American Mandarins
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2022, a classic of American journalism and politics will be 50 years old: The Best and the Brightest, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author David Halberstam. Still in print, it explored in unprecedented detail and memorable style “why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects” of what the author considered “the worst tragedy since the Civil War.” That tragedy was, of course, Vietnam. The current edition includes a foreword by the late Senator John McCain, whose harrowing experiences as a prisoner of war gave him perspective on the decisions that brought so much Vietnamese and American suffering.
For many commentators, the anniversary will be the occasion for renewed debate about what went wrong in Vietnam—in the light of not only the Iraq War and its aftermath but also the traumatic exit of Americans and some of their local allies after the unexpectedly swift fall of Kabul last year. Very few observers still believe that further escalation and commitment of resources could have preserved an independent South Vietnam. And although some others suggest that friendly persuasion (as championed by Edward Lansdale, celebrated in the military writer Max Boot’s biography The Road Not Taken) might have turned the tide, there has been no broadly based revisionism since Halberstam’s exposure of the elite political advisers to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson whose hubris is captured in his book’s title. The roles of individuals are still debated, but as the title of a book by former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara put it, this and much else about the Vietnam war constitutes an “argument without end.”
Beyond assigning responsibility for U.S. policy in Vietnam, Halberstam’s book explores another theme proclaimed by its title, which is the larger role of the American mandarin, a career adviser to presidents and other high officials who serves as a political appointee rather than as a civil servant. Even those who have never read the book know the phrase the best and the brightest as a reference to a position in government that is unique in the world. Halberstam mistakenly believed, at least initially, that people took his title literally. And John McCain’s foreword to the Modern Library edition reads the title as a genuine tribute to gifted patriots, despite the taint of hubris. But as one critical defender of meritocracy, the British writer Adrian Wooldridge, puts it in his book The Aristocracy of Talent, “Thanks to Halberstam, the phrase ‘the best and the brightest’ now comes with an exasperated sneer.” That is quite a comedown from the 19th-century hymn about the Star of Bethlehem that may have inspired the title.
When McGeorge Bundy died in 1996—as the charismatically brilliant Harvard professor and popular dean who became national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he played a leading role in Halberstam’s drama—his fellow mandarin the Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called him “the last hurrah of the Northeastern Establishment.” But Schlesinger was only half right. The Establishment never really ended, nor did the role of the mandarin that was a distinctive part of it. Far from liquidating, the mandarinate has continued to flourish in the 21st century, though more in some administrations than in others. It has become more diverse, first by national origin and religion—Schlesinger no doubt had the European Jewish ancestry of Henry Kissinger and Walt Rostow in mind—and then by race and gender.
It has been easy to overlook the continuity of the American mandarins because they have gone by so many names during the past 100 years: the Inquiry, the Brain Trust, the Wise Men, the Kennedy White House Action Intellectuals, the Friends of Bill [Clinton], the
