Shame and Humiliation: Presidential Decision Making on Vietnam.

Almost a quarter of a century after America's involvement in the Vietnam War, a steady stream of scholarly efforts describing and explaining this controversial conflict continue to be published. Each may well serve a purpose within the historical goal of arriving at a complete or nomothetic explanation. Blema Steinberg's work proffers a somewhat unique idiographic suggestion. She argues that Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon had narcissistic personalities, although the manifestations were dramatically different. Steinberg's primary theme is that the specific personalities of these men impacted their decisions about the role of the United States in Vietnam. Notably absent from her discussion is John F. Kennedy. She notes that while he did increase the number of military advisors in Vietnam, the timing of his assassination was such that he never had to confront the decision of whether to escalate American intervention efforts.

Shame and Humiliation is a revelation of how personality traits affect one's perception of reality. Exhaustively researched and meticulously referenced, …