Dereliction of Duty : Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam

Rating:
Summary: The most amazing book I have ever read
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: An eye-opening study of gigantic egos
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: The Duty To Tell The Truth
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Important, informative, but too long
Review: I picked up this book because I heard that it influenced D. Rumsfeld significantly, and to gain more knowledge on the Vietnam War itself. This book gives a very detailed account on the inner workings of the J.B. Johnson's White house, and how the decisions on the war were made. The book argues that these were made with other (domestic, etc.) considerations in mind, and hence undermined the war effort. There is also a stress on the deceit of the president as well as the compliance (active/passive) of his staff. The problem with this book is that is it very drawn out, and gets rather repetitive. The epilogue summarizes a good deal of the book in 15 pages. I also would have liked more time spent on setting a historical context and outcome, something which might be redundant to Vietnam experts. Overall an important book which should have been edited better

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Summary: The war was lost in D.C.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Best and the Brightest?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Talk about research...McMaster did it. A scary account..
Review: of how we (the people) we duped/fooled into one of the greatest tragedies in our nation's history. LBJ was not the "victim" of poor advice as is often conveyed by the Left. This is a balanced book. LBJ, McNamara ... , The Joint Cheifs, they were all complicit in this deception.

Rating:
Summary: SLOW SLOW SLOW
Review: Ordered book on 8/18/04 and received e-mail on 8/20/04 that book had been sent. I just received the book in the mail yesterday, 10/14/04. The package was postmarked 10/8/04.

Rating:
Summary: American Hubris
Review: This book is one of the school in looking at the Vietnam was that "America could have done things better but".

Before discussing the thesis of the book lets look briefly at the war. Before the 1950's it had been easy for European Powers to conquer colonies with fairly minimal use of military power. The forces used by the Dutch, the English and the French were small although well equipped and well trained. Without going into the wrongs and the rights what went wrong in Vietnam.

What happened initially was that a local communist insurgency developed in South Vietnam. North Vietnam supplied its weapons using a port in Cambodia. The South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) was for whatever reason unable to deal with this insurgency. The United States sponsored a coup to change the leadership of Vietnam. Shortly after it started to send combat troops to fight alongside the ARVN and to use its air force to bomb targets in North Vietnam. The United States thus had a strong military force, which had at all times total air superiority. It should not be forgotten that the army contributed by the United States combined with the ARVN was an enormous force which at all times had technological superiority over its opponents.

Due in some degree to the success of the United States tactics and in other parts to the adventurism of the Tet Offensive the local insurgents the Viet Cong were defeated in the main by the end of the 60's. The North Vietnamese were able to keep the war going by deploying units of its regular army. The North Vietnamese regular units were able to infiltrate through Laos which at that time was in chaos and through Cambodia which was officially neutral. The casualties suffered by the North Vietnamese were staggering. The United States were not able to stem this flow despite hiring a mercenary army in Laos and sponsoring a coup in Cambodia to bring to power a government responsive to its interests.

Although the United States could have won a conventional war against North Vietnam an invasion would not have been possible. It is clear that China would have intervened as they did in Korea and they could have won a conventional war against the sort of United States forces that could be deployed in this sort of adventure.

The war showed that bombing was limited in what it could achieve. North Vietnam was a peasant subsistence economy. It was not a complex industrial nation and bombing would only really be effective if it was aimed at civilian targets. This would have been repellent politically. Taking all of these things into account it is hard to see in retrospect how the United States could have won the Vietnam war as long as North Vietnam was willing to pay a big price to keep the war going.

This knowledge however derives from hindsight. Johnson, McNamara and the others involved in turning of this conflict into an American war would not have known the immense price the North was willing to pay to win the war. In 1964 it was clear that a bombing campaign would cause considerable damage to the North setting back its economic growth. It was also clear that the commitment of ground forces would cause enormous casualties to the insurgents. Normally that would have been enough to win such a war.

Now what this book is about is a criticism of the political process that led to the war. The criticism is not one related to the morality of what happened but rather it criticizes civilian decision-makers opting for a policy of "Graduated Military Pressure". This doctrine is really a short hand description of the process that was used in the Cuban missile crisis. McNamara had played a role in this American triumph and wanted to try the same strategy. That is to make a series of demonstrations including air attacks commitments of troops till the other side gives in.

McMasters suggests that the attraction of such an approach was it allowed a slight of hand by which Johnson the President could initially win office and later concentrate government resources on his Great Society Program. He suggests that an assessment by the Joint Chiefs of staff suggested that to win in South Vietnam an army of 500,000 would be needed and that it would take five years.

The problem with the book is however something which comes out as an undercurrent in a lot of American foreign policy writing. That is the myth of American omnipotence. That is that if there is a loss or a set back, rather than such a thing being perhaps inevitable it is due to a mistake or a miscalculation. Thus after the take over of the communists in China in 1949 Truman was accused of losing China, when it is clear that America simply would not have been able to prevent it.

This book falls into the same trap of suggesting that in the mid 60's it would be possible to make a clear prediction about the outcome of the Vietnam War and to develop a measured military policy. There simply wasn't as the critical variable the response of the North Vietnamese and how much punishment they would be willing to take was not clear.

Despite the problems with the basic thesis of the book it is an interesting work based on detailed analysis of recently available material. A must read for anyone interested in the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Detailed Research with an Axe to Grind
Review: This book represents an indictment of the Johnson administration and the ramifications of prioritizing personal political fortunes (i.e. presidential legacies) before the national interest. McMaster�s describes Kennedy coming to power and bringing in the likes of McNamara and other �New Frontiersman� to attempt to reform defense policy. He also describes the Kennedy administration dismantling Eisenhower�s National Security Council structure, which effectively reduced the Joint Chiefs of Staff�s (JCS) voice and influence. Kennedy, having an uneasy relationship with the military, brought in General (Retired) Maxwell Taylor as his �military representative.� This effectively allowed him to distance the JCS, traditionally sanctioned to provide military advice to the president, from policy making.

For example, McMaster�s describes how McNamara and Taylor misrepresented the JCS concerns over the strategy of graduated response. They also deliberately distorted the Khanh�s opinion that South Vietnam required a strong response. Johnson, Taylor and McNamara also gave the impression that no decision had been made on a Vietnam strategy to stall any public criticism. McNamara and Taylor were able to co-opt and suppress JCS criticism by encouraging parochialism between the services and providing favors to them in return for no public condemnation. Most who have led soldiers will probably consider the facts described within this book as criminal.

My one criticism of the book rests in its clearly biased thesis. Beginning with the title, McMaster�s shows his one sided opinion, yet rigorously substantiates it through detailed research. Had he simply presented the facts, without characterizing them as lies and deliberate machinations of the system, he would have presented a more powerful case. The reader could base his or her own conclusions upon an individual interpretation. Instead, McMaster�s shows his predisposition from the beginning, immediately creating suspicion within the reader. Other than this one criticism, the book clearly merits attention by anyone interested in Vietnam, the military, or presidential politics.

Highly recommended for the military and political professionals.