The veritable galaxy of scholarship on the Vietnam War has made it increasingly difficult for any new study to make a truly original contribution to a core issue or to a particular time period. The proverbial bar for originality and significance has become ever more daunting to clear. With this outstanding monograph, David L. Prentice clears it in impressive fashion. Concentrating intensively on the 1969–1970 period, he restores contingency and complexity both to the Vietnam War strategies adopted by Richard M. Nixon's administration and to the way South Vietnamese officials reacted to U.S. moves.

The figure of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (who had formerly been a congressman from Michigan) looms especially large in this study. Although National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger's role has tended to dominate the historical literature—not least because of Kissinger's prodigious, if self-serving, memoirs—the politically astute Laird actually exerted greater influence on Nixon's approach to the...

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