Imperial brotherhood

"This book begins with a question about the Vietnam War. How is it, asks Robert D. Dean, that American policymakers - men who prided themselves on hard-headed pragmatism and shunned "fuzzy" idealism - could have committed the nation to such a ruinous, costly, and protracted war? The answer, he argues, lies not simply in the imperatives of anticommunist ideology or in any reasonable calculation of national interest. At least as decisive in determining the form and content of American Cold War foreign policy were the common background and shared values of its makers, especially their deeply ingrained sense of upper-class masculinity."--BOOK JACKET.