It will tell you everything that you could know about how our lack of strategy in Vietnam developed, beginning with blunders by Kennedy and most heavily with the utter deceitfulness of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara.
Johnson and McNamara had no intention of winning that war. The JCS told them before the first combat soldier was sent that it would be a major war taking a minimum of 500,000 troops and 5 years of hard fighting.
Johnson wanted nothing to interfere with his giant Great Society domestic programs so he was only willing to commit enough military effort to put on a "show of American resolve". This piecemeal, "graduated response" was designed by lawyers working for LBJ and it was the disaster that the military predicted it would be, allowing the North to ramp up their own efforts to match ours. It's all in the memos and Presidential papers that McMaster uncovered in his research.
Adding to your good summary, the book basically ends in 1964 saying the die was cast by McNamara’s failures and Johnson’s subterfuge. Everything after that was preordained failure and McNamara knew it.