Opinion David Halberstam’s ‘The Best and the Brightest’ at 50 still casts a long shadow

By George F. Will
Columnist
August 31, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT



A White House Cabinet meeting in February 1965. (Charles Gorry/AP)

It was the 1960s and Joseph Kraft, an eminent Washington columnist, was smitten. McGeorge Bundy, one of the many intellectual ornaments in President John F. Kennedy’s administration, was, Kraft wrote, “a figure of true consequence, a fit subject for Milton’s words: ‘A Pillar of State; deep on his / Front engraven / Deliberation sat, and publick care; / And princely counsel in his face.’”

House Speaker Sam Rayburn was less enthralled. When his fellow Texan, President Lyndon B. Johnson, sang the praises of the academic luminaries he had inherited from his assassinated predecessor, Rayburn said, “They may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

Both vignettes are in a book published 50 years ago Thursday and still in print. The title of David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest,” and a corresponding mentality, are firmly embedded in the nation’s politics. Today, Halberstam’s title is usually wielded in the service of snark; the mentality is a populist disdain for elites, even — perhaps especially — worthy ones.

Halberstam’s subject was “why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects” of the Vietnam tragedy. His answer was partly that academia is an unsatisfactory incubator of statesmen. And partly that elites were shown uncritical deference by journalists who did not sufficiently question the serene self-satisfaction of those who came from the banks of the Charles River to the banks of the Potomac.

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Opinion by George Will
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, "American Happiness and Discontents," was released in September 2021. Twitter https://twitter.com/georgewill