The Best and the Brightest.

HALBERSTAM, David.

Item Number: 3498

New York: Random House, 1972.

First edition of the author’s magnum opus. Octavo, original blue cloth. Inscribed by the author, “For Barbara Firgir with best wishes David Halberstam.” Bookplate to the inner panel, near fine in a near fine dust jacket.

"The Best and the Brightest, Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam’s most important and impressive book, sets out to discover why America got involved in the worst and messiest war in our history. ‘What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place?’ They were, after all, ‘the best and the brightest,’ so why did it happen? It happened, Halberstam concludes, because, ‘they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look and learn from the past." In 1992, looking back over 20 years to this first publication of The Best and the Brightest, "Halberstam noted that the book’s title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. ‘It is often misused,’ he wrote, ‘failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended" (New York Times).