Insight and Foresight

David Halberstam vividly recalls how his 17th book transformed itself from a “a little project, almost a longish magazine piece,” into a definitive and disturbing account of U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s.

“I was having dinner with my friend Bob Woodward,” Halberstam recalled during a recent stop in Los Angeles. “I described to him what I was working on, and he said to me, ‘But David, it’s the second part of “The Best and the Brightest.””’ Halberstam’s magisterial exploration of how America’s foreign policy elite came to involve their country so disastrously in Southeast Asia.

Even so, as he labored, the author and his editors were anxious that a serious look back at recent American foreign and military policy would feel besides the point. “We all worried that it would be perceived as a book about the Balkans and not about America.”

In fact, the U.S. and those who led it through the last decade are emphatically at the center of Halberstam’s new book, “War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals,” which already has become his 13th national bestseller. It is history made relevant by fresh tragedy. “War in a Time of Peace” vividly describes how the United States wandered through the years preceding the current crisis, as well as the shortcomings and strengths it will bring to the conflict still ahead. In a single chillingly prescient passage that appears on the 494th and final page and was written long before Sept. 11, Halberstam anticipates the trauma of the last month:

It cites a “belief among many senior intelligence analysts that the greatest threat to an open society like America came from terrorists, rather than the military power of rogue states, which offered exceptional targets themselves. The real danger to an open society like America was the ability of a terrorist, not connected to any sitting government, to walk into an American city with a crude atomic weapon, delivered, as it were, by hand in a cardboard suitcase.”

As several engineers subsequently have pointed out, the two fully fueled jumbo jets piloted by terrorists into the World Trade Center struck with the explosive force of tactical nuclear weapons.

Still, said Halberstam, “I don’t feel in the least bit prophetic. The analysts were simply expressing what anyone familiar with the issues simply would regard as common sense. My recitation of their views was no more than competent reporting. Everyone now knows what those of us with certain experiences have known for a long time: There are no immunities in an open society, and that will remain true, even if we go to a much higher degree of physical security. You can’t make our sort of society airtight.

“I keep thinking of those firemen at the World Trade Center,” mused Halberstam, a longtime Manhattan resident. “In Vietnam, I saw extraordinary acts of heroism by men carrying their stricken buddies from harm’s way. But those firemen went willingly--eagerly, in fact,--into that inferno for the sake of perfect strangers. That’s something we haven’t seen--at least, not on that scale--for a very long time here,” said Halberstam, who at 67 is an imposingly athletic figure, carefully and elegantly dressed, intense and engagingly informal all at once.

“Citizenship--now, there’s a word whose implications I think we’re all going to want to weigh very carefully in the months ahead,” he continued.

Citizenship and its role in American identity, in fact, are central to Halberstam’s career, which began in 1955 as a reporter covering the early days of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi--first for a tiny local daily and then for the Nashville Tennessean. Five years later, he joined the New York Times, which sent him to the Congo and Vietnam. The skeptical dispatches he filed on the U.S. intervention there earned him the enmity of many U.S. policymakers and, in 1964 when he was 30, the Pulitzer Prize. Those years also launched him on the research that produced “The Best and the Brightest.”

The books and hundreds of magazine articles Halberstam has written since can properly be appreciated as a single literary project in which reported history is employed to explore how the American character shapes our response to conflict--military, social and sporting--and how that national character is, in turn, constantly reshaped by successive conflicts. Paradoxically, Halberstam is in some sense more a European “author” than an American “writer.” His literary preoccupations are history and narrative synopsis rather than style. And, somewhere deep in his authorial consciousness, there still echoes the editorial admonition proffered to generations of young newspaper feature writers: show; don’t tell.

“War in a Time of Peace” does just that, deploying a series of thoroughly reported vignettes and shrewdly drawn character portraits to depict not only the U.S. role in the Balkans, Somalia and Haiti, but also to suggest just how a decade of popular and governmental evasion, self-indulgence and willful confusion left the nation ill prepared for the morning of Sept. 11.

During that period, according to Halberstam, American foreign policy was directed by a president, Bill Clinton, “who wanted to keep a cap on foreign policy because his defeat of George Bush, the victor in the Gulf War, had taught him there were no votes in foreign policy. He also had no instinctual feeling for foreign policy or its nuances, whereas his instinct for domestic policy was pitch perfect. “His Secretary of State, Warren Christopher--an extraordinarily decent, moral and able man--nonetheless conceived his role as that of a lawyer in the service of his client,” Halberstam said. “Christopher had no strategic vision of his own. He didn’t think that was his role, and he was always waiting for signals from his client that never came. And, in that sense, he was extremely ill-served by his client, the president.

“It meant the foreign policy team was extremely soft. One of the key things about the Democrats in those years was that they had been out of power for 20 of the previous 24 years. That is extremely damaging in how you develop bench strength among the talented people of a certain generation. There is a profound difference between somebody with a terrific curricula vitae and some one who is actually good at government.”

The situation in Washington, Halberstam believes, was aggravated by a public “that was electrically drawn only to those foreign policy situations that somehow affected the Dow. They were aided and abetted in this flight by the feather merchants in the media, who--with the exception of a couple elite newspapers, like the New York and Los Angeles Times--spent the 10 years after the Gulf War consciously abandoning the coverage of foreign news. It was an appalling instance of the media putting profits ahead of principle.”

For now, at least, that national self-preoccupation has ended. But one of the implications of Halberstam’s work is that, since Vietnam at least, the U.S. foreign policy and military establishments have been engaged not so much in fighting the last war, as they have been in avoiding it. How might that aversion manifest itself in this new war against a new sort of antagonist--one Halberstam describes as having “a deadly but limited sort of competence” and the fuel of “indescribable rage and vast sums of money”?

“The two institutions that really were most severely damaged by the Vietnam War were the Democratic Party and the U.S. Army,” he said. The Democrats have been engaged in a powerful, unresolved tribal struggle ever since. ... The army picked up a very bad virus as well. In Korea, we sent over a very bad army and got back a pretty good one. We sent a very good army to Vietnam and got back a very bad one. Colin Powell is justifiably proudest of being one of those generals who cleansed the army of that poison, who brought the army back. But he and his contemporaries are extraordinarily wary of the uses to which the civilian leadership might put the army.”

That “fault line between the civilian leadership and the military,” according to Halberstam, “is particularly acute during Democratic administrations” but continues to this current crisis. The military, he said, came out of its Balkan experience under the Clinton administration “very ambivalent. But the military is not a monolith. Some of them came away very nervous, anxious over the values-driven, humanitarian character of our intervention. Some of that was assuaged by the fantastic success of the air war waged against Serbia over Kosovo. But others, particularly those who served there, began to change, to come around to the notion that this is increasingly the American future,” he said.

“But the fault line is there and, in some ways, wider than ever because of the culture wars in the country. The military comes from this country’s more conservative tradition. A lot of it is from the small-town South, very traditional. More than in the past there also is a fault line between the mores of the civilian world’s leadership class and those of the military’s emerging mid-level leaders. They are values-driven in a different way. More fundamentalist, more socially conservative in this new Sun Belt way.”

That, in Halberstam’s view, has engendered a further split between those lower-ranking officers and the military’s senior commanders, who “by and large are sophisticated, educated, very impressive with a wide and genuine experience of the world in all its variety. That is, I think, an emerging struggle.”

How might it bear on what is about to transpire?

“I don’t think it will, at least not initially,” he said. “This is one where everybody will be on the same page, at least for a while. The uniformed military is understandably wary of the notion of foot soldiers--even specialized units, like the Delta Forces--on the ground in Afghanistan. No matter how good they are, it is very tricky country.”

Halberstam remarked on how struck he has been by Russian generals’ description of Afghanistan “as a bone yard, not a grave yard, but a bone yard. Listening to them brought to mind the ossarium at Verdun,” site of one of World War I’s bloodiest battles. “Anybody who has been to Afghanistan,” he said, “doesn’t want anybody else to go there. It exhausts everything we know about civilization. The vulnerability to their adversaries that even elite troops inevitably suffer is not something American commanders will willingly expose their kids to.”

Hence, “the prudence you currently see at the uniformed military’s senior level. The question now is how to apply power there in Afghanistan.” It is, he agrees, a nation in which there is nothing left to attack, only people to kill. “Figuring that out,” he said, “will take a lot of time and a lot of patience, a lot of knowledge and no rush to judgment.

“All the next steps,” he said, “are tricky ones. We need to study further their strengths and weaknesses. You know, they’ve been very good at assessing the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the West and the United States, but I don’t think they have any real sense of our strengths. What we see as strength, they see as decadence.

“As terrible as our loss was, it was a small part of our civilization,” Halberstam said. “Yet in 1,000 years, the arid civilization they propose couldn’t duplicate the small part of our world that they’ve destroyed. They underestimate us, but then totalitarians always do.”