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

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy was the prototypical best and brightest Vietnam War policymaker in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Bundy was, according to foreign policy scholar Goldstein, an out-and-out war hawk who again and again demonstrated a willingness, if not an eagerness, to deploy military means in Vietnam. Goldstein worked with Bundy in the year before his death, in 1996, on an uncompleted memoir and retrospective analysis of America's path to war. While drawing on that work in this warts-and-all examination of Bundy's advisory role, this book is something different, containing Goldstein's own conclusions. He painstakingly recounts his subject's role as national security adviser and ponders the complexities of the elusive inner Bundy: for example, the buoyant good humor in the 1960s that seemed unbowed by the weight of difficult strategic decisions. Among the surprising revelations: late in life Bundy came to regret his hawkish ways, although he maintained to the end that the presidents, not their advisers, were primarily responsible for the outcome of the war. Vietnam, he said, was overall, a war we should not have fought. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

An important addition to the literature of the Vietnam War, this analysis examines the man who was the president’s national security advisor from 1961 to 1966. For three decades afterward, Goldstein relates, McGeorge Bundy declined to write a memoir about his role in the decisions that plunged America into that war, but he changed his mind when Robert McNamara published his mea culpa In Retrospect (1995). Unfortunately, Bundy died before the project made much progress; posthumously, Goldstein pulled together a manuscript, but, he reports, Bundy’s widow quashed its publication and decreed its deposition in the archives of the JFK library. Therefore, this work does not derive from Bundy’s memoir; it is Goldstein’s negatively critical consideration of Bundy’s role on Vietnam. Flavored with anecdotes of Goldstein’s interactions with Bundy as his research assistant, the narrative conveys Bundy’s hawkish recommendations to JFK and LBJ, expresses Goldstein’s belief that the former would not have escalated the war as Johnson did, and hints that Bundy before his death might have been preparing a recantation on Vietnam. A vital volume for Vietnam War collections. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Times Books (November 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805079718
• ISBN-13: 978-0805079715
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #54,154 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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56 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent but Painful Analysis of the Buildup of the Vietnam War, January 19, 2009

By	Ted Marks (Phippsburg, ME, USA) - See all my reviews

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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 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 was elevated to one of the key 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 1968, 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.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The doves were right, January 4, 2009

By	Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable and accessible, December 2, 2008

By	Mark (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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.