The Best and the Brightest answers these questions more directly and more completely than any other book written on America in the last decade. From the self-doubting of the post-McCarthy era to the phenomenal hubris of the mid-sixties, America is captured within these pages with a lucidity and intelligence that is fascinating. The Best and the Brightest is an enormously important book.
Did the Vietnam War have to happen? And why couldn't it have ended earlier? These are among the questions that Robert McNamara and his collaborators ask in Argument Without End, a book that will stand as a major contribution to what we know about the Vietnam War. Drawing on a series of meetings that brought together, for the first time ever, senior American and Vietnamese officials who had serv…