Review By. D.W.
Dereliction of Duty by H. R. McMaster is a carefully researched
and scholarly work that details the true nature of the political
motivations that influenced the decisions of Lyndon B. Johnson’s
Administration to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
The popular yet false belief surrounding the Vietnam War was that
the Joint Chiefs of Staff was able to plan and direct a victory but
that they were consistently thwarted by the politicians in power
during that era.
H.R. McMaster proves that the Joint Chiefs were never actually
allowed or even expected to develop a comprehensive strategy to win
the war in Southeast Asia.
Quite simply, the Johnson administration planned to fail in
Vietnam.
The White House, along with Secretary of Defense Robert S.
McNamara who headed the Vietnam debacle, knowingly subordinated
victory in Vietnam to domestic political issues related to Johnson’s
re-election campaign and to the passage of his Great Society
legislation through congress.
The fact of the matter is that Johnson and McNamara never allowed
the Joint Chiefs to fulfill their congressionally mandated role as
strategic advisors to the president. In fact, McNamara carefully
organized several effective bureaucratic obstacles that filtered
communication between the chiefs and the office of the president and
even to himself.
What is more appalling is that the Vietnam War strategy was
largely left to Harvard trained lawyers whose supposedly superior
intellect made them better strategists than generals with decades of
experience.
The Joint Chiefs themselves failed the nation by not
collaborating on the development of a coherent strategy for
Southeast Asia. They mired themselves in pointless inter-service
rivalries based upon nearsighted short term goals.
In all reality, the politicians planned for failure in Vietnam
and our generals rolled over and passively allowed it to happen.
Dereliction of Duty is a brilliant book that all serious students
of history, government, and foreign policy should read and take to
heart. It proves the truism that a nation should never enter into a
war that it is not absolutely committed to winning.
And most importantly, because the lives of Soldiers and the fate
of nations are at stake, wartime policy must trump domestic politics
until the conflict is complete.
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