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Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam

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Reading "Lessons in Disaster; McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam" is a very painful experience - especially if one happens to be a Vietnam veteran -- because the book demonstrates that most of American leadership in Washington during the Vietnam era consisted of a group of incompetents.

That is not a happy conclusion to take away from this book, but it is an inescapable one. There are few heroes in this book. John F. Kennedy may have been one (his assassination precluded any final judgments). George Ball was consistently steadfast in his opposition to the war in Vietnam. There were others, including Mike Mansfield. But otherwise the senior political leadership in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was woefully short of the leadership standards one would expect from one of the world's leading powers. And in this narrative the biggest knucklehead of all was McGeorge Bundy, the Harvard intellectual whom JFK chose as his national security advisor, and who remained as the principal national security adviser to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 as LBJ "Americanized" the war in Vietnam that he inherited from JFK.

That's a harsh judgment and an even sadder comment. Especially since the author says Bundy made "regular" visits in his final years to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, no doubt contemplating the families who were mourning their lost ones. Those must have been poignant moments for the Harvard Brahmin, because one has to assume that Bundy knew he engineered one of America's greatest foreign policy fiascos - costing the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. So he apparently had genuine regret over his role in that war, and at the least we have to respect him for that.

The one thought that nags one throughout the book is why was McGeorge Bundy, a 34-year-old dean of students at Harvard College, elevated to one of the key national security positions in the American government? After all, Bundy had virtually no practical experience in foreign or military affairs. Most of his life was spent in the ivory towers of elite universities with little exposure to real life. He had accumulated no wisdom culled from the hard knocks of life. Indeed he had no hard knocks in his life.

Bundy came from an old blue-blood Boston family, and apparently it was that pedigree that attracted JFK. And that ill-fitted pedigree may have been the problem, because from the gitgo, Bundy was not a very effective national security adviser. He had neither the knowledge nor the hands-on experience to understand or manage the nuances of foreign affairs.

Gordon Goldstein, the author of this excellent book, tells the tale of how a group of assistants to Bundy (who was on vacation at his wife's beach's house north of Boston) sent an overnight cable from the White House to the U.S. embassy in Saigon, suggesting that South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem should be replaced. This single cable, sent when all the key officials were out of Washington over a lazy summer weekend, changed the entire direction of American policy in Southeast Asia.

Less than three months after the cable was sent Diem was dead. Three weeks after his death, JFK was also dead, and LBJ was president; worse, the American policy in Indochina was about to go off the cliff.

The insecure LBJ wanted all of JFK's White House staff to remain so that there would be continuity. And most complied, including Bundy. It becomes apparent from this narrative that Bundy liked being at the pinnacle of power in Washington and that taste of power clearly was one of his biggest motivations to flex the sinews of American military might.

But, in fact, keeping on the JFK staff was a crucial mistake for Johnson - and the country. JFK knew his foreign policy, including personal acquaintances with most of the overseas leaders, and he was essentially his own Secretary of State (e.g. the appointment of Dean Rusk). Especially after the Bay of Pigs episode, JFK had an instinctive distrust of any and all advice he received from his own senior staff, and anyone else for that matter, and Goldstein concludes that JFK would never have allowed the introduction of substantial American ground forces into Vietnam, despite the recommendations of people like Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy.

But LBJ was an easy mark for the hawks. In the early months of his presidency Johnson was more concerned with the election he knew he would have to win to remain in office. LBJ told Bundy to put Vietnam essentially on "hold" for the first half of the year, so that bad news from Southeast Asia would not derail Johnson's election prospects - especially in view of the hawkish campaign of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater. Then, on Aug. 2, 1964, an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin gave LBJ all the motivation he needed to seize the campaign initiative and cement his national security credentials.

Events surrounding the North Vietnamese attacks on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin (off North Vietnam) have always been murky. But when a second (again murky) incident took place on Aug. 4, Johnson realized he had been handed his ace in the hole, and within three days, Congress had overwhelming passed the Gulf of Tokin resolution giving LBJ the power to escalate the war in Vietnam. Bundy almost immediately recommended that LBJ consider sending two brigades of U.S. troops to take the Viet Cong on directly in South Vietnam. Goldstein writes:

"While Bundy's proposal for an initial combat troop deployment to South Vietnam was itself momentous - the brigades would arrive two weeks before the election - his memorandum was silent on the broader strategic concept for how the United States would prevail in a counterinsurgency ground war."

Which brings up another weakness about Bundy's performance as a national security adviser. His focus was political, not strategic or tactical. Goldstein reports that most of Bundy's ruminations during (and after) his service in Washington were concerned with the political aspects of national security. His recommendations rarely dealt with the military mechanics of achieving political goals. He was quick to recommend escalations of troop levels or bombing campaigns, but he didn't bother with the details on how to implement those recommendations so to maximize success in the overall objectives of American foreign policy.

And, Goldstein reports, even in mid-1964, when the State Department or the Pentagon did conduct strategic studies (SIGMA I and SIGNMA II) on American bombing in Vietnam that indicated the bombing would only motivate Hanoi to continue the fight, Bundy ignored them.

Bundy, of course was not the only Johnson adviser to advocate escalation in Vietnam. Defense Secretary McNamara was the principal architect of the war, and Rusk and others were also pushing Johnson. Indeed McNamara recommended that troop strength be boosted to 175,000 by late 1965, and it was onward and upwards from there. McNamara, of course, recanted his war advocacy a self-serving book, "In Retrospect" that many considered a unique feat of hind-sighted hypocrisy.

By 1965, Bundy's relations with LBJ were deteriorating. Bundy spent a lot of time in Boston where the anti-war forces were located, and he was in constant contact with his old Harvard friends who were all becoming doves, as well as the media which was also turning against the war. Bundy felt the need to defend his performance in Washington (he was always a transparent individual), and he offered to go on television to debate the doves. LBJ forced him to cancel one appearance, but Bundy soon scheduled another with CBS, which did take place. When LBJ found out he was enraged and the relationship between the president and Bundy effectively ended at that point.

In 1966, Bundy became president of the Ford Foundation, where he remained for some years. But he never got over the fiasco in Vietnam, and he spent the rest of his life trying to figure out what went wrong. Sadly, from the "fragments" of notes that Bundy wrote to himself that Goldstein includes in this excellent book he never did figure it out.


Note: The writer served in Vietnam in 1967, conducting counterinsurgency operations in the Mekong Delta; he subsequently become a war correspondent and covered the wars in Cambodia and Laos He left Phnom Penh in 1975 on one of the last American evacuation helicopters.

McGeorge Bundy, even in hindsight, is hard to forgive for his advice to President Johnson during the Vietnam buildup. That said, he has passed on and what we are left with is a glimpse of what the White House years were like when Bundy was around and advising both JFK and LBJ. The term "the best and the brightest" was applied to him and others but Bundy failed miserably. At least he began to come to terms with this before he died.

Author Gordon Goldstein has cobbled together a book not by Bundy but about him, as he indicates, and it is revealing. "Lessons in Disaster" is a two-part narrative, the first commenting on the Kennedy years and the latter, Lyndon Johnson. The second part is far more intriguing. JFK had shied away from using ground troops or air strikes but within a year or so after his assassination, things had changed dramatically for the worse. Bundy, in arguing for more military involvement in Vietnam, helped to create the quagmire. Yet, in reading Goldstein's book I was struck by how minor a player McGeorge Bundy seemed to be in all of this. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was certainly more in the forceful forefront of policy decisions and one gets the impression that this Harvard dean....Bundy....was in the wrong place at the wrong time. His inadequacies were only exacerbated by his own intimidation by President Johnson. He should never have been in the White House and he left too late. A nice continuing career in academia would have suited him better.

Goldstein, without saying so, gives us a reminder that although Korea should have been a model for future military involvement, Iraq has been the third disaster in modern times. The questions that weren't asked of LBJ and his advisors during Vietnam were subsequently not asked during George Bush's presidency with regard to Iraq. He begs the question about why our leaders continue to fall into traps that lead to disaster and for that reason alone, I highly recommend "Lessons in Disaster". Its merits are well-received.

The reviews of this book by Henry Kissinger in Newsweek and by Richard Holbrooke in The New York Times give one a good sense for the seriousness of its ideas and its relevancy to current events. The real surprise about this book is how readable and accessible it is. The accolades "intellectually challenging" and "hard to put down" are rarely used to describe the same book, but the author manages both brilliantly. This is a highly satisfying read.

Goldstein does an excellent job of making it clear that Bundy, despite his brilliance and pedigree, strongly facilitated the escalation of US commitment in Viet Nam. The author marshals his facts precisely and writes with forcefulness. He had unique access to Bundy. The book ranks in historical importance alongside McNamara's confession, but contains important lessons on how overseas commitments can escalate despite glaring indications the strategy is wrong headed.

An intimate look at the beginnings of what became the Vietnam War, told by the author, but also through the eyes of McGeorge Bundy, who had a seat at the table when both Kennedy and Johnson made some of the most consequential decisions about the escalation of the conflict.

Debate has raged for decades over whether Kennedy would have pulled the troops out of Vietnam once he had won a second term. The answer, clearly, is no one will ever know for sure. Kennedy's approach was certainly more reserved than Johnson's, and he does at times, come off as one of the books few heroic figures. The reader can draw the conclusion that had Kennedy lived, he would not have approved the build-up that Johnson approved, but there isn't enough historical evidence to fully understand Kennedy's thinking.

Using the material he has to work with, the author does make a case that, as mentioned by a previous reviewer, George Ball was one of the few individuals whose resistance to a build-up in Vietnam seems almost prophetic in hindsight. Further, rather than seriously consult him for further information, the Best and the Brightest often referred to him as a court jester whose contrarian point of view was a mere formality. In the end, McNamara, Bundy and most everyone else was wrong. It's hard not to see a parallel to the decision to go to war in Iraq, though in this instance those who opposed a military action weren't tarred, feathered and accused of being unpatriotic.

At the same time, it is surprising to see how ambivalent Johnson was when he first received word of the "Gulf of Tonkin incidents" (another historical debate that will continue), until he realized how much political capital a stand against the communists Vietnamese would earn him in the face of a challenge from Barry Goldwater in 1964. When awoken in the middle of the night and initially greeted with the shady reports of an attack, Johnson makes a passing mental note and then immediately moves on to domestic issues.

The book follows several intertwining themes, most interestingly the personal agony Bundy experienced later in life as he reflected on his decision and contribution to history by making regular visits to the Vietnam Memorial Wall. And while sympathy may not be the first emotion that overtakes you, author Gordon Goldstein does an incredible job of painting a picture of an old broken down bureaucrat left to ponder the destruction his policies helped enable. Highly recommended read for fans of history, as well as for foreign policy wonks.

Although I didn't serve in Vietnam, I spent a lot of time, energy and career redirection ensuring that I would not be drafted. The war, to which I and most of my friends were opposed, was a central part of our experience as college and graduate students.

Lessons In Disaster reminds vividly reminds us about what happens when shibboleths (e.g. The Domino Theory) become operating tenets, where ideology passes for analysis, and where being intellectually powerful without meaningful experience can embroil us in catastrophe. Goldstein shows us how McGeorge Bundy, appointed National Security Adviser by JFK, and retained by LBJ, held powerful sway over Johnson if not over the much more skeptical Kennedy. The other significant figures, Rusk, McNamara, John McNaughton (a Harvard Law professor who believed in game theory), Maxwell Taylor, General William Westmoreland, all contributed to the tragically sloppy thinking and decision-making that sucked the U.S. into a war that was, even to those men, clearly "unwinnable" in conventional terms.

This is a powerful book, must reading for anyone with interest in how our government could have been so wrong when so many of its citizens knew better.

This fascinating book tracks the US escalation in Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson primarily through the career of McGeorge Bundy, who served as national security adviser to each of those presidents from 1961 to 1966. The story encompasses at least three serous failures in the decision making process, one of which can be attributed to each of the presidents and the other to those who advised the presidents.

Kennedy procrastinated on serious decisions about Vietnam, a procrastination that eventually led to the displacement and murder of Diem and a series of utterly ineffective Vietnamese governments. Johnson subordinated all decisions to US domestic political considerations and his desire to appear to stand up to communism. In the summer of 1964 Johnson allowed Congress to be misled regarding the naval incidents in the Tonkin Gulf and pocketed the resulting Tonkin Gulf Resolution for use at his discretion. After the 1964 election Johnson privately decided to escalate US commitments in Vietnam, including using combat troops there, and manipulated the decision making process to obtain the desired result.

The advisers also failed. Johnson intimidated them, including Bundy. They did not present all options objectively. What was presented was often vague and devoid of supporting evidence. There was no defined overall objective, no fall back plan if the proffered plan was not successful and no exit plan. Above all there was no analysis of underlying assumptions, such as the domino theory or the idea that the "loss" of Vietnam would be a critical blow to US positions all over the world. Bundy seemed to accept the idea that the commitment of 100,000 or more men was worth it although he was aware of facts and studies that showed that such a commitment would be ineffective.

Bundy personally cuts a poor figure. He lost credibility with Kennedy because of inadequate performance, and he apparently never had much credibility with Johnson. He failed to force his office and others to undertake the hard look at Vietnam that the situation required and that was his duty to see undertaken. He failed to fulfill the basic obligations of the national security adviser. For all his supposedly great organizational ability and allegedly formidable analytical intelligence, he was unqualified for his post and failed dismally at his job. On the evidence of this book, even Bundy's effort in the last eighteen months of his life to analyze the events of 1961-65 seems to have yielded few useful final conclusions or insights, but Goldstein was able to work well with what he had (fortunately for Bundy).

In the last chapter Goldstein presents a good argument that, had Kennedy survived, he would have refused to commit combat troops to Vietnam. In the end, however, the question of what Kennedy would have done is both irresoluble and irrelevant because Kennedy did not survive. A sad story and one that we recently repeated.

After reading this very fine book about how we sent our troops into Vietnam and kept them there long after it was obvious the effort was doomed, and reading Ted Marks' equally fine review, I have only a few additional points to make.

First, I agree that Mac Bundy was a poor choice for JFK's national security advisor. But I can see how the appointment made sense to Kennedy. First, Bundy was considered a brilliant Dean at Harvard who brought in some excellent people, including Kissinger, and handled the faculty with great skill. Second, Bundy was a Republican and foreign policy in those days was still supposed to be bipartisan. Third, Bundy had helped Stimson write his memoirs and knew all the important people in the field of foreign affairs. Bundy was a manager, not a deep thinker, but he turned out to be an arrogant and incompetent manager. Bundy's "policy" against working on the weekends
when he was out of town played an important part in the letter allowing the coup against Diem to proceed.

Second, I agree with Goldstein's suggestion that JFK would not have kept American combat troops in
Vietnam after the 1964 election, which JFK thought he would win. The best evidence of this is that JFK did not send combat troops into Vietnam. I loved Goldstein's description of LBJ handling decisions about the war as if he were still Senate Majority Leader manipulating powerful but somewhat naive Senators. While Bundy was out of his element in foreign affairs, LBJ was a control freak who lacked the kind of intelligence to ask: what is the strategy? All Johnson did was political and what he achieved was to be hated by much of the Democratic party. In the immortal words of Pete Seeger, "waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool said to push on."

Third, LBJ made the politically-fatal mistake of relying on an extraordinarily stupid bunch of
military leaders. At every step in this story the generals and admirals got it wrong, and very
nearly killed millions of people in a nuclear war. They had no strategy for victory in Vietnam,
because there was no prescription for any such victory, given that our weapons of bombing the North and sending troops into the jungles to fight the Vietnamese were completely useless.
LBJ's misguided policies killed thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese to no point.

Finally, it is shocking to learn that Eisenhower was such a hawk in pushing Johnson further and further into Vietnam. A man of peace he most certainly was not. None of the generals and advisors look good, 40 years later, except for George Ball, who LBJ refused to listen to. Someone should put up a statue to that good and wise man.

For those of us who were engaged in the politics of the Vietnam War this book sheds much needed light on what was happening behind the scenes. I find the author to be very even handed. Yet he stays focused on the heart of the matter and I never found myself being distracted with irrelevant detail

This is strong stuff, and it's very understandable that the Obama administration is consulting this work in preparation and review of the policy in Afghanistan. US foreign policy often gets excused for "mistakes" when the participants were actually well aware of the likely consequences. The Vietnam War certainly fits that description.

Lessons in Disaster

by Gordon M. Goldstein

It's been reported that Lessons in Disaster by Gordon M.Goldstein is must reading for Barack Obama's national security team. And for good reason. Tom Brokaw has called it "an illuminating book and a cautionary tale about the perils of intellectual arrogance overpowering good judgment at the highest levels of security decision making."

The book chronicles America's steady descent into the morass of the Vietnam war, focusing on the decisions behind the escalation that ultimately saw 500,000 American troops fighting in the jungles of Asia with neither clear goals nor a winning strategy.

The story is told through the eyes of former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, one of the "Best and Brightest" members of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

It took Bundy until the last years of his life to come to grips with the mistakes that led to the Vietnam debacle, in which he played a critical role. "I had a part in a great failure. If I had learned anything, I should share it," he said. Author Goldstein benefitted from interviews and analysis conducted with Bundy before his death in 1996 and has added his own brilliant insights.

Lessons in Disaster is both a fascinating and informative read. Let's hope it isn't too late to help avoid a Vietnam-style disaster in Afghanistan!

Barry Francis