Böcker av Brian Vandemark

On 4 May 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, political fires that had been burning across America during the 1960s exploded. Antiwar protestors wearing bell-bottom jeans and long hair hurled taunts and rocks at another group of young American-National Guardsman sporting gas masks and rifles. At half past noon, violence unfolded at chaotic speed, as guardsmen-many of whom had joined the Guard to escape the draft-opened fire on the students. Two reductive narratives ensued: one, that lethal state violence targeted Americans who spoke their minds; the other, that law enforcement gave troublemakers the comeuppance they deserved. For over fifty years, little middle ground has been found due to incomplete and sometimes contradictory evidence.Kent State meticulously re-creates the divided cultural landscape of America during the Vietnam War and heightened popular anxieties around the country. On college campuses, teach-ins, sit-down strikes and demonstrations exposed the growing rift between the left and the right. Many students opposed the war as unnecessary and unjust and were uneasy over poor and working-class kids drafted and sent to Vietnam in their place. Some developed a hatred for the military, the police and everything associated with authority, while others resolved to uphold law and order at any cost.Focusing on the thirteen victims of the Kent State shooting and a painstaking reconstruction on the days surrounding it, historian Brian VanDeMark draws on crucial new research and interviews-including, for the first time, the perspective of guardsmen who were there. The result is a complete reckoning with the tragedy that marked the end of the sixties.

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to fully explain why such decent, brilliant, and previously successful men failed so badly. With this book?more than twenty years in the making?that changes.In Road to Disaster, acclaimed historian Brian VanDeMark draws upon decades of archival research, his own exclusive interviews with many of the officials involved with the war, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as defense secretaries for presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Beyond that, Road to Disaster is the first account of the war to look at the cataclysmic decisions of those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations through the prism of recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and organizational theory to explain why ?the best and the brightest? became trapped in situations that suffocated creative thinking and willingness to dissent; why they found change so hard; and why they were so blind to their own errors.A comprehensive history of America's descent into Vietnam during the 1960s that posits a striking new way of understanding that catastrophe, Road to Disaster is a landmark in scholarship and a work of paramount importance, both in comprehending what happened and why, and?just as importantly?preventing fiascoes in the future.