Dereliction of Duty

Dereliction of Duty is a 1997 book by H.R. McMaster. McMaster was at the time a major in the United States Army. He would later rise to the rank of Lieutenant General, and subsequently serve as National Security Advisor. The book argues that the Vietnam War was mishandled by President Lyndon Johnson and his primarily civilian advisors, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that the conflict could have been resolved to the United States’ advantage using clear and effective strategies. The book is an expansion of ideas that McMaster first presented in his Ph.D. thesis.

McMaster begins his analysis by noting that John F. Kennedy, having won a narrow victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, chose Robert McNamara to be Secretary of Defense and Dean Rusk as Secretary of State. Both were retired military men, and both were chosen in part to help reform the Pentagon, which Kennedy believed to be outdated in its organization and methods. Kennedy was confident. The Bay of Pigs disaster, however, shook Kennedy’s confidence and he felt the need to install an advisor who would help him avoid such mistakes in the future. He selects Max Taylor as his personal military advisor, supplanting the Joint Chiefs of Staff who were created to be the president’s military advisors. Taylor and McNamara were in agreement on many foreign policy issues and thus came to exert a great deal of influence over Kennedy and later Lyndon Johnson. McNamara’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis solidified his reputation.

McMaster then reviews the recent history of Vietnam, which had been a French colony before World War II. After the Japanese invasion and subsequent retreat, Ho Chi Minh returned from Moscow to establish a communist-leaning government. The French attempted to reclaim their colony, and initially the U.S. remained uninvolved. America’s support for the French grew, but the French effort failed, and the U.S. became worried that Vietnam was part of a wave of communism spreading across the area, and made defeating Ho Chi Minh a foreign policy priority. The U.S. assumed full responsibility for supporting the South Vietnamese Army in 1956.



Kennedy refused to send combat units to Vietnam, limiting U.S. support to an advisory and supply role. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson inherited the growing challenge of Vietnam. McMaster begins his argument that Johnson was a calculating politician obsessed with gaining and maintaining his political power. He recounts the way Johnson turned brief and unexceptional service in World War II into a harrowing tale of combat that was simply not true, concluding that Johnson’s service was a stunt to solidify his political support.

McNamara and Johnson worked well together, as McNamara was immediately willing to manipulate budget numbers in order to help Johnson politically. The Joint Chiefs of Staff began pressuring Johnson to commit to seeing Vietnam through to a successful result, but McNamara’s policy of gradually increased pressure remained in effect. This kept the U.S. committed without actually leveraging the force necessary to gain a resolution. McMaster argues that Johnson liked this because it allowed him to appear to be handling Vietnam while actually concentrating on domestic issues that were his priority: First, securing re-election in 1964, and later the Great Society social reforms. McMaster also notes that this policy of gradual pressure was also established without the input of the Joint Chiefs, cutting the military out of the decisions.

Taylor and McNamara began a policy of simply not passing the objections and recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on to Johnson, but telling them otherwise. Johnson was very brazen about making decisions that helped him politically. When Taylor was named Ambassador to Vietnam, McNamara became the sole voice advising Johnson. As the conflict in Vietnam worsened, Johnson authorized a ‛one time’ strike on North Vietnam in order to appear strong and in command without actually committing to on-the-ground intervention there.



McMaster criticizes the Joint Chiefs, who not only did not contradict false reports McNamara issued in order to shape reporting on Vietnam in Johnson’s favor, but lent their uniformed presence to press conferences, giving McNamara and Johnson the appearance of their support. Behind the scenes, Johnson was advised several times that without a stable government in South Vietnam, no amount of military intervention would succeed. Johnson’s decisions inched the U.S. towards overt war, but he continued to hesitate and sought ways to disengage without the South Vietnamese government collapsing. McMaster notes that Johnson was reluctant to order military strikes because he had run as a candidate of peace and worried how it would look.

Advisors to the president pushed the idea that even if the U.S. lost, military engagement in Vietnam would enhance its prestige as it would be seen as resisting communist encroachment. Johnson continued to make decisions that matched his domestic image and allowed him to concentrate on domestic policies, until finally the U.S. took over complete responsibility for the fighting in 1965, putting Johnson irrevocably on the path to a disastrous war that never had a clear strategy.

McMaster ends by arguing that the failure in Vietnam had its roots long before the U.S. withdrawal in the 1970s, that it was mainly Lyndon Johnson’s fault for pursuing policies that helped him politically in the short-term—but also the fault of the Joint Chiefs for allowing themselves to be manipulated and misrepresented.