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    Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
    Unavailable
    Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
    Unavailable
    Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
    Ebook406 pages7 hours

    Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam

    By Gordon M. Goldstein

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 3, 2013
    ISBN9781466852112
    Unavailable
    Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
    Author

    Gordon M. Goldstein

    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 the author of Lessons in Disaster. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for Lessons in Disaster

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    • 4/5
      An infuriating book because I so hate how decisions were made about Americanizing the Vietnam War when they did not need to have been made IF McGeorge Bundy had been a better national security advisor, IF Lyndon Johnson had not cared only about his election, IF George Ball and others had been listened to, IF assumptions such as the domino theory had been discussed, analyzed, and considered fraudulent, IF war games' results had been paid attention to, and, most of all, IF Kennedy had not been assassinated, then and only then could so many lives have not been wasted. And all for what???? The parallels to what is happening today in Afghanistan and in the Obama administration are striking.
    • 4/5
      LESSONS IN DISASTER by Gordon Goldstein is about how Kennedy and Johnson decided to go to war in Vietnam. The book is good but he does not put enough emphasis on how Eisenhower started the war. What I mean is that he prevented the resolution of the previous war and made a commitment almost certain to lead to the next one.The Geneva Conference of 1954 negotiated a settlement of the colonial war that France militarily lost. Up to then Vietnam was universally considered a single country. The settlement established two temporary administrations for two years - explicitly not a division into two countries. Eisenhower and Kennedy both agreed that the war should not be settled on that basis and Eisenhower committed the US to support for a new regime in the south contrary to the settlement. At the end of the two years the situation was that Vietnam was one country with a civil war between two contending governments.By preventing the end of the last war Eisenhower started the next. He was trying to get his war goals without sending in troops. His puppet regime did his fighting for him. Goldstein does say that the division was temporary (page 50). But when on page 25 he writes of "The accounts of all of the other central protagonists in the Vietnam drama - from the beginning of U.S. military engagement [1961] ..." he leaves out the most central of all: Eisenhower started the war by proxy with the troops of his government in "South Vietnam".