How we got into the messiest war in our history

How we got into the messiest war in our history: "'Why do we find it so hard,' Henry Steele Commager has recently asked, 'to accept this elementary lesson of history, that some wars are so deeply immoral that they must be lost, that the war in Vietnam is one of these wars, and that those who resist it are the truest patriots?' I would answer that rhetorical question by observing that for those of us not directly involved with the war at either end, it is not hard at all, but that's partly because we were not there. Long distance morality is the easiest kind. Halberstam, however, was there, and he has been back, and if the Halberstams don't help us discover where the political brink stops and the moral abyss begins, who will?

Why are we in Vietnam? In portraying the decision making process as a struggle between the humanists and the rationalists; in suggesting that had the humanists been in charge all might have been well; in finding the origins of the Vietnam war primarily in the cold war; in focusing on the politics of bureaucracy to the exclusion of the morality of politics, Halberstam has been faithful to, if critical of, the perspective of his subjects, and to that extent his inquiry may lack optimal historical imagination. It may be, ironically, that to get a book as rich in inside information, insight and occasional wisdom"