W. J. Lederer was an American Naval Officer, who had considerable experience of the Far East during WWII and after. In this book he laments, and documents American foreign relations failures that would result in the Vietnam War, and in the failure of the USA to succeed in that conflict. A sub theme is the lamentable failure of the American educational system to inform the USA's public about affairs in the Indochinese peninsula. It has had a number of reprints useful for students of the period and the region. ( )

Written by the co-author of the novel, The Ugly American, this non-fiction work, first published in 1960, reinforces many of the same ideas offered in its famous predecessor.

In A Nation of Sheep, Lederer, a foreign service and Navy veteran begins by outlining several recent U.S. foreign policy blunders, including years-long wrong-headedness in China, Laos and Korea. Lederer traces our troubles to an inability to do basic things like understand the language of countries we're trying to influence or help. The result is that we ended up relying for our information on the very ruling classes we should have been investigating, the people taking and spending our aid money and supposedly ruling their countries in their own peoples' interests. Hence, we received bad, self-serving information, and spent decades backing poor, sometimes criminally so, tyrants like Chiang Kai Shek and Syngman Rhee. This all sounds distressingly familiar, doesn't it?

Lederer also outlines the problems brought on by the growing pervasiveness of government secrecy and an over-arching CYA culture in U.S.diplomatic and government circles; a gullible and disinterested press; and (the source of the book's title), a complacent and apathetic U.S. citizenry.

Brief, clearly written and refreshingly straight-forward, this book serves as a reminder that when it comes to U.S. foreign policy blunders, there's little that's new under the sun. It's been going on in this fashion, according to Lederer, anyway, at least since the days of FDR.

Lederer's warning was that we would end up succumbing to the Communists, who he claimed were much wilier when it came to communicating with the average citizen, in their own languages, in the countries they wished to influence. Well, we survived that threat, but the lessons still seem relevant, nevertheless. ( )

This book has over a hundred pages of complaints concerning government blundering and about thirty pages of solutions. It was written in the sixties and some of the biased, paranoid language clearly reflects the times. Despite this the information provided seems factual and some of the proposed solutions are reasonable and well-thought out.

The books is a quick read, written in easy to understand, direct prose. The tone of the book can be a little overbearing at times. ( )