FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Claire Noble (410) 295-1039,
[email protected]
WHY VIETNAM MATTERS By Rufus Phillips Foreword by Richard Holbrooke
Rufus Phillips is featured in the new Ken Burns’ 2017 documentary film series, The Vietnam War, which will premiere on 17 September 2017 on PBS. “Phillips’s short chapter on lessons the U.S. should have learned from the Vietnam War should be mandatory reading in Washington, D.C.” — Publishers Weekly “It is, among other things, a wonderful read, full of detail and drama.” —George Packer, The New Yorker “If you want to know why Vietnam matters, read this brilliant memoir and find out why those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are doomed to make the same mistakes." —Joseph L. Galloway, coauthor of We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young “In the flood of books on every aspect of the Vietnam War, this is one that will endure as among the most valuable, accurate, and important.” — Lewis Sorley, author of A Better War Rufus Phillips offers an extraordinary inside history of the most critical years of American involvement in Vietnam, from 1954 to 1968, and explains why it still matters. Describing what went right and then wrong, he finds that our failure to understand the Communists, our South Vietnamese allies, or even ourselves took us down the wrong road of a conventional war until it was too late—we missed the war’s essential political character. Documenting the story from his own personal files, now available at the Texas Tech Vietnam Archive, as well as from the historical record, the former government official paints striking portraits of such key figures as John F. Kennedy, Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara, Henry Cabot Lodge, Hubert Humphrey, and Ngo Dinh Diem, among others with whom he dealt. RUFUS PHILLIPS spent much of his time over a fourteen-year period in South Vietnam as a U.S. Army officer, CIA case officer, USAID counterinsurgency official, and State Department consultant. He helped monitor the 2009 Afghan elections. He also provided counterinsurgency advice to the U.S. embassy in Kabul. He was inducted into the U.S. Army OCS Hall of Fame in 2014 and appears in Ken Burns’ 2017 documentary film series, The Vietnam War.
Why Vietnam Matters By Rufus Phillips Publication date: 15 August 2017 ISBN: 978-1-68247-310-8 | Paperback & eBook: $24.95 448 pages, 32 b/w photos
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