Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Just when you thought you'd heard everything you would ever want to know about America's hapless descent into the Vietnam quagmire, along comes a book to boggle your mind with new revelations of ineptness, duplicity, and arrogance amongst the senior-most officials of the United States.

That such information has taken 30 years to see the light of day says much about the masterful chicanery of the principals and their cohorts, according to military historian H.F. McMaster. He charges President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara not only with cynically leading America into the Vietnam War, but with trying to escape responsibility by distorting the historical record with half-truths, misstatements, and outright lies.

Much of this has been inferred by the many critics who never could fathom why America got involved in Vietnam in the first place and who deplored the whole adventure as an inexplicable waste of lives and money. But before ennui moves you on to other topics, consider this: McMaster's Dereliction of Duty glows with the convincing detail and period patina that only the transcribed White House phone conversations and the secret diaries of powerful men can provide. It is a cautionary tale of power and political manipulation, and all too explicable.

McMaster brings a new generation's energy to the Vietnam debate. He's a young officer who signed up long after America's Vietnam involvement had ended, only to find the military haunted by the war and its unanswered questions. Proudly participating in Operation Desert Storm, McMaster was determined to find out for himself why Vietnam veterans were in shameful denial about their own experiences. His search for the truth took him from graduate work in American History at the University of North Carolina, along a paper trail that included Lyndon Johnson's newly released phone transcripts, Marine Commandant Wallace Greene's secret diaries, and thousands of other documents previously unavailable to historians and researchers. McMaster says in his introduction, "The discoveries astonished me, and I felt compelled to share them with others."

It is the canniness of McMaster's research that makes his book so interesting, comparing, as he does, the public and private record of the most critical years of decision. He discovered that the minutes of the National Security Council and Johnson's formal meetings -- upon which the current literature of the war relies so heavily -- are an imperfect record, because important policies were made at private meetings of the president and his inner circle, the records of which are only now becoming available.

McMaster traces Vietnam policy-making from November 1963, when Johnson took over from the assassinated John F. Kennedy, to July 1965, when the newly-elected president sent 125,000 troops to Vietnam and Americanized the war. McMaster pastes all the puzzle pieces together to reveal a plot Shakespearean in its proportions, in which those who practiced to deceive were tangled in the web of their own making.

What Lyndon Johnson feared most in 1964, McMaster determined, was losing the chance to win the presidency in his own right. He saw Vietnam principally as a danger to that goal. After the election, he feared that an American military response to the deteriorating situation in Vietnam would jeopardize chances that his landmark legislation, his Great Society, would pass Congress. What Johnson needed was a strategy to achieve both goals. This was provided by Robert McNamara, who served not only as secretary of defense, but as the president's principal policy architect.

McNamara would help the president first protect his electoral chances and then pass the Great Society by offering a strategy for Vietnam that would appear cheap and could be conducted with minimal public and congressional attention. McNamara's strategy of graduated military pressure, McMaster writes, permitted Johnson to pursue his objective of not losing the war in Vietnam while postponing the "day of reckoning" and keeping the whole question out of public debate all the while.

You might argue that we've heard all this before, but it is in the detail of McMaster's work that it becomes apparent that the president and his principal advisers believed that the ends justified any means -- even persistent betrayal of public trust.

According to McMaster, the record shows that Johnson recognized from the beginning that he needed to make a clear choice in Vietnam between war and withdrawal from the region. Neither of these choices were palatable to him, so he turned to his all-too-compliant defense secretary for another option.

The flaws in McNamara's strategy of graduated pressure were apparent from the beginning. It ignored the uncertainties of war and the unpredictable psychology of violence in favor of systems analysis quantification -- the contribution of the defense secretary's "whiz kids" to modern warfare. That graduated pressure was unlikely to break North Vietnam's will was readily apparent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of whom wanted to pull out of Vietnam or go all out to win. The strategy's limitations were further confirmed in two crucial Pentagon war games in 1964 that resulted in hypothetically disastrous troop escalations in a war zooming out of control.

But McMaster writes that these problems were deemed secondary to the president's domestic goals. Graduated pressure allowed him to determine the level of military force in Vietnam that would be politically palatable to the American public in an election year. Johnson then based his Military strategy on the forces he intended to make available -- regardless of whether that strategy addressed the stated policy goal of keeping South Vietnam anti-communist.

The author contends that, instead of tailoring the means to achieve the end, Johnson decided on the means without any regard to the end, virtually guaranteeing failure. He was interested in short term goals like his election and the Great Society, with the containment of communism at the most equal in his thinking and possibly even a less important factor than his domestic political agenda.

McMaster paints a devastating portrait of Robert McNamara as a sycophant resolved to give only the advice he knew LBJ wanted to hear, even though he was aware the strategy would ultimately fail. The author blames the defense secretary's collusion with the president for the public's ignorance of the true state of affairs at that crucial time.

The author gives examples of McNamara's misleading and outright lying to a Congress trying to get a handle on a Vietnam policy whose shape was increasingly difficult to conceal -- particularly with Johnson running as the "peace candidate" in 1964 while planning an expansion of the war. McMaster says the eventual massive escalation of the war would have been impossible without McNamara's manipulation of Congress, the media, and the American people, activities given scant attention in McNamara's seemingly mea culpa book, In Retrospect. What McNamara failed to admit in his book, the author contends, was that the tactics he used to reconcile the American commitment to Vietnam with Johnson's domestic political concerns ultimately led to the flawed strategy under which the war was prosecuted.

McNamara's eminence at this time was unassailable, the author says, because the president was insecure and distrustful of anyone but his closest civilian advisers. Johnson viewed the Joint Chiefs of Staff with suspicion. As for the Joint Chiefs, says McMaster, they too failed the country: Knowing that the U.S. effort in Vietnam would take many years and hundreds of thousands of lives, they failed to forcefully present those estimates to Johnson in the hope that over time they could transform the American commitment into one more consistent with their own vision.

The author says Johnson was not interested in frank military advice from the chiefs; he simply wanted support for his policies based on the credibility associated with their uniforms. When the situation in Vietnam seemed to demand action, the president turned to his civilian advisers to determine how to postpone a decision. The relations between the president, the defense secretary, and the Joint Chiefs, says McMaster, led to the curious situation in which the nation went to war without the benefit of effective advice from the organization with statutory responsibility as the nation's principal military advisers.

McMaster finds many others close to the president in collusive denial, such as aide McGeorge Bundy, willing to advocate an expansion of the American military in both North and South Vietnam despite pessimism verging on defeatism.

Another example is the patrician soldier-statesman Gen. Maxwell Taylor, blithely misleading his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the president's intentions, and then as Ambassador to Vietnam, setting aside his own misgivings about an extensive American troop commitment to the war, and going along with the recommendations for exactly that by the commander on the ground, Gen. William C. Westmoreland.

But the dominant figure in the book is President Lyndon Baines Johnson, busily twisting arms and manipulating policy and opinion makers to forge a contrived consensus behind what many in his administration knew would lead to disaster in Vietnam. The author argues that not only did Johnson fail to recognize arguments against his Vietnam policy, and the strategy under which that policy was executed, but deliberately suppressed any arguments against the assumptions on which his policies were based. In the end, Johnson should not have been surprised by the consequences of his early decisions. The author convincingly argues that the president had disregarded the advice he did not want to hear in favor of a policy based on the pursuit of his own political fortunes and his beloved domestic programs.

McMaster's scholarship and presentation is exemplary in Dereliction of Duty, spiced as it is by the righteous indignation of one who, through the discovery of the White House tapes, finds the smoking gun of perfidious behavior in the highest offices of the land. The author's arguments are coherent and convincing and important to the historical record. But his findings will probably do little to assuage the angst of disillusioned Vietnam vets and the many others who are still trying to live with the waste of America's most controversial foreign war.