Dereliction of Duty by H.R. McMaster Book Review

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Dereliction of Duty, by H.R. McMaster

New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Pp. 446. . Illus., notes, biblio., index. $27.50. ISBN:0-06-018795-6.

The Vietnam War was a traumatic experience for the United States. America lost 58,000 dead, hundreds of thousands wounded. Ultimately, the effort to keep South Vietnam from falling under Communist oppression failed. The question some ask is, "Where did it go wrong?"

H.R. McMaster, the hero of the Battle of 73 Easting in Iraq in 1991, provides a lengthy look into the American involvement in Vietnam. He describes how the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson made decisions to prosecute the war in the early stages. McMaster goes into incredible detail of how the men interacted.

In a sense, McMaster's biggest villain is not Robert S. McNamara (who arguably deserves that role), it is the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With the exception of Curtis LeMay, who was retained for an additional year to keep him quiet during the 1964 presidential campaign, they are portrayed as taking the path of least resistance as opposed to standing up to a civilian leadership that was not willing to be honest with the American people about what was involved in Vietnam. In a sense, they were caught between a rock and a hard place. All of them, to one degree or another, felt that civilian control of the military was "essential to a Democracy" (McMaster's quotation of LeMay). At the same time, there were deep concerns about the direction, and these men were being lied to and manipulated by President Johnson.

McMaster provides notes and a bibliography -- one can easily make one's own judgements about what he has written. His timeframe -- from November, 1963 to July, 1965, is small enough that he is able to cover it well. The details are present in a huge quantity. When one wishes to study, and therefore learn from, the mistakes made in the lead-in to Vietnam, this book is an invaluable starting point. Herein lies its value, which is immense. It shows, in great detail, how not to lead a country into war.

By only focusing on this timeline, however, a lack of context results. It seems to be a bit presumptuous to focus on a period of 20 months, and proclaim that the sole cause of losing the Vietnam War is there. Particularly when there are comments from North Vietnamese leadership that point towards the anti-war movement (see Bui Tin's August, 1995 interview with the Wall Street Journal and Vo Ngyuen Giap's memoirs of 1976 for their thoughts). Certainly, the mistakes made in Washington improved the North Vietnamese strategy's chances of success, but the anti-war movement cannot be given a pass for its part in ending a war that was being won on the battlefield in spite of the mistakes made in the timeframe McMaster has so brilliantly covered. That said, this is a brilliant book that deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone who is studying the Vietnam War. It is immensely valuable in the area and timeframe that McMaster has focused on.

Reviewer: Harold C. Hutchison

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The explicit purpose of H .R . McMaster's groundbreaking Dereliction of Duty (1997 ) is, as he states in his preface, to understand more fully how and why the key decisions were made by high-level military and government officials that ultimately "involved the United States in a war that it could not win at a politically acceptable level of commitment ' but as the full title of his book suggests, this is very much a book that focuses on the implications of lies and dissimulation on the policy making of this volatile era, and on the dereliction of responsible decision making at the highest levels of government during the critical period of 1964-65, from the Presidential office of Lyndon

Johnson through the manipulations by Secretary of Defense Robert

McNamara Pentagon and the ineptitude of the Joint Chiefs of Staff . Not surprisingly, this is a book in which the major themes are not political acuity and respect for the common good but are of an arrogant and willful deception, neglect, political infighting, and an apparently systemic betrayal of public trust . In the end, McMaster concludes, the most important policy and strategy decisions concerning the war -- including whether the United States should increase its presence in Vietnam or withdraw with dignity from the region - were rarely if ever discussed within the corridors of power . What mattered in the months leading up to the "disaster of the Vietnam War [that] would dominate America's memory of a decade ' was not idealism or bold policy making but self-interested machinations aimed at sustaining a web of lies,

misinformation, and self-serving political gamesmanship .

A key to McMaster establishing the main theme of his book is to show convincingly that a number of related factors combined in the early

1960s in such a way as to entrench a kind of culture of deception in the administrations of the day (first under Kennedy, then deteriorating

rapidly during the presidency of Johnson ) and to exacerbate an already

existing set of problems fissuring both the subcultures of the Pentagon

and the Joint Chiefs of Staff . The first, and perhaps most damaging rupture emerged in what McMaster depicts as an era of tense transition that saw the New Frontiersman (the like-minded civilians who coalesced under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ) and the Old Guard of the Joint Chiefs, many of whom had been field grade or even senior officers during World War II and who are presented in this book as parochial to the point of fearfulness . Forced together under the Kennedy administration, the two groups remained firmly entrenched and determinedly adversarial as Johnson came to power following Kennedy's assassination in 1963 . Put simply, as McMaster does, this was a political terrain almost designed to promote the promotion of a kind of institutional territoriality that would pit the Old Guard Joint Chiefs