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

As national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy was the prototypical “best and brightest” Vietnam War policymaker in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Bundy was, according to foreign policy scholar Goldstein, an out-and-out war hawk who “again and again demonstrated a willingness, if not an eagerness, to deploy military means” in Vietnam. Goldstein worked with Bundy in the year before his death, in 1996, on an uncompleted memoir and “retrospective analysis of America's path to war.” While drawing on that work in this warts-and-all examination of Bundy's advisory role, this book is something different, containing Goldstein's own conclusions. He painstakingly recounts his subject's role as national security adviser and ponders the complexities of the elusive “inner Bundy”: for example, the buoyant good humor in the 1960s that seemed unbowed by the weight of difficult strategic decisions. Among the surprising revelations: late in life Bundy came to regret his hawkish ways, although he maintained to the end that the presidents, not their advisers, were primarily responsible for the outcome of the war. Vietnam, he said, was “overall, a war we should not have fought.” (Nov.)