Halberstam on War and Peace

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals is a penetrating look at America’s military and foreign relations strategy in the 1990s—and the political landscape guiding it—from David Halberstam ’55, a powerful writer who has been watching the United States grow and change and describing it for decades.

War in a Time of Peace is driven by its profiles of and rich insights into the lives of its major figures and the struggles they have faced at the top of the government. Halberstam spent two years putting the book together, conducting so many interviews that he can speak with authority about the thought processes and actions of major American leaders of our time.

Describing the fragile resiliency of Secretary of State Warren Christopher, he writes, “At the end of a long, hard day, he might sit in front of a television set in his office, having a single glass of wine. The sign that he was relaxing was when he took his jacket off. He and a few close aides would watch the news, and night after night, there would be a quick, inevitably oversimplified report about him…Christopher would watch silently, then say that it had not been their best day, but they would all be back here at the office at 7 a.m.”

Halberstam’s book alternates between two main themes; dramatic developments in the international arena—the end of the Cold War, explosive conflict in the Balkans and the disaster in Somalia among them—and America’s turn inward at home. Halberstam convincingly argues that, because of a variety of far-reaching changes in the past three decades—the collapse of the Soviet Union, new weapons which allow the U.S. to conduct military actions from afar, the abandonment of serious foreign news coverage by network television and the rise of a new generation who came of age in a time of peace and prosperity—the country has focused internally once more, shying away from major international conflicts.

In an era when American casualties of any number are viewed as bad public relations more than anything else, Halberstam forcefully highlights the foreign policy quandary the Clinton administration faced. Former President Clinton’s predecessor, President George H.W. Bush, helped broker the end of the Cold War and a ridiculously easy victory in the Gulf War over Iraq, only to be voted out of office the next year. Then Clinton, whose strength and instincts lay in domestic politics, was forced time and again to make tough decisions about committing America’s troops to fight in hard-to-understand conflicts in foreign lands.

Much of the book deals with the internal conflicts of the American bureaucratic elite. The underlying struggle was between those pushing wholeheartedly for direct involvement in the Balkans and other international hot spots and those, like Colin Powell, who agree to send troops into a foreign conflict only if there are clear objectives and a clear exit strategy. The question of the U.S.’s responsibility as a world power is one that the country has been wrestling with for much of the past century, and Halberstam pointedly places it in the context of the last decade. The post-Cold War world is one in which America rules alone, and its citizens don’t feel any great urge to pay attention to the rest of the world because danger—at least until a few weeks ago—seems far away. His conclusion—always implicit—is that the United States should be more involved in foreign affairs, because world crises will confront the president whether he wants them to or not.

His character assessments are deft and perceptive. He points out how the elder Bush—shaped by the Great Depression and World War II in his youth—was reluctant to take credit for the foreign policy achievements of his first term, and how Albert Gore ’69 came across during the 2000 presidential campaign as awkward, stiff and even self-defeating. Halberstam writes, “To those who had studied both Clinton and Gore, the outgoing president was clearly the more skilled politician, his loyalty always calibrated to the needs of the moment, his allegiances, like his thoughts, always inner-directed. Gore, not by any means as gifted a politician, was by contrast the better human being, a man of greater and more consistent beliefs and personal loyalties.” Halberstam’s great details can also, on occasion, be quite funny. Clinton immediately denied his relationship with “that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Halberstam relates, using that phrase “not so much to distance himself from her, he later confided to his Hollywood producer friend Harry Thomason, but because he had momentarily forgotten her first name.”

Halberstam, a former sports editor and managing editor of The Crimson, has been here before: War in a Time of Peace is a “younger sibling,” he says, to The Best and the Brightest (1972), his renowned account of the men who led the U.S. into the war in Vietnam. After covering the early civil rights movement and reporting in the field from Vietnam—for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964—Halberstam left the New York Times in 1967 and began to write books full-time two years later. But despite his wealth of experience and top-notch reporting, War in a Time of Peace has its weaknesses. At 494 pages of actual text, the book is comprehensive but long, and because of its overwhelming scope it is necessarily somewhat jumpy and scattered; with so many characters to keep track of, it is sometimes hard to follow the big picture. Halberstam also tends to repeat what he has said, particularly in the life histories of his characters. When Halberstam tells the same story for the third time, it almost seems as if he doesn’t trust the reader to remember what he said before.

While Halberstam nicely wraps up the stories of the characters he has been following throughout the book in the final chapter, the ending still seems somewhat abrupt. After explaining in exhaustive detail the course of American foreign policy—and domestic presidential politics—over the past decade, he is content to devote his final page to a rushed rundown of President George W. Bush’s first few months in office. The conclusion is not so much an ending as an added segment in a continuing story, but it has, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, turned out to be immensely potent. Rather than rogue states shooting missiles, he writes, senior intelligence analysts have said that America’s greatest danger in the coming years would come from terrorists, who could walk into an American city, any American city, and wreak havoc. “Foreign policy was not high on the political agenda,” he says, “primarily because whatever the forces that might threaten the future of this country were, they were not yet visible.” They are visible now, and Halberstam’s assessment of the complexities of domestic politics and foreign policy is now a timely comment on how the U.S., as the world’s most powerful country, cannot ignore the consequences of that title.

War in A Time of Peace

by David Halberstam

Scribner

543 pp., $28