War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals

David Halberstam

Nov 2015 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

“This book . . . is likely to stand as the definitive record of the American use of armed force in [the 90s] . . . a tour de force of reportorial narration” (The New York Times).

In The Best and the Brightest, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Halberstam pulled back the curtain on the personalities and discussions that led America into the war in Vietnam. In War in a Time of Peace, he once again enters the halls of power to chronicle the inner workings of American foreign policy in post–Cold War America.

Evoking the internal conflicts, unchecked egos, and power struggles within the White House, the State Department, and the military, Halberstam shows how the decisions of men who served in the Vietnam War, and those who did not, have shaped America’s role in global events. He provides fascinating portraits of those in power—Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Kissinger, James Baker, Dick Cheney, Madeleine Albright, and others—to reveal a stunning view of modern political America.

About the author

David Halberstam was one of America's most distinguished journalists and historians, a man whose newspaper reporting and books have helped define the era we live in. He graduated from Harvard in 1955, took his first job on the smallest daily in Mississippi, and then covered the early civil rights struggle for the Nashville Tennessean. He joined The New York Times in 1960, went overseas almost immediately, first to the Congo and then to Vietnam. His early pessimistic dispatches from Vietnam won him the Pulitzer in 1964 at the age of thirty. His last twelve books, starting with The Best and the Brightest and including The Powers That Be, The Reckoning, and The Fifties, have all been national bestsellers. Thirty-eight years after Mr. Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam, War in a Time of Peace was the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in April 2007.