Publishers Weekly
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As national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy was the prototypical "best and brightest" Vietnam War policymaker in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Bundy was, according to foreign policy scholar Goldstein, an out-and-out war hawk who "again and again demonstrated a willingness, if not an eagerness, to deploy military means" in Vietnam. Goldstein worked with Bundy in the year before his death, in 1996, on an uncompleted memoir and "retrospective analysis of America's path to war." While drawing on that work in this warts-and-all examination of Bundy's advisory role, this book is something different, containing Goldstein's own conclusions. He painstakingly recounts his subject's role as national security adviser and ponders the complexities of the elusive "inner Bundy": for example, the buoyant good humor in the 1960s that seemed unbowed by the weight of difficult strategic decisions. Among the surprising revelations: late in life Bundy came to regret his hawkish ways, although he maintained to the end that the presidents, not their advisers, were primarily responsible for the outcome of the war. Vietnam, he said, was "overall, a war we should not have fought." (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Library Journal
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McGeorge Bundy was the embodiment of what David Halberstam called "the best and the brightest." Until Bundy's death in 1996, Goldstein, an international affairs scholar, interviewed him extensively about the Vietnam War and his role in it as special assistant for national security affairs (now called national security advisor) for Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1966. What results is an impressive investigation of the importance of presidential leadership in determining war-making policies. Bundy remained a strong hawk throughout his tenure, even though he did not believe escalation would ensure victory. Like most cabinet members, he accepted the Cold War consensus, which stressed a loss of credibility if the United States were to leave Vietnam. JFK never bought into this, Goldstein says; judging from Kennedy's diplomatic solutions to Laos, the Bay of Pigs, and, most important, the Cuban Missile Crisis, he would have removed the American presence during his second term. But LBJ, unlike Kennedy, Americanized and politicized the war to ensure his election in 1964. In his later years, Bundy came to understand how his views helped lead to the Vietnam tragedy and, according to the author, learned the heavy price the United States pays when a President fails to learn that intervention cannot be defended as inevitable. Strongly recommended for larger public and all academic libraries.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

An important addition to the literature of the Vietnam War, this analysis examines the man who was the president's national security advisor from 1961 to 1966. For three decades afterward, Goldstein relates, McGeorge Bundy declined to write a memoir about his role in the decisions that plunged America into that war, but he changed his mind when Robert McNamara published his mea culpa In Retrospect (1995). Unfortunately, Bundy died before the project made much progress; posthumously, Goldstein pulled together a manuscript, but, he reports, Bundy's widow quashed its publication and decreed its deposition in the archives of the JFK library. Therefore, this work does not derive from Bundy's memoir; it is Goldstein's negatively critical consideration of Bundy's role on Vietnam. Flavored with anecdotes of Goldstein's interactions with Bundy as his research assistant, the narrative conveys Bundy's hawkish recommendations to JFK and LBJ, expresses Goldstein's belief that the former would not have escalated the war as Johnson did, and hints that Bundy before his death might have been preparing a recantation on Vietnam. A vital volume for Vietnam War collections.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2008 Booklist