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Dereliction of Duty

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Of all the books I've read on the Vietnam conflict, McMaster's offers the clearest insight on the political and military policy decisions which sucked America into an unwinnable war. McMaster analyses the decisions and perspectives of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations through to 1966, by which time American troops were fully engaged in Vietnam.

This book should really be read in conjunction with Robert MacNamara's 'In Retrospect', which I thought was a fairly honest account of MacNamara trying to come to terms with the consequences of his (and LBJ's) mismanagement of American policy on Vietnam, which, to his credit, he later recognised as wrong.

McMaster is justifiably harder on both the folly and outright deception of the Johnson administration's actions than MacNamara's version of events and his insights are profound, cool and lucid.

MacNamara's 'Whiz Kids' (Halberstam's 'The Best and the Brightest'), the technocrats from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, emerge from this account as arrogant, ignorant and shallow policy wonks who thought they knew war better than the military and thus kept the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) out of all major policy decisions on the war. They believed that any situation could be resolved through analysis, statistics and 'war as communication'. Tragically, the hubris of these nerds got 58,000 soldiers killed in a war they all clearly knew couldn't be won.

Johnson's determination to both commit to a limited war without the approval of Congress and hide his actions from the American people was breathtakingly cynical, even by US political standards. All his decisions were based on domestic political criteria (the Great Society programme) and he always seemed to believe that his reputation as a deal-maker would allow him to pull any iron out of the fire. As a political bully and shrewd cynical manipulator, he (with MacNamara's active help) was responsible for the shockingly (and knowingly) bad advice he received from his advisors, both political and military. His actions were fully conscious ones, framed by his limited defining perspective of domestic political considerations.

MacNamara's enthusiastic support and encouragement and his willingness to lie about the administration's actions is clinically exposed. The role of the JCS Chairman, and later US Ambassador to Vietnam, Maxwell Taylor, exactly fulfils the term 'dereliction of duty' referred to in the title.

The JCS, unable to overcome crippling inter-service rivalry and torn between offering professional military strategic advice (as they were charged to do under the constitution) and loyalty to a President they rightly perceived as authorising military actions which could only have disastrous results, allowed themselves to be marginalised from the decision-making process. They, too, emerge with little credit, clearly seeing the consequences of the administration's decisions but lacking sufficient conviction or backbone to either act or resign, tried to make the best of a very bad job, making a bigger mess in the process.

An extremely well-researched and written book, the conclusions are more damning due to the balanced and cool approach adopted by McMaster. It would be easy to tip into righteous indignation, but McMaster's approach is all the more effective.

Along with Bernard Fall's books and Neil Sheehan's 'A Bright Shining Lie', one of the best on the subject.

This carefully-researched, highly-detailed study of military policymaking during the formative period of the Vietnam War focuses on events between November 1963 through July 1965, when the Johnson administration made a series of disastrous decisions leading to the commitment of American ground troops, which resulted in over 50,000 deaths during the next decade. H.R. McMaster, a career Army officer with a Ph.D. in history who served on the faculty at the U.S. Military Academy, asserts that President Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed about policy and then lied to the American people about that policy. Using "[r]ecently declassified documents, newly opened manuscript collections, and the release of the official history of the [Joint Chiefs of Staff] during the Vietnam War," McMaster's disturbing narrative of dishonesty and intrigue casts the highest civilian and military officials of the government in a very unfavorable light. McMaster seeks to understand and explain "decisions that involved the United States in a war that it could not win at a politically acceptable level of commitment." It is an a ugly picture.

According to McMaster: "Under the National Security Act the Joint Chiefs of Staff were `principal military advisers to the president, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense.'" However, McMaster writes, McNamara never had a good relationship with the Chiefs because they "were unable to respond to McNamara's demands fast enough, and their cumbersome administrative system exacerbated the administration's unfavorable opinion of them;" and "McNamara quickly lost patience with the Chiefs' unresponsiveness and squabbling." According to McMaster, although President Kennedy "was willing to send U.S. military `advisers' into South Vietnam and mount covert operations in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, he drew the line at U.S. combat units." McMaster writes that November 1963, when both Ngo Dinh Diem and Kennedy were assassinated, "marked a turning point in the Vietnam War." According to McMaster: "McNamara soon established himself as the most indispensable member of Johnson's cabinet." McMaster writes: "McNamara believed that "military pressure would aim to convince Hanoi to stop supporting the Viet Cong." But the Chiefs warned that McNamara's plan "would be insufficient to `turn the tide' against the Viet Cong." In McMaster's view: "At the end of March, after the president had approved McNamara's strategy of graduated pressure, discontent within the Joint Chiefs of Staff bubbled to the surface." This may be McMaster's most damning criticism: "Each Chief's desire to further his own service's agenda hampered their collective ability to provide military advice... The Chiefs desperately needed a leader to bring them together." However, the appointment of Army General Earle Wheeler as Chairman of the J.C.S. "was immensely unpopular with many Pentagon officers, particularly those outside the Army." According to McMaster: "Differences of opinion among the Chiefs stemmed, in part, from their institutional perspectives as heads of their services. It seemed that each service, rather than attempt to determine the true nature of the war and the source of the insurgency in South Vietnam, assumed that it alone had the capacity to win the war." By the summer of 1964, according to McMaster, the JCS had been reduced to serving "more as technicians for planners in the [Office of the Secretary of Defense] than as strategic thinkers and advisers in their own right." In 1964 and early 1965, President Johnson focused on getting elected and advancing his domestic agenda. On November 1, 1964, the Viet Cong attacked the American airfield at Bien Hoa. According to McMaster, Chairman of the JCS, General Earle "Wheeler reported to McNamara that the Chiefs believed that, if the United States did not take action against North Vietnam immediately, it should withdraw all forces from South Vietnam." McMaster writes with brutal frankness: "On the first day of his four-year term, Johnson hid the truth about Vietnam for the sake of a domestic political agenda. McNamara assisted his dissembling." In late January 1965, according to McMaster, President Johnson "authorized the resumption of destroyer patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin" "[i]n hopes of provoking a North Vietnamese attack." According to McMaster: "In February 1965 President Johnson made decisions that transformed the conflict in Vietnam into an American war...[T]he president's decision, at the end of February, to introduce U.S. ground combat units into South Vietnam represented an irrevocable commitment to the war." McMaster then makes this disturbing assertion: "Although the JCS thought that the president's policy was fundamentally flawed, their actions supported and reinforced it." This is the essence of McMaster's indictment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "The body charged with providing the president with military advice and responsible for strategic planning permitted the president to commit the United States to war without consideration of the likely costs and consequences." According to McMaster: "When the Chiefs endeavored to carry out the president's instructions [in April-May 1965], interservice differences over how to fight the war in Vietnam resurfaced.." As a result, McMaster writes: "American soldiers, airmen, and Marines went to war in Vietnam without strategy or direction." According to McMaster: "The `five silent men' on the Joint Chiefs made possible the way the United States went to war in Vietnam." McMaster asserts: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff became accomplices in the president's deception and focused on a tactical task, killing the enemy. General Westmoreland's `strategy' of attrition in South Vietnam was, in essence, the absence of strategy." McMaster concludes: "The war in Vietnam...was lost in Washington, D.C., even before Americans assumed sole responsibility for the fighting in 1965 and before they realized the country was at war; indeed, even before the first American units were deployed."

The Joint Chiefs' submission to civilian control of grand strategy is understandable. But their interservice rivalries were inexcusable. I agree, therefore, with McMaster's most important point: The fact that Americans were dying in Vietnam while the Chiefs engaged in high-level turf battles constituted dereliction of duty. But, as McMaster also amply and ably demonstrates, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Given all the current talk about how the current Iraq war is or is not turning into a new Vietnam I thought this book would be an interesting read. What I found was a book that described a presidency that was so concerned with their political standing that they were almost incapable of determining a course of action and following it. The author spent time reviewing all the documents and tapes he could get his hands on to try and figure out what really happened with the war and where did the US lose the war. What the reader is shown is that first off the main players in the war strategy, the Joint Chief's of staff verses the President and the Secretary of Defense all distrusted each other and were working toward different ends. LBJ continued to make personnel decisions regarding the leaders of the armed services to put men that he could control instead of the best men for the job. This created a major riff between the players that really need to be working as a close team during a war.

The second item that really came to the forefront of the book was the down right lying that LBJ was doing too basically the whole country. He would tell Congress one story, Military staff another and the public a third story. None of which was too close to the truth. What makes this so interesting to me is that it was this continual shading of the truth that eventually caught up with LBJ and caused the war to become such a mess and his popularity to fall so low. IF he would have been above board and honest there is a good chance that the US would not have gotten so deep into the war and LBJ would have coasted into a second term. If ever there is a case study in how not to conduct a war, at least from the political side, this is it. I am sure that LBJ thought his activities would work based on his experience on all other political matters and his arm twisting way to move social legislation through Congress, but it failed with Vietnam.

If I have one complaint about the book it is that the author left out of the text a certain zip that would make that book a great read. The book is full of details and the conclusions are very well laid out. It is just that the somehow the author chose some very bland ways of detailing items. It is not to say that the book is bad, not by a long shot. It is just that the book is not the type to keep you up all night reading it. Overall I enjoyed the book, even if it was a bit wooden. For any of you that are interested in trying to draw analogies with the current war and this war, this is a good book that will send you in the direction.

Author H.R. McMaster masterfully examines historic events that led to the disastrous Vietnam war within the context of two gigantic egos. Early on President Lyndon Johnson is shown to have a long political career of stretching the truth...starting with his alleged heroic air combat role in World War II. Robert McNamara is a towering intellectual who is not afraid to manipulate statistics to support his Cold War position or that of the president. The pattern is contagious as the Joint Chiefs of Staff also maintain upbeat reports that do not properly reflect the reality in Vietnam.

"Dereliction of Duty," is an eye-opening book that documents how powerful leaders in Washington D.C. who were bestowed with an enormous trust by the American people betrayed the young men and women who answered the nation's call in Vietnam. McMaster impressively reviews a painful period in American history and clearly shows how American foreign policy in Vietnam was manipulated for political and egotistical reasons. This book is clearly written and well researched. The conclusions are stunning...Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff [mislead] the American people. One of the few heroes in this book is Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup, who received a Medal of Honor for heroism on the Pacific island of Tarawa and who in November of 1963 strongly advised, "not, under any circumstances, should we get involved in land warfare in Southeast Asia."

Bert Ruiz

I enjoyed reading this book because it was the first book about the war in Vietnam that explored the involvement and the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The book also shows how the differences of opinion and disagreements between the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and President Lyndon Johnson led to the escalation of the war and why the United States had lost. This a really good book.

Very well written. Extremely well researched and documented. Should be required reading for all military service personnel and their families - as well as for all high school students in the US.

Our military service personnel deserved a lot better than they got from our government then - and they still do.

This is the most incisively devastating book I have ever read on military history. When I finished reading it, I felt like I had taken a punch in the abdomen. Words like "riviting", "masterpiece" and "moving" tend to be wasted on most books, but not this one. This is a model in historical writing.

The book begins with the Kennedy administration and covers it in two chapters; most of the detail begins with Johnson's accession in Nov. 1963. As told here, nothing Kennedy did made America's entry into the Vietnam war inevitable, but JFK certainly did a lot to move us in that direction. Kennedy's administration is described as being complicit in the assassination of Diem, ending any semblance of political stability for good. Ironically, Kennedy is pictured as being nonchalant about the brutal murder of the South Vietnamese leader just a few weeks before his own assassination.

The remaining 293 pages take the reader through a detailed examination of what must have been every meeting that either Johnson and his advisors or the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) had between Nov. 1963 and July 1965. He describes a process by which Johnson strictly prevented the most senior officers of the armed forces from participation in substantive discussions. Time after time they were presented with a final policy they had no hand in forming.

Secretary of Defense McNamara takes the heaviest fire, for while Johnson was both deceiver and deceived, McNamara was fully aware of differing views by members of the JCS and deliberately suppressed them, in some cases falsifying memos by presenting one copy to subordinates and then removing pages before giving it to Johnson, and the pages remaining would have McNamara's pre-formed policy.

Johnson is described as terrified that public discussion of his Vietnam policy would undermine his "Great Society" programs, always insisting that there was no change in policy from Kennedy even as U.S. involvement was dramatically escalated. Johnson also skillfully manipulated the JCS, taking advantage of inter-service rivalries, playing senior generals against one another. If only he had been as skillful in foreign policy.

McMaster writes that Vietnam was not lost in the battlefield or on the college campuses, but in Washington, D.C.. That about sums it up. The book's characters were Pathetic - all of them: LBJ, McNamera, the Bundy's, Wheeler, the Joint Chiefs. Greed, ego, arrogance and incompetence. This book tells it like it is and pulls no punches, unlike McNamera's own explanation in "In Retrospect".

This is LBJ at his worst: deceptive, underhanded and foolish. His bullying and subterfuge are forgiven by history in his domestic policy triumphs, i.e., the end justifies the means; but not with Vietnam, for it ended in debacle. As good as Johnson was at his tactics, he was out of his league in the area of foreign policy. Especially in the Eastern arena. While apparently nonpareil in sizing up the motivations and weaknesses of his peers and constituents, he did not have the gift across cultures. And he received absolutely no assistance from McNamera who was equally clueless in this area ... and equally as deceptive and self-absorbed.

It's a comedy of errors. The DC clique of LBJ, McNamera, Taylor and the Bundy brothers listened only to the advice they wanted to hear. Everyone else was considered extreme. It was interesting to see Taylor change his tune once he replaced Lodge in Saigon, and then how the DC clique even failed to listen to one of their own.

LBJ no doubt justified his actions by convincing himself of the need to protect Great Society legislation, but anyone who has studied LBJ knows that his zeal for the Great Society was more about establishing a place for himself in history than a real care for the downtrodden. This tale is also an excellent example of how tough it is to prosecute a war in a democracy, when the commander-in-chief is faced with soul-searching alternatives of protecting his stay in power vs. protecting the lives of his subjects.

Good book and good research. This was my second time through. I can understand how this might be dry if one isn't real interested in the subject. And it's not a comprehensive treatment of Vietnam, but rather the political mess that got us there.

Although the Vietnam Conflict stretched over a quarter-century in duration, this book is a snapshot look at the pivotal decisions made in Washington DC that changed American involvement in Vietnam from an advisory effort to large-scale intervention. McMaster's research fully exposes the true depth of conceit and duplicity on the part of men like Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and even Maxwell Taylor and it challenges very effectively a number of the prominent misconceptions about the "inevitability" of an open-ended intervention (some of those myths continue to resurface in the reviews on this website). McMaster writes: "The movement toward war seems in retrospect to have been inexorable largely because LBJ succeeded in minimizing the participation of Congress in his decisions that escalated American military involvement in Vietnam. McNamara, reflecting on the decisions of the spring and early summer of 1965, recalled that `we were sinking into the quicksand.' It was, however, a quicksand of his and the president's making--a quicksand of lies. The support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would prove crucial to LBJ's and McNamara's efforts to conceal the changed nature of American involvement in Vietnam." (page 243). As I consider how American military forces have been committed to action since Vietnam (and particularly in the last ten years), I doubt if we have learned our lesson.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions." This book is an outstanding case study of why character DOES matter in our national leadership. Immediately after you finish this book, pick up "We Were Soldiers Once and Young" by Lt Gen Harold G. Moore (ret.) & Joseph Galloway and see the direct, on-the-battlefield consequences, of an arrogant and reckless decision-making process.

I read McNamara's In Retrospect as soon as it was published several years ago. As someone who was born in the 60's & was 11 at the time of the Saigon airlift, I knew very little about the war except what I'd seen on the TV show Mash (actually portrayed Korean War) & the movie Platoon. Despite having relatives who faught in Vietnam, no one every spoke of the war in front of me as a child. McNamara's book gives the impression that he, JFK, & LBJ all meant well, but things got away from them, the slippery slope argument. McMasters provides ample proof of McNamara's complete lack of ethics, & his continuing lying and machinations. No one in his book escapes blame. The Joint Chiefs of Staff continually were selfish & would not fulfill their Constitutional obligations. McNamara's insistence on using "superior" analytical techniques was laughable, as well as his belief that his experience from the Cuban Missile Crisis translated into him knowing better than the military how to proceed in Vietnam. I can't say that I actually enjoyed the book; the content made me angry. But it cleared up misconceptions from McNamara's book & is especially important to people of my generation, who don't know much about what happened in Vietnam. Also, I kept thinking throughout the book that JFK appointing McNamara as Secretary of Defense was a loss for the country, but what a gain for Ford Corporation. I wonder how long it would have taken him to ruin the company with his superior analytical strategies & lack of ethics.