The joint chiefs thus failed to provide the president with the best military advice available. They did this for a variety of reasons including excessive caution, interservice rivalries, personal relationships and obligations and ignorance or willful misunderstanding of the actual state of affairs in Vietnam. The chiefs, he demonstrated, had knowingly and willingly acquiesced in many of the administration’s decisions and policies even when they believed them to be mistaken. McMaster not only expertly dissected the peculiar mindset of Johnson and his advisers but, for the first time, also explained the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the legally designated top military advisors to the president, in moving the nation into the Vietnam quagmire. I doubted McMaster had anything new to add. Studying presidential decision-making was congenial to academic American historians of the 1970s and 80s who had been trained in political or diplomatic history and had relatively little interest in, or knowledge of, Asia or of military affairs. Herring had extensively-one might say obsessively-explored the subject of President Johnson’s 1965 decisions about Vietnam. Besides, as I noted in my review, a dozen or so prominent American historians including Larry Berman, Robert Dallek, Lloyd Gardner, David Halberstam and George C.

As a Marine I had never placed much value on the insights of Army majors and colonels, even if they had advanced degrees. McMaster’s subtitle was “ Lyndon Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. The book was Dereliction of Duty, a published version of a recent history dissertation completed at the University of North Carolina by an Army Major named H.R.

In the middle of 1997, almost exactly 30 years after I had entered the Marine Corps and begun my own journey to Vietnam, I was asked to review a new book for the New York Times. Ronald Spector, professor of history and international relations at George Washington University, is the author of After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam and two other books on the Indochina wars.

Dereliction of duty mcmaster