Free The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

woolly-headed, and had made a convenient target for hard-liners in the press and in Congress. Part of this was Bowles’s own fault; he was marvelous at long-range thinking, at seeing the dangers inherent in policies, but he was a weak infighter. He lacked an ability to dissemble, he had no instinct for the jugular, he did not maneuver well at close hand. Thus, while Averell Harriman might stand for the same policy as Bowles, Harriman was not a good target; he was a vicious, almost joyous, brutal infighter, and anyone who tangled with him would do so in the full knowledge that Harriman would remember and strike back, and for a hard-line columnist like Joe Alsop, who had more than a little of a bully in him, Bowles made a much better target. His career in government thus was limited by the knowledge of potential adversaries that they could strike at him and he would not strike back.
    Actually there was precious little chance for Bowles, anyway, for it was one thing to use a liberal name to woo back the eggheads, but it was quite another to reassure the financial establishment, and the Democratic party was bitterly divided on questions of foreign policy, with two main chords running through it. One followed a harder line on foreign affairs, with a certain amount of cool acceptance of the New Deal issues. It was exemplified in foreign policy by the traditionalists like Dean Acheson, who had broken with Roosevelt in the New Deal over financial questions, whose entourage included the Alsop brothers as columnists and, to a degree, William Fulbright in the Senate. These men were committed to a view of manifest U.S. destiny in the world, where America replaced the British throughout the world as the guarantor of the existing order. It was a group linked to the Eastern establishment, that nebulous yet very real conglomerate of businessmen, lawyers and financiers who had largely been determining American foreign policy in this century. They believed that the great threat to the world was Communist, an enemy at once totalitarian, antidemocratic and antibusiness, that the Communists must be stopped and that the Communists understood only one thing, force. This group was above all realistic. It understood power; it was, in a favorite word of the era, hard-nosed. Some of its principal members had, for all their anti-Communism, been badly burned during the McCarthy years and they would never want to look soft again. The Cold War had not surprised them and they had rallied gladly to its banner. This wing had called for greater defense spending, and in the fifties and in general, the Democratic party espoused that cause, with only Hubert Humphrey of its congressional leaders speaking for disarmament. In fact, the Democratic party had been more committed to military spending than the Republicans. It was the Democrats who wanted a larger and larger defense establishment, and although Kennedy was not one of the great leaders at the time, he had been a part of it. (In 1960, at the start of the campaign, slightly worried about Kennedy’s lack of credentials in this area, a young Kennedy staff member named Deirdre Henderson had called one of the Defense intellectuals to summon his help on the problem. Kennedy, she said, needed a weapon. Everyone else had a weapon: Scoop Jackson had the Polaris, and Lyndon had Space, and Symington had the B-52. What could they get for a weapon for Kennedy? Well, said the young Defense intellectual, whose name was Daniel Ellsberg, “What about the infantryman?”)
    Former Secretary of State Acheson, the leader of this group, was uneasy with the Dulles years, not because of Dulles’ bombast, but because Acheson sensed weakness in Dulles. Acheson was afraid there was too little will to sacrifice, to spend for military might. In the late fifties, when the Democratic party’s Advisory Council met periodically to criticize the Eisenhower policies, some of the liberals like Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger and