The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked

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Few analysts of U.S. involvement in Vietnam would agree with the provocative conclusion of this book. The thesis of most postmortems is that the United States lost the war because of the failure of its foreign policy decisionmaking system. According to Gelb and Be...

Leslie H. Gelb is President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former columnist at The New York Times, where he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism. Gelb has worked as a senior official in the State and Defense departments. Richard K. Betts is a professor of political science at Columbia University. He was a Senior Fellow and Research Associate at the Brookings Institution and has taught at Harvard and the Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Professor Betts has also served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and as a consultant to the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency. Professor Betts is a member of the National Commission on Terrorism.