Beyond assigning responsibility for U.S. policy in Vietnam, Halberstam’s book explores another theme proclaimed by its title, which is the larger role of the American mandarin, a career adviser to presidents and other high officials who serves as a political appointee rather than as a civil servant. Even those who have never read the book know the phrase the best and the brightest as a reference to a position in government that is unique in the world. Halberstam mistakenly believed, at least initially, that people took his title literally. And John McCain’s foreword to the Modern Library edition reads the title as a genuine tribute to gifted patriots, despite the taint of hubris. But as one critical defender of meritocracy, the British writer Adrian Wooldridge, puts it in his book The Aristocracy of Talent, “Thanks to Halberstam, the phrase ‘the best and the brightest’ now comes with an exasperated sneer.” That is quite a comedown from the 19th-century hymn about the Star of Bethlehem that may have inspired the title.
When McGeorge Bundy died in 1996—as the charismatically brilliant Harvard professor and popular dean who became national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he played a leading role in Halberstam’s drama—his fellow mandarin the Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called him “the last hurrah of the Northeastern Establishment.” But Schlesinger was only half right. The Establishment never really ended, nor did the role of the mandarin that was a distinctive part of it. Far from liquidating, the mandarinate has continued to flourish in the 21st century, though more in some administrations than in others. It has become more diverse, first by national origin and religion—Schlesinger no doubt had the European Jewish ancestry of Henry Kissinger and Walt Rostow in mind—and then by race and gender.
It has been easy to overlook the continuity of the American mandarins because they have gone by so many names during the past 100 years: the Inquiry, the Brain Trust, the Wise Men, the Kennedy White House Action Intellectuals, the Friends of Bill [Clinton], the Vulcans of the George W. Bush administration, and most recently (in the ironic phrase of Anne-Marie Slaughter, a think tank president and former director of policy planning under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, regarding Barack Obama’s and Joseph Biden’s confidants) the Band of Brothers. That last phrase is a reminder that whatever strides in the direction of diversity have been made in the mandarinate, white males educated in the Northeast continue to dominate.
