Dereliction of Duty

Dereliction of Duty by H.R. McMaster

 

Dereliction of Duty is one of those books that I would give a grade of A+ to the first half of the book; but a D- to the second half.  So about a ‘B’ overall. There have already been so many books about the Vietnam war; both the war itself and the politics behind it. The first question one should ask is “Is there really anything new that we haven’t read before?”  In a sense, you could argue that this book does fill somewhat of a void in the unpleasant history. The bulk of this book takes place in the years 1964 and 1965; when things were just starting to heat up and the country hadn’t yet been exposed to ubiquitous peace rallies, sabotaged presidential conventions, and Woodstock.   For me, this was the overall problem of the book though. It didn’t seem necessary to spend so much time and effort focusing on these two years alone. Yes, these years are important and, yes, this is where the tiger started to become too hard to tame, but there’s simply too much minutiae here.  There comes a point where it’s not necessarily enjoyable to read about every single thing that was said by every single member of LBJ’s cabinet and/or the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This book, as I mentioned, starts off wonderfully. It does a brilliant job setting the stage of how and why the U.S. got involved in Viet Nam in the first place. Contrary to what Oliver Stone might tell you, Viet Nam was very much John F. Kennedy’s idea. Kennedy wasn’t a peace monger who was slayed by the establishment so Lyndon Johnson could appease his rich government contract friends.  No, Kennedy is the one who first got us in the mess.  To be fair, I think had Kennedy had lived, he would have done much better job than his successor and the outcome probably would have been much more favorable. But one can truthfully only speculate on such matters.  If we’re going to place blame or credit, let’s blame and credit people for their real actions, not their imagined ones.

We also read about how Kennedy learned the hard way not to trust the military heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff  (see: Bay of Pigs).  He quickly changed protocol and instead learned to rely on his cabinet and closest advisors in military matters who did, in fact, do a much better job for their Commander in Chief (see: Cuban Missile Crisis). So when Lyndon Baines Johnson unexpectedly becomes the nation’s 34^th president, it shouldn’t shock many that LBJ kept the same system in place.  In fact, the majority of Kennedy’s advisors and cabinet stayed on board once Johnson took over the reins. 

Unfortunately for Johnson, he really didn’t know how to lead a country. He was used to wheeling and dealing in the halls of congress and generally worked through intimidation and palm-greasing.  He could very easily state something as “fact” before the case, and then quickly manipulate those surrounding him to make such facts come true.  This works if you’re an influential senator, but not as president of a democratic country involved in an unfamiliar Asiatic war.  Truth be told, the war was more of a nuisance to LBJ than anything.  He wanted to place his primary focus on his “Great Society”.  So Viet Nam almost became a means to an end for his other priorities of his administration.  We then must remember that when Johnson became president, he had roughly less than one year before the election of 1964.  So the main priority of his first year in office was ensuring he would get to remain in office come November.  Therefore, Viet Nam had to be kept out of the headlines as much as possible.

So the bulk of this book is Johnson and his cabinet strategizing one way, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff vehemently opposed to these plans.  Since the chiefs are basically ignored or given limited opportunity to express their doubts, this allows Johnson to do what he had always done as a career politician: shout his opinion and made sure everyone around him agreed with him,  or face dire consequences of being kicked out of his inner circle (see: Humbert Humphrey).  All of this really does make good, interesting reading, yet once we get about halfway through the book, we feel we’re reading the same stories and the same arguments over and over (and over) again.

So why does this book end in 1965 and not ‘continue’?  To be fair, I’m glad it did as I was really worn out by the end of the book.  It seems that the author could have kept his thesis intact, shortened the detailed years of 1964-65, and then continued with key events of 1966 through 1968 instead. For me, this would have produced a more satisfying read.  It was simply too tedious for me to read so many details of who said what to whom in the mentioned limited timeframe of two years.

Another point of irony: this book contains an epilogue.  I always thought ‘epilogue’ meant something like “this is what happened next”, yet for this book the epilogue was mostly a summary of everything we had already read!  The author simply takes his long dissertation and quickly encapsulates it at the end.  This leads me to wonder why he couldn’t practice such measures of ‘summarizing’ throughout his entire book instead of including it in a so-called ‘epilogue’.

Still, as I said earlier, the first half of the book really is stellar, and I probably used my e-reader highlighting tool to draw attention to well over 100 key statements made by those embroiled in the thick of things. I guess if you really like detail, you’ll love this book.  Personally, I prefer my history to be a bit more concise and summarized.