The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era

The late Halberstam won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his New York Times coverage of Vietnam, yet 1965's Making of a Quagmire languished in relative obscurity, finally going out of print in 1977 with only 16 thousand copies sold. The editor for this abridged version, Singal (history, Hobart and William Smith Colleges), suggests two reasons for this neglect. One is the rapid shift in the on-the-ground realities of the war immediately following the book's publication, with American advisors being replaced by large numbers of American soldiers thrown directly into the fighting. The other is the fact that the book was an ostensible argument for how to win the war, which offended those against the war, that simultaneously presented an implicit factual case that the war was already lost due to the inability of the South Vietnamese government on their American backers to either understand or win over the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people, which turned off those supporting US involvement in Vietnam. This edition is approximately one-third shorter than the original, Singal having eliminated redundant material, as well as whole chapters concerning Halberstam's reporting experiences in the Congo or his philosophical views on world politics. Content footnotes have been added to help identify now unfamiliar persons and events. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Pulitzer-prize winning author David Halberstam's eyewitness account provides a riveting narrative of how the United States created a major foreign policy disaster for itself in a faraway land it knew little about. In the introduction to this edition, historian Daniel J. Singal supplies crucial background information that was unavailable in the mid-1960s when the book was written. With its numerous firsthand recollections of life in the war zone, The Making of a Quagmire penetrates to the essence of what went wrong in Vietnam. Although its focus is the Kennedy era, its analysis of the blunders and misconceptions of American military and political leaders holds true for the entire war.