[.ca] Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, ... (ISBN 0694518514)

From Amazon.com:
For years the popular myth surrounding the Vietnam War was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew what it would take to win but were consistently thwarted or ignored by the politicians in power. Now H. R. McMaster shatters this and other misconceptions about the military and Vietnam in Dereliction of Duty. Himself a West Point graduate, McMaster painstakingly waded through every memo and report concerning Vietnam from every meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build a comprehensive picture of a house divided against itself: a president and his coterie of advisors obsessed with keeping Vietnam from becoming a political issue versus the Joint Chiefs themselves, mired in interservice rivalries and unable to reach any unified goals or conclusions about the country's conduct in the war. McMaster stresses two elements in his discussion of America's failure in Vietnam: the hubris of Johnson and his advisors and the weakness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dereliction of Duty provides both a thorough exploration of the military's role in determining Vietnam policy and a telling portrait of the men most responsible.

The Duty To Tell The Truth:
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.

The Best and the Brightest?:
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.

The war was lost in D.C.:
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.

The most amazing book I have ever read:
I read this book at a University level history course, and honestly after reading many history books, some of which were dense and biased, I could not have been more pleasantly surprised with McMaster's book. His amazing discoveries and extensive research were presented in an eloquent style, differing much from my previously read books. The book tiggered an interest in the history and cosequences of the War in Vietnam as well as matured my naive views of the government. This book should be required reading for all University students, politicians, and military officers as it could prevent a future situation such as the Vietnam War due to its educational value.

Important, informative, but too long:
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