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

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

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Dereliction of Duty : Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of
Review: In a book that predates and yet closely parallels the important new work by David Kaiser on the same subject, career military historian H.R. McMaster masterfully indicts both the Pentagon and the civilian leadership for leading us into the Vietnam War in an interesting, provocative, and well-written work of careful scholarship. By doing so he, like Kaiser, has raised the level of intellectual discussion regarding the origins and prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Interestingly, this West Point graduate and career soldier who is also a well-credentialed historian, places blame for American involvement in Vietnam squarely on the shoulders of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their civilian counterparts like Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk. Also like Kaiser's book, it is a worthy companion piece to David Halberstam's memorable book, "The Best And The Brightest", in the fact that it argues that it was a number of specific individuals within the upper reaches of the military and civilian establishment within the government operating with their own personal credos, private agendas, and belief systems that led to the deepening involvement in Southeast Asian affairs.

Using newly available archival and other historical materials, the author argues quite persuasively that both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were seriously misled and mis-served as to the status of ongoing efforts through obfuscations and deliberate deception on the part of individuals such as Dean Rusk, William Westmoreland, and Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in both Kennedy's and Johnson's administration (see my review of McNamara's book). Thus, Kennedy died in late 1963 believing the situation in Vietnam to be much more constrained and careful than it actually was. With Kennedy's departure from the scene in late 1963, events began to move much more quickly and fatefully toward our blind involvement in a situation we neither appreciated the complexity of nor had any real strategy to deal with. In this sense, Lyndon Johnson became the unwitting dupe of self-interested efforts on the part of Rusk, McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs to massively escalate the war, eventually employing over half a million men in country to try to defeat the communist insurgency.

At each step of the way along the tortuous route into and the quagmire of Vietnam, a quite deliberate campaign of self-serving lies and deceptions was used to deliberately and callously escalate a war that many privately understood could never be meaningfully won. This is a wonderfully written book, and the author's no-nonsense narrative style is lends itself well to debunking the notion that the military were caught in a bind by civilians like Rusk and McNamara. On the contrary, they were willing and often-enthusiastic co-conspirators in the single most disastrous series of military decisions ever made by this country. McMaster writes with authority and candor, and deals with a whole range of issues, complexions, and countervailing situations with aplomb, honesty and verve. He makes the otherwise inexplicable series of decisions to descend into the national madness of the Vietnam War all too understandable and human. And while he does not specifically broach the issue, 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), I believe this book will quickly become one of the standard texts for helping us to 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.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Somewhat repetitious
Review: In summary: 1) LBJ had a hidden political agenda 2) McNamara basically orchestrated the war effort for LBJ but hadn't a clue as to what he was doing 3) The Joint Chiefs of Staff's recommendations were almost always avoided (this was repeated more times than I care to remember) I recommend: Vietnam: A History (Karnow)

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Cover Says It All
Review: It's rare that you can tell a book by its cover, but this is an exception. 'Powerful men, keeping secrets right in front of everyone' is what the cover says to me and the book covers that in detail. The other reviews cover the specifics nicely. I just want to add my voice in agreement to those who said this was an excellent book and a well researched work. Then I want to say "Read this book and then tell me you want me to trust the government on any issue, ever."

Rating: 4 stars
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: 5 stars
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: 5 stars
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: 1 stars
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: 2 stars
Summary: Excellent research, "dry-as-a-bone" writing style...
Review: Reminds me of the book "One Hell of a Gamble" on the Cuban Missile Crisis (masterful research, "textbook" writing style). I also must agree with some of the earlier reviewers of this book that nothing new is really presented here and the conclusions give no new insight into Vietnam. Disappointing and not really worth your time and money.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: An Old Story With Few New Characters
Review: The major contribution of this book is an indictment of Maxwell Taylor and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1960 to 1965. The utter lack of any context for the decisions or lack of them made by the JCS causes this book to suffer from tunnelvision. McMaster has written what amounts to an excellent treatise for his graduate degree; as a book, it is lacking. It is a valuable contribution to the history of the JCS and its marginalization by the Johnson administration, but most readers already know of the duplicity of McNamara, the complicity of Wheeler, and the simplicity of LeMay. McMaster mentions Johnson's fondness for his domestic programs in a rather offhand manner, betraying the bias of a career military officer. This book may serve as a valuable companion piece to other works on the subject, but that is a judgment better made by scholars in the coming years. Harry Summers' "On Strategy" (1982) covers much of the same material with a broader perspective.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: If it is written, then it must be so.
Review: The public get soaked once more from a "Vietnam" book. Nothing new is in this book. We (those in the military) have read this drival over and over in hopes of finding really useful information. Will the repetition ever stop? The extra star is for the effort in research. This would have been an excellent dissertation...no challenge from anyone.


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