Not surprisingly, this is a book in which the major themes are not political acuity and respect for the common good but are of an arrogant and willful deception, neglect, political infighting, and an apparently systemic betrayal of public trust . In the end, McMaster concludes, the most important policy and strategy decisions concerning the war -- including whether the United States should increase its presence in Vietnam or withdraw with dignity from the region - were rarely if ever discussed within the corridors of power . What mattered in the months leading up to the "disaster of the Vietnam War [that] would dominate America's memory of a decade ' was not idealism or bold policy making but self-interested machinations aimed at sustaining a web of lies, misinformation, and self-serving political gamesmanship .

A key to McMaster establishing the main theme of his book is to show convincingly that a number of related factors combined in the early

1960s in such a way as to entrench a kind of culture of deception in the administrations of the day (first under Kennedy, then deteriorating

rapidly during the presidency of Johnson ) and to exacerbate an already

existing set of problems fissuring both the subcultures of the Pentagon

and the Joint Chiefs of Staff . The first, and perhaps most damaging rupture emerged in what McMaster depicts as an era of tense transition that saw the New Frontiersman (the like-minded civilians who coalesced under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ) and the Old Guard of the Joint...

Forced together under the Kennedy administration, the two groups remained firmly entrenched and determinedly adversarial as Johnson came to power following Kennedy's assassination in 1963 . Put simply, as McMaster does, this was a political terrain almost designed to promote the promotion of a kind of institutional territoriality that would pit the Old Guard Joint Chiefs
against what McMaster calls "McNamara's Whiz Kids ' the group of civilian intellectuals and policy gurus "who shared [a] penchant for qualitative analysis and suspicion of...

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Book Review - Dereliction of Duty

McMaster, H.R., Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, New York, Harper Collins, 1997.

H.R. McMaster examines the role of civilian leadership and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States' direct military involvement in the Vietnam War. Believing they could base all military decisions on a systems analysis approach, the Kennedy administration's civilian leaders excluded the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the process of developing strategic objectives in Vietnam. The inability of civilian and military leaders to work together to establish achievable goals and a coherent strategy in Vietnam caused the sporadic American military buildup in