Amazon.com
Political biographer Robert Mann minces no words when he characterizes America's "ill-advised military foray into Vietnam" as a sequence of delusions. America's citizens and lower-echelon political leadership, he writes, were deluded about the nature of the communist threat to Southeast Asia, which was less an expression of some grand design on the part of Moscow and Beijing than one of nationalist resistance to colonialism. Several presidents were deluded about the effects of their policies in Vietnam and the prospects for military success. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon deluded voters into believing that peace was close at hand, while the death toll mounted under their management of the war.
Vietnam, Mann suggests, was never vital to U.S. national security, as five presidents once insisted. Political from the outset, the war resisted the military solution those leaders promised. And it nearly resulted in a civil war at home, which, Mann writes, yielded a pervasive distrust of the government at all levels of society. "The Vietnam War," he concludes, "should be remembered as the kind of tragedy that can result when presidents--captivated by their grand delusions--enforce their foreign and military policies without the informed support of Congress and the American people."
Mann's book, a useful adjunct to such standard texts as Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History and A.J. Langguth's recent Our Vietnam, joins the history of the war in Vietnam to the conduct of the cold war at large. Controversial and provocative, it promises to find many readers. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
Mann, a former Senate aide, puts Senate-president politics at the center of this masterful political history of America's involvement in Vietnam, which began with Truman's commitment to support the French in the wake of charges of "losing" China to the Communists. Many of the senators who attacked the Truman administration were isolationists who voted against the realistic anti-Communist institutions such as NATO and the Marshall Plan. Yet such contradictions mattered little, as the Democrats' disastrous political defeat in 1950 and 1952 convinced them to never let another "loss" be blamed on them. The twin strands of ideological surrealism and political realism interweave throughout Mann's account in various forms, illuminating the persistent patterns and underlying motivational logic of presidential lies and congressional acquiescence. Eisenhower promised to end Truman's containment policy, but he delivered the Korean armistice and refused to fight in Vietnam. Two major congressional resolutions authorizing use of force led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson promised "no wider war" while escalating for fear of "losing" Vietnam. Mike Mansfield - the Senate's foremost Asia authority, as well as majority leader - opposed America's deepening involvement, but his concept of his institutional role made him publicly loyal to Johnson's policies, which in private he strove mightily to change. Each participant responded distinctively to fundamental contradictions, brilliantly elucidated by Mann's highly nuanced account of presidential policy and the tortured evolution of Senate opposition. This book's unique perspective in illuminating Congress's role in the Vietnam War should permanently alter and deepen our understanding of that conflict. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Recent volumes suggest that America's lengthy involvement in the Vietnam War was the necessary cathartic event that allowed the Cold War to be abandoned at last. While not elucidating that thesis, this book reinforces it with its involved rendition of the collision of personalities throughout the White House, Congress, and elsewhere during that era. Mann's history concentrates on seven American leaders in the halls of power rather than on the battlefield, a subject that has been thoroughly covered elsewhere. A former press secretary to two U.S. senators, Mann has the perspective of a generation not closely associated with the events, so his approach can be analytical, lacking the emotional component that has kept us from examining our actions dispassionately in the first place. At times, his excellent description of the war's political evolution reads like an unlikely novel. Here is Mike Mansfield, senator and Asian political expert, whose eventual opposition to the war was discounted because at first he was a proponent of military intervention, and Lyndon Johnson, whose forceful personality kept him from listening to the very people whom he first believed when they eventually grew disenchanted with his policies. This is a gripping tale, well told and voluminously documented, with the 1960s and 1970s as a volatile background. A good complement to A.J. Langguth's Our Vietnam (LJ 1/01), a view of the war from both sides that emphasized the military. Mel D. Lane, Sacramento, CA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The more that the American debacle in Vietnam is dissected, the wider the responsibility spreads. Mann's contribution to the postmortem emphasizes the response of Congress, especially of the Senate, to the ever-incremental, ever-deepening American entanglement in Indochina that began with the first dollars and advisors sent there by Truman in 1950. To Mann, Truman's decision established the pattern for presidential-congressional fencing on the issue: he dispatched the money and men without consulting the committees with jurisdiction on the matter. A few individual senators objected at the time, and their numbers and decibels would increase over the ensuing two decades, but institutionally Congress acquiesced to the war until it asserted itself against a Watergate-weakened Nixon. Mann's book is a political history of Congress' role in allowing the war to escalate, with a close recounting of particular members who, the closer they examined the shifting rationales advanced by executive branch officials, became afflicted by profound doubts about the wisdom of America's course. A significant addition to the historiography of the war. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
". . . [Mann] has permanently altered the landscape of serious scholarly debate on the one topic that draws passionate scholarly attention..."
"This is a gripping tape, well told and voluminously documented. . ."
Publisher's Weekly [2/15/01, Starred Review]
". . . [a] masterful political history of America's involvement in Vietnam."
Book Description
A Grand Delusion is the first comprehensive single-volume American political history of the Vietnam War. Spanning the years 1945 to 1975, it is the definitive story of the well-meaning but often misguided American political leaders whose unquestioning adherence to Cold War dogma led the nation into its tragic misadventure in Vietnam. At the center of this narrative are seven such men-Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, J. William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, and George McGovern. During their careers, each occupied center-stage in the nation's debate over Vietnam policy. Mann focuses in particular on the role played by leading members of Congress, including senators' Mansfield and Kennedy's shaping of American policy toward Vietnam in the 1950s; Congress's acquiescence in the 1950s to the Eisenhower administration's support of the American-backed Diem government; and the blank check that Congress gave to Lyndon Johnson with the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Mann considers as well the evolution of opposition to the war, including pivotal hearings conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1966 to 1968; the small band of war opponents led by senators Fulbright, McGovern, and Wayne Morse; Mansfield's quiet-but-persistent lobbying campaign to dissuade his friend Lyndon Johnson from escalating the war in 1965; the bitter political feud that erupted between Fulbright and Johnson-erstwhile friends-over the war; McGovern and Hatfield's determined effort to force Richard Nixon to withdraw American forces from Vietnam; and Congress's assertion of its Constitutional role in war making in the early 1970s, culminating in the passage of the War Powers resolution in 1973. In addition to being a piercing analysis of the political currents that resulted in and eventually ended the war, A Grand Delusion is an epic tragedy filled with fascinating characters and a keen reflection on the antagonisms and beliefs that divided the nation during those tumultuous years.
About the Author
Robert Mann has served in Louisiana politics as a press secretary to two U.S. senators and is the author of a widely praised book on the Civil Rights Movement, The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and the Struggle for Civil Rights. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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