Lessons in Disaster

Political scientist Gordon M. Goldstein examines how the United States was drawn into the Vietnam War through the choices of McGeorge Bundy, who advised John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson on national security. Late in life, Bundy, the one principal architect of Vietnam strategy who had stayed publicly silent, chose to revisit those decisions and enlisted Goldstein to help. Their joint manuscript was left unfinished when Bundy died in 1996, and Goldstein built on it, combining his own research with the interviews and analysis he had conducted with Bundy. The result is a work of presidential history about the uses and misuses of American power. It appeared in 2008, and a later edition was a Foreign Affairs best seller.

It appears among the nonfiction titles on a list of every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency.