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Why was the Vietnam War such an epic tragedy? Historian Max Hastings will talk to us about his new book, The Vietnam.

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This is the Book Review Podcast from The New York Times. I am Pamela Poe.

I am so pleased to have Max Hastings join us now from London. He is a journalist, an historian, author of 26 books. His most recent one is called Vietnam, an epic tragedy, 1945 to 1975.

Max, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure Pamela.

This is a monumental book. It is massive, both in terms of ambition and achievement. I didn't mean length, although it is also a bit long.

But before we get into talking about the book itself, I want to start with your own experiences covering the Vietnam War, first from the US and then from overseas.

Who did you report for and when?

When I first came to the United States in 1967 on a journalistic fellowship which I traveled all over the country and then I stayed in 1968 to report the presidential election, which was a huge experience to me because I was very young, only in 1962 in 1968.

It was a hell of a time to be in the country. On my own impressions, I was a very immature journalist. My writing reflected that.

But one did see a huge amount of stuff and meet a huge amount of people which made a great impression. I mean I shall never forget for my dying day once I was in Washington when I went with a group of foreign journalists to the White House one morning to meet the president.

Linda Johnson arranged us for 40 minutes about why he so passionately believed that the Vietnam War was worth fighting and had to be kept going.

When this was a mere six weeks before he himself stunned the American people by announcing that he wouldn't run for reelection in the interests of John the Secure Piece of Vietnam.

So that was a big experience for me and then in 1970 still very young I went to Vietnam and I haven't written in this book at all about my personal experiences because I was so incredibly green that if you put me up against the giants of American Vietnam reporting, whether it's the Harbush Dam, it's all the she-uns or whatever, I know where they are.

But on the other hand, my various trips to Vietnam between 1970 and 75 when I came out of the Embassy compound and the final evacuation, obviously it does lend a color, it lends unbelievably vivid memories to the stuff that I'm writing about what happened to Vietnamese people and what happened to Americans.

What stuck with you most from that experience reporting in Vietnam?

I think for the first time once saw what a huge war I'd grown up in a rather stupid household, what I mean by stupid is that my father and all the men in our family were always banging on about what from there had in World War II and some people did talk like that in the 1950s and early 1960s.

And then when I started reporting wars and especially Vietnam, you realize that war is not an adventure laid on for the amusement of young men, it's a colossal tragedy.

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