“Vietnam continues in different shapes, in different sizes, in different words and in different forms to affect the way policymakers reach decisions about war and peace,” said Kalb, who worked on book during his time as USIP’s writer-in-residence last year. He was interviewed by USIP Executive Vice President Tara Sonenshine.

Kalb discussed at length President Barack Obama’s concern to understand the “lessons” of Vietnam—an interest reflected in President Obama’s conversations with fellow senators on a trip to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2008 before he was elected president. Even so, Kalb said, in his first meeting with his National Security Council, Obama flatly stated that “Afghanistan is not Vietnam.”

Kalb also noted that the outgoing top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the lessons of Vietnam. Petraeus has been confirmed by the Senate this summer to serve as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Kalb is the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice, Emeritus, at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also the founding director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.

He said that he wrote Haunting Legacy with his daughter because, “I could not get the war out of my system.” He recalled that even among journalists, there were two broad visions of the war: one generally reflecting the government’s stance out of Washington and the other, more skeptical sense conveyed from reporting out of Vietnam.

Kalb suggested that the impact of the Vietnam war on American policymakers and society would exceed that of more recent conflicts, including Iraq and Afghanistan, in part because it was freighted with heavier emotions about its human toll and its moral questions. “There were too many people who died for nothing,” he said.