You should really enjoy reading about Cabinet history before trying this book, but if you do, you won't be disappointed. This isn't a complete history of the Secretary of Defense (look at the DOD Web page for an excellent summary) but rather a look at the highlights. The best part, in my opinion, was the chapter dealing with James Schlesinger's term in office. Validates my opinion that he was one of the most under-rated and best Secretaries the government has ever seen and is the only real account of his stay in office that I can find. You'll get bogged down in budget detail (a necessity for any Pentagon chief to consider) but the historical perspective that Kinnard gives more than makes up for it. Good Cabinet history.

The premise of this book sounded appealing to me: the generals who managed the Vietnam war giving their views on what was done right and what wasn't. And, the author himself was one of those generals. However, in my opinion, this author may have won the battle of getting a broad response to his questionnaire, but he lost the war of delivering a good book presenting an insightful set of conclusions and supporting data.

Here's where I think this author and publisher missed the boat: they designed this book to be more of an academic thesis with a focus on a survey's results and less of an interesting book which took themes from the results and enlarged on those with specific interviews, other supporting data and anecdotes. That might have been a good book. This one really isn't.

Further, the author's data collecting tool, his multiple choice survey, allowed for some fairly close gradations in answers which seemed to blur the results. And, there was no analysis of results sorted by grade of general (1 star input same as 4 star) or what type of command they had. In other words, the author looked for data, the generals were kind enough to mostly reply, and he presented the data. It just wasn't a study or effort that was successful in adding much insight or much of interest to a reader. It's probably a fine book for an Army war college or a West Point course, but not much else.