Description:
For all the countless books the Vietnam War has inspired--the anguished analysis, revised history, and blow-by-blow reports--no consensus has even been reached on precisely who, or what, is to blame for America's failure in Southeast Asia. The antiwar movement, the media, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Congress, and staunch military hawks have all been implicated in the defeat, but a commonly accepted explanation (or scapegoat) remains elusive. Jeffrey Record may not provide the final, binding word on Vietnam, but in The Wrong War, he is prepared to place blame squarely on the shoulders of both the military and civilian leadership for their lack of communication and inability to establish a clear objective. As a former civilian State Department adviser in Vietnam and legislative assistant to Senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen, Record was close to the action in Asia and Washington, and he believes the U.S. set itself up for failure largely by overestimating the military's ability to break the Viet Cong and underestimating the Vietnamese will to fight; lessons that should have been learned by watching the French limp out of Indochina several years before. The Americans, he stresses, were on a blinding anti-Communism crusade, while there was much more at stake for the Vietnamese than political ideology, particularly nationalistic fervor and an insatiable desire to rid themselves of colonialism. Though his book is a fiercely critical analysis, Record attempts to draw important lessons from what he calls the "most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century."
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