Fog of Wars

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals, by David Halberstam (Scribner, 544 pp., $28)

IN 1965, fresh from winning a Pulitzer for his stint in Saigon as a correspondent for the New York Times, the young David Halberstam published a book about the war in Vietnam. The Making of a Quagmire was an exceptional piece of reporting—vivid, concise, hard-hitting, and entirely without pretense. By contrasting developments in the villages and rice paddies far from Saigon with the illusions nursed by senior American officials back in the South Vietnamese capital, it told important truths about how the U.S. government was even then plunging heedlessly into a conflict that it fundamentally failed to understand.

AJ

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Andrew J. Bacevich

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War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals, by David Halberstam (Scribner, 544 pp., $28)

IN 1965, fresh from winning a Pulitzer for his stint in Saigon as a correspondent for the New York Times, the young David Halberstam published a book about the war in Vietnam. The Making of a Quagmire was an exceptional piece of reporting—vivid, concise, hard-hitting, and entirely without pretense. By contrasting developments in the villages and rice paddies far from Saigon with the illusions nursed by senior American officials back in the South Vietnamese capital, it told important truths about how the U.S. government was even then plunging heedlessly into a conflict that it fundamentally failed to understand.