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LESSONS IN DISASTER by Gordon M.  Goldstein

LESSONS IN DISASTER

McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam

by Gordon M. Goldstein

Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7971-5
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt

Astute distillation of the essential lessons now-deceased national security adviser Bundy learned from Vietnam.

Prompted to revisit the war after the 1995 publication of former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s memoir, in which he admitted, “We were wrong, terribly wrong” about Vietnam, Bundy, then 76, began collaborating with international-affairs scholar Goldstein on a book about his experiences working under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His reconstruction and retrospective analysis of the pivotal decisions about Vietnam strategy from 1961 to 1965, when Bundy resigned as Johnson’s national security adviser, remained incomplete upon his death in 1996. Goldstein’s present work, informed by interviews with Bundy and access to his manuscripts, provides an invaluable record of Bundy’s thoughts and actions during the war, as well as unusually candid commentary on his admitted failures in “perception, recommendation and execution.” Goldstein is especially driven to find out why Bundy, Harvard dean and member of the intellectual elite embodying the “best and brightest” of his generation, failed to question the validity of the domino theory or test the logic of potential American military escalation in Vietnam. The book begins with a systematic examination of Kennedy’s encounter with Vietnam during his first year in office, in particular his remarkable ability to resist the pressure of brilliant advisers such as Bundy to send in ground combat troops. Had Kennedy lived, Bundy suggested years later, America’s disastrous role in the war could have been averted. Johnson, by contrast, accepted the dire warnings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his civilian advisers, which led to the Americanization of the war. Goldstein goes step by step through this “strategy for disaster,” marveling at Bundy’s arrogant adherence to “the perception of credibility” as the most important consideration in American policy, trumping every other aspect of military strategy.

A significant then-and-now reassessment.