I just watched a film about the Cuban Missile Crisis

[sharedvalues]

18. Agree on patriots. But "best and brightest" is a pejorative

Halberstam "The Best and Brightest"
Goldstein "Lessons in Disaster"
McMaster "Dereliction of Duty" (yes that McMaster)


All those books discuss how the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses got us into Vietnam and kept us there to our great detriment. The general idea is that Bundy and McNamara were too confident in their own intelligence and believed "graded escalation' would get the North to give up, and the US generals were marginalized and ineffective contrary voices.


They did handle the Cuban Missile Crisis well, though.

I believe it is McMaster who wrote that the Cuban Missile Crisis is in some way what brought us Vietnam - in Cuba, the blockade appeared to work and made Bundy and McNamara believe such soft power would work in Vietnam too. (Yet the argument is that a real concession - removing the US missiles in Europe - is what ended the Cuban crisis.)