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."