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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.
David Halberstam (1934–2007) was the author of 20 books, the last 14 of which have been national best-sellers. His most recent book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, is about the Chinese entry into the Korean War. He was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam and was a member of the elective Society of American Historians.
His books were loaded with anecdotes, metaphors, suspense, and a narrative tone most writers reserve for fiction. The resulting books -- many of them huge bestsellers -- gave Halberstam heavyweight status (he won the Pulitzer for international reporting in 1964) and established him as an important commentator on American politics and power.
Halberstam was also known for his sports books. In The Breaks of the Game, which a critic for The New York Times called "one of the best books I've ever read about American sports," he took on professional basketball.
In The Amateurs, he examined the world of sculling; in Summer of '49 and October 1964, he focused on two pivotal baseball events: the Boston Red Sox's exasperating near victory over the New York Yankees for the 1949 pennant, and the 1964 season, when the Yankees lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1999's Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, Halberstam documented the making of a legend.
Always happy to extend his reach well beyond the subject at hand, Halberstam packed his books with social commentary as well as sports detail.
His writing routine was as strenuous and disciplined as that of any of the athletes he wrote about. To sustain his steady output of extensively researched, almost-always-massive books, he allows no unscheduled interruptions: "Most of us who have survived here [New York] after a number of years have ironclad work rules. Nothing interrupts us. Nothing," he once wrote in The New York Times. "We surface only at certain hours of the day."
Introduction Part I: Edging Toward Calamity: Vietnam in the Early 1960s Chapter 1: Coming into a Troubled Land Chapter 2: Latter-Day Mandarins: The Ngo Family Chapter 3: A Strange Alliance: The Americans and Diem Part II: The War in the Delta Chapter 4: In the Field with the ARVN Chapter 5: Finding an Elusive Foe Chapter 6: Disaster: The Battle of Ap Bac Chapter 7: Collapse in the Delta Part III: The Fall of the Diem Regime Chapter 8: The Buddhist Revolt Begins Chapter 9: The Raid on the Pagodas Chapter 10: A Slow Change in American Policy Chapter 11: The Saigon Press Controversy Chapter 12: The Final Days of Ngo Dinh Diem Chapter 13: What Should Be Done in Vietnam?
Epilogue: Return to Vietnam
Anonymous
Posted April 27, 2010
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Overview
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 ...