A Grand Delusion

Alan Brinkley

[Mann] describes an aspect of this history much less well understood by casual observers -- the unromantic and fundamentally political nature of the decisions that created the war. If this appealingly accessible book attracts the audience it is clearly designed to serve, it could provide a useful counterweight to the popular transformation of this military and political disaster into an evocative myth.
— New York Times Book Review

New York Times

He turns complicated history into a vivid and engaging story. A Grand Delusion is the longest and most ambitious narrative of the policy-making process since David Halberstam's book of nearly thirty years ago.

Los Angeles Times

A considerable achievement, albeit a depressing reminder of the compounded misjudgments of four presidents and the wholesale lies and illegalities of two.

Denver Post

. . . [Mann] has permanently altered the landscape of serious scholarly debate on the one topic that draws passionate scholarly attention from all walks of American life.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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 Cahners Business Information.

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 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Mann, a US Senate aide and former newspaper reporter, augments the many military, diplomatic, and social studies of the Vietnam War by examining the role of politicians and policymakers who shaped US foreign policy from 1945 to 1975. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, and McGovern march across the tapestry. Chronicling their failure, he recounts how their virulent anti-Communism led the country into one of its darkest periods of the 20th century. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

A comprehensive history of the political causes of the American conflict in Vietnam. As the extreme divisiveness that marked the Vietnam War slowly fades into America's cultural consciousness, historians have busied themselves trying to place the conflict in an appropriate historical perspective. Mann, a veteran US senatorial staffer and acclaimed author (The Walls of Jericho, 1996), combines his insider's understanding of the era's political climate with a keen talent for narrative history to produce an insightful analysis of the American experience in Indochina. He casts the conflict as a series of false assumptions and miscalculations, and argues that Ho Chi Minh's struggle against South Vietnam was not a Cold War expansion of communism so much as it was a nationalist struggle against western colonialism. After having presented Vietnam to the public as conflict over the containment of communism, Mann suggests that US presidents faced the unhappy dilemma of either appearing soft on communism or further miring the nation in an unwinnable war-and he demonstrates the heavy political price paid by Mike Mansfield, George McGovern, and others who opposed the fighting on principle. Mann further implies that such political risk led to Johnson's gradual and ineffective escalation of the hostilities and Nixon's equally cautious reduction of American commitment to the region. His research attempts to convince readers of how and why key politicians and policymakers led the nation into the foreign and domestic tumult caused by the war. His focus on political history provides a fresh view of the conflict and allows his account to rise above the many ideologically tainted histories ofAmericain Southeast Asia. A credible and intellectually honest reevaluation.