Brian VanDeMark

“While by 1961 many of the early dynamics of the Cold War—Stalinist brutality, Sino-Soviet cooperation, Moscow’s considerable influence on other Communist movements—had begun to fade, American perceptions, assumptions, and political rhetoric remained rooted in an earlier mindset. (The Soviet Union suffered from its own simplistic myopia about the West during this period.) As a result, Kennedy and his advisors made policy on Vietnam by relying on Cold War blueprints that assumed the monolithic nature of Communism, defined Communism and nationalism in mutually exclusive terms, and understood the domino theory as a given, filtering it all through fear of a domestic political firestorm that would follow the loss of a country to Communism. They feared the costs of what they termed a “cut-and-run” policy “too much and too automatically,” said Bundy retrospectively.27 More fundamentally, “we never fully explored each other’s views about Communism and the danger of it in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia,” McNamara later acknowledged.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“(In 1968, an average of 45 Americans died in Vietnam every day.)”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam