Book of a Lifetime: The Best and the Brightest By David Halberstam

From The Independent archive: Liaquat Ahamed on a 700-page study of how the US came to be mired in the disastrous war in Vietnam

US soldiers are evacuated from a Vietcong position in December 1965 (AFP/Getty)

After college in England, I arrived in the US in the autumn of 1974 to go to graduate school. The war in Vietnam was no longer a bitter political issue on campuses. A few months after I arrived in the US, Saigon fell to the communists. I was not especially politically engaged.

Nevertheless, with the media full of graphic images of desperate Vietnamese scrambling to climb over the wall surrounding the US embassy and of marines dumping helicopters into the sea lest they fall into communist hands, one could not help talking about Vietnam.

To understand these events, a friend recommended I read David Halberstam’s book, The Best and the Brightest, published a couple of years before to great acclaim. The book was a 700-page study of how the US came to be mired in the disastrous war in Vietnam. It sounds unspeakably dull and ponderous; it was not.