The Best and the Brightest

The Best and the Brightest

<b>David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.</b><br><br><b>"A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience.”—<i>The New York Times</i></b><br><br> Using portraits of America’ s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, <i>The Best and the Brightest</i> reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic.<br><br><b>Praise for <i>The Best and the Brightest</i></b><br><br>“The most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. . . . It is also the <i>Iliad</i> of the American empire and the <i>Odyssey</i> of this nation’s search for its idealistic soul. <i>The Best and the Brightest </i>is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.”<b>—</b><i><b>The Boston Globe<br></b></i><br>“Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative. . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance.”<b>—<i>Los Angeles Times</i></b><br><br>“A fascinating tale of folly and self-deception . . . [An] absorbing, detailed, and devastatingly caustic tale of Washington in the days of the Caesars.”<b>—<i>The Washington Post Book World</i></b><br><br>“Seductively readable . . . It is a staggeringly ambitious undertaking that is fully matched by Halberstam’s performance. . . . This is in all ways an admirable and necessary book.”<b>—<i>Newsweek</i><br></b><br>“A story every American should read.”<b>—<i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</i></b>