Product Description

"The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C."

- H. R. McMaster (from the Conclusion)

Dereliction Of Duty is a stunning new analysis of how and why the United States became involved in an all-out and disastrous war in Southeast Asia. Fully and convincingly researched, based on recently released transcripts and personal accounts of crucial meetings, confrontations and decisions, it is the only book that fully re-creates what happened and why. It also pinpoints the policies and decisions that got the United States into the morass and reveals who made these decisions and the motives behind them, disproving the published theories of other historians and excuses of the participants.

Dereliction Of Duty covers the story in strong narrative fashion, focusing on a fascinating cast of characters: President Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy and other top aides who deliberately deceived the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Congress and the American public.

Sure to generate controversy, Dereliction Of Duty is an explosive and authoritative new look at the controversy concerning the United States involvement in Vietnam.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39522 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-01
• Released on: 1998-05-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

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 New York Times Book Review, Ronald Spector
The notion that a war like that in Vietnam, which began 14 years before the election of Kennedy and continued for six years after the end of the Johnson Administration, can be satisfactorily explained by reference to decisions made in Washington during late 1964 and early 1965 would seem at best questionable.

From Booklist
The "error not of values and intentions but of judgment and capabilities" to which Robert McNamara admitted in In Retrospect (1995) leaves out his deceptions that helped plunge America into the Vietnam War. McNamara may not have remembered them in his memoir, but army officer McMaster found them in the Joint Chiefs of Staff's archives for the crucial decision-making years of 1964 and 1965. Distilled to its essence, McMaster's thesis proposes that the plans and advice on Vietnam prepared by the nation's military advisers were systematically sidetracked by McNamara. Two facts exemplify the whole dense forest of facts McMaster explores: the prediction of the Joint Chiefs of the Army and Marine Corps that "victory" would require five years and 500,000 troops only reached LBJ's ears once (he didn't listen, obviously), and the Pentagon war games of McNamara's theory of "graduated pressure" eerily ended in stalemate. McNamara suppressed all such warning signs, theorizes McMaster, because he was responding to LBJ's anxiety to keep Vietnam's "noise level" down until the 1964 election was over and the Great Society safely enacted. As damning of the civilian leaders as he is, McMaster doesn't blithely exonerate the brass. They didn't heed their own warnings and acquiesced in McNamara's incrementalist policy, in the hope of eventually getting the huge force they diffidently advised would be needed to win. Writing about an ocean of memos, meetings, and reports as he does, McMasters delivers a narrative more diligent than dramatic, but his take on pinpointing the architect(s) of the Vietnam fiasco should prove, nonetheless, of high interest. Gilbert Taylor

Customer Reviews

LBJ and his assistant liars
This book is a clear indictment of LBJ and his closest advisers on the policy on and war in Vietnam. Why was the Vietnam War lost? It was lost because of the fault of LBJ. The war was lost in Washington before it even began in Vietnam. LBJ shared the same distrust and despise of the military with his closest adviser, Robert S. McNamara. How can a military campaign be won if a leader does not trust his military experts? How can a war be won if a president does not listen to the recommendations of his military experts and instead follow the strategy set by his civilian advisers who have little or no military experience?

Plus, LBJ and McNamara consistently misled Congress and the American people about the U.S. policy toward Vietnam as well as the situations in Vietnam. Can a war be won based on lies? I would think not.

The most outrageous thing is that McNamara based his whole policy of "gradual pressure" for Vietnam on his single experience in the Cuban Missile crisis. Only an idiot, in this case a super-arrogant idiot, would rely on a single experience for the war in Vietnam. McNamara thought he was an instant military expert just because he defused the Cuban Missile crisis. What a fool he was! McNamara should have studied the past great generals and military leaders on how they lead and fight wars. But alas, he was too proud for that.

Though this book place equal blames on LBJ, McNamara and the Joint Chiefs, I strongly disagree with the author on this view. The Joint Chiefs had been systematically excluded from strategy and policy setting in LBJ administration. They were powerless. Therefore, the failure of the Vietnam War and the dead of 50,000 U.S. soldiers should be placed only on LBJ and McNamara.

In my opinion, the best way to view a presidency is to see what kind of top-level people he uses. Looking at LBJ, one can clearly see that he used smart people, but these people were arrogant liars and master-pleasing compromisers. No wonder Vietnam War was such a dismal failure.

Why only four stars? The author is very repetitious - the same points were stressed over and over again. Also, the writing style was very dry.

A Timeless Classic!
The Vietnam War took the lives of 58,000 Americans and over one million Vietnamese, while consuming billions of U.S. dollars and leaving Vietnam in ruins. It also led Americans to question the integrity of their government as never before.

McMaster provides a detailed history of the top-level decision-making in Washington regarding the war. Readers clearly realize that while General Taylor (then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Secretary Mcnamara consistently withheld, watered-down, and misrepresented JCS views to LBJ, McNamara also bent Vietnamese leadership positions to his own and kept the JCS out of the decision-making loop to create a greatly "overstated" sense of unanimity.

The JCS, however, were far from blameless. Some allowed themselves to be bought off in return for service enlargement (Marines), reappointing General LeMay despite his bombastic attitude (Air Force), or maintenance within the existing power structure (Navy). Meanwhile, the group never seemed to get beyond inter-service rivalry - eg. the Air Force proposing "solutions" that featured bombing, the Marines proposing multiple point invasion and enclave-holding, etc. About the only thing they agreed on was that Mcnamara's strategy of limited response was doomed to failure - the French had already failed with 500,000 troops in North Vietnam, and an early Pentagon war game had eerily predicted the eventual direction of the war.

Why LBJ's direction? On the one hand, he feared being blamed for losing Vietnam to the Communists (aka Truman vs. China), while on the other did not want to detract from his re-election efforts and subsequent passage of the Great Society initiative through Congress.

Other reasons for the JCS' silence include the "lesson" of Truman vs. MacArthur, early training on allegiance to civilian control (however, this also include Congress, which also ended up woefully misinformed).

Mcmaster concludes that the Vietnam War was not lost in the field, nor on college campuses, nor the pages of the New York Times - rather it was lost in Washington, almost from the beginning.

What have we learned from "Dereliction of Duty?" At one point, it was "recommended" reading at the Pentagon's top level. On the other hand, General Sinseki clearly was pushed out prior to the Iraq War for telling the truth, as was Bush's chief economic advisor (Lindsay) for giving an unvarnished economic estimate of projected costs. Other lower-level generals have resigned to speak out rather than continue to support the Iraq War. At the same time, General Powell, in his new role as Secretary of State also failed to model forthright and assertive behavior to rebut Cheney, Rumsfeld et al, while Secretary Rumsfeld clearly failed to learn anything from McNamara's failures. Meanwhile, the book's author (Mcmaster) has been passed over twice so far for further promotion to Brigadier General.

Bottom Line: I do not question the loyalty or integrity of those in current military leadership positions. However, we have still managed to repeat the Vietnam leadership failures in Iraq.

Interesting subject matter, bad book
The subject of the is book is very interesting, so I struggled through to the end (with plenty of skimming), but this guy can't tell a story. Too dry, too long, no sense of style.

Tayloe Nickey