of the United States and the Western world. The other was that only the South Vietnamese could defend their nation" (p. 29). Taken together, these premises made the US a hostage to the government of South Vietnam. McNamara further points out that the US government had little access to expert opinion on Asia, and for an ominous reason: because the experts had largely been purged during the Joe McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s.
Chapter 3: By the fall of 1963, the contradictions McNamara mentioned were being revealed. South Vietnam was in a state of collapse. Frantically, the US acquiesced in a coup, in the hope it would bring in a stronger government; in the aftermath of the coup, the dictatorial president of South Vietnam, Diem, was assassinated. The larger policy contradiction remained unresolved, and in the absence of a firm decision to cut South Vietnam loose to its fate, the drift was in the direction of greater US involvement in an effort to shore it up.
Chapter 4: Scarcely a month after the coup and assassination of Diem in Vietnam, President Kennedy himself was assassinated. (It should be noted that nothing in McN
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