Author Description

How did the U.S. become bogged down in a seemingly endless Asian conflict? This authoritative book is the first to place the Vietnam War in the perspective of two hundred years of history, and it enables Americans to reach a fresh understanding of our past involvement in the Far East. Marvin Kalb (b. 1930), a CBS diplomatic correspondent in Washington, and Elie Abel (1920-2004), past Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, trace the story from its roots in the earliest days of the Republic to the Nixon Administration. They pinpoint the key attitudes and assumptions that American have held about Asia from one generation to the next. They show that that conflict in Vietnam was not the result of an unforeseeable accident but the inevitable consequence of actions that stretch back to the days of Yankee clipper trade with China and the Indies, and the missionaries, consuls, business, and military men who followed. In its extraordinary climax, the book presents a wealth of firsthand, hitherto undisclosed information on the Johnson Administration and Vietnam. It sheds new, highly relevant, and often startling light on the roles played by such leaders as Dean Rusk, Maxwell Taylor, and Dean Acheson, through a succession of crises, on options that opened (and all too swiftly closed), and on the confrontations developing between the president and his most trusted advisors, finally leading to Lyndon B. Johnson's "resignation" in a time of national agony. For its narrative sweep, its sharp insights into American policy toward Asia, for its revelations about men and events that figure in a drama which alternates between the heroic and the tragic, this book is as informative as it is exciting reading.