Fog of Wars.(War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals)(Review)

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals, by David Halberstam (Scribner, 544 pp., $28)

In 1965, fresh from winning a Pulitzer for his stint in Saigon as a correspondent for the New York Times, the young David Halberstam published a book about the war in Vietnam. The Making of a Quagmire was an exceptional piece of reporting-vivid, concise, hard-hitting, and entirely without pretense. By contrasting developments in the villages and rice paddies far from Saigon with the illusions nursed by senior American officials back in the South Vietnamese capital, it told important truths about how the U.S. government was even then plunging heedlessly into a conflict that it fundamentally failed to understand.

Halberstam followed up this achievement with an even more spectacular success: In 1972 he published The Best and the Brightest, a huge bestseller, still in print nearly 30 years after it first appeared. Basing his work on extensive interviews, Halberstam offered-or purported to offer-the inside story of a vast tragedy in the making, the book's very title capturing one of the war's central ironies. The book itself was compulsively readable, its signature feature being a series of finely honed and devastating portraits of senior U.S. officials: Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Taylor, Westmoreland, and all the rest whose brilliant careers cracked up on the rocks of a misguided war.

With the 1972 book, Halberstam transformed himself into something more than a mere journalist: He set out to be a somewhat more definitive chronicler of his age. More books followed, many of them blockbusters. The subjects became grander, the books fatter, the titles more portentous. The prose, alas, became progressively more flatulent and self-indulgent.

Halberstam himself ascended to the status of literary celebrity. For years (we learn, courtesy of his publicist) Halberstam had resisted the clamor that he write a sequel to The Best and the Brightest; finally, however, he has acceded to those demands-not with a concluding volume on Vietnam, but with this book, an account of America's various military escapades during the 1990s, with memories of that Other War hovering darkly in the background.

Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has blurbed War in a Time of Peace as "nothing less than the War and Peace of our generation." Halberstam may well be the Tolstoy that "our generation" deserves for its sins, but by any standard apart from sheer bulk this book does not merit comparison with the Russian classic: It is warmed-over journalism masquerading as history. The sharp-eyed war correspondent who once derided diplomats and generals for sitting around Saigon while pretending to know the real score would have dismissed this book out of hand.

Halberstam's stated intent in undertaking this project was to see what the military events of the past decade might "tell us about the dramatic societal changes in this country over the last 30 years." The minor wars, interventions, occupations, and episodes of gunboat diplomacy littering the 1990s would serve as a "mirror" revealing what sort of nation the U.S. had become. This is a nice idea, but one only dimly reflected in the final product. In reality, this book provides an account-told almost exclusively from Washington's perspective, based largely on interviews with Washington insiders-of the successive crises in Bosnia and Kosovo, each of which culminated in a U.S.-led armed intervention. Although Halberstam gives nodding ...