The History Boys
| AP |
Before his untimely death in a car accident on April 23, journalist and author David Halberstam prepared a piece for Vanity Fair on the twilight of the Bush administration. Appearing in the upcoming August issue, Halberstam’s piece notes that although the administration has been referencing the lessons of history more than ever, you don’t hear it “citing the lessons of Vietnam much.” (Halberstam wrote the definitive work on Vietnam, “The Best and Brightest.”)
“[I]t is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn’t see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet’s nest in the world,” he says.
Halberstam also turns his rapier pen on the chief executive. Among his characterizations of President Bush: “sad, terribly diminished”; “a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions”; “it’s not just [his] speech that got dumbed down — so also were the ideas at play.”
