The parade of retrospectives marking the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War tells us a lot about how that war was waged and lost. But missing, as ever, is the why of it all -- the psychology of the people who created the war.
David Halberstam's classic book "The Best and the Brightest" gives an outsider's view of the policymakers in action. But there is little, apart from the rather self-serving account by former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, to give us the inside view.
As a China specialist working in Australia's Foreign Affairs Ministry at the time and who was somewhat on the inside, I can confirm McNamara's key point, namely, that concern over alleged Chinese communist expansionism rather than the fate of South Vietnam's anticommunist regime was the crucial factor behind Western, mainly U.S. and Australian, intervention.