Road to Vietnam featuring Dr. Brian VanDeMark

History Does You

The Road to the Vietnam War has been scrutinized by historians for decades offering a variety of explanations on how the U.S. became involved a war that most concluded was unwinnable by 1966, only a year after combat troops had been deployed. We explore the cataclysmic decisions of those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to explain why the "Best and the Brightest" became trapped in situations that suffocated their thinking and willingness to dissent, why they found change so hard, and why they were so blind to their own errors. To explain we interview Dr. Brian VanDeMark who is a professor of history at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis where he has been a member of its History Department since 1990. He is the author of several books on American history, he co-authored Robert McNamara's #1 best-selling Vietnam memoir, In Retrospect, which became the basis of Errol Morris's Academy Award-winning documentary film, "The Fog of War." He also wrote Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb and Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. His most recent book is Road to Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam which was a Financial Times Best Book of the year in 2018