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Publisher’s Weekly said of The
Certain Trumpet: Maxwell Taylor and the American Experience in Vietnam, “Maxwell Taylor, an unregenerate
"hawk," was one of the few advisers who supported President Lyndon Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam war to the
very end. His eight-year involvement with Vietnam was longer than that of any senior American official. Kinnard ( 1890-1990:
A Pictorial History ) traces his influence on presidential policy-making both in strategic decisions and domestic and international
matters relating to Vietnam between 1960 and 1968, first as John Kennedy's military representative, then as ambassador
to Saigon and presidential consultant under LBJ. Based partly on 12 interviews with Taylor before his death in '87, the
book portrays him as "the very model of the modern soldier-statesman" and the first of the new breed of managerial
generals. Kinnard also reveals Taylor's strong anti-media feelings: the great mistake of the Vietnam War in his view was
“the failure to impose censorship on the news media.” Kinnard concludes that Taylor's role in the Vietnam
War was “central but not decisive.” A balanced look at one of Kennedy and Johnson's key advisers, but a study
of limited appeal.”
According to the book description of
From the Paterson Station, “This is the story of a boy abandoned in 1926 at the age of four
in industrial Paterson, New Jersey, and subsequently raised by a warm extended Irish Catholic family during the Great Depression.
We meet the people-many of them characters in their own right-who influenced Doug's early life including the nuns of St.
Joe's School. Winning a pre-war appointment to West Point, he graduates with the D-Day Class of 1944 and serves in the
European War as an artillery lieutenant in one of Patton's divisions. Here we meet the men of the GI Generation with whom
he fought the war and served in the early occupation of Germany. The story ends in the summer of 1947 as the Cold War gets
underway.”
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Brigadier General Douglas
Kinnard, USA (ret.), Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Vermont graduated from West Point in the
D-Day Class of 1944 and served in combat in World War II, the Korean War, and twice in Vietnam-the latter time as a Brigadier
General; as chief of staff of the most important field command in Vietnam. He retired in 1970 to become a professor-scholar, and after receiving the Ph.D. in Politics
from Princeton University in 1973 became a member of the Political Science Faculty at the University of Vermont. While there,
he took a two-year leave of absence to serve as the only civilian Chief of Military History, U.S. Army. Since becoming Emeritus
Professor at Vermont he has been a Visiting Professor at a number of universities, and is currently at work on his seventh
book. He is also serving as a Commissioner on the American Battle Monuments Commission, having been appointed by President
Clinton.
Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard
is the author of The War Managers; President Eisenhower and Strategy Management: A Study in Defense Politics;
The Certain Trumpet: Maxwell Taylor and the American Experience in Vietnam; Eisenhower: Soldier-Statesman of the American
Century; From the Paterson Station; and, The Secretary Of Defense.
According to the book description
of The War Managers, “In 1977 Douglas Kinnard sent out an extensive questionnaire to the 173
Army generals who had managed the war in Vietnam. A surprising sixty-seven percent of them completed the questionnaires, with
many adding pages of comments. Kinnard then personally interviewed twenty of the respondents and supplemented the data with
research from the files of the Army's military history center. The War Managers is the astonishing result of Kinnard's analysis of the responses of these men.
Kinnard had focused on such central issues as the quality of both American and Vietnamese troops, the generals' own chains
of command, the influence of the media, civilian authority, U.S. objectives, the importance of the "body count,"
and many others. What emerges from the generals answers, compiled in an absorbing manner in this book, is a uniquely fascinating
and penetrating view of the Vietnam War from the perspectives of the U.S. Army generals who commanded there.”
According to a reader of President
Eisenhower and Strategy Management: A Study in Defense Politics, “President Eisenhower & Strategy
Mgt provides a useful foundation for today's discussion of America's future defense posture. It is also one of the
first books to show that Eisenhower, contrary to the conventional view, was the guiding force of US strategic policymaking
during this administration.”
According to the book description of
Eisenhower: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century, “Dwight David Eisenhower proudly claimed that he
“came from the very heart of America.” Yet it could be argued that, despite those provincial beginnings,
no other American exerted more influence on world history during the twentieth century. From his humble birth in Abilene,
Kansas, Eisenhower rose to the supreme command of the Allied armies that helped destroy Adolf Hitler’s Nazi war machine
and to the presidency of the United States. Douglas Kinnard’s profile of this great soldier-statesman describes his
rise through the ranks of the peacetime army of the 1920s and 1930s the recognition of his abilities by such leaders as Douglas
MacArthur and George C. Marshall, his “great crusade” in Europe during World War II, and his two terms in the
Oval Office. Kinnard’s penetrating look at this great military leader and commander in chief serves as an introduction
to Eisenhower’s life and provides a concise account of the momentous military and political events of the first half
of the twentieth century.”
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