America Adrift: Writing the History of the Post Cold Wars

For three decades now, David Halberstam has been, in the phrase of George Kennan, our most readable "historian of the present." Halberstam specializes in driving a big truck of a book through the gap that separates journalism from academia. He manages to transcend both on-the-scene reportage that often fails to grasp the larger picture and more professorial accounts that supply the Big Think but often bog down in soporific jargon and abstraction. At his best, Halberstam hits a narrative sweet spot between the mere chronicling of a Bob Woodward and the tendentiousness of, say, William Greider. His finest books succeed in capturing an epochal moment -- such as the Vietnam War, the rise of big media, or the economic confrontation between Japan and the United States -- almost as it happens. Leading characters, interviewed close to power, are fully fleshed out. Whether you are a journalist, a historian, or a political scientist, these are achievements equivalent to trapping lightning in a bottle.

Although he has served up mostly lighter fare in recent years (with books on baseball and Michael Jordan), Halberstam made his reputation grappling with important events still in progress, when the surrounding emotions were still raw and the official history unfinished. Even now, Halberstam writes as if he were dictating a hot story from the field. His prose is not pretty and is often annoyingly verbose, and his slicing and dicing of history is sometimes simplistic. But in his best work, he manages to combine the personal with the political in a way that makes for both great history and great reading.

In The Best and the Brightest, for example -- Halberstam's brilliant skewering of the hubris that got the United States entangled in Vietnam -- he used the story of McGeorge Bundy, a patrician Harvard dean turned national security adviser with a scintillating but shallow intellect, to demolish the wrong-headed U.S. Asia policy that dated back to the Truman Doctrine. Halberstam performed similar feats, combining personal narratives with national history, in two other superb books: The Powers That Be and The Reckoning.

One of the risks of being a historian of the present, of course, is that events can overtake you. That is what happened to Halberstam in the most dramatic way on September 11, after his book had already gone to press. The deadliest attack ever on U.S. soil abruptly transformed the foreign-policy landscape he describes in War in a Time of Peace. But the subject of his book is still relevant. Billed as "the long-awaited successor" to The Best and the Brightest, the book purports to sum up the impact of the Vietnam War on current U.S. interventionism and describe how domestic politics has come to dictate foreign policy. Halberstam tells this tale by detailing the often brittle relations between the civilians in the White House and State Department and the Pentagon brass. The concept of the book is clever: Halberstam starts off with President George H.W. Bush's stunning electoral defeat after the Gulf War. The battle against Saddam Hussein was the United States' last major foreign policy triumph in the twentieth century, but one that seemed to gain Bush few votes. In fact, Bill Clinton's equally stunning victory shortly thereafter owed in no small part to his success in exploiting Bush's reputation as a foreign policy patrician out of touch with the American people, who were mainly interested in "the economy, stupid." Alternating chapters between the home front and subsequent crises abroad --

in Haiti, Somalia, and especially the Balkans -- Halberstam demonstrates how during the 1990s, key foreign policy decisions were held hostage to the whims of an American public that no longer cared very much about events abroad.

VIETNAM REDUX

War in a Time of Peace describes how both Bush and Clinton tried to navigate this new reality. Along the way readers are enlightened by the kind of apercus we have come to expect from Halberstam: Somalia, he notes, "was a tragic example of the fickle quality of foreign policy arrived at because of images, in this case images of starving people, which can be quickly reversed by a counterimage, that of a dead body being dragged through a foreign capital."

As Halberstam shows, Vietnam left a deep, still-unhealed wound in the American national psyche. No boast made in the last decade was more empty than Bush's claim in 1991 that "we've kicked that Vietnam syndrome for good." In fact, despite Bush's optimism, both his successor, Bill Clinton, and his top general, Colin Powell -- two leading characters in the book -- had been shaped by their respective Vietnam experiences. Powell's two tours of duty had made him reluctant to send the U.S. military abroad on interventionist adventures, and Clinton's history as a draft dodger made him gun-shy about pushing Powell and the Pentagon brass to do just that. The 1993 debacle in Somalia, where 18 U.S. soldiers were killed, only made things worse, leading to what Richard Holbrooke, another of Halberstam's leading characters, called the "Vietmalia" syndrome: support for any U.S. foreign policy where the national interest is not clear is so shaky that a few American casualties can torpedo it.