In Part I the author discusses his experiences as Chief of Operations Analysis for Westmoreland during the 1966-67 phase of the Vietnam War. In 1969 he returns to Vietnam as Commanding General Force Artillery and Chief of Staff of Second Field Force, where his final action involves planning the 1970 Cambodian incursion. Turning down further promotions, in Part II he pursues a Ph.D. at Princeton on a campus alive with antiwar protest. We follow him to a tenured professorship at the University of Vermont, where his polling of U.S. generals who had served in Vietnam results in The War Managers, considered a classic book that sets forth their conflicting views on the conduct of that war.
Douglas Kinnard Knihy



Reprint. Previously published: Hanover, N.H.: Published for the University of Vermont by the University Press of New England, 1977.
Since its creation by the National Security Act of 1947 the office of secretary of defense has grown rapidly in power and influence, surpassing at times that of the secretary of state to become second only to the presidency in the government of the United States. The pivotal secretaries, according to Kinnard, are James Forrestal, Charles Wilson, Robert McNamara, Melvin Laird, and James Schlesinger.Kinnard analyzes the administration of each of these secretaries not only within the domestic and international contexts of his time but also within the bureaucratic world in which the secretary functions along with the president and secretary of state.