Homo Neoconus.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War and The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam

David Milne, America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 336 pp., $26.00.

Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 334 pp., $49.95.

THOUGH IT has been over for decades, the Vietnam War continues, more often than not, to loom large in American presidential campaigns. In 1980 Ronald Reagan promised to end the Vietnam syndrome and raised liberal hackles by calling the war a "noble cause." Bill Clinton was pummeled by the conservative press in 1992 for being a draft dodger. Dan Quayle and George W. Bush were fiercely questioned about their war records, or lack of one. John F. Kerry, who actually saw combat and declared that he was "reporting for duty" at the Democratic convention in 2004, was Swift-boated as a traitor. Now, as the 2008 presidential campaign heats up, Vietnam promises to be the subject of contention once more.

President Bush declared before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2007 that defeat in Iraq would amount to a new Vietnam, but the GOP's nomination of Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who endured five years of torture in Hanoi, has substantially raised the stakes. At outlets such as the Weekly Standard and elsewhere, McCain's neoconservative bedfellows are contending that Iraq offers a unique opportunity to redress America's humiliation in Vietnam, when liberal elites allegedly betrayed the troops, just as they are intent on doing today. In this telling, McCain's rise has become synonymous with the rebirth of Iraq itself. In the January 22, 2008, Wall Street Journal, for example, Bret Stephens observed:

There is another kind of honor, however, which is uniquely bestowed by one's adversaries and enemies.... It is the honor many Americans feel they lost in Vietnam, and which, through Mr. McCain's not-so-improbable resurgence, they now seek to regain and make their own. David Milne's America's Rasputin and Andrew Preston's The War Council thus arrive opportunely. At a moment when new myths about Vietnam are being purveyed, they offer two important reminders. The first is of the dangers posed by warrior intellectuals who propagate seductive illusions about America's ability to rebuild distant societies in its own image. The second is that Vietnam was not a conservative war. It was a liberal one that was doomed to failure.

Few liberal intellectuals and government officials championed the Vietnam War more ardently than Walt Rostow, the subject of Milne's informative and pointed biography. An advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Rostow was a fervent liberal hawk, who believed that America had to avoid a new "Munich" and that it was its duty to democratize other nations, no matter what the cost. Though Kennedy was fascinated by Rostow's intellectual fireworks, he became wary of him. Rostow's faith in strategic bombing prompted Kennedy to dub him "Air Marshal." Under Johnson, however, Rostow rebounded to become national-security advisor and the most-fervent proponent of the Vietnam War, shielding Johnson, as far as possible, from its realities, to the extent, as he later admitted, of actively concealing official government information from the president.

Rostow's boundless confidence in America's ability to triumph in Vietnam stemmed from the sunny belief that capitalism and liberty represented the inexorable wave of the future for the third world. With just a little nudge from the American military, he believed, history could be accelerated, Communism defeated and freedom expanded abroad. If Rostow's idealistic views sound eerily reminiscent of the current neoconservative crusade, it's because they are.

Rostow, who was born in Brooklyn in 1916, inherited his idealism from his parents. His mother Lillian was the child of Russian emigres; his father Victor, a Ukrainian metallurgical chemist who had fled czarist Russia, met her at a socialist...