected him to criticism and parody, in this instance the subject fully deserved his passionate treatment. “The basic question behind the book,” he later wrote, “was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.” When the book was published, Mary McCarthy wrote a scathing assessment in The New York Review of Books. It read like pulp historical fiction, she wrote, without a purpose: “I cannot think who will be benefited by ‘The Best and the Brightest,’ who corrected or instructed.” McCarthy, whose own work on Vietnam consisted of a sympathetic report after a brief visit to Hanoi, was seldom more spectacularly wrong. Halberstam had invented a new genre, the Washington book (now published annually by the dozen), in this case on a tragic historical scale, and with a purpose: to take the reader into the lives of the men around Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to show why their biographies and talents not only failed to prevent the mistakes of Vietnam but made them almost inevitable.
I read “The Best and the Brightest” in Iraq in the summer of 2004. By then, that war had gone badly, perhaps irretrievably, wrong, and Halberstam’s three-decade-old book seemed like front-page news. Halberstam was critical of some of the reporting on Iraq, especially during the prewar period and the invasion. It didn’t always meet his standard of unintimidated truthfulness. Perhaps an element of professional caution had settled over ambitious journalists, as it had over ambitious military officers and government officials. Halberstam’s reporting in Vietnam drew on sources, such as Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, who risked and sometimes lost their careers. In Iraq, no high-ranking soldier or civilian has been audacious enough to get fired for telling the truth, and it’s almost impossible to imagine a young correspondent refusing to shake the hand of a commanding general in the Green Zone. But that summer, among reporters in Baghdad, “The Best and the Brightest” kept coming up in conversation, making it clear that any historical account that may be written about the origins of this new war will have only one model. ♦
