The Experts

Long out of print, The Experts is Clyde Edwin Pettit’s masterful selection of self-damning words from the men who led America into a disastrous war in Vietnam, and who kept it going for a decade with vague assurances and stale imagery about tides turning and lights at ends of tunnels. Arranged chronologically, it amounts to an implicit narrative of mounting horror and increasingly tortuous self-delusion.

Pettit insisted that The Experts should be read cover to cover. “Most people pick it up and flip through it randomly looking for Top Secret reports,” he said. “Or they look in the index to find themselves. But the whole point is that you’re supposed to read it straight through, from front to back.”