Air Power Politics

David Halberstam is a legend in American journalism. I was a journalism student when Halberstam was the New York Times correspondent in Vietnam in the early 1960s, and I remember how much we admired his work. His dispatches offered empirical evidence that our ally in Saigon was an Oriental despot who terrorized his own people and that the US-supported military program was a fake and a failure. This, of course, was not the way US Embassy officials in Saigon saw it, and they questioned his patriotism. The reporter stood his ground, brashly charging that the embassy had become "the adjunct of a dictatorship."

Halberstam subsequently became what most journalists secretly aspire to--a successful author of big and smart books on sweeping topics. His The Best and the Brightest, which deals with the decision-making in military and foreign policy surrounding America's involvement in Vietnam, remains a classic. What makes it still so compelling a read is his critical eye, passion for truth and sheer zest for mapping out the Washington bureaucratic infighting that steered the country into Vietnam. It was not hyperbole to present the narrative in epic terms, for although Vietnam is a small and underdeveloped, distant land, the war there was a part of a historic struggle between the world's two superpowers and two competing ideologies.

In War in a Time of Peace Halberstam returns for the first time to the area of national security reporting to look at America in the 1990s "through our decisions in foreign policy." He brings to the task his prodigious writing skills and the understanding that decision-making in military and foreign policy affairs is driven by personality as much as by events. The canvas is vast. But the baby boomers who now run the US government are a different breed from the men who surrounded JFK and LBJ. President Clinton, an enormously talented man of great promise that was never fulfilled, himself seems to embody the new generation. Quite apart from various domestic scandals, he had little interest in foreign affairs. (A few days before taking office, he told Lee Hamilton, then chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that nobody in America cared about foreign policy except for a handful of journalists.) After informing the nation that he had ordered an attack on Yugoslavia, Clinton vanished from public view, apparently shying away from public responsibility for it.

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