Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam

by H.R. McMaster

By law the Joint Chiefs of Staff were the “principal military advisers to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense.”4 That was not the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Under the Kennedy-Johnson system, the Joint Chiefs lost the direct access to the president, and thus the real influence on decision making, that the Eisenhower NSC structure had provided.

Of the approximately thirteen hundred men who actually reached the beaches, almost twelve hundred were taken prisoner and about one hundred were killed in action.

Bay of Pigs