Customer Reviews

A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam

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Let me start by saying that this is a long book, a very long book. As it should be. Starting with the "roots" of the war, specifically the fallout over Truman's so-called "loss" of China, Mann takes us through every twist and turn of political thought and action behind the war, covering the period from the late 1940s to April 29, 1975. The great value of the book and its length is that Mann frequently makes wonderful connections between events of different times. This is the best pure political history of the war, and as such should be a must-read for anyone wishing to understand why it unfolded as it did.

The domestic American politics of the Vietnam War has been largely ignored by so many myopic historians who have devoted most of their time to diplomatic and military histories of the war. Many of those histories are also ideologically tainted and repetitive.

Thanks to political historian Robert Mann, we now have a truly fresh, non-ideological pespective on the war. His very readable, well-written political history will undoubtedly change the way we look at this tragic episode. Mann's masterful account helps the reader understand the whys and hows of one of our nation's most politically charged military conflicts. He does a wonderful job of explaining how presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were haunted by the political ghosts of the political turmoil over encroaching communism in Asia in the early 1950s. The political damage suffered by Harry Truman and his Democratic Party in the 1950 and 1952 elections remained strong memories for future presidents who were determined not to let the same fate befall them.

This book will likely challenge the well-worn and politically motivated views about Vietnam that have been peddled by diplomatic and military historians who have ignored this important aspect of the war for much too long. Mann's provocative and controversial views will likely offend some and challenge the long-held views of others, many of whom are still captured by the "grand delusions" of Vietnam. In many ways, he is as critical of the war's opponents, as its mindless advocates.

This excellent and groundbreaking work is a very welcome addition to the historiography of the Vietnam War and is a must for any Vietnam War collection.

Sure the book is lengthy, but so was American involvement in Vietnam. The value of Mann's work is as a single volume history that focuses laser-like on the backdoor political story, an aspect of the conflict that usually gets much less attention than headline-grabbing military or protest developments. All in all, the book sheds much needed light on 30 years of deceitful shenanigans in Washington that left 3,000,000 Vietnamese dead, 50,000 Americans dead, and generations of wounds, emotional and physical, that will probably never heal. As the book shows, Americans are correct in not trusting their government, especially as it behaves abroad.

Mann walks us through a revealing series of presidential administrations and policies, starting with Truman's, and ending with Ford's. Each has a role in gearing up the meat grinder, some more honorably than others, but none comes off looking good as the country spirals ever downward toward disillusion and defeat. Ditto for the senators who opposed the war (Fulbright, Mc Govern, Mansfield, et. al.), lawmakers who, despite hours of pious rhetoric, could never get their legislative act together. Scarce mention is made of military or protest developments except when either influences major political decisions. As a much needed political chronicle of that 30 year span, the book succeeds admirably.

Mann's perspective is primarily a liberal one (which probably explains one particularly misleading review), but favors no individuals, liberal, conservative, or radical. He emphasizes the extent to which official hands were tied by red-baiting rhetoric of the cold war, in which every communist, be he nationalist or internationalist, was seen as taking his marching orders from Moscow. Such cramped thinking refused to distinguish a national liberation movement from an international communist conspiracy, thereby setting policy on a one way track from which there was no exit. On these matters, Mann is on solid ground. But on the allied topic of the domino theory, there is more truth to that theory than liberals such as Mann like to admit. The problem for defenders of the theory is that southeast Asia is not where the dominoes fell. Rather they fell in Central Africa (Angola, Mozambique, the collapse of the Portuguese empire) and Central America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, to a degree Guatemala). As more recent documentation has shown, rebel movements in each of these contested venues were boosted considerably by US defeat, demoralization, and subsequent lessening of a will to intervene. So in the rather ironical sense of being right for the wrong reasons, conservatives understood better than liberals the global stakes of intervention in southeast Asia. Be that as it may, Mann has written a very readable and revealing account of how Washington got us into that bloody mess in the first place.

Robert Mann offers a well-researched account of the Vietnam War, beginning with its Cold War roots. He meticulously charts the progress of the war from the French attempt to re-annex Indochina after World War II to its conclusion in 1975 when the Americans finally pulled out of this quagmire. It was a 25 year ordeal that left over 3 million Vietnamese dead. But, it was the continual loss of French and American soldiers that wore down the resolve of these two nations.

Mann begins by noting the early protest to the war in the Senate chamber in the mid 60's. He shows how this dissent was ignored for the most part by the various presidential administrations over the years, as the US found itself locked into a battle with communism and was bound and determined not to lose Vietnam, as it had China and North Korea. Even those who had their reservations early on, such as Mike Mansfield, chose to defer to the president, assuming he had information Congress was not privy to. If all this sounds like the Iraq War, then take note because Mann states that the lessons have yet to be learned from America's most humiliating war.

Yet, Mann avoids making too much commentary, relying instead on a wealth of material to present one of the best overall pictures of the war. If there is one shortfall to the book it is that Mann divorces Vietnam from all the other events going on at the time. The Civil Rights movement gets scarcely any mention, which was Johnson's main concern. Yet, it was Johnson who made the plunge into Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Mann uncovers information that casts sufficient doubt if any attack on American vessels ever took place in the Gulf of Tonkin, yet is careful to note that Johnson was acting on what he believed to be good authority. From that point on, it was a series of battles which the US felt it was winning, yet the Vietcongs continued to hold their ground. Mann notes the savvy of Vietnamese generals in this war of attrition, and how American generals continually underestimated their opponents.

The book lacks the immediacy of "Dispatches," and other first hand accounts. Mann has firmly placed this war in history, allowing the reader to view it at a distance. For those who still view Vietnam as a part of the present, this book might lack punch, but it makes up for it with a thorough body of research that helps the reader understand some of the reasons for the decisions that were made, as ill-fated as they were.

The basics of the Vietnam disaster are familiar to all of us. There is much new information to learn, however, about the political aspects of the conflict. All this and more is covered in great detail in this enormous volume by Robert Mann. Besides the familiar details exposed by David Halberstam some thirty years ago in "The Best and the Brightest", Mann documents in enormous detail the political events related to Vietnam each and every year beginning with the French defeat and running right through the fall of Saigon in 1975. This was far and away America's longest war and there is much to tell. While Mann blames Eisenhower and Kennedy, he reserves the bulk of blame for Lyndon Johnson who knew the struggle was hopeless yet refused to be "the first president to lose a war." Johnson also misled COngress and the country at large as to the costs of the war because he was afraid it would jeopardize his domestic programs. This book is most useful, however, in showing the evolution of later war opponents like Mike Mansfield William Fulbright and George McGovern. All supported the war in its early stages. Much has been written about this war and much still needs to be written. While all concede the war was a disaster opinions still vary on why. Could the war have been won? Was it worth fighting at all? Why did these political figures who later opposed the war support it at the beginning? These are questions Mann attempts to answer. The book is not easy or light reading but is a necessary antidote to a generation of books and films which portray the horror of the war but not the why's of it. It's a good read and I recommend it.

This is a wondeful book, very well written, and readable. Because it's written by someone who has worked in Washington and knows the political process, I gained a surprising understanding of the political machinations and intrigue behind our involvement in Vietnam. Mann clearly understands that his readership is not the professional historians, but the casual reader and people, like me, who are devoted afficiandos of Vietnam lore.

If you are interested in congressional history, this book will also be appealing. In addition to discussing Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, Mann also devotes more attention to the congressional side of Vietnam than anything I've ever read. Mansfield, Fulbright, McGovern, Church, Morse, Russell and others are very prominent characters and central to the story.

At times I thought this read like a novel.

A riveting narrative and an encyclopedic source of information regarding how we became involved in Vietnam, including who made the decisions each step of the way, and why they made them. Unprecedented, definitive and indispensible to anyone interested in both politics and the war in Vietnam. Although the book has been criticized for leaving out other subjects relating to the war, such as its impact on the U.S., and the details of the fighting in Vietnam, those topics were properly left by the author to be treated elsewhere. A true masterpiece!

In an interesting, provocative, and well-written addition to the growing body of thoughtful monographs about how the American imbroglio in Vietnam came to pass, Author Robert Mann has extended the circle of unindicted co-conspirators to include both houses of Congress and shows how through active participation as well as cravenly benign neglect they allowed the executive branch of the federal government to run amok. In so doing he 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 both individuals and governmental institutions out of control. Not one to quibble over words, Mann early on describes the perspective of American officials leading us into the quagmire was nothing more than a fateful series of delusions.

In this sense this book is a worthy companion piece to both David Kaiser's wonderful "American Tragedy" as well as 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. 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, Mann uses an approach that, like Kaiser's, presents a veritable wave of documentary evidence which serves to indicate 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, Mann offer credible evidence regarding a number of policy changes President Kennedy enacted which serve to illustrate his own deep concern and reticence regarding involvement in the former French Indochina. While JFK did in fact sanction escalation by way agreeing to more military advisors, he repeatedly quite specifically denied, (both verbally and in documented minutes of meetings with advisors) specific authorization to escalate through introduction of any direct combat involvement. With Kennedy's assassination in late 1963, events moved quickly and fatefully toward a blind involvement in a situation we neither appreciated the complexity of nor had any real strategy to deal with. Instead, Mann contends, we deluded by the so-called facts that officials like Robert McNamara twisted and turned to support his policy decisions and recommendations to Lyndon Johnson. In this fashion, then 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.

Likewise, Johnson's successor, the erstwhile Cold Warrior 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. Against all evidence to the contrary, he deluded himself and his advisors that an "honorable Peace" was achievable.

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. Personally, I am not as magnanimous; 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). Books like this one can help us 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 everything 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. I highly recommend this book. Enjoy!

Robert Mann, a former congressional aide, fails to disappoint in his comprehensive political history of the nation's longest war. Mann focuses on the politics and policy that led to the worst military defeat in American history.

For the most part, "A Grand Delusion" turns its gaze away from the action on the ground in Indochina, examining instead the decisions that policymakers in Washington faced during the war, the political pressures brought to bear on them, and the choices that they made over the course of twenty-five years. Mann finds the roots of American involvement in the bitter political debates that erupted following the "loss" of China and North Korea's invasion of its southern neighbor, as President Truman suffered mortal political damage from his apparent inability to stem the Communist tide in Asia. From those disasters, American policymakers took the first of several dangerous delusions: no politician could survive if he allowed an Asian country to fall to a communist government.

As the situation in South Vietnam deteriorated in the face of a virulent and effective communist insurgency, US government officials stirred more "delusions" into the policymaking mix: after the debacle at Munich in 1938, the West must always use force against its enemies, regardless of the nature of the threat or the national interests implicated; the VietCong guerillas were communists first and nationalists second, with their foremost goal the spread of global Communism and not national independence from the French; the unification of Vietnam under Communist leadership would threaten other American allies in Southeast Asia; America's national security depended on the success of the South Vietnamese government; and South Vietnam was ultimately capable of mustering the will, the political reforms, and military capability to defend itself, provided that the US stood by it until it could do so. Each of these assumptions, according to Mann, was disastrously wrong. Mann charts how these assumptions, like the progression of a fatal illness, infected every step of the policymaking process, leading five presidents to escalate America's involvement.

Mann guides the reader through the internal debates that led policymakers down this dangerous path, showing how officials from both parties clung to these false assumptions and how these delusions informed their decisions. Mann pays special attention to the relationship between the White House and the Senate, the branch of Congress that the Founders expected to have more of a role in foreign affairs because of its longer terms and power over appointments and treaties. Perhaps the most tragic figure in this book is Senator Mike Mansfield, the majority leader through much of the war, who suppressed his doubts about the war out of political loyalty to the President and the sense that the Senate must not undermine the Commander in Chief in a time of war. Indeed, much of the book is a story of how Congress threw aside its constitutional responsibilities to declare war and provide oversight to the Executive's foreign policy, and how it slowly reclaimed those powers.

The book has a few defects. The book contains far too many spelling and grammatical errors. Also, at times, the narrative bogs down in bureaucratic minutiae, leaving some passages as interesting as a typical inter-office memo. Still, the book is a noteworthy addition to the literature of the Vietnam War by reminding us how it came about and why. If anything, it has only become more relevant since it was first published: readers will find haunting parallels, for instance, between Vietnamization and "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

As comprehensive an analysis of the political aspects of the Vietnam conflict as I have ever read. Mann's focus is on Congress and the particular members who took on the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Mann goes into great detail concerning Congress' abdication of power and responsibility in its passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This theme of abdication forms the lense which all subsequent action is viewed. The bitter divisions in Congress and amongst the American people are on full display. Heavily researched and written in an easy to read style, I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the subject.