In 1997, David Halberstam published a 25th anniversary edition of his 1972 best-seller, “The Best and the Brightest,” he penned a new introduction for it and he did not hold back on whom he thought was the real best of brightest: himself.
The book had indeed done well in the year of Richard Nixon’s landslide, a quarter-century earlier before the new preface appeared. Halberstam takes pains to tells us so. The original hardcover had sold 60,000 copies in its first two weeks, 180,000 in hardcover total, and 1.5 million paperback copies.
That is indeed a “big book.” It is also literally a big book at 800+ pages. Its impact was even bigger. The self-regard of the author for himself and his work is so very explicit that it is suffused in every paragraph of the introduction. It’s worth the $25 just to listen to those 40 minutes, but the whole thing is transfixing, a time capsule of sorts. The book isn’t read much now. It ought to be, and not because of the ambitions of DOGE —which genuinely does look like “the best and brightest” of the tech world.
The old book ought to be read now because “The Best and the Brightest” tells us so much about the origin of the collapse of legacy media we see around us. It began with…hubris, and with an agenda not to tell the truth but to tell a story that served one side in a debate, in this case the Kennedy side, the side of the Democratic Party, the “enlightened” side.
Halberstam’s project, really, was an apologia for Jack Kennedy, a painstaking explanation of how the Establishment let him down, how the Bay of Pigs wasn’t his fault, why he got crushed by Khrushchev in a June, 1961 summit in Vienna, and how the whole Vietnam disaster was a combination of LBJ’s and Nixon’s fault.
JFK was going to get out of Vietnam, Halberstam tells us, and the second term would have been different etc. The book is a whitewash, perhaps the original and biggest whitewash, and a Rosetta Stone for understanding how the cracked and shattered shells of legacy media came to be as they are today, looking at their feet whenever the Hunter laptop or the former president’s infirmity was covered up. Legacy media was passed down the mission to protect the left and attack the right. It began here with “The Best and the Brightest.”
Halberstam’s vast success, and his claim to genuinely understand what happened, spread out among the Manhattan-Beltway media elites, and became a sort of Holy Grail for every journalist. Watergate is actually the second act in the coronation of Beltway media as kings of the realm. Halberstam’s book was the first.
I hadn’t read “The Best and the Brightest” —if I even ever finished it— in more than 40 years. I downloaded the audio version Friday, prompted by Commentary magazine editor John Podhortez’s off-handed comparison of the Halberstam title —in the magazine’s excellent daily podcast— to Elon Musk and the seven “Men in Black” sitting down with Bret Baier last week. (I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Tommy Lee Jones stride-in and take a chair.)
Podhoretz’s point was we have tried “really smart people” in government before and it didn’t work out. He mentioned “Best and Brightest” and it touched a distant memory. Were the smart guys who came in with President John F. Kennedy really that smart? Or were they just…connected? Products of the right bloodlines, the right schools, the right mentors?
Turns out that’s what Halberstam thought and wrote about that topic —at length— but a reread, especially of the 1992 edition, reveals much more. It is the origin story of legacy media’s rise and fall. In the 1992 edition’s introduction, Halberstam revealed the origins of his book in an article for Harper’s —one of the serious magazines for serious journalists back in the day. Midge Dector, whom Halberstam notes went on to be a neoconservative, had suggested an article on McGeorge Bundy. Halberstam ran with it. And ran, and ran, and ran.
“A light went on immediately,” he tells us. “It was a chance to look at perhaps the most luminescent of the Kennedy people, all of whom had seemed so dazzling when they had first taken office.” It would also be a chance for Halberstam to survey the whole administration and especially its Vietnam debacle.
“The article created something of a storm,” he tells us, as “the general power of print and a magazine like Harper’s was a good deal more powerful in relationship to television than it is today.”
“And this was regarded as an important article. It marked the first time that anyone in any major centrist magazine, let alone a presumably centrist one, had been so critical of a member of the Kennedy Administration. Far more important, it was the first time a writer in the liberal center had suggested that the Kennedy administration might be overrated and that its decision-making on Vietnam was significantly flawed,” he concludes.
Halberstam had been to Vietnam for three months in 1967 —he had been a correspondent there four years earlier— and this 90-day trip had left him “appalled and disillusioned.” He brands himself “depressed” repeatedly. He found in Vietnam “optimism” that was, he says, self-deception.
“‘What the American Army lost in Vietnam,’ my close friend and colleague Charlie Moore told me years later,” Halbestram tells the reader in one of a thousand asides, “in the best summation of that time, ‘was its intellectual integrity.’”
Up until that time, Halberstam concedes, there had been a “gentleman’s agreement among the ‘good journalists of Washington’ that the Kennedy administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and when it did bad things, it was only in self defense so that it might do other good things.”
Halberstam broke the agreement, and much of Georgetown establishment was angry, but Halberstram got a book deal. Thus, more than a decade before “All the President’s Men” came out, the founding myth of the journalist as Sir Galahad arose.
“Ours is a profession built on the immediacy of reward,” Halberstam confesses as he discourses on the difficulty of giving up a regular byline for the life of an author. Journalism isn’t a profession at all —it’s a craft, and anyone can do it— but the subtle climbing up the status ladder of journalism is at work here, one that he since launched a thousand ships.
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There are also collected in one place the received wisdoms that dominate still much of legacy media, often held tightly by people whose acquaintance with the actual post-war history of the United States is, at best, passing. The Cold War, McCarthyism, the 1960 campaign…Camelot: It’s all here. “The difference between intelligence and wisdom” is something Halberstam thinks he understands.
One sentence stands out: “The good reporters of that era, those who were well-educated and who were enlightened themselves and worked for enlightened organizations like the Kennedy’s and were for the same things the Kennedys were for.”
There are other “tells” throughout this book. “There is no small irony here,” he writes, about the “arrogance of the men of the Atlantic,” and Halberstam’s conclusion that Kennedy “would not have sent combat troops into Vietnam.”
“In 1964 [JFK] wanted to put [Vietnam] on the back burner, run against Goldwater, beat him handily —which he expected to do, then negotiate his way out.”
See, the reporter as mystic, telling us what would have been if the “good journalists” from “enlightened publications” had just helped JFK steer the boat a bit better, had the president not been murdered and succeeded by the oafish LBJ and the sinister Nixon.
“The truth was that history —and in Indochino we were on the wrong side of it— is a hard taskmaster.”
Halberstam actually writes that in the 1992 preface. We adjusted “much of our journalism to make it seem as if it were a war of communists against anti-communists, instead, as the people of Vietnam may have seen it, as a war of colonial power against an indigenous, nationalist force.”
Halberstam credits Theodore White’s Making of the President 1960 as inventing the form he followed, and White certainly did set up a genre. But Halberstam did much more than that. He created an archetype: The journalist as semi-god and truth-teller. It was a myth, a myth that was intended to be believed. One that is a joke now.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
