Leslie H. Gelb

"""If a historian were allowed but one book on the American involvement in Vietnam, this would be it."" — Foreign Affairs When first published in 1979, four years after the end of one of the most divisive conflicts in the United States, The Irony of Vietnam raised eyebrows. Most students of the war argued that the United States had ""stumbled into a quagmire in Vietnam through hubris and miscalculation,"" as the New York Times's Fox Butterfield put it. But the perspective of time and the opening of documentary sources, including the Pentagon Papers, had allowed Gelb and Betts to probe deep into the decisionmaking leading to escalation of military action in Vietnam. The failure of Vietnam could be laid at the door of American foreign policy, they said, but the decisions that led to the failure were made by presidents aware of the risks, clear about their aims, knowledgeable about the weaknesses of their allies, and under no illusion about the outcome.The book offers a picture of a steely resolve in government circles that, while useful in creating consensus, did not allow for alternative perspectives. In the years since its publication, The Irony of Vietnam has come to be considered the seminal work on the Vietnam War."

Three former government officials rethink the foreign policy decisions of America's leaders as they detail their failures and inadequacies and propose effective new moves the nation could make to self-correct. The authors of Our Own Worst Enemy, each of which have held high positions in the State Department and Pentagon, argue that for more than 20 years the United States has been experiencing a nervous breakdown concerning the making of foreign policy. As foreign policy continuously becomes more partisan and ideological, and each president disavows his predecessor as he starts anew, the authors describe how America has watched its leaders repeatedly trap themselves in foreign policy debacles. Within the pages of this book, I.M. Destler, Leslie H. Gelb, and Anthony Lake propose clear and effective measures by which America may extricate itself from the political quagmire it is repeatedly placed in.

"Fluent, well-timed, provocative. . . . Filled with gritty, shrewd, specific advice on foreign policy ends and means. . . . Gelb's plea for greater strategic thinking is absolutely right and necessary." -- The New York Times Book Review "Few Americans know the inner world of American foreign policy--its feuds, follies, and fashions--as well as Leslie H. Gelb. . . . Power Rules builds on that lifetime of experience with power and is a witty and acerbic primer." -- The New York Times Power Rules is the provocative account of how to think about and use America's power in the world, from Pulitzer Prize winner Leslie H. Gelb, one of the nation's leading foreign policy minds and practitioners.

"Few analysts of U.S. involvement in Vietnam would agree with the provocative conclusion of this book. The thesis of most postmortems is that the United States lost the war because of the failure of its foreign policy decisionmaking system. According to Gelb and Betts, however, the foreign policy failed, but the decisionmaking system worked. They attribute this paradox to the efficiency of the system in sustaining an increasingly heavy commitment based on the shared conviction of six administrations that the United States must prevent the loss of Vietnam to communism. However questionable the conviction, and thus the commitment, may have been, the authors stress that the latter ""was made and kept for twenty-five years. That is what the system—the shared values, the political and bureaucratic pressures—was designed to do, and it did it."" The comprehensive analysis that supports this contention reflects the widest use thus fare of available sources, including recently declassified portions of negotiations documents and files in presidential libraries. The frequently quoted statement of the principals themselves contradict the commonly held view that U.S. leaders were unaware of the consequences of their decisions and deluded by false expectations of easy victory. With few exceptions, the record reveals that these leaders were both realistic and pessimistic about the chances for success in Vietnam. Whey they persisted nonetheless is explained in this thorough account of their decisionmaking from 1946 to 1968, and how their mistakes might be avoided by policymakers in the future is considered in the final chapter. "