Horizon

I won't say much about the specifics because I don't know enough about either Vietnam or the Cold War. But I would have to categorize this as an unreliable review, in the sense that I'm not convinced that the reviewer is telling the same story or drawing the same conclusions that the author would recognize. I'll give you one example. Bacevich describes presidential authority as being "largely a fiction", and to support this he quotes Porter as saying: "the national security bureaucracy acted as an independent power center within the US government with the right to pressure the president on matters of war and peace." Well, hang on a minute. 'The right to pressure' is not the same thing as the right to overrule. The fact that the NSA may have become an important influence on the president's strategic calculations does not mean that the office of the commander-in-chief is ipso facto a sham. Presidents have always had institutional influences. So do all decision-makers. And I imagine Porter knows that too. Bacevich is, I suspect, stretching his quote to make it say something it does not really say. Of course, I could be mistaken, and the only way to check this for sure is to read the original book, and I'm not going to do that because I don't have the time. But be warned. The Nation's version of Perils of Dominance may not be identical to the Perils of Dominance that Gareth Porter imagines he has written.

The publisher's description includes this:

Challenging conventional wisdom about the origins of the war, Porter argues that the main impetus for military intervention in Vietnam came not from presidents Kennedy and Johnson but from high-ranking national security officials in their administrations who were heavily influenced by U.S. dominance over its Cold War foes. Porter argues that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were all strongly opposed to sending combat forces to Vietnam, but that both Kennedy and Johnson were strongly pressured by their national security advisers to undertake military intervention. Porter reveals for the first time that Kennedy attempted to open a diplomatic track for peace negotiations with North Vietnam in 1962 but was frustrated by bureaucratic resistance. Significantly revising the historical account of a major turning point, Porter describes how Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara deliberately misled Johnson in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, effectively taking the decision to bomb North Vietnam out of the president's hands.

Although to Bobby's comment it should be noted that publishers blurbs are written by people who have not actually read the book (I am not kidding about this).

Do authors have the right to veto publishers' blurbs with which they disagree? (Wrt real publishers like UC Press, I mean?)

I'm not sure about 'veto', but I know that authors are usually allowed a fair amount of discretion wrt jacket covers they dislike, etc. What the legal situation is I don't know.

Well, the legal situation between publisher and writer is pretty much determined by contract and within certain very basic constraints the contracts are pretty much determined by custom and what the market will bear. So I was asking what's the custom.

As the author of Perils of Dominance, I can tell you that Bacevich accurately reflected the thrust of my historical account of Vietnam policymaking in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. I concluded that the legal fiction of presidential authority gave way to the political need to have the support of key national security advisers -- especially the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- for any decision on Vietnam that risked Republican attack for having "lost" Vietnam. I document the fact that both Kennedy and Johnson had very good reason to believe that they were in the crosshairs of the Joint Chiefs on Vietnam, and that McNamara was the pivotal figure in the policymaking of both presidents.

So when you read Bacevich's review you can take it as a good summation of my thesis. It is profoundly revisionist in its view of the nature of that period of the Cold War (effectively unipolar, not bipolar balance of power as it has always been depicted) and the reasons for the natinal security elite to be drawn into war (U.S. dominance, not fear of falling dominoes).

Sorry Gareth, have only just seen this (accidentially) - thanks for the response.