The War Council : McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam

By Andrew Preston

Book Overview

Was the Vietnam War unavoidable? Historians have long assumed that ideological views and the momentum of events made American intervention inevitable. By examining the role of McGeorge Bundy and the National Security Council, Andrew Preston demonstrates that policymakers escalated the conflict in Vietnam in the face of internal opposition, external pressures, and a continually failing strategy.

Bundy created the position of National Security Adviser as we know it today, with momentous consequences that continue to shape American foreign policy. Both today's presidential supremacy in foreign policy and the contemporary national security bureaucracy find their origins in Bundy's powers as the first National Security Adviser and in the ways in which he and his staff brought about American intervention in Vietnam. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were not enthusiastic about waging a difficult war in pursuit of murky aims, but the NSC's bureaucratic dexterity and persuasive influence in the Oval Office skewed the debate in favor of the conflict.

In challenging the prevailing view of Bundy as a loyal but quietly doubting warrior, Preston also revises our understanding of what it meant--and means--to be a hawk or a dove. The War Council is an illuminating and compelling story with two inseparable themes: the acquisition and consolidation of power; and how that power is exercised.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674046323
• ISBN13: 9780674046320
• Release Date: April 2010
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

a fabulous additon to history

This volume provides sharp insight into the bureaucratic and intellectual sources of the expansion of American military involvement in the Kennedy and early Johnson years. It delves into the process much more deeply than do Halberstam and others, I assume because so much more primary material is now available. It is most striking in its portrayal of LBJ as a reluctant rather than an eager advocate of expansion. It is as if LBJ was swept along by the irresistible pressure that issued from Bundy's basement shop. This is a vital read for those who seek to understand the origins of the most profound American foreign policy misadventure of the twentieth century.

Stunning new history with chilling modern parallels

If you thought there was nothing new to say about the Vietnam War, think again. This book takes you inside the heads of the Washington policymakers who sent thousands of American boys to die in Southeast Asia and raises new questions about their motives. It focuses on JFK's National Security Advisor, the peculiarly named McGeorge Bundy, and shows how he championed a war that soon became a tragedy. Parallels with Iraq are always hanging in the background, but Andrew Preston is too good a historian to overdo them. In fact this book is a model of historical scholarship: massively researched and gracefully written, and thus a pleasure to read. As a biographical portrait of Bundy it's a masterpiece, and as a thrilling new guide to the origins of the Vietnam War it probably has no peer. I finished it in a couple of evenings by the fireside with a bottle of rye whiskey and half an eye on Arsenal's progress in the European Champions' League. That's quality.