Somber lessons from Vietnam
“Road to Disaster” drives them home. Review,
The Vietnam War continues to haunt America’s conscience, as well as historians, who keep searching for the truth of how we stumbled into Southeast Asia and stayed year after bloody year.
Our latest literary attempt at understanding the war comes from Brian VanDeMark, a history professor at the United States Naval Academy who has written “Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam” (Custom House, 542 pp., ★★★★), an absolutely first-rate analysis of U.S. involvement in that war-torn country.
VanDeMark brings invaluable perspective to this evaluation. He co-wrote “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” a remarkable 1995 book by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that gave a compelling account of the events that drove the war.
As a researcher, VanDeMark worked closely with both McNamara, perhaps the American official most closely associated with the war, and with Clark Clifford, who replaced McNamara as defense secretary and championed a policy of de-escalation.
These relationships and the author’s previous work provide detailed historical background. We learn about the inability of civilian leaders and military brass to trust one another, diplomatic assertions that were hideously wrong, the military’s arrogant mistakes and the utter failure of Americans to understand the Vietnamese people they were fighting for, and against.
This book, however, goes further by incorporating research from psychologists and behavioral scientists to answer: How did they get it so wrong?
The result is an engrossing narrative of the inept handling of the war, and how bad decisions can be made by intelligent, well-meaning officials responsible for millions of lives. Simply put, Americans blew it by making unsound choices and refusing to reconsider con- clusions once they were made.
Consider the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. American generals were convinced the North could be bombed into submission, but they were basing their belief on past success against an industrialized enemy in World War II. Vietnam, however, was an agricultural nation with relatively little industry, so the bombs had little effect, other than to stir up civilian resentment against America and strengthen the North’s resolve.
And back home, President Lyndon Johnson faced relentless political pressure to succeed in Vietnam and growing public opposition to the war. The administration fell victim to the sunk cost fallacy – “the more invested people and organizations are in a failing course of action, the more unwilling they are to give up and change their course.”
America invested heavily and tragically in Vietnam: wealth, pride and blood. “Road to Disaster” is a compelling account of how that expenditure was made and will leave readers wondering how new investments, in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, are being decided now.