David Halberstam’s 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest, chronicles the origins of the Vietnam War in the Kennedy administration and the conduct and escalation of the war during the Johnson administration.  More specifically, it examines how Camelot’s “best and the brightest” got U.S. policy in Southeast Asia so wrong.  After all, how could so many smart and capable individuals make such poor foreign policy decisions? 

Haunted by the specter of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the perception that the Democrat’s were responsible for “losing China” to the communists in 1949, the Kennedy administration drew a line against communism in…