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

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.

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.