There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Length, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.

— David Halberstam

There was, I found, always more to learn.

— David Halberstam

The telephone was a sign of being rushed.

— David Halberstam

The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.

— David Halberstam

They (the media) found little quality of depth to him, that when she said on the platform with that which he said to them in private. The qualities of introspection and effectiveness that they particularly treasured were missing.

— David Halberstam

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

— David Halberstam

Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.

— David Halberstam

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

— David Halberstam

When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.

— David Halberstam

Why did McNamara have such good figures? Why did McNamara have such good staff work and Ball such poor staff work? The next day Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with the figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them, he dissembled even within the bureaucracy, though, of course, always for a good cause. It was part of his sense of service. He believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior.

— David Halberstam