BY MATTHEW HERBERT

Critics are supposed to criticize, yes?

If you’ve read more than one of my book reviews, you’ve likely noticed a tone of glad, unbroken praise. Once or twice I’ve used these pages to cast the stern, disapproving eyebrow, but it’s mostly sweetness and light I try to spread. I love books, and, life being short, I mostly read books I think will reward me.

This summer I finally got around to reading David Halberstam’s 1969 masterpiece, The Best and the Brightest. It tells how the most privileged, idealistic constellation of political leaders in the history of the United States committed the long series of moral crimes and strategic blunders that made up our “experience” in Vietnam. Americans’ belief that our government would do the right thing and tell us the truth has never recovered. I think it would be hard to call yourself a student of our national history without reading this book. Do so without delay.

But, as I sat outside enjoying the long German summer along with Halberstam’s classic, I couldn’t help feeling that things, as nice as they were, were perhaps going on too long. Halberstam especially.

So, I’m just going to say it: The Best and the Brightest would be a far better book if it were half as long. As is, it clocks in at 665 dense pages. And don’t get me wrong; it is never boring. Halberstam is a masterful writer with an eye for the revealing detail. But there are just so many of them.

As Halberstam puts each of the major Vietnam players and several of the not-so-major Vietnam players under the microscope, one wonders if we need the same cellular level of detail on the whole cast of characters. While it is illuminating to see how the nerdish National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy followed a path from Groton to Yale to Harvard, evincing “so much intelligence harnessed to so much breeding,” as Halberstam puts it, we get several more pages illustrating just how and why Bundy’s Harvard years were so happy. He reads the Greeks; comes to be tutored by a little known professor named Henry Kissinger–an important observation but one that should be made and moved on from. We all know who Kissinger will become.

In about half the space he actually takes, Halberstam could have reached his useful, important conclusion, that Bundy, like so many of the men who took us to war in Vietnam, was an example of “a special elite, a certain breed of men whose continuity is among themselves. They are linked to one another rather than to the country.” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s background at Ford Motor Company (and, yes, Harvard) is revelatory.

My point in criticizing Halberstam is that his thesis is too important to leave sloshing around in a sea of tidbits and longeurs. The path to Vietnam had two defining characteristics. One: it was forged by a small clique of power elites disconnected from the national will and was therefore undemocratic. Two: it was based on a delusion born of our experience in World War Two that said technical know-how wedded to managerial ability would infallibly deliver war-winning power and insight. The tragic narrative that Halberstam tells with such admirable skill pierces this delusion. America’s best and the brightest just knew we were winning in Vietnam. That’s what all the spreadsheets and data points and PSYOPS studies were telling them But the managerial class missed the fact that “when they had brought . . . the slide rules and the computers which said that two plus two equals four, that the most basic rule of politics is that human beings never react the way you expect them to.” The Vietnamese got a vote in the outcome of the war too, and our best and brightest ignored it and distorted it and misunderstood it for decades. Until we lost.

So again I say, read Halberstam without delay. Even if you have little interest or education in foreign affairs, it is instructive to see just how damnably wrong we can be about our deepest convictions.