THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST

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The Best and Brightest

The Best and the Brightest

Introduction

“The Best and the Brightest,” detailing the origins of the war. The best and the brightest, the term were coined by journalist David Halberstam in a book of that title published in 1972. He alluded to the advisers who surrounded John F. Kennedy. Among them, some minds in their generation. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the thirty-fifth President of the United States (Chafe, 2009).

Discussion

The focus of the book is on the foreign policy crafted by the academics and intellectuals who were in John F. Kennedy's administration, and the consequences of those policies in Vietnam (Curry, 2006).

Halberstam's classic book on how the United States got itself into the quagmire in Vietnam, he identified several reasons for why a superpower would fall to what President Lyndon Johnson called a “raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country”.

Though written forty years ago, the lessons drawn by Halberstam from the debacle still ring true today (Chafe, 2009).

Halberstam (1972) stated that a joint venture between Groupon and Tencent, Gaopeng had the best of both worlds from the get-go. Groupon's American can-do spirit and experience combined with Ten cent's local knowledge seemed to be a winning combination. However, armed with a tremendous amount of resource (100 million dollars), Gaopeng stumbled from be beginning. Blind expansion into dozens of cities required the company to hire quickly, resulting in a bloated 3000 men staff (p.19).

False belief of invincibility and omnipotence

The U.S. never thought it could lose to Ho Chi Minh, so there was never any consideration for Ho's strength or how North Vietnam would respond to American moves. On various occasions, Americans believed that by simply waltzing into Saigon, it could put the fear of God into Hanoi and force it to surrender. That never happened, and many of America's ...