"A fabulous piece of scholarship. This book will open a whole new chapter in our study of Vietnam."––Tom Clancy"Here"s everything you didn"t read in Robert S. McNamara"s book. Vietnam did not simply happen; it was not an accidental Cold War collision that killed 58,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese. Men of power and responsibility caused that disastrous war and left their fingerprints all over it––and here are their names and what they did and said and decided in secret. McMaster has mined newly declassified records and, in these pages, sheds fresh light and understanding on how the best and the brightest, shielded by a bodyguard of lies and the words ‘Top Secret," maneuvered and manipulated our country down the road to war and bitter defeat." ––Joseph L. Galloway, Senior Writer, U.S. News and World Report, and co-author of We Were Soldiers Once . . . and YoungDereliction of Duty makes a unique, groundbreaking contribution toward clarifying what happened, why, and who was responsible for the decisions that led to direct U.S. military intervention in the Vietnam War. Based on more than five years of painstaking research, it includes startling revelations from previously classified transcripts of crucial meetings. The result is an inescapable correction to the prevailing view that an American war in Vietnam was inevitable.Based on dramatic and irrefutable evidence, Dereliction of Duty proves that the war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, or on the front pages of The New York Times, or on the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C., even before the first American units were deployed.