I come away from this hard-headed critique of the career of William Westmoreland with almost as many questions as I arrived to it with. Part of the problem is that while Lewis Sorley's main finding is that the virtues that propelled Westmoreland to high command came to be dysfunctional when exercising theater command, I do have the sense (having read Samuel Zaffiri's biography of the man) that one is not given a strong enough sense of the man's virtues at lower command levels. It's as though Westmoreland's faults in high command are being anachronistically projected back to his early career.

Two, I'd like to know the contingencies that brought Westy to command at what became MACV. While his arrival predates the arrival of the "Big Unit" War and attrition as a strategy, my sense is not that he was a harbinger of that war. Could it be that the man was simply in Saigon to get some seasoning before being given command at the Army level in either NATO or Korea and, again, it was simply a fluke that an apostle of conventional warfare was in command at a time when the government in Saigon really began to lose it.

This then leads to the point that I'm not sure Sorley plays up enough, that Westy was squarely in the "American Way of War" that saw the road to victory as being closing with the enemy main force to inflict comprehensive defeat. It is likely that most American generals that could have held that position in 1965 would have come up with a similar operational prescription.

Three, while Westmoreland can't avoid blame for presiding over the failures of execution exposed by the Great Tet Offensive, it is also true that he provided the Johnson Administration what it wanted. While Sorley includes H.R. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty" as a source (and which is an essential study to read), I'm not quite clear that he embraced it in terms of providing the Washington context to this period of the war.

Four, I think Sorley could have given a better sense of the command politics of the United States Army in this period, as the time that Westy was rising to high command was also the period when the dashing paratroop generals of World War II (Maxwell Taylor, Jim Gavin, Matt Ridgway, etc.) dominated the service. Westy certainly saw these men as the main chance, and did successfully court them as patrons. I suppose that this is a roundabout way of asking the question of just how did Westy manage to avoid War College in the first place, which would have either opened his eyes to a wider world or would have aborted his rise to theater command and then to being kicked upstairs to being service chief; the chapter on Westy's even more dysfunctional time as Army Chief of Staff is most damning.

Another question I come away with from this book is the whole question of Westmoreland's anti-intellectualism. Was this simply a question of the culture he grew up in (South Carolina in the shadow of the American Civil War) and the man's level of native intelligence, or was something more at work. I begin to suspect that Westmoreland labored under the burden of dyslexia or some other reading disability, and that the drive for apparent perfection was the reaction to this condition. It doesn't seem to be an issue that occurred to Sorley.

This then is an important book, and one that any student of the American involvement in Vietnam should read, but I suspect that it isn't the last word on William Westmoreland, at least in terms of examining the whole context of his career. I also actively dislike the subtitle, as whatever Westmoreland's failures it only serves to paint the man (and whatever the faults fairly depicted) as a convenient scapegoat. Many hands made light work of creating a failure. ( )

Very depressing! This is purported to be about CG in Viet Nam for for years. Although there is much about Westmoreland's professional qualifications, despite some "apparently" obvious issues, he was still given a 4th star and command. On the other hand, a book which supposed to be level handed, does not include his orders when taking command. Does Sorley even know what it was Westy was supposed to accomplish. There are numerous citations from others, some of which good, but this seems more like a book being written for the express purpose of dumping on someone. ( )