Literary Quote of the Day: David Halberstam

April 24th, 2007 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist

Iâ€™m reviving this late great TMV feature for the day in honor of David Halberstam, whom I remembered in a post earlier today.

This quote, which Dick Polman had the good sense to dredge up, is from the closing pages of Halberstamâ€?s The Best and the Brightest (1972):

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past. . . . He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America (about an unwinnable war) and perhaps incurring a great deal of domestic political riskâ€¦

Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen; they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress, and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending, and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopefully inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina, and lack of belief. . . . What was singularly missing . . .was an iota of public admission that they had miscalculated. The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worth of them. So they lost it all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Quotes, History, Books. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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