The Best and the Brightest Read Online Free PDF

not excited by that. My backup title was Guardians at the Gate, which came from a speech of Johnson’s saying that we had not chosen to be the guardians at the gate but that, if need be, we would honor that role. But I still liked The Best and the Brightest, and in the end I went with it.
    Most people who liked the book liked the title, except the writer Mary McCarthy, who seemed not to like me, the book, or the title. I could not even get the title right, she claimed in a violent attack on me and the book in The New York Review of Books. In the Protestant hymn, she pointed out, the phrase is “brightest and best.” I was never very strong on hymns and knew nothing of the one she cited. I was much cheered by a letter from Graham Greene, who thanked me for sending him a copy and said that he was quite puzzled by the vicious attack Mary McCarthy had written in The New York Review: “I couldn’t understand the ferocious attack by Mary McCarthy, who is not one of my favourite writers,” he wrote to me. “I suppose she resented your not having quoted anything from her account of a weekend in Hanoi,” he said. As for the title, she was wrong about that; hymn or no, it went into the language, although it is often misused, failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.
    It did not occur to me that the book would be a major commercial success. For years others had assured me that I was wasting my time, that no one was interested in a book about the origins of the Vietnam War, and that it would have little commercial appeal. My editor Jim Silberman and I agreed that if it cleared 50,000 in hard cover, it would be a significant success. The print order for the book was originally 25,000, by far the largest for anything I had ever written. A few weeks before publication we began to have a sense that the book was going to move. Excerpts in both Harper’s and Esquire had helped greatly. The publishing order was increased to 50,000. By the date of publication it was 75,000. In the first two weeks it sold some 60,000 copies, almost unheard-of for a book that serious. Eventually it sold around 180,000 copies in hard cover, which was considered astonishing, and an estimated 1.5 million in paperback. The reviews were almost uniformly good; it was that rarest of successes, a book which was both a critical success and a commercial success. More, it got out there. It did not just sit on coffee tables. People read it and took it seriously; to this day I still hear from people who like to tell me how old they were and where they were when they read it and the name of the person who encouraged them to read it, and how it reshaped their thinking on Vietnam.
    The great pleasure for me was an inner pleasure: it was very simply the best I could do. In my own mind, I had reached above myself. There were no skills I possessed which were wasted, and there were skills which I found in doing it which I had never known of before, of patience and endurance. If a reporter’s life is, at its best, an ongoing education, then this had been in the personal sense a stunning experience, and it had changed the way I looked not just at Vietnam, but at every other subject I took on from then on. I had loved working away from the pack, enjoyed the solitude of this more different, lonelier kind of journalism which I was now doing. I had gotten not just a book which I greatly valued from the experience, but a chance to grow.

 

     
    Chapter One
     
    A cold day in December. Long afterward, after the assassination and all the pain, the older man would remember with great clarity the young man’s grace, his good manners, his capacity to put a visitor at ease. He was concerned about the weather, that the old man not be exposed to the cold or to the probing questions of freezing newspapermen, that he not have to wait for a cab. Instead he had guided his guest to his own car and driver. The older man would remember the young man’s good manners almost