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Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, MacNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies That Led to Viet Nam.

By H.R. McMasters, a West Point graduate. I believe this is based on his Phd thesis at North Carolina, where he was doing graduate work while a major on detached duty.

An altogether invaluable account, as outlined by this review:

For years the popular myth surrounding the Vietnam War was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew what it would take to win but were consistently thwarted or ignored by the politicians in power. Now H. R. McMaster shatters this and other misconceptions about the military and Vietnam in Dereliction of Duty. Himself a West Point graduate, McMaster painstakingly waded through every memo and report concerning Vietnam from every meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build a comprehensive picture of a house divided against itself: a president and his coterie of advisors obsessed with keeping Vietnam from becoming a political issue versus the Joint Chiefs themselves, mired in interservice rivalries and unable to reach any unified goals or conclusions about the country's conduct in the war.
McMaster stresses two elements in his discussion of America's failure in Vietnam: the hubris of Johnson and his advisors and the weakness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dereliction of Duty provides both a thorough exploration of the military's role in determining Vietnam policy and a telling portrait of the men most responsible.

I couldn't read it for more than an hour at a time...before throwing the book up against the wall and walking around the block to cool off.

There is a good argument that Clinton was our worst president ever. There might be a better one for Johnson...

To judge from the excerpt quoted, the author may be a little harder on the military that they deserve. With an impossible situation at the commander in chief level, with Johnson just trying to muddle through in typical liberal fashion, juggling various constituencies with no greater object in mind than the next election, what could military officers do? Johnson wouldn't say we're not in this to win so we're getting out before anybody else gets killed, and he wouldn't commit to what it took to win. To some extent Nixon continued with this. In fairness to Nixon, he inherited the situation and tried to get out while minizing the damage, but it took him too long. In some ways Johnson is worse than Clinton, but in the same circumstances, be assured that Clinton would likely have followed the same immoral policy of trying to please everybody while letting soldiers die.

My take is that every RAT president had some major failing, some worse than others, but all were responsible for terrible disasters for the Republic.

Examples: FDR gave us WW II and the socialist programs we still are paying for. Truman gave us the UN and the non-war of Korea that cost more then 50K military lives. Carter gave us a weakened military, terrible foreign policies and huge economic problems. JFK helped jump-start Viet Nam and almost got the nation into a nuclear war over Cuba with Russia. LBJ helped us lose 58K troops in a losing effort in Viet Nam and began the ruinous welfare policies still in place. Then there was the Felon. His failures are too numerous to count, but as a traitor to the nation, he was the worst RAT of all.