Consequences of Failure

The author of The Betrayal assesses the effects of the Vietnam War―on our government, our military establishment, on our economy, and on ourselves.

In the historical evolution of the American people there have been four major crises, each of which we either surmounted out of our own spiritual and physical resources or were rescued from by virtue of outside events: the birth of a viable government in 1789, slavery and the trauma of ending it, the moral obligation of membership in the League of Nations, and the Great Depression of 1929. And now there is a fifth, the challenge to deal with the consequences of our failure in Vietnam in the world at large, in Asia, in Vietnam, and most importantly here at home. Victory and how to achieve it has proved to be a fascinating subject for study by a wide variety of scholars, politicians, and soldiers. The psychology of failure or, if you will, the consequences of failure to those who believed in the certainty of their victory has received relatively little attention.