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’s character have dented this wishful thinking. The problem with sacralizing his memory is not that it ignores his philandering, abuse of drugs, and concealment of chronic health problems, but that it creates an impression of discontinuity where none existed. The abrupt termination of Camelot did not ring down the curtain on some ambitious effort to reorient American statecraft. The Kennedy who embraced the strategy of overkill, sought to subvert the Cuban Revolution, and deepened the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam was continuing work that his predecessor had begun. When Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy in the Oval Office, the postwar tradition of American statecraft passed into the hands of yet another faithful steward.

Taylor and McNamara restore our appreciation of those continuities. When Kennedy went to his reward, they stayed on to serve his successor—Taylor accepting LBJ’s appointment to become U.S. ambassador to Saigon in 1964 and McNamara remaining at his post in the Pentagon until 1968.

Taylor and McNamara did not see themselves as turncoats. They were not defiling Kennedy’s memory. They were carrying on his work. The pursuit of options did not end with Kennedy’s death.

FREEFALL

Well over forty years after his passing, the carefully burnished image of John F. Kennedy still glistens. Ngo Dinh Diem, meanwhile, has all but vanished from collective memory. Yet to a far greater extent than Kennedy’s murder at the hands of a deranged gunman, Diem’s overthrow, engineered by the U.S. government, qualifies as a historical turning point.

Once Diem passed from the scene, the situation in South Vietnam quickly went from awful to far worse. For senior officials back in Washington, every available course of action now appeared unattractive. Devoted to the techniques inherent in the Washington consensus, however, and unable to conceive of an alternative approach to exercising “global leadership,” they swallowed their doubts and plunged on. All of this happened to the accompaniment of considerable angst and hand wringing, with Taylor and McNamara playing pivotal roles. Making an equally important contribution was McGeorge Bundy, the bespectacled and buttoned-down former Harvard dean who had served as Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs and who soldiered on in that capacity under Johnson.

At the urging of this unholy trio, Lyndon Johnson bet his presidency and his domestic vision of creating a “great society” on the proposition that the exceedingly unwelcome climes of Southeast Asia posed no barrier to the effective application of flexible response.

Again, the domestic political calendar dictated the tempo of decision making. In August 1964, the Tonkin Gulf incident—North Vietnamese gunboats allegedly launching unprovoked attacks against U.S. Navy warships—enabled Johnson to pocket a blank check for further war. Voting with near unanimity, a compliant Congress authorized him “to take all necessary measures to repeal any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression.” Yet for the moment, Johnson, presenting himself in the 1964 presidential campaign as the candidate of peace and reason, temporized. Only after he had secured a full term as president did Vietnam claim his sustained attention. Then, with deteriorating conditions in Saigon permitting no further delay, the pace of events quickened. Between January and April 1965, the United States took full ownership of the Vietnam War.

As McNamara described it, throughout this brief interval, the administration fixated exclusively on the “question of what military course to follow.”53 That a viable military option might not exist or that nonmilitary alternatives deserved careful consideration were propositions that received scant attention.

A long January 6 cable from Ambassador Taylor to President Johnson set in motion the train of decisions that culminated in the full-fledged application of flexible response. The situation in Saigon looked bleak, Taylor reported.

We are faced here with a seriously