David Halberstam's breathless, deathless prose.

Sarah,

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I'm glad you mentioned Gabriel García Márquez, because for me there was a faint whiff of magical realism about this book. No one exactly speaks in tongues or gets turned into a South American rodent. But Halberstam is yet again chasing ghosts and apparitions from the past, most of whom trace their origins to another magical place in the tropics--Vietnam. In his ceaseless questing backward, he seems like a writer searching for something he will never find.

You asked if I've read him before, and I have. Years ago, when I first encountered it, I thought The Best and the Brightest was powerful--his 1972 inside history of the foreign policy geniuses who conceived and executed our disastrous policy in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Since this book is being coyly marketed as the long-awaited sequel (or, weirdly, its "younger sibling"), I was looking forward to reading it for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons was personal--I worked in the National Security Council from 1997 to 2000, and I wanted to know how a great journalist would interpret the issues that seemed so important at the time, but have already faded into the gloaming that is somewhere between tomorrow's history and yesterday's current events.

In quite a few ways, I was not disappointed. Many of his insights are important, and--what is rare for a foreign policy book--interesting. There are telling anecdotes, and you mentioned some of the best. Halberstam has been sharing late-evening off-the-record cocktails with foreign policy movers and shakers for over three decades, and it shows. He knows a lot, and we hear more than a few stories behind the story. One very valuable service that this book provides is that it gives a vivid sense of some important policymakers not generally known to public--people ranging from Lawrence Eagleburger in the Bush 1 administration to John Shalikashvili and Bill Perry in the Clinton administration (he's stronger on Clinton's first term than his second). Some people he really captures--Richard Holbrooke and Tony Lake spring to mind, and in each case, there's a good story to tell, one that winds sinuously back to Vietnam, where Halberstam first met them as a young New York Times correspondent.

But I was left with a feeling that he had not written a book with the energy and focus of The Best and the Brightest--and that his desire to live up to it, and in a sense, repeat it, is precisely what's wrong with the new effort. My problem, in a nutshell, is that Halberstam is trying to force three stories into one book. Near as I can figure it, he is trying to write 1) how Vietnam has cast a shadow over all subsequent U.S. foreign policy; 2) how the United States got involved in the Balkans in the 1990s; and 3) everything else that happened since then. All would be good on their own, but they're confusing jumbled together, and they water each other down. Some foreign policy gurus are haunted by Vietnam, but--newsflash!--many are not. Book 2--the Balkans story--would be important and deserves to be written by Halberstam, but this one wanders too peripatetically from geopolitical hotspot to hotspot to qualify. In the end, it's a pointillist mishmash--entertaining, observant--but muddled.

We don't have to look too far for an explanation. In the '60s Halberstam was a hungry young correspondent. Now he's a literary celebrity, summering on Nantucket, lending his name to charitable causes. Could there be a fate more horrible? Most of his recent books have been about sports heroes, particularly from the golden summers of yesteryear--a sure sign that a writer is losing his grip on contemporary reality. Do English intellectuals begin to fantasize about cricket matches of their youth as they fade into the sunset? Like George Foreman, Halberstam has come out of retirement to throw some more punches at the real world--and many of them connect. But not as many as I hoped.

I don't want to sound too harsh. I would genuinely recommend this book to someone who wants to know how we got entangled in the Balkans, or how foreign policy and strong personalities collide inside the Beltway. It's perceptive about many of the flaws in a system that is too diffuse, and on the sparks that fly between two cultures (White House and Pentagon) that are inherently in conflict. It's a decent primer on the major issues discussed in the Situation Room over the last decade (though there's precious little on Northern Ireland, the Middle East, China, nukes, or, what we really need--a clear explanation of what missile defense can and cannot offer). But in the long run, War in a Time of Peace does not do what it so often criticizes others for failing to do--provide a coherent strategy and execute it.

Best,
Ted

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This week, Slate's Book Clubbers tackle War in a Time of Peace, David Halberstam's examination of America's post-Vietnam military actions. Click here for an explanation of our format and here to buy the book.

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