Major McMaster, who has taught history at West Point and who commanded a
cavalry regiment in combat in the Persian Gulf War, challenges, as WFB puts it, "all the
assumptions about the Vietnam War that we tend to cling to, both those who approved
the war and those who did not." As a talk-show guest, the Major suffers from a desire to
impart all he knows about the subject in half an hour; but what we do learn should send
us to his book to learn more. HRM: "One of the elements of the conventional wisdom in
connection with Vietnam is that Vietnam was a quagmire that sucked an unwitting
American Government into a war that it fundamentally did not understand. What this
new evidence suggests--most of it recently declassified documents of the most
confidential meetings between the President and his closest advisors, and tapes of
telephone conversations, for example, between Lyndon Johnson and his closest advisors
and confidants--[is] that these were men who not only should have known better, but
who did know better and who made these decisions anyway."
- Hoover ID: Program S1177
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