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.