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Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
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“A compelling portrait of a man once serenely confident, searching decades later for self-understanding.”—Richard Holbrooke, The New York Times Book Review
I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution. If I have learned anything I should share it.”
These are not words that Americans ever expected to hear from McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But in the last years of his life, Bundy—the only principal architect of Vietnam strategy to have maintained his public silence—decided to revisit the decisions that had led to war and to look anew at the role he played.
In this original and provocative work of presidential history, Gordon M. Goldstein distills the essential lessons of America’s involvement in Vietnam, drawing on his prodigious research as well as interviews and analysis he conducted with Bundy before his death in 1996. Lessons in Disaster is a historical tour de force on the uses and misuses of American power, and offers instructive guidance that we must heed if we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Gordon M. Goldstein is a scholar of international affairs who has served as an international security adviser to the United Nations secretary-general and as a Wayland Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
These are not words that Americans ever expected to hear from McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But in the last years of his life, Bundy—the only principal architect of Vietnam strategy to have maintained his public silence—decided to revisit the decisions that had led to war and to look anew at the role he played. He enlisted the collaboration of the political scientist Gordon M. Goldstein, and together they explored what happened and what might have been. With Bundy's death in 1996, that manuscript could not be completed, but Goldstein has built on their collaboration in an original and provocative work of presidential history that distills the essential lessons of America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Drawing on Goldstein's prodigious research as well as the interviews and analysis he conducted with Bundy, Lessons in Disaster is a historical tour de force on the uses and misuses of American power. And in our own era, in the wake of presidential decisions that propelled the United States into another war under dubious pretexts, these lessons offer instructive guidance that we must heed if we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
"For America, the Vietnam War was the traumatic event of the second half of the last century. Entered into with a brash self-confidence after a decade and a half of creative and successful foreign policy, our engagement ended with America as divided as it had not been since the Civil War. As a result, Congress cut off aid to Vietnam two years after the troops had been withdrawn, and the last Americans left Saigon by helicopter from the roof of our embassy. No account of that period adequate to the emotion and drama of the time has yet appeared. The dwindling number of witnesses of the period remains traumatized by its passions or divided by their own pasts. For younger leaders, an understanding of the controversies of their fathers has proved elusive, obliging them to slide into the same dilemmas in their contemporary policies. Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam does not fill that vacuum. It does, however, illuminate the five years during which the defense of South Vietnam was Americanized. Tracing the efforts of one of the most prominent public servants of the time, it seeks to come to terms with America's entry into its tragedy . . . After leaving office, Bundy became the target of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, which used him to illustrate the thesis that the cream of the establishment led America astray in Vietnam. The book set the tone for most of the subsequent assessment of the war. Bundy bore the opprobrium with dignity, never answering the criticisms directly and perhaps privately agreeing with some of them. Toward the end of his life, he began, with a research assistant, to assemble materials for reconstructing the events that had pushed America from hope to despair. He died before he could begin the manuscript. Bundy's researcher, Gordon M. Goldstein, has now turned their collaborative effort and some fragments of Bundy's writing into Lessons in Disaster. It's his own effort, representing the researcher's view, not authorized by the Bundy family. It's also a strange yet fascinating book. No one is said to be a hero to his valet; this book permits one to extend the truism to research assistants. Lessons in Disaster is relentlessly hostile to its subject, not so much to Bundy's person—whom it treats respectfully—as his policies. With the hindsight of some decades, it helps explain many facets of Bundy's performance . . . The book is an illuminating window into a seminal time. It is also further evidence of the inability of America to transcend the debates that tore it apart a generation ago."—Henry Kissinger, Newsweek
"A sharp picture of the extent to which advisers and the government bureaucracy shape Presidencies . . . Gordon Goldstein, a former international security adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General's Strategic Planning Unit, conducted a number of uniquely penetrating interviews with Bundy, who grew up in Boston, epitomized the WASP establishment, and became famous for his arrogance and intellectual acuity. Kissinger has said Bundy treated him with a special Brahmin condescension because of his Jewish heritage . . . A valuable reminder of the contingent nature of events while Presidents scramble from one crisis to the next. As A.J.P. Taylor once said, the only lesson of history is that there is no lesson of history."—Jacob Heilbrunn, The New Leader
"[An] astute distillation of the essential lessons now-deceased national security
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2570 in Books
- Published on: 2009-09-01
- Released on: 2009-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780805090871
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Review
“The must-read book for Obama’s war team. . . . Many on the national security team at the White House are now reading Lessons in Disaster by Gordon Goldstein. . . . A great, great book. Well worth the read as the Afghanistan debate heats up.”—George Stephanopoulos, ABCNews.com
“Full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. . . . The book’s intimate account of White House decision-making is almost literally being replayed in Washington as the new president sets a course for the war in Afghanistan. The time for all Americans to catch up with this extraordinary cautionary tale is now.”—Frank Rich, The New York Times
“A Vietnam book that haunts the U.S. in Afghanistan.”—Stephen Schlesinger, Huffington Post
“Practically required reading in the West Wing.”—Jonathan Alter, Newsweek
“The Vietnam analogy remains haunting. On Mr. Obama’s nightstand is Gordon Goldstein’s acclaimed biography of McGeorge Bundy, Lessons in Disaster, which describes the flawed decision-making of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Vietnam quagmire.”—Al Hunt, International Herald Tribune
"No American who has lived through the Iraq experience will doubt how important it is for us to understand why and how American presidents take our country to war. Key to understanding how John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson took the nation into Vietnam is the story of McGeorge Bundy’s service to both men as national security adviser. Thanks to his many long and penetrating talks with Bundy, his assiduous study of the written record, and his mastery of the interplay among personality, politics, and national security strategy, Gordon Goldstein has brought us a dispassionate, powerful, and brilliant assessment of McGeorge Bundy’s performance during the years he was given his cardinal moment in history. Goldstein’s book helps us comprehend how Americans were led, step by step, into the abyss of Vietnam. It also provides crucial lessons for future presidents, members of Congress, and citizens as we grapple with the problems of where, when, and how to apply American power around the world."—Michael Beschloss
"A compelling and personally sympathetic appraisal of Bundy as a brilliant statesman but also as a fallible human being. Despite his remarkable intellect, Bundy ultimately failed to grasp the fundamental novelty of the historical challenge posed by a communism fanatically driven by nationalistic anticolonialist passions. In that context, presidential decision-making became increasingly focused on the imperatives of a local war and less on its damaging impact on America’s world role."—Zbigniew Brzezinski"
Thanks to Gordon Goldstein’s superb book, we have fresh evidence for judging between a facile mind and a wise one, and we can now assess more accurately the role of McGeorge Bundy in the Vietnam tragedy."—A. J. Langguth
“This meticulously researched book gives us remarkable insight into one of the most critical foreign policy decisions in U.S. history. Anyone aspiring to a leadership position in American politics or public policy should carefully examine this perceptive work and its many valuable lessons.”—Warren B. Rudman, former U.S. senator (R–N.H.) and former chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
Customer Reviews
An Excellent but Painful Analysis of the Buildup of the Vietnam War
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.
The doves were right
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.
Highly readable and accessible
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.
