The story of General William C. Westmoreland’s stubborn four-year pursuit of a flawed strategy in Vietnam, as related by Lewis Sorley, is both maddening and tragic. It portrays the handsome general, Time’s Man of the Year in 1965, as a hollow man unfit for the demands of high command. His disastrous leadership led to the fruitless deaths of thousands of GIs, a demoralized Army, a loss of confidence in the military and the Vietnam War by the American public, and the political demise of the man who chose him for the job, President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The biography is no mere hatchet job. Colonel Sorley has devoted more than two decades to the study of his topic. The General Who Lost the Vietnam War is based on a thorough understanding of all of the strategic debates, the leadership failures, and the eventual successes of U.S. Army operations in Vietnam. Col. Sorley has interviewed all of the significant military figures of the era, has written biographies of the former Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson and Westmoreland’s successor as commanding officer in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, and has edited The Abrams Tapes, a painstakingly transcribed record of Gen. Abrams’s command conferences from 1968 to 1972. Sorley laid out the findings of this research in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. That book traces the ways in which the U.S. effort in Vietnam, under the leadership