American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War

Abstract

It sounds like a cliché, but it is true: democracy, to fulfill its promise as the best of human traditions, requires enlightened leadership. According to David Kaiser, the generation of Americans who came of age in the turbulent 1930s and 1940s felt blessed in that regard. By shepherding the battered national economy out of the Great Depression and leading the Grand Alliance to resounding victory over fascism, the government in Washington had proven itself capable of solving the world's most daunting problems and so demonstrated the supremacy of American institutions. Almost anything appeared manag eable, if not achievable. Members of the “GI generation,” an analytical category Kaiser effectively, if inconsistently, employs in his recent study of the Vietnam War, had reason to believe in their government. They had learned that their leaders could parlay benevolent intentions into beneficial action. Their institutions, they thought, were effective mechanisms for recruiting men, if not women, capable of making right and just decisions. How, then, could those leaders, in the name of freedom and democracy, have made the grossly wrong choices that launched the nation into the tragic war in Vietnam? American Tragedy and Argument without End are important additions to the evergrowing literature seeking to provide clues toward an answer to this haunting question.