H.R. McMasters' book, Dereliction of Duty is a critical look at the decision-makers during the war in Vietnam. His central thesis is that Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all worked to keep the truth of Americas' ever-deepening commitment in Vietnam from reaching the American people in order to protect Johnson's "Great Society" program. Using previously classified materials, he compares what was said in public with what was said behind closed doors, effectively condemning all concerned. The research here is excellent; however, after careful reading, several questions remain:

Had LBJ done away with the "Great Society" altogether, and fully committed American forces to Vietnam, would we have won?

Was Robert McNamara a criminal for implementing the President's wishes?

Were the Joint Chiefs derelict in their duties for not going public with their criticisms of the war effort when they saw clearly we were headed for disaster?

Dereliction of Duty provides insight into the behind-the-scenes deliberations during Vietnam. It should be purchased and read for that reason. However, McMaster ignores the fact America had a commitment to a free, independent South Vietnam dating back to the Truman Administration. To ignore that commitment, it was believed, would encourage Communist inspired, "wars of national liberation," worldwide. Failure to meet this threat could start the dominos falling, ending who knows where? There assumptions were construed as facts in every element of American society. All decisions were made with that in mind. Vietnam was no exception.

McMaster has done a good job of showing that what the men in the arena did was wrong. He has made no attempt to show what should have been done differently that would have enabled America to extricate herself from Vietnam with her credibility as an ally intact. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon all waited for that answer as well. We are all still waiting! Radio commentator Paul Harvey ends his program with his trademark comment, "And now you know the rest of the story." Only when that question is answered conclusively will we be able to say we truly know, "the rest of the story."ÿ

History is more than the dry repetition of dates and statistics; it must show how the players understood their world. H.R. McMaster demonstrates in " Dereliction of Duty" the instincts of a detective coupled with a writing style that is clear and concise. He spares neither the military or their civilian masters in his analysis of the blundering and scheming that eventually culminated in the deaths of over a million people and the horrible scarring of millions more. This is not a story anyone who loves this country and its military will find easy to read but it is a book which demands careful study. Vietnam in many ways was a civilian's war. Led and directed in the US by amateurs, it inflicted pain and suffering on a civilian population who cared nothing for the high-minded concepts of the elites running the war. One can only grow increasingly angry with the intelligent fools who conducted experiments with people's lives, who thought to send messages with bombs, who so little understood warfare that they thought dedicated revolutionaries reacted like college professors or corporate executives. H. R. McMaster scores hit after hit on the bewildered American leaders; one wonders why he doesn't explore their unwillingness to learn from the successful British response to the Malayasian insurgency. The book will not be well received by those who like their Kennedys saintly and their Johnsons unsoiled. Both presidents wanted to control the military, to reduce its independence, and make it completely subservient to politics. Both presidents succeeded. They encouraged lying; they rewarded lap dogs. They ruined the Army for a generation and instilled in the American people a distrust of their Government. As my grandfather used to say when I had fouled up some task on the farm in a particularly bad manner, it took a real smart fellow to do that. In the case of Vietnam, it took America's "Best and Brightest."

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.