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

"I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution. If I have learned anything I should share it."

These are not words that Americans ever expected to hear from McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But in the last years of his life, Bundy—the only principal architect of Vietnam strategy to have maintained his public silence—decided to revisit the decisions that had led to war and to look anew at the role he played. He enlisted the collaboration of the political scientist Gordon M. Goldstein, and together they explored what happened and what might have been. With Bundy's death in 1996, that manuscript could not be completed, but Goldstein has built on their collaboration in an original and provocative work of presidential history that distills the essential lessons of America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Drawing on Goldstein's prodigious research as well as the interviews and analysis he conducted with Bundy, Lessons in Disaster is a historical tour de force on the uses and misuses of American power. And in our own era, in the wake of presidential decisions that propelled the United States into another war under dubious pretexts, these lessons offer instructive guidance that we must heed if we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

"For today's readers, what's most important about Lessons in Disaster is not the details of how the United States stumbled into a war without knowing where it was going; that story has been told in hundreds of other books. Goldstein's achievement is quite different: it offers insight into how Bundy, a man of surpassing skill and reputation, could have advised two presidents so badly. On the long shelf of Vietnam books, I know of nothing quite like it."—Richard Holbrooke, The New York Times Book Review

"For today's readers, what's most important about Lessons in Disaster is not the details of how the United States stumbled into a war without knowing where it was going; that story has been told in hundreds of other books. Goldstein's achievement is quite different: it offers insight into how Bundy, a man of surpassing skill and reputation, could have advised two presidents so badly. On the long shelf of Vietnam books, I know of nothing quite like it."—Richard Holbrooke, The New York Times Book Review

"For America, the Vietnam War was the traumatic event of the second half of the last century. Entered into with a brash self-confidence after a decade and a half of creative and successful foreign policy, our engagement ended with America as divided as it had not been since the Civil War. As a result, Congress cut off aid to Vietnam two years after the troops had been withdrawn, and the last Americans left Saigon by helicopter from the roof of our embassy. No account of that period adequate to the emotion and drama of the time has yet appeared. The dwindling number of witnesses of the period remains traumatized by its passions or divided by their own pasts. For younger leaders, an understanding of the controversies of their fathers has proved elusive, obliging them to slide into the same dilemmas in their contemporary policies. Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam does not fill that vacuum. It does, however, illuminate the five years during which the defense of South Vietnam was Americanized. Tracing the efforts of one of the most prominent public servants of the time, it seeks to come to terms with America's entry into its tragedy . . . After leaving office, Bundy became the target of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, which used him to illustrate the thesis that the cream of the establishment led America astray in Vietnam. The book set the tone for most of the subsequent assessment of the war. Bundy bore the opprobrium with dignity, never answering the criticisms directly and perhaps privately agreeing with some of them. Toward the end of his life, he began, with a research assistant, to assemble materials for reconstructing the events that had pushed America from hope to despair. He died before he could begin the manuscript. Bundy's researcher, Gordon M. Goldstein, has now turned their collaborative effort and some fragments of Bundy's writing into Lessons in Disaster. It's his own effort, representing the researcher's view, not authorized by the Bundy family. It's also a strange yet fascinating book. No one is said to be a hero to his valet; this book permits one to extend the truism to research assistants. Lessons in Disaster is relentlessly hostile to its subject, not so much to Bundy's person—whom it treats respectfully—as his policies. With the hindsight of some decades, it helps explain many facets of Bundy's performance . . . The book is an illuminating window into a seminal time. It is also further evidence of the inability of America to transcend the debates that tore it apart a generation ago."—Henry Kissinger, Newsweek

"A sharp picture of the extent to which advisers and the government bureaucracy shape Presidencies . . . Gordon Goldstein, a former international security adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General's Strategic Planning Unit, conducted a number of uniquely penetrating interviews with Bundy, who grew up in Boston, epitomized the WASP establishment, and became famous for his arrogance and intellectual acuity. Kissinger has said Bundy treated him with a special Brahmin condescension because of his Jewish heritage . . . A valuable reminder of the contingent nature of events while Presidents scramble from one crisis to the next. As A.J.P. Taylor once said, the only lesson of history is that there is no lesson of history."—Jacob Heilbrunn, The New Leader