The Book!
Available for Pre-Order Now
As the LBJ and McNamara series has evolved over the past eighteen weeks, readers were engaged, but time being what it is, I had the sense that they were mainly reading each entry as an excerpt.
For this and other reasons, there is now a book version available for pre-order. The publisher is Rivertowns Books in New York (https://tinyurl.com/2jc6ctf9). The book is also for sale at Bookshop.org, Amazon, or BN.com, and it is (or will soon be) available at practically all online bookselling sites. It can be ordered at bookstores with the ISBN 978-1-953943-55-2 for the print book at $17.95 and the ISBN 978-1-953943-57-5 for the ebook at $8.99. The book will be released November 12.
Having been thinking about this project for so long, I continue – really – to be surprised that in the vast array of books about the American decade in Vietnam, relatively little has been written about how so many people in leadership, especially President Johnson and Robert McNamara, the men most responsible for policy decisions, got those decisions so wrong.
This explanation is what the book is about.
Next week’s Substack is called “The Crucible of Choice,” about a recent BBC series “The Corridors of Power,” which contains a remarkable soliloquy from Jake Sullivan, now the national security adviser, apparently filmed several years ago.
Decision making, he says, is “an imperfect loop” of choices made by imperfect people faced with immensely complicated problems. This was the case in the Vietnam era, and it is still true in our time.
Congrats to Peter for this fascinating retrospective look at the tragedy of Vietnam. What were they thinking? That is a question that is still being asked a half century after the American intervention ended. Peter, as McNamara's publisher, knew the former Defense Secretary well, and is in a unique position to attempt an answer -- one that looks forward as well as back. His forthcoming book on the McNamara-LBJ tortured relationship ,will be essential reading for those groping for a new and more sustainable American foreign policy -- one that that acknowledges the immensely costly, and bloody failures of the post-Vietnam era..
Look forward to reading this. I’m fascinated by LBJ yet I’ve only read the first of the Robert Caro book, shame on me. McNamara too … I saw that doco a few years back.