The Best and the Brightest (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

HALBERSTAM, David. The Best and the Brightest. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2005.

Large octavo. Full grey leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design, lettering and fore-edges. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 688 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Random House, 1972.

David Halberstam (1934–2007) was one of the most significant American journalists of the twentieth century. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1964 for his dispatches from Vietnam for the New York Times — dispatches that directly challenged the official optimism of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and made him a figure of controversy inside the White House. The experience of watching the war from the ground, and of watching the official version of the war diverge from what he could plainly observe, became the foundation of The Best and the Brightest, which he spent years researching after leaving daily journalism. He was killed in a car accident in Menlo Park, California, in April 2007, two years after signing this Easton Press edition.

The Best and the Brightest, published in 1972, set out to answer a question that had been troubling American public life since the escalation of the war: how did the most powerful and most intellectually formidable group of men ever assembled in the executive branch — Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow — lead the United States into the most catastrophic military and political failure in its history? Halberstam's answer was that their intelligence, their confidence, their institutional authority, and their shared assumptions about American power and American exceptionalism constituted not a protection against error but the conditions for catastrophic error. They believed what they needed to believe. They suppressed or dismissed information that conflicted with their models. They were, in the phrase that entered the language with the book's publication and has remained there, the best and the brightest.

The book is constructed as a series of interlocking portraits — of the men themselves, of the culture and institutions that produced them, and of the specific decisions and non-decisions through which the war was escalated — that together constitute a sustained structural analysis of how power operates and how institutions fail. It is one of the essential works of American political nonfiction, and its central argument about the relationship between intellectual confidence and institutional blindness has proved durable well beyond its immediate subject.

Near fine. Some very minor loss to cover gilt; very faint spotting along gilt edges. Otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000549