Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Gordon M. Goldstein

From the Publisher

A revelatory look at the decisions that led to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, drawing on the insights and reassessments of one of the war’s architects

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. 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.

The New York Times - Richard Holbrooke

…in Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein's highly unusual book, Bundy emerges as the most interesting figure in the Vietnam tragedy—less for his unfortunate part in prosecuting the war than for his agonized search 30 years later to understand himself…what's most important about Lessons in Disaster is not the details of how the United States stumbled into a war without knowing where it was going; that story has been told in hundreds of other books. Goldstein's achievement is quite different: it offers insight into how Bundy, a man of surpassing skill and reputation, could have advised two presidents so badly. On the long shelf of Vietnam books, I know of nothing quite like it. The unfinished quality of Bundy's self-inquest only enhances its power, authenticity and, yes, poignancy.

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.)

Karl Helicher - Library Journal

McGeorge Bundy was the embodiment of what David Halberstam called "the best and the brightest." Until Bundy's death in 1996, Goldstein, an international affairs scholar, interviewed him extensively about the Vietnam War and his role in it as special assistant for national security affairs (now called national security advisor) for Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1966. What results is an impressive investigation of the importance of presidential leadership in determining war-making policies. Bundy remained a strong hawk throughout his tenure, even though he did not believe escalation would ensure victory. Like most cabinet members, he accepted the Cold War consensus, which stressed a loss of credibility if the United States were to leave Vietnam. JFK never bought into this, Goldstein says; judging from Kennedy's diplomatic solutions to Laos, the Bay of Pigs, and, most important, the Cuban Missile Crisis, he would have removed the American presence during his second term. But LBJ, unlike Kennedy, Americanized and politicized the war to ensure his election in 1964. In his later years, Bundy came to understand how his views helped lead to the Vietnam tragedy and, according to the author, learned the heavy price the United States pays when a President fails to learn that intervention cannot be defended as inevitable. Strongly recommended for larger public and all academic libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Astute distillation of the essential lessons now-deceased national security adviser Bundy learned from Vietnam.

Prompted to revisit the war after the 1995 publication of former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's memoir, in which he admitted, "We were wrong, terribly wrong" about Vietnam, Bundy, then 76, began collaborating with international-affairs scholar Goldstein on a book about his experiences working under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His reconstruction and retrospective analysis of the pivotal decisions about Vietnam strategy from 1961 to 1965, when Bundy resigned as Johnson's national security adviser, remained incomplete upon his death in 1996. Goldstein's present work, informed by interviews with Bundy and access to his manuscripts, provides an invaluable record of Bundy's thoughts and actions during the war, as well as unusually candid commentary on his admitted failures in "perception, recommendation and execution." Goldstein is especially driven to find out why Bundy, Harvard dean and member of the intellectual elite embodying the "best and brightest" of his generation, failed to question the validity of the domino theory or test the logic of potential American military escalation in Vietnam. The book begins with a systematic examination of Kennedy's encounter with Vietnam during his first year in office, in particular his remarkable ability to resist the pressure of brilliant advisers such as Bundy to send in ground combat troops. Had Kennedy lived, Bundy suggested years later, America's disastrous role in the war could have been averted. Johnson, by contrast, accepted the dire warnings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his civilian advisers, which led tothe Americanization of the war. Goldstein goes step by step through this "strategy for disaster," marveling at Bundy's arrogant adherence to "the perception of credibility" as the most important consideration in American policy, trumping every other aspect of military strategy.

A significant then-and-now reassessment.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0805079718
  
• ISBN-13: 9780805079715
• Format: Hardcover, 320pp
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated
• Pub. Date: November 2008
• Sales Rank: 13,189