 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | “A compelling portrait of a man once serenely confident, searching decades later for self-understanding.”—Richard Holbrooke, The New York Times Book Review 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. In this original and provocative work of presidential history, Gordon M. Goldstein distills the essential lessons of America’s involvement in Vietnam, drawing on his prodigious research as well as interviews and analysis he conducted with Bundy before his death in 1996. Lessons in Disaster is a historical tour de force on the uses and misuses of American power, and offers instructive guidance that we must heed if we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past. 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 a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in Brooklyn, New York. "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. "For today's readers, 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."—Richard Holbrooke, The New York Times Book Review "For today's readers, 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."— Richard Holbrooke, The New York Times Book Review
"For America, the Vietnam War was the traumatic event of the second half of the last century. Entered into with a brash self-confidence after a decade and a half of creative and successful foreign policy, our engagement ended with America as divided as it had not been since the Civil War. As a result, Congress cut off aid to Vietnam two years after the troops had been withdrawn, and the last Americans left Saigon by helicopter from the roof of our embassy. No account of that period adequate to the emotion and drama of the time has yet appeared. The dwindling number of witnesses of the period remains traumatized by its passions or divided by their own pasts. For younger leaders, an understanding of the controversies of their fathers has proved elusive, obliging them to slide into the same dilemmas in their contemporary policies. Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam does not fill that vacuum. It does, however, illuminate the five years during which the defense of South Vietnam was Americanized. Tracing the efforts of one of the most prominent public servants of the time, it seeks to come to terms with America's entry into its tragedy . . . After leaving office, Bundy became the target of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, which used him to illustrate the thesis that the cream of the establishment led America astray in Vietnam. The book set the tone for most of the subsequent assessment of the war. Bundy bore the opprobrium with dignity, never answering the criticisms directly and perhaps privately agreeing with some of them. Toward the end of his life, he began, with a research assistant, to assemble materials for reconstructing the events that had pushed America from hope to despair. He died before he could begin the manuscript. Bundy's researcher, Gordon M. Goldstein, has now turned their collaborative effort and some fragments of Bundy's writing into Lessons in Disaster. It's his own effort, representing the researcher's view, not authorized by the Bundy family. It's also a strange yet fascinating book. No one is said to be a hero to his valet; this book permits one to extend the truism to research assistants. Lessons in Disaster is relentlessly hostile to its subject, not so much to Bundy's person—whom it treats respectfully—as his policies. With the hindsight of some decades, it helps explain many facets of Bundy's performance . . . The book is an illuminating window into a seminal time. It is also further evidence of the inability of America to transcend the debates that tore it apart a generation ago."— Henry Kissinger, Newsweek
"A sharp picture of the extent to which advisers and the government bureaucracy shape Presidencies . . . Gordon Goldstein, a former international security adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General's Strategic Planning Unit, conducted a number of uniquely penetrating interviews with Bundy, who grew up in Boston, epitomized the WASP establishment, and became famous for his arrogance and intellectual acuity. Kissinger has said Bundy treated him with a special Brahmin condescension because of his Jewish heritage . . . A valuable reminder of the contingent nature of events while Presidents scramble from one crisis to the next. As A.J.P. Taylor once said, the only lesson of history is that there is no lesson of history."— Jacob Heilbrunn, The New Leader
"[An] astute distillation of the essential lessons now-deceased national security |
Average Customer Rating:   LESSONS IN DISASTER McGEORGE BUNDY AND THE THE PATH TO WAR IN VIETNAM GREAT LOOK INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE LEADING UP TO AND AT THE START OF THE VIETNAM WAR... THIS IS A MUST READ FOR ALL VETERANS YOUNG AND OLD. I HOPE THAT OUR COUNTRY'S LEADERS HEAD THE LESSONS IN THIS BOOK. Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam wish this was available years ago For those of us who were engaged in the politics of the Vietnam War this book sheds much needed light on what was happening behind the scenes. I find the author to be very even handed. Yet he stays focused on the heart of the matter and I never found myself being distracted with irrelevant detail
This is strong stuff, and it's very understandable that the Obama administration is consulting this work in preparation and review of the policy in Afghanistan. US foreign policy often gets excused for "mistakes" when the participants were actually well aware of the likely consequences. The Vietnam War certainly fits that description.
Takes some effort, but lots of good information "Lessons in Disaster" provides a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at the political machinations and gamesmanship roiling in the White House. McGeorge Bundy was the national security advisor for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The author, Gordon Goldstein, had worked extensively with Bundy in his later years for a biography that eventually fell through. Goldstein wrote this book instead. He examines the choices that led to the expansion of the Vietnam War. Kennedy comes out looking much better than Johnson in Goldstein's treatment--less hawkish and more restrained. Goldstein separates the chapters into six lessons, including "Conviction without rigor is a strategy for disaster" and "Never deploy military means in pursuit of indeterminate ends." While lessons with titles like these don't exactly beg to be read, they are well-thought-out, insightful, and detailed. No one can accuse Goldstein of "conviction without rigor." An Excellent Analysis This book provides an excellent detailed analysis of events leading to the expansion of the Vietnam War. It looks at the importance of presidential character and leadership when war, as an instrument of policy, is considered and used. JFK and LBJ used the advise of their advisors (McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara) differently and the results were evident. The book appears to support the long standing claim that JFK would have withdrawn all American forces from Vietnam in 1965,and furthers the argument LBJ used the war for political purposes and deceived the American public. The influence and pressure the military generals and academic deans put on the decision making process is unrelenting and daunting. The Best and the Brightest let the nation down, and waited over thirty years to admit their failure. The book should be required reading for any one within the current administration, especially the State Department, as well as anyone studying this most tragic period in American History. It brought the old saying fore: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I point the reader to the current situation in Afghanistan, and back to the recent decision making efforts in the Iraq war. But only half the story Maybe Lessons in Disaster exposes the most important episodes about the war in Vietnam from a U.S. perspective. But the story requires shared reading with Sorley's book A Better War. Sorley suggests that South Vietnam nearly became the self-sufficient republic that was postulated in 1965--a victory not a disaster. The final disasterous outcome was ordained when we pulled out of the game in 1973, while North Vietnam's sponsors showered their client with support of all kinds, physical and moral. Still, for a couple of years the Saigon government held its own. I think the critical point is that South Vietnam fell because of a conventional invasion by a large land army, not because of internal collapse. |  |
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