In this book, Prof. Logevall argued that the US's involvement in Vietnam was not inevitable, there were opportunities where the US could have left Vietnam, none better than the months immediately after Lyndon Johnson was elected as President. Unfortunately he was not of the temperament to read the signals coming from his own electorate or the international community. In the end, he would have to bear a big part of the responsibility for bringing the US into war.Whether one agrees with the thesis, this is an excellent book. Extensively researched, logically argued, and fluidly written, the book takes the reader through an exploration of the circumstances surrounding Vietnam after the French left. It takes a broad frame of reference, tackling the issues including presidential leadership, their advisers, the attitude of the electorate and the international political climate. He examined the options available at each point between 1964 and 1965 and whether a different decision could have been made. 'Yes', he argued, and in hindsight might not have been difficult, but no, these roads were not taken.
The different questions he explored include: Would JFK keep the US out of the war had he lived as some came to argue (e.g. McNamara in his book In Retrospect)? Were the attitudes of the elites at that time as they said they were after the war (eg. George Bell)? Did the 'Domino Theory' really hold? To the first of these questions, the author examined JFK’s fundamental doubts about the US’s agency in dealing with the political issue in Vietnam (pg. 37) and compared it against his actual actions. In that section the author started one of the paragraphs with these two words: And yet. That’s the author's lament. JFK, despite his doubts, first adopted a wait-and-see attitude, but would later boxed himself in with his rhetoric. The author systematically dismantled the enduring myth that JFK would have kept the US out of the war if only he had lived.
Of more interest is why LBJ, despite having won a large mandate from an electorate that expected him to keep the US out of the war, continued to stay the course and in fact progressively up the stakes, eventually Americanising the war. This the author explored in detail, taking care to explain that it was not because he felt that LBJ had managed the situation worse than JFK would have, but because he had a much longer time in the game and so was able to make many more decisions. I shall not spoil the plot by leaking his conclusions here, enough for me to say that the argument was convincing.
The final chapter of the book is a summary of the arguments but the author also expanded it to consider a few counterfactual scenarios. The fact that Prof. Logevall revisited questions he asked earlier and gave them a somewhat different treatment shows the nuance he employed in investigating this important issue of why the US ended up caught in Vietnam. The Vietnam War receive a lot of attention by historians, journalists and people who fought and suffered in the war. In all cases the motivation is to understand why and how it happened and hopefully we are able to avoid getting in such a situation in future. How much we have succeeded we still do not know, but if this book has gotten it right then we are looking at a complex mix of flawed logic, personality, arrogance and career management. Any one of which can lead any nation down this unfortunate road.
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