The Expertocrats Dragging America into the Vietnam Horror Chamber: Halberstam’s 20-years-later overview

David Halberstam began his seminal study in the late ’60s of how and why America got into its war in Vietnam and of how and why it was gonna be so hard to get out. Almost three years before the US government finally just gave up and called it quits, his groundbreaking book The Best and the Brightest came out, detailing what he learned. From two decades of hindsight, he updates it in 1992 to highlight points that he feels should get greater emphasis. [

*4] Before starting research for the book, he’d previously reported from Vietnam multiple times over more than half a decade.

After telling about his path in journalism that’d finally gotten him to delve into—to dive into—this study, he describes something he discovered about his own occupation. It took him by surprise, even though he’d been in that line of work for a dozen years and had talked with and written about Washington decision-makers before and had spent time with other reporters who also had:

One of the things which surprised me was how thin most of the newspaper and magazine reporting of the period was, the degree to which journalists accepted the norms of the government and, particularly in the glamorous Kennedy era, the reputation of these new stars at face value.

doubt about the Administration and its members and their abilities did not exist in the early years under Kennedy, when they had first come to power. Rarely had a new Administration received such a sympathetic hearing at a personal level from the more serious and respected journalists of the city. Credit was given more readily for educational prowess and for academic achievement than for accomplishment in governance.

He also found that this awe—of the credentials and self-assuredness and overconfident swagger of these presumptuous “experts” from the highly prestigious scholarly establishment—was shared not only by the swooning press who would, because of it, abrogate their most basic core responsibility. It also infected those who were already part of the government. And this catastrophically included one person especially—the one who would be in charge after Kennedy was murdered. Looking back on what he had written 20 years earlier, Halberstam reflects on what he says

Among those dazzled by the Administration was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next

The presumed brilliance of this vaunted expertocracy was firmly ensconced in Johnson’s mind. Not only had they helped to lead Kennedy into the morass that previous administrations already had blazed the trail toward, but after his assassination, Johnson retained essentially the whole lot of them, who led him deeper into what more and more commonly came to be called the quagmire.

The other thing I learned about the Kennedy-Johnson team was that for all their considerable reputations as brilliant, rational managers they were in fact very poor managers. They thought they were very good, and they were always talking about keeping their options open, even as, day by day and week by week, events closed off those options. The truth was that history—and in Indochina we were on the wrong side of it—was a hard taskmaster and from the early to the middle sixties, when we were making those fateful decisions, we had almost no choices left.

Our options had been steadily closed down since 1946, when the French Indochina War began. That was when we had the most options, and the greatest element of choice. But we had granted, however reluctantly, the French the right to return and impose their will on the Vietnamese by force; and by 1950,

We adjusted our public statements, and much of our journalism, to make it seem as if this was a war of Communists against anti-Communists, instead of, as the people of Vietnam might have seen it, a war of a colonial power against an indigenous nationalist force.

By the time the Kennedy-Johnson team arrived and started talking about all their options, like it or not (and they did not even want to think about it) they had in fact almost no options at all. In fact, for a team of Democratic politicians they were sooner or later going to be faced with the most unpalatable of choices: getting out, and then being accused of losing a freedom-loving country to the Communists, or sending in combat troops to fight an unwinnable war. “Events,” wrote George Ball, paraphrasing Emerson “are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

In addition the Kennedy-Johnson team never defined the war, what our roles and missions were, how many troops we were going to send and, most important of all, what we were going to do if the North Vietnamese matched our escalation with their escalation, as they were likely to. It was an ill-defined commitment, one made in stealth and in considerable secrecy, because those making it were uneasy about their path and feared an open debate, feared exposing the policy to any serious scrutiny.

He continues to expand on what he’s found by going on to pinpoint, highlight, and elaborate on five more—five larger—factors that also had been interacting with those other five—and been interacting with each other as well—to exacerbate the slide into the trap:

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over.

Halberstam has come to the view that a weird mixture of unsavory and unhealthy attributes in the character of Americans had merged together—beyond only that McCarthy himself was a ruthlessly out-of-control and vicious loose cannon. These included—in that part of the heart of the country from where McCarthy arose—a long-standing desire to keep isolated from the concerns of far-off Europe or Asia, to remain aloof from caring about pogroms or ethnic cleansing or decimation of entire nations or peoples; with the Second World War, the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan had shown that no place on the globe was safe any longer. The advent of the nightmares that the nuclear age brought made this even starker. And Halberstam sees another political factor in the mix.

When Abraham Lincoln—running on the ticket of the barely half-a-dozen-year-old Republican Party—had won the 1860 election, it had not only set in motion the breaking apart of the Union and therefrom the Civil War. It had also begun a dominance of White House control that lasted for the next 72 years. Republicans served in 14 out of the 18 presidential terms in that period, and only once did they lose in back-to-back elections. They were not used to being the party on the outside looking in for more than just a short stretch.

They then saw the Democrat—Franklin Roosevelt—win four presidential elections in a row. When Harry Truman—the vice president who had taken over the presidency when Roosevelt died—ran in the next election, Republicans were confident that their candidate would beat him. As it turned out, there were pollsters who had begun to use newer, more advanced statistical tools, and their polling had shown that the Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey, would likely lose. But the Republicans—and most of the mainstream media, which tended to lean more favorably toward them anyway—continued to use less sophisticated forecasting techniques, and they predicted that his win over the Democratic incumbent was a certainty.

Truman ended up winning in an Electoral College landslide. (The Republicans in fact would only win the presidency again when they were able to convince the general who had commanded all Allied forces in the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II—and who thought of himself as a New Deal progressive—to run on their ticket instead of as a Democrat.) The Republicans were now looking at a minimum two decades being out of the White House. This so rattled many of them that in their despairing discombobulation they looked to use any tactics or strategies, no matter how despicable, in their grubbing and grabbing for power:

The American people were now consistently lied to about what the real dangers in the world were and about ways that might be devised and put into action to work toward overcoming them; these fabrications and prevarications and the paths taken because of them would end up costing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands—yea millions—more, would end up costing the lives of millions of people overseas and destroying the lives of tens of millions—yea hundreds of millions—more. These were politically medieval times, and in these dark ages, with such Machiavellian maneuvering and manipulations of reality and mendacious masking of the tidal forces of history, the mounting horrors ensued:

The people comprising the body politic of America might not in general, particularly if things were honestly explained to them, be that frightened of the Communists (making legitimate claims to nationalism) taking over a small country some 12,000 miles away,

One enormous figure loomed over it all: China. (Yíng Zhèng—also referred to as Zhào Zhèng—the king of Qín, completed his conquest of the other warring states in 221 BCE. He invented the title of huángdì—emperor—and established himself as the first emperor of the Qín dynasty. Numerous dynasties followed, and 2,132 years later, Pǔyí, an emperor of the Qīng dynasty, abdicated, thereby ending the history of imperial China.) Various foreign powers had been dominating China, carving it up, and ruling over parts of it for decades.

Starting in 1927, in attempting to establish a modern country, two different factions fought each other for power in a civil war—the Nationalists and the Communists. The Nationalists lost the civil war in 1949 and fled to the island of Taiwan, and the Communists founded the People’s Republic of China, which Americans commonly began to call Red China. The US had backed the Nationalists and continued to recognize them as the legitimate government of all of China—Halberstam equates their government with being essentially a form of medieval feudalism (their leaders ran a murderous terrorist dictatorship on Taiwan that allowed no political opposition, that declared martial law—the longest in human history up to that point—until 1987, that massacred well over a hundred thousand journalists and intellectual and political and social leaders, that arrested, tortured, imprisoned, or executed anyone if there was the slightest suspicion they might advocate democracy, that didn’t set up any system for compensating even a few of the families of their victims until 1998, and that didn’t officially apologize for its terrorism until 2008 [

*1] [

*2] [

*3] [

*6] [

*7]).

The Republicans found the loss of the civil war by the Nationalists to be an excuse to target Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson—as if the United States had in some way been fighting in the civil war and as if China had been some kind of US territory. And they continued to harangue on it through the rest of Truman’s term—using it as a major campaign issue in the presidential election three years later, which the Republicans finally won:

The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history.

Richard Nixon had become notorious in his first campaign for election to the House, and then to the Senate as well, for suggesting each opponent of his could be a communist—such as by claiming they voted like communists would or that communist groups might endorse them; Halberstam points out how Nixon, like a warlock, would conjure up this same demonic spirit that was possessing other Republican politicians and would attack any political leader who might consider recognizing China and how this is the reason that ultimately there was only one president who would be able to normalize relations with China without being assaulted by Nixon for it—and that of course was he himself:

In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

Further he points to how—once the half-baked policy that Kennedy’s expertocrats cobbled together of sending advisors to prop up South Vietnam had accomplished nothing they’d hoped for—President Johnson was afraid that the Republicans would use this as an excuse to tear down all the progress of his domestic programs:

The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China, and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon.

And of course the irresponsible, incompetent mainstream media never reported on this, never clued the American public in on this, which was right in front of them, never let them know that this was the reason their kids were being sent into this horror—of risking their lives and of bringing slaughter and destruction to an entire country and, yea, to the neighboring countries as well:

That was the terrible shadow of the McCarthy period. It hung heavily albeit secretly over the internal calculation of Democratic leaders of the period. But of course it was never discussed in the major newspapers and magazine articles that analyzed policy making in Vietnam. It was a secret subject, reflecting secret fears.

The Western powers that won the Second World War had throughout that war championed democracy and self-determination as their rallying principle in opposition to the barbarous domination of the Axis powers. The era that followed that war was one in which countries around the world who had long been under the imperialist and colonialist rule of those Western powers began more forcefully than ever to assert their right to be free and independent. With the United States having become the world’s greatest superpower, it was for the most part transitioning from being an imperial power to being a global hegemon—the year after the war ended, for instance, it granted independence to the Philippines, in line with a federal law enacted a dozen years earlier.

When Truman—and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson—left office, Eisenhower came on the scene and chose as his secretary of state John Foster Dulles; the ideology and approach to foreign affairs that Dulles undertook appears to Halberstam to have been completely out of step with the move away from imperialism—to have posed huge dangers for America and to have been basically insane, most especially in the approach to events in the Far East. While Kennedy’s supposedly sophisticated and scholarly expertocrats might have derided what they recognized as the bellicose blustering and the imperialist actions taken to overthrow the governments of democratic countries and install dictators who would be puppets of the US government, Halberstam does not see any courageous actions taken to change this deranged behavior:

There may’ve been more to this than simply belligerent Republican imperialist behavior being continued acquiescently by Democrats due to their cowardly fear of political ramifications. At those highly prestigious scholarly institutions that Kennedy’s expertocrats had attended, they might have been taught the scientific method but apparently never had learned the managific method. And that would’ve been disastrous enough; yet there was a far deeper ignorance that Halberstam finds was crucial:

The men who had made those early hard decisions of the Cold War had served a much longer, much more complete apprenticeship in their professions. The decisions on how to handle the Soviet Union were made as a result of carefully weighing the advice of accomplished men like Kennan, Bohlen, and Harriman, who had in different ways devoted much of their lives to the study of the Soviet Union.

Nor did the men who made the policy have any regional expertise as they made their estimates about what the other side would do if we escalated and sent American combat troops. All of the China experts, the Asia hands who were the counterparts of Bohlen and Kennan, had had their careers destroyed with the fall of China. The men who gave advice on Asia were either Europeanists or men transferred from the Pentagon.

So it is true that McCarthyism had left its carnage, but in those citadels of scholastic prominence and in those bastions of economic and societal privelege, Halberstam finds another cohort of culprits that imposed its tilt toward Eurocentric thinking: men of the Atlantic. And in them he looks at yet another attribute of the American character—a tendency perhaps darker and deeper and maybe more hidden off in a high corner—as a contributor to this tragic ignorance. Their scorn for places and peoples that they thought of as being too vulgar and ignoble led them to scoff at the worth of having knowledge of any such lowly things and to disdain anyone who might be interested in that knowledge:

Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.”

The entire decades-long Vietnam fiasco revealed to all the world something about the integrity and sanctity of how the government of the United States of America treats human beings outside its borders, how it treats any other country anywhere around the globe—about how America conducts its foreign affairs:

It was one of the great myths of that time that foreign policy was this pure and uncontaminated area which was never touched by domestic politics, and that domestic politics ended at the water’s edge. The truth, in sharp contrast, was that all those critical decisions were primarily driven by considerations of domestic politics, and by political fears of the consequences of looking weak in a forthcoming domestic election.

One day, Rome became the great imperial superpower of the Western World; one day, Spain did; one day, Britain did. Historians may look at how those powers made that transition and make comparisons with how the United States made its transition to being the greatest global superpower of its day:

Clearly, the new terms of apprenticeship in modern America as the nation ascended so quickly to superpower status were to be much briefer. On the issue which was to prove so critical to them, Vietnam, and which so greatly undermined any positive accomplishments of the Administration, and to the question of extending the logic of the Cold War in Europe to the underdeveloped world, and to a spot where nationalism was clearly at stake, they brought no comparable expertise at all. There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War.

In a country that was brought into being by the people declaring they could govern themselves, the people chose to put that governance into the hands of successive expertocracies, and the American people may, if they will, choose to learn from having taken that course of action:

When my book was finally done and accepted by my publisher, I realized I had not made this point strongly enough. So I added another chapter, the story of John Paton Davies, one of the most distinguished of the China hands who had had his career savaged during the McCarthy years. The section reflected my belief that in a better and healthier society he or someone like him might have been sitting in as Assistant Secretary of State during the Vietnam decisions. I think adding the chapter strengthened the book, but years later as I ponder the importance of the McCarthy era on both our domestic and foreign policy, I am convinced that this flaw in the society was even greater than I portrayed it, and that if I were to do the book over, I might expand the entire section.