A few days after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, John F. Kennedy famously declared that “victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” The implication was obvious: Nobody in Washington was going to claim responsibility for the failed invasion of Cuba. Kennedy ended up becoming the father of the Bay of Pigs, but by his sardonic reference to an “orphan” he made clear that defeat, just as much as victory, also has a hundred fathers.
As far as we know, Kennedy never thought of his other great foreign policy disaster, Vietnam, in patrilineal terms, but this has not stopped historians from doing so. The war in Vietnam is by no means an orphan—there are many who share the blame. The conflict is commonly known as “Lyndon Johnson's war,” after Kennedy's successor as president; it has also been called “McNamara's war,” after the irrepressible secretary of defense...