This book and its accompanying other volume constitute a textbook edition of my work Warriors and Fools: How America’s Leaders Lost the Vietnam War and Why It Still Matters. I have decided to make my original work - still available in their eBook, hardbound, and paperback versions - into this textbook edition of two volumes. That way I can share with readers the important pictures, maps, diagrams and tables that I had gathered in my research but did not include in my original work. My intent is to provide a scholarly textbook with the additional information of my research that teachers, students, and veterans can use in their study of the Vietnam War. Collectively, the two volumes of this textbook contain thirteen chapters that are grouped into four parts; each of which offer a different, but related viewpoint of the war. This Volume I contains two parts. The first begins at the end of World War Two and examines the Vietnam war from the Washington policy making view. That is, it explains how each administration - with a focus on the Kennedy to Nixon Presidencies – developed its policies and strategies on how to contain the spread of communism in SE Asia and defend South Vietnam from communist aggression. The second part then narrates the conduct of the war from the North Vietnamese view. It covers who their main decision makers were and how they waged war to first gain independence and then unify Vietnam. The essential points of this overall two volume textbook edition remain the same as my original work. First, both US civilian and military leaders charged with making decisions and executing them during the Vietnam War failed America and its soldiers. Second, they also failed others, particularly the South Vietnamese, who depended on the US to keep its commitment to an independent South Vietnam free of communist subjugation. The reasons for these failures are explained throughout and take a different view than what most historians have offered. Unfortunately, they may not surprise some veterans.