张学良与日本 （臼井勝美/陈鹏仁）

This book was originally published in Japanese coming out of a documentary that NHK made about Zhang Xueliang (张学良), also known as the Young Marshal. Zhang was the son of Zhang Zhuolin (张作霖） the warlord from the northeastern provinces of China. His life was a fascinating one but he was most well-known for the Xi'an Incident (西安事变) where he and his associates abducted Chiang Kaishek and forced him to stop the pursuit of the Communists and instead work with them to fight the Japanese who at that time had occupied Manchuria and had declared it an "independent" country called Manchukuo.

As mentioned, this book was written from the materials and interviews made for the documentary on Zhang and reads exactly like that. While the author had access to Zhang, this book is not a collection of her interview with Zhang. In many places it was written almost like a script for a documentary and in other places the author filled it with materials from other sources. In fact there was surprisingly little from the actual interviews and the most disappointing of all, Zhang refused to divulge anything on what happened in the Xi'an Incident. And honestly, he  had kept his mouth tightly shut about the most important details of the negotiations between Zhou Enlai and Chiang Kaishek in the years after that.

However if one is looking for a source that is easy to read to get all the facts of Zhang's life, this book would be a good reference. It is not one that gives the reader an in-depth understanding of the events because it lacks the analyses of the various events and therefore ended up looking a little disjointed and lacking a central thesis. But to be fair, the author never meant for this book to be one of an analysis of Zhang or any events associated with him, it is simply a documentary turned into a book.

I know of Zhang in my earlier readings but did not find out more about him. If this book has done anything for me, it has piqued my interest in him and he being young in those tumultuous years actually lived long enough to entertain a few video-recorded interviews that are available on YouTube (they are in Chinese though). His history has been presented in almost opposite ways in China and Taiwan. With this book as a start I hope to find out more about him and come to my own assessment of him.

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The Best And The Brightest (David Halberstam)

This book features almost all the people who had a hand in the decision on the US’ involvement in Vietnam. There was no question that these were the best and the brightest, which all more makes the reader wonders why the US eventually found herself in the quagmire. By the end of the book the reader may still not find the answer, but what he or she will find is a lesson in human folly and how the illusion of superior ability can lead one to arrogance, or perhaps less, over-confidence, but ending in hubris nevertheless.

This book is cleverly structured, the first half featuring one president (and the presidency) and the second half the next. Under this over-arching framework, the author added the layers below the presidents, starting with the national security advisor, secretaries of defense and states, their deputies and assistants, then the chief of staffs, and finally the ambassadors to South Vietnam. In some cases these happen to be the same people who worked across the administrations, in others there were multiples changes. But all the time the message was consistent – these are the most brilliant people, although in different ways. Yet there was no denying that these were the best and the brightest.

And thus the reader is led to ask – why then did the US eventually slipped into the Vietnam War which killed more than 50,000 Americans, severely draining the treasury, divided the country, and lost the country of a lot of its prestige and goodwill? The author did not provide a simplistic answer to this complex question, rather, he showed the mixture of personalities, beliefs, politics, and self-interest that slowly pushes the country deeper and deeper into a situation from which they could not extricate themselves, even after some have changed their minds about the US’ involvement.

At the beginning there were those who did not know what Vietnam was about, besides the unpalatable fact that it was a French colony which the French should quit, but would not. But in view of the need for France’s support in Europe a little sweetener for them in Vietnam is of negligible cost to the US. Then there were those who framed it with cold-war rhetoric of having to stop the spread of Communism in Asia. After “losing” China, it would be unthinkable to let the rest of the dominoes fall. Later it began to look to others like it was a good place to fight a good war. To be sure, there were those who tried to stop the tide and where impossible, to at least retard it. But these were in the minority, their cases always weak and their stance uncoordinated. In the end they were among the earliest casualties, and the author took us up the hierarchy again, only this time showing the sequence of the casualties: the ambassadors, the deputy and assistant secretaries, the secretaries, and ultimately the president himself. Few came out looking good, those who escaped rather unscathed politically would look unprincipled in the book.

The author did not just write a book that recorded the events and the decisions, he wrote a book to caution decision makers of all kinds. His message is for people to remember that arrogance has no place even (or especially) among the best and the brightest, for the game will eventually play you. But the biggest chill that the author gave me was not the fact that if the best and the brightest can fall into such a folly what more the lesser beings, it was that it is precisely when you think you have control of the game that you lose control. When you think you have resisted the tide because you managed to not give your opponent all that he wanted, you have actually forgotten what you had to give him in exchange for that. The illusion of being on top of things will lure you into the trap. I think this book should be kept handy, not because it would serve as a reference, but it would serve as a good reminder that even if you think you are the best and the brightest, you can still be catastrophically wrong. And then you would have to live with it.

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