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124 of 126 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best and the Brightest?, May 17, 2004
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.
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86 of 90 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Waging War Without Consideration of Costs and Consequences, July 11, 2000
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.
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50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Duty To Tell The Truth, May 12, 2004
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.
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