51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific Entry In Debate Over Responsibility For Vietnam!, September 12, 2000
This review is from: American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Hardcover)
In an interesting, provocative, well-written and often very surprising work of careful scholarship, author David Kaiser has raised the level of intellectual discussion regarding the origins and prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Using a range of new archival materials only now available, he carefully constructs an intriguing and disturbing portrait of individuals out of control. In this sense this book is a worthy companion piece to David Halberstam's memorable book, "The Best And The Brightest", in the fact that it argues that it was a number of specific individuals with their own personal credos, private agendas, and belief systems that led to the deepening involvement in Southeast Asian affairs. However, this is not to suggest that Professor Kaiser either agrees with Halberstam's thesis or to argue that he has nothing new or worthwhile to reveal. Yet there are undeniable threads of similarity running through both works. Most interesting is Kaiser's contention that it was the unique and singular "can-do" Yankee spirit and aggressive attitude of the World War Two generation that directly led to the decisions to interfere in the internal policies of Vietnam.
Unlike previous tomes such as Halberstam's as well as Stanley Karnow's excellent book, "Vietnam", that portrayed President Eisenhower's policies of global containment of communism as extremely cautious and careful, Kaiser presents a mass of documentary evidence that reveals that it was precisely those decisions and policy predispositions established by Eisenhower, including a willingness to use nuclear weapons tactically, that later led to the fateful moves toward greater involvement by Lyndon Johnson. Even more interesting, Kaiser presents evidence by way of policy changes made By President Kennedy illustrating his own deep concern and reticence regarding involvement in the former French Indochina. In fact, the author shows that for the three years of his administration, Kennedy purposefully denied repeated attempts by both his senior advisors and the military to significantly widen our action in Vietnam. According to Kaiser, while JFK did allow escalation by way of many more military advisors, he repeatedly quite specifically denied, both verbally and by way of documented minutes to meetings with advisors, authorization to escalate by introducing direct combat involvement.
However, the author argues that even Kennedy was seriously misled and misserved as to the status of ongoing efforts by deliberate deception on the part of that great national hero and contemporary revisionist historian, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in Kennedy's administration (see my review of McNamara's book). As a result, Kennedy died believing the situation in Vietnam to be much more constrained and careful than it actually was. With Kennedy's departure from the scene in late 1963, events began to move much more quickly and fatefully toward our blind involvement in a situation we neither appreciated the complexity of nor had any real strategy to deal with. In this sense, Lyndon Johnson became the single worst possible foil for the efforts by McNamara and Army General William Westmoreland to massively escalate the war by introducing forty-four combat battalions to the conflict.
According to Kaiser, Johnson lacked Jack Kennedy's sophisticated foreign policy approach and did not understand or appreciate the massively negative effects that an active prosecution of the war would have in our relationship with the rest of the world. So, even as he reassured the American people to the contrary, Lyndon Johnson prepared for a quick and massive entry into the single most disastrous American foreign policy decision of the 20th century. Later, of course, he tried to extricate himself from the tar baby the war became for his administration, yet given his own philosophical world view as a cold warrior, could never manage to take Hubert Humphrey's advice to "just cut and run'. Likewise, Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, did no better. After shamelessly interfering in the internal political disposition of the South Vietnamese government through Madame Chennault in order to ensure his place in winning the closely contested 1968 elections, Nixon soon found himself stuck to the waist in the sucking quicksand of continuing involvement in the war and a terrifying related national debate approaching a revolutionary fervor. He waited four long and painful years before finally ending American involvement.
This is a wonderfully written book, and the author's style is both entertaining and edifying. He handily deals with a myriad of issues, complexions, and countervailing situations with aplomb, honesty and verve. He makes the otherwise inexplicable descent into national madness and the nightmare of Vietnam all too understandable and human. While I do not share his personally stated philosophical resignation regarding the liability of those individuals responsible for prosecuting the war (I still believe that Robert McNamara, General William Westmoreland, and a number of others should be tried as war criminals for crimes against humanity; after all, otherwise to try Serbians and Croats for their detestable deeds in the former Yugoslavia is utter hypocrisy), I believe this book will quickly become the standard text for helping us to understand how the ritual abuse of power by officials not democratically elected can itself become an anti-democratic force profoundly affecting not only the lives of our citizens, but people everywhere in the developing world.
Hopefully books like this will help us to come to understand and accept the reality of what the American government did in our name to Vietnam. We need to understand how we came to export our darkest emotional suspicions and a sense of national paranoia about a monolithic communist threat into an incredibly murderous campaign that almost exterminated a whole generation of Vietnamese by way of indiscriminate carpet bombing, deliberate use of environmentally horrific defoliates, and creation of so-called "free-fire" zones, where everthing and anything moving was assumed to be hostile, whether it be man, woman, child, or beast. All of this was visited on the world in general and the Vietnamese in particular for little or no reason other than the extremely aggressive and ultimately dangerous can-do macho world-view of the power elite. The sooner we recognize this, the better it will be for us as citizens of a democratic government, and the more likely it is we will stop the next set of so- inclined bureaucratic monsters from acting in this way again.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unlike most historians, David Kaiser sees the social subtext, August 18, 2000
This review is from: American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Hardcover)
These days, not many argue with Tom Brokaw's coinage, "Greatest Generation," for those who came of age with World War II and held power in America from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Back in the '60s, David Kaiser reminds us, this was the generation of Rusk, McNamara, the two Bundys, alias the "best and brightest" on the far side of the angry "generation gap."
In this extraordinary book, Kaiser reveals more than just who wrote which memo for whom; he also describes and interprets the peer motivations that made Vietnam the tragic failure of these men of geopolitical hubris, numbers-crunching technocracy, and "controlled response" secularism--much to the anger of their draft-age children.
Kaiser's sharp eye for generational dynamics is what makes "American Tragedy" such a fine and complete history, one that should be required reading for anyone who has read or heard Brokaw's encomia. Yes, this was a "great generation," but also one with great flaws. They, not Boomers, were the real Vietnam Generation.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is the best of the Viet Nam books, May 7, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Hardcover)
This book tells us things that previous books haven't, apparently because of newly released documents the author managed to get access to. He is very persuasive about his theories of what went wrong and when. It sheds a whole new light on this period of history, and it convinced me that several things I thoughtI knew about it were wrong.Everyone with an interest in this terrible war should read it.
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