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The Vietnam War in pop culture -- In books like ''The Short-timers'' and movies like ''Good Morning, Vietnam,'' we have tried both to face the war and to domesticate it

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Updated August 18, 2016 11:50:38

Few conflicts have spawned as many film, music and TV spin-offs as the Vietnam War - and few have divided the pop culture world as much.

Long before Robin Williams shouted "Gooooood morning, Vietnam!" into the microphone, the pop culture industry had latched on to the Vietnam War to shape a compelling, if conflicting, narrative.

Films, music and TV shows - mostly coming out of the US - have tackled the war in different ways and told stories that in the years since may have shaped our perception of history.

Films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July have become cultural icons.

Credence Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA have found a similar spot in the musical canon.

Closer to home, Cold Chisel's Khe Sanh is in high rotation in any Australian pub and Redgum's I Was Only Nineteen still stirs emotions.

So how have these pop culture depictions affected our view of the Vietnam War, and does the US story risk skewing the Australian interpretation of the conflict?

The first shot

In the early days of Western involvement in the Vietnam War the champions of film and music were notably split on how to spin the conflict.

"Hollywood has made a significant effort to portray America's Vietnam experience," Professor of cinema studies David Desser wrote in Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television.

"Yet the films ... hardly present a unified, coherent vision.

"If we take these films as a group, we find contradictions and ambiguities throughout, while many individual works are similarly conflicted in what they are trying to say about the Vietnam War and America's involvement in it."

John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968) was a staunchly pro-US military film that told the story of a journalist who was cynical about the war but came to support it after travelling to Vietnam with US troops.

The film was released at the height of the war and was panned by critics - partly for its quality, but also because of reports of heavy US government involvement in the editing and production of the film.

Its pro-military message was in stark contrast to the growing public protests back home in the US that musicians were starting to tap into.

The 1967 song I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag was satirical and anti-war and received widespread attention after it was performed at the now famous 1969 Woodstock festival. Fortunate Son wasn't explicit in its criticism of the war, but it tapped into the counterculture that was starting to be seen in the pop culture material of the time.

And while Sergeant Barry Sadler's Ballad of the Green Berets (1966) was a pro-military song, it became the outlier in the collection of songs from the era.

The aftermath of the war

When the war officially ended in 1975 there was not a rush from Hollywood to create the epic dramas many might associate with the conflict.

Instead, many productions dealt with the issue by proxy and focussed on the effect the war had on returned soldiers.

Taxi Driver (1976) and The Deer Hunter (1978) both looked at former soldiers who were prone to violence and were struggling to return to normal life after the war.

After these two films were met with critical acclaim and Academy Award nominations, the "tortured Vietnam vet" become a stock character in many films over the years, including Jacknife (1989) Forrest Gump (1994) and Dead Presidents (1995).

In the music scene, Khe Sanh (1978), I was Only Nineteen (1983) and Born in the USA (1984) picked up on the theme of returned soldiers and ran with it.

I Was Only Nineteen is a first-person narrative about a soldier who goes to fight in Vietnam and comes home disillusioned and scarred.

The song's writer and performer, John Schumann, told ABC News Breakfast it encapsulated how many Australians felt about the war.

"It was a pretty accurate and compelling insight into the lives, minds and bodies, as it turned out, of the young men who went off to fight and came back to a society that did not value or respect their service as it had their fathers in WWII and grandfathers in WWI," he said.

"I've had so many stories from veterans about when they first heard the song, but I think the most telling one for me, the one that grabbed me the most was a veteran from Queensland who had tried to slip back into his life in rural Queensland and he heard the song and he pulled over to the side of the road ... and he listened and his first thoughts he told me were, 'those bastards were lying to me'.

"All the symptoms I talked in the song, he had. He then realised that if somebody else had those symptoms, then he was not alone."

The action '80s

Slow-burn dramas about traumatised soldiers were soon on a collision course with the desire for action films that came in the 1980s.

The success of the epic Apocalypse Now (1979) arguably helped steer films about the Vietnam War in this direction and they hit their stride with Rambo in 1982 - an action-packed feature film about a Vietnam veteran who had to survive while being chased through the American wilderness.

By the mid '80s films and TV were starting to base their stories back in Vietnam itself, rather than dealing with the aftermath and soldiers coming home.

Rambo returned to the Vietnamese jungle in the second film of the series in 1985, and Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) quickly followed.

Television - a relative latecomer to the Vietnam War story - did eventually join the action/adventure narrative in with The A-Team, a story of Vietnam vets-turned-mercenaries. The 1987 series Tour of Duty - a story of US troops fighting in Vietnam - followed soon after.

Towards the end of the decade, cinemagoers watched Good Morning Vietnam (1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) deal with the politics of the war both in Vietnam and back at home. In Born on the Fourth of July Tom Cruise plays a wounded veteran who becomes an anti-war political activist after feeling betrayed by his country.

Since the turn of the century there have been comparatively fewer depictions of the Vietnam War, with the political drama Quiet American (2002), the action-escape film Rescue Dawn (2006), and the musical Across the Universe (2007) being notable exceptions.

But by the time the '90s began almost every film was tapping into at least part of a now-established narrative: that the US should not have joined the Vietnam War; that soldiers were returning traumatised; and that the public had long protested against US involvement.

The Australian experience

Australia's contribution to the pop culture collection on the Vietnam War is relatively sparse compared to the US.

The only major attempt at film was The Odd Angry Shot in 1979, which mostly steered clear of any political ideology and showed little action compared to US films.

Some historians have suggested this could be explained by the fact the Australian experience of the war does not gel with the narrative coming from the US, and the racial and political upheaval that existed in America at the time.

Professor John Murphy from Melbourne University said Australians were not opposed to the war from the beginning and that not all soldiers were shell-shocked on return.

"The opinion polls show the war had majority support until 1969," he told ABC News Breakfast.

"There's a strong myth that [soldiers] were maligned and stigmatised, and there certainly were some incidents where the anti-war movement condemned returning troops, but how widespread it was is hard to say."

For his part, Schumann said there had been a "bit of revisionism" of the Vietnam War story over the years and it was risky for Australians to let US film depictions influence their understanding of Australia's involvement.

"To try to overlay, as we always do in this country, our experience with the American one is [folly]," he said.

In 2005 Australian hip-hop group The Herd did a cover of I was Only Nineteen that made the Triple J Hottest 100 list for the year and brought the song and its themes to a new generation.

"I was very pleased that they did it [and] I was pleased that they did it the way they did," Schumann said.

Topics: history, unrest-conflict-and-war, arts-and-entertainment, film-movies, music, vietnam

First posted August 18, 2016 09:22:57

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Updated August 18, 2016 11:50:38 Few conflicts have spawned as many film, music and TV spin-offs as the Vietnam War - and few have divided the pop culture world as much. Long before Robin Williams shouted "Gooooood morning, Vietnam!" into the microphone, the pop culture industry had latched on to the Vietnam War to shape a compelling, if conflicting, narrative.

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Pop culture: The dictator of how we see the Vietnam war today?

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Pop culture: The dictator of how we see the Vietnam war today?

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

For generations born after the Vietnam War (1954-75), the dominant source of information about that war comes from popular culture. There are novels, music, TV shows and movies all depicting some part of the war. In fact, there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to Vietnam War movies, featuring 137 different titles. The problem is that whether or not these pop culture references depict positive or negative attributes of the war, it is still an American depiction. The Vietnamese story continues to go largely untold. Little do many Americans realise that the same war is called the "American War" in Vietnam.

One Professor is trying to introduce the Vietnamese perspective into her classroom. Dr. Donna Alvah at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York teaches "The United States and the Vietnam War. " At the course's onset she has students write an essay on what they already know about the war. Unsurprisingly, essays turned in reflect the common perspective shared by most Americans born after the war. According to Dr. Alvah, it is "largely gleaned from movies, documentaries, music, and other popular cultural expressions, as well as from older relatives who served in the war, or who in any case hold strong opinions about it."

Many American students are not instructed on the Vietnam War in middle or high school. Dr. Alvah's students have shared that often "teachers didn't get as far as the Vietnam War, because teachers have a broad span of history to 'cover' - and the Vietnam War comes toward the end of it." Those who do have the chance to learn about the war generally receive a very condensed history.

Perhaps one of the culprits is the infamous standardised test. Nowadays, many teachers teach in a way that ensures students do well on the state-administered tests. If the Vietnam War is not on the test, it is not taught in the classroom. Maybe the lack of instruction is a sensitivity issue.

"I wouldn't be surprised if many teachers are uncomfortable with teaching about the war because it's still a controversial topic in the US," said Dr. Alvah.

In any case, the gap of formal instruction is leading post-Vietnam War generations to absorb pop culture created versions of the war. The problem is that these versions, originating in America by Americans, are leaving out the Vietnamese story. And whether it is a negative or positive depiction, it is an American depiction.

The rest of Dr. Alvah's semester covers varying Vietnamese memoirs and other firsthand accounts of the war. She slowly introduces Vietnamese perspectives by going back in history before the Cold War and the ultimate American involvement in the country. She also includes overlooked American perspectives of the Vietnam War. Still Dr. Alvah admits that by the semester's end, some students still hold a dismissive attitude towards the Vietnamese side, including the massive death toll.

"Perhaps fathoming the enormity of the war takes more than a semester," she said.

Dr. Alvah hopes to add to the course in the future, ideally a travel component to Vietnam. But Dr. Alvah is just one woman, at one college, trying to debunk false American attitudes towards the Vietnamese War. Until there are more Dr. Alvah's, or those who have the opportunity to visit Vietnam and hear their stories, the Vietnamese side of the war will remain hushed. And generations to come will continue to view the Vietnam War as dictated by pop culture fabrications.

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Pop culture dictates the American version of the Vietnam War | Investvine

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For generations born after the Vietnam War (1954-75), the dominant source of information about that war comes from popular culture. There are novels, music, TV shows and movies all depicting some part of the war. In fact, there is an

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An hour long video of Vietnam war songs.

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Tunesmith Depot: Vietnam War Songs (Some songs here were written specifically about the Vietnam War while others came out during that era but were actually written about other wars or war in general.) Play list: Johnny Wright: Hello Vietnam Country Joe & the Fish: I'm Fixing to Die The Monkees: Last Train To Clarksville Buffy Sainte Marie: Universal Soldier Sgt.

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Clacker: a small hand-held firing device for a claymore mine

didi: slang from the Vietnamese word di, meaning "to leave" or "to go"

expectants: casualties who are expected to die

flaky: to be in a state of mental disarray

hamlet: a small rural village

slant: derogatory term for a Vietnamese

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It's quite funny, really (perhaps in a satirical manner..) that our involvement in the war was somehow an honorable duty. A "great responsibility"...and that it was something to be proud of. The men were fearful, sure, but this cartoon shows how they were compelled by their "responsibility",(which was heavily influenced by the American government).

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The American public was fed lies from the government about the lives lost in the war...leading us to believe that we had somehow "won" or were "winning" the war.

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By early 1963, the number of American military personnel in Vietnam had grown from several hundred to more than 10,000 in a few short years. The ramifications of the United States' direct involvement in a conflict halfway around the globe - less than a decade after the ceasefire in another brutal war in Korea - were certainly part of the national conversation, but in '63 America's growing role in Vietnam was not even close to the all-encompassing, divisive issue it would become by the middle of the decade.

Vietnam was on people's radar, of course, but not as a constant, alarming blip. Military families were learning first-hand (before everyone else, as they always do) that this was no "police action; but for millions of Americans, Vietnam was a mystery, a riddle that no doubt would be resolved and forgotten in time: a little place far away where inscrutable strangers were fighting over . . . something.
[MORE: "Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week's Toll"]
All the more remarkable that in January of 1963, LIFE magazine published the powerful cover article, "We Wade Deeper Into Jungle War," and illustrated it with not one or two photos but with a dozen pictures - most of them in color - by the great photojournalist, Larry Burrows.

Burrows, seen at left in Vietnam in 1963, worked steadily - although not exclusively - in Southeast Asia from 1962 until his death in 1971. His work is often cited as the most searing and the most consistently excellent photography from the war, and several of his pictures ("Reaching Out," for example, featuring a wounded Marine desperately trying to comfort a stricken comrade after a fierce 1966 firefight) and photo essays (like 1965's harrowing "One Ride With Yankee Papa 13") both encompassed and defined the long, polarizing catastrophe in Vietnam.

He and three fellow photojournalists died when their helicopter was shot down during operations in Laos. Burrows was 44.

The pictures here, meanwhile, are striking not only for the clarity with which they document a scary, widening conflict, but for how graphic they are. To American eyes, long accustomed to having their news sanitized by the major media, the notion that these and similarly gruesome pictures routinely ran in a popular weekly magazine five decades ago will likely come as something of a shock. Today, a photograph of blood stains and broken glass on a street after a car bombing is about the extent of what most Americans will ever see on the nightly news, on bale shows or in their newspapers. (Raggedly severed limbs, torched corpses and viscera-covered walls evidently being deemed too upsetting to the fragile American sensibility.)

But it's worth recalling - or reminding those who weren't alive at the time - that, starting even before the January 25, 1963, issue in which the photos in this gallery appeared, and throughout the war in Vietnam, LIFE and other major, mainstream American news outlets, in print and on TV, regularly published and broadcast what today would be considered graphic, unsettling content.

That LIFE considered this a significant, indeed a groundbreaking article is evidenced by the highly unusual treatment it received on the magazine's cover. The first slide in this gallery illustrates this perfectly: rather than the customary horizontal, one-sheet image found on literally thousands of other LIFE covers, the January 25, 1963, issue featured an exceedingly rare fold-out, giving full play to Burrows' powerful portrait.
Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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America in Vietnam, 1963: Deeper Into War

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By early 1963, the number of American military personnel in Vietnam had grown from several hundred to more than 10,000 in a few short years.

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The Band - I Shall Be Released (Vietnam War footage)

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"You have left too much of yourself in this land for it not to be yours.

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News Article Stating How the War broke trust

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News Article Stating How the War broke trust

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And yet even as Vietnam continues to shape our country, its place in our national consciousness is slipping. Some 65 percent of Americans are under 45 and so unable to even remember the war. Meanwhile, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our involvement in Syria, our struggle with terrorism - these conflicts are pushing Vietnam further into the background.

All the more reason, then, for us to revisit the war and its consequences for today. This essay inaugurates a new series by The Times, Vietnam '67, that will examine how the events of 1967 and early 1968 shaped Vietnam, America and the world. Hopefully, it will generate renewed conversation around that history, now half a century past.

What readers take away from that conversation is another matter. If all we do is debate why we lost, or why we were there at all, we will miss the truly important question: What did the war do to us as Americans?

CYNICISM

Vietnam changed the way we looked at politics. We became inured to our leaders lying in the war: the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, the number of "pacified provinces" (and what did "pacified" mean, anyway?), the inflated body counts.

People talked about Johnson's "credibility gap." This was a genteel way of saying that the president was lying. Then, however, a credibility gap was considered unusual and bad. By the end of the war, it was still considered bad, but it was no longer unusual. When politicians lie today, fact checkers might point out what is true, but then everyone moves on.

We have switched from naïveté to cynicism. One could argue that they are opposites, but I think not. With naïveté you risk disillusionment, which is what happened to me and many of my generation. Cynicism, however, stops you before you start. It alienates us from "the government," a phrase that today connotes bureaucratic quagmire. It threatens democracy, because it destroys the power of the people to even want to make change.

You don't finish the world's largest highway system, build huge numbers of public schools and universities, institute the Great Society, fight a major war, and go to the moon, which we did in the 1960s - simultaneously - if you're cynical about government and politicians.

I live near Seattle, hardly Donald J. Trump territory. Most of my friends cynically deride Mr. Trump's slogan, Make America Great Again, citing all that was wrong in the olden days. Indeed, it wasn't paradise, particularly for minorities. But there's some truth to it. We were greater then. It was the war - not liberalism, not immigration, not globalization - that changed us.

RACE

In December 1968, I was on a blasted and remote jungle hilltop about a kilometer from the demilitarized zone. A chopper dropped off about three weeks of sodden mail and crumpled care packages. In that pile was a package for Ray Delgado, an 18-year-old Hispanic kid from Texas. I watched Ray tear into the aluminum foil wrapping and, smiling broadly, hold something up for me to see.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's tamales. From my mother."

"What are tamales?"

"You want to try one?" he asked.

"Sure." I looked at it, turned it over, then stuck it in my mouth and started chewing. Ray and his other Hispanic friends were barely containing themselves as I was gamely chewing away and thinking, "No wonder these Mexicans have such great teeth."

"Lieutenant," Ray finally said. "You take the corn husk off."

I was from a logging town on the Oregon coast. I'd heard of tamales, but I'd never seen one. Until I joined my company of Marines in Vietnam, I'd never even talked to a Mexican. Yes, people like me called people like Ray "Mexicans," even though they were as American as apple pie - and tamales. Racial tension where I grew up was the Swedes and Norwegians squaring off against the Finns every Saturday night in the parking lot outside the dance at the Labor Temple.

President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the military in 1948. By the time of the Vietnam War, the races were serving together. But putting everyone in the same units is very different than having them work together as a unit.

Our national memory of integration is mostly about the brave people of the civil rights movement. Imagine arming all those high school students from Birmingham, Ala. - white and black - with automatic weapons in an environment where using these weapons was as common as having lunch and they are all jacked up on testosterone. That's racial tension.

During the war there were over 200 fraggings in the American military - murders carried out by fragmentation grenades, which made it impossible to identify the killer. Almost all fraggings, at least when the perpetrator was caught, were found to be racially motivated.

And yet the more common experience in combat was cooperation and respect. If I was pinned down by enemy fire and I needed an M-79 man, I'd scream for Thompson, because he was the best. I didn't even think about what color Thompson was.

White guys had to listen to soul music and black guys had to listen to country music. We didn't fear one another. And the experience stuck with us. Hundreds of thousands of young men came home from Vietnam with different ideas about race - some for the worse, but most for the better. Racism wasn't solved in Vietnam, but I believe it was where our country finally learned that it just might be possible for us all to get along.

SERVICE

I was at a reading recently in Fayetteville, N.C., when a young couple appeared at the signing table. He was standing straight and tall in Army fatigues. She was holding a baby in one arm and hauling a toddler with the other. They both looked to be about two years out of high school. The woman started to cry. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, "My husband is shipping out again, tomorrow." I turned to him and said, "Wow, your second tour?"

"No, sir," he replied. "My seventh."

My heart sank. Is this a republic?

The Vietnam War ushered in the end of the draft, and the creation of what the Pentagon calls the "all-volunteer military." But I don't. I call it the all-recruited military. Volunteers are people who rush down to the post office to sign up after Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center gets bombed. Recruits, well, it's more complicated.

When I was growing up, almost every friend's father or uncle had served in World War II. All the women in town knew that a destroyer was smaller than a cruiser and a platoon was smaller than a company, because their husbands had all been on destroyers or in platoons. Back then it was called "the service." Today, we call it "the military."

That shift in language indicates a profound shift in the attitudes of the republic toward its armed forces. The draft was unfair. Only males got drafted. And men who could afford to go to college did not get drafted until late in the war, when the fighting had fallen off.

But getting rid of the draft did not solve unfairness.

America's elites have mostly dropped out of military service. Engraved on the walls of Woolsey Hall at Yale are the names of hundreds of Yalies who died in World Wars I and II. Thirty-five died in Vietnam, and none since.

Instead, the American working class has increasingly borne the burden of death and casualties since World War II. In a study in The University of Memphis Law Review, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen looked at the income casualty gap, the difference between the median household incomes (in constant 2000 dollars) of communities with the highest casualties (the top 25 percent) and all the other communities. Starting from almost dead-even in World War II, the casualty gap was $5,000 in the Korean War, $8,200 in the Vietnam War, and is now more than $11,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put another way, the lowest three income deciles have suffered 50 percent more casualties than the highest three.

If these inequities continue to grow, resentment will grow with it. With growing resentment, the already wide divide between the military and civilians will also widen. This is how republics fall, with armies and parts of the country more loyal to their commander than their country.

We need to return to the spirit of the military draft, and how people felt about service to their country. The military draft was viewed by most of us the same way we view income tax. I wouldn't pay my taxes if there wasn't the threat of jail. But as a responsible citizen, I also see that paying taxes is necessary to fund the government - my government.

People would still grumble. We grumble about taxes. People would still try to pull strings to get more pleasant assignments. But everyone would serve. They'd work for "the government," and maybe start to see it as "our government." It's a lot harder to be cynical about your country if you devoted two years of your life making it a better place.

Let the armed services be just one of many ways young people can serve their country. With universal service, some boy from Seattle could find himself sharing a tamale with some Hispanic girl from El Paso. Conservatives and liberals would learn to work together for a common cause. We could return to the spirit of people of different races learning to work together in combat during the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War continues to define us, even if we have forgotten how. But it's not too late to remember, and to do something about it.

Correction: January 15, 2017

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Opinion | Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust

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And yet even as Vietnam continues to shape our country, its place in our national consciousness is slipping. Some 65 percent of Americans are under 45 and so unable to even remember the war. Meanwhile, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our involvement in Syria, our struggle with terrorism - these conflicts are pushing Vietnam further into the background.

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Mark Moyar holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the U.S. Marine Corps University, Quantico, VA 22134; moyars@mindspring.com

By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict. The Civil War and World War II were the wars that historians were advised to cover if they wanted to reach the public. Among government officials, military officers, and political scientists, Vietnam was considered irrelevant, because the United States would never get caught in protracted counterinsurgency warfare again. Iraq changed all that. Ever since the outbreak of insurgency in the former empire of Saddam Hussein, people of all persuasions have been mining the history of Vietnam for information that will support their preferred Iraq policies. Hundreds of thousands of American troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan have received more instruction on Vietnam than on any other historical subject.

Although more than thirty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, historians today are as divided on what happened as the American people were during the war itself. During the 1960s and 1970s, huge numbers of antiwar Americans entered academia and the media, while few Vietnam veterans and other supporters of the war obtained jobs in those professions, in many cases because veteran status or pro-war sentiments were considered unacceptable. As a result, most academic and journalistic accounts of the war written during and shortly afterwards depicted Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should not have fought. Antiwar history of the Vietnam War thus acquired the label of "orthodox" history.

A small group of veterans and academic historians who rejected the fundamental tenets of the antiwar movement were, from the beginning, producing works that became known as "revisionist." Over time, the number of revisionists would increase, but the movement has never made major inroads into academia. Some academics have attempted to explain that fact by arguing that revisionists are irrational or dimwitted. David L. Anderson, the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and an orthodox historian of the Vietnam War, stated in his 2005 presidential address that revisionists interpret the war based on an "uncritical acceptance" of American cold war policy rather than analysis of the facts, whereas orthodox historians rely exclusively on "reasoned analysis" in reaching their conclusions. ¹ Some orthodox scholars have maintained that the revisionists' primary ambition is not to find the truth but to twist the facts of the Vietnam War to justify contemporary wars or other policies. University of Iowa history professor Colin Gordon, for example, said with respect to revisionists and those who based foreign policy decisions on their interpretations, "History is temporarily useful to those who willfully misinterpret it, but genuinely useful only to those who make an effort to understand it. The historical memory of recent American foreign policy is shallow, cynical and selective. It shapes the past for present purposes, retrieving only those historical fragments which reinforce present assumptions." ²

While such comments may hold some truth with respect to a few individuals, they most definitely do not apply to the most prominent of the revisionists. Why, then, do historians keep making them? A leading possibility is the ideological imbalance among today's academic history departments. History faculty tirelessly profess commitment to "diversity," but within their own ranks one finds near uniformity of political sentiment. For example, at the University of Iowa history department, of which Professor Gordon is the chair, Democrats outnumber Republicans 27 to 0. ³ As analysts of group-think have observed, people in such environments are led toward the conclusion that every reasonable person shares their views, and hence any outsider who disagrees is not reasonable. Historians who oppose the orthodoxy on Vietnam, or on other politically-charged subjects like Soviet espionage in America or feminism are likely to be received by these departments as if they were crank propagandists or foolish eccentrics.

Another problem that impedes the study of Vietnam is a politically correct contraction of allowable inquiry. Within history departments, there is a generally recognized spectrum of subject matter respectability. At its left end, denoting maximum political correctness, lies the history of race, class, and gender. Between that end and the center lie such fields as cultural history, immigration history, and environmental history. At the other end of the spectrum political history stands at moderate incorrectness, diplomatic history at serious incorrectness, and military history at maximum incorrectness. As a result, military history has suffered more than any other field at the hands of the radicals, with military history jobs disappearing from most history departments as soon as their elderly military historians retire.

Political correctness has also banished certain crucial ideas from the academic discussion of Vietnam. When a revisionist contends that the Vietnamese had an authoritarian political culture that allowed strong men like Ho Chi Minh to thrive and made democracy unfeasible, orthodox professors often hurl accusations ranging from insensitivity to racism. The only instance in which authoritarian cultures may be discussed is Iraq-the existence of an authoritarian culture in Iraq can be used to highlight the foolishness of George Bush's invasion of that country.

Another weakness of the contemporary university that affects the study of the Vietnam War is excessive compartmentalization. When it became fashionable several decades ago for historians to focus on niche topics, proponents argued that this research would shed new light on big historical questions. That may have been true in certain cases, but the overall effect has been to reduce interest in the big questions and drive historians into compartments that bear little relation to each other except for their political ideology.

The diplomatic historians who study the Vietnam War often gravitate toward niche topics, such as the role of American universities in Vietnam, Vietnamese and American ideas of nation building, or the operations of the National Security Council. ⁴ Those who address the broad policies of the United States or other great powers usually give only cursory treatment to events in Vietnam or the rest of Southeast Asia. Yet one often cannot pass sound judgment on decisions in Washington without knowing the details in Southeast Asia. ⁵ Historians of Vietnam who cover the war tend to focus on narrow issues of culture and politics and avoid strategy or warfare. ⁶ Knowing what is most important in culture and politics in wartime is impossible without knowing the strategic and military context. Studies of the American media in Vietnam generally devote little attention to South Vietnamese culture and politics. ⁷ Yet it is wrong to judge the American press or American press policies without understanding South Vietnamese politics and culture.

Some compartmentalized historians would respond to the foregoing by contending that they can get the necessary contextual information from the many wider histories that have already been written about Vietnam. When I began working on a broad history of Vietnam, I was told more than once by publishers and other scholars that there was no need for another broad history because people like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Stanley Karnow had already written everything that needed to be written about the political and military events.

Therein lies one of the worst problems concerning the study of the Vietnam War-the uncritical acceptance of the "big picture" presented in dated and dubious writings. Most of what today is considered the conventional wisdom originated with the triumvirate of Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow, journalists who reported on the war as it was happening and afterwards wrote best-selling books. Halberstam began writing books well before the others, publishing The Making of a Quagmire in 1964, Ho in 1971, and The Best and the Brightest, which sold more than a million copies, in 1972. ⁸ Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History, published in 1983, also sold over one million copies and was accompanied by a multivolume PBS documentary that attracted Ken Burns-size audiences. ⁹ Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie arrived in 1988 and promptly won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. ¹⁰ All three of these journalists were entertaining writers, and awful historians.

The narrative that emerged from their books is relatively straightforward. The United States was wrong to fight the war, the story goes, for American policymakers mistook Ho Chi Minh for a member of an international Communist conspiracy when in reality he was merely a proud nationalist who disdained his Chinese Communist neighbors. American leaders were completely ignorant of South Vietnam and mindlessly optimistic about progress in the war. America's South Vietnamese allies were corrupt and cowardly, in contrast to the patriotic and dedicated North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. The only real American heroes of the war were the reporters and the few servicemen who recognized that the enterprise was doomed from the start.

Some prominent journalists criticized Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow from the early stages of the war. In a September 1963 article, Joseph Alsop likened the American correspondents in Saigon to the American journalists of the 1940s who had denigrated Chiang Kai-Shek and praised Mao Tse-Tung as a "great and humane man," as well as to Herbert Matthews, the reporter who had idealized Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution. Alsop accused these reporters of portraying the situation in unduly negative terms, asserting that "it is easy enough to paint a dark, indignant picture, without departing from the facts, if you ignore the majority of Americans who admire the Vietnamese as fighters and seek out the one U.S. officer in ten who inevitably thinks all foreigners fight badly." ¹¹

Marguerite Higgins, who had become the first female war correspondent to win the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the Korean War, found that Halberstam's articles contained many glaring inaccuracies, most of which were intended to tarnish the image of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. After Higgins authored a string of New York Herald Tribune stories eviscerating various claims Halberstam had made in the New York Times, an editor at the Times went so far as to send Halberstam a letter stating: "Some of what she has been writing would tend to balance the material we have been getting from Saigon recently....I am sure that you will take care of this aspect of the Vietnamese story as soon as you can." The letter prompted Halberstam to shoot back, "If you send me one more cable referring to that woman's copy you will have my resignation forthwith by return cable and I mean it repeat mean it." ¹² Higgins went on to write a terrific book entitled Our Vietnam Nightmare, which was published in 1965.

Unfortunately, Higgins's book did not achieve the popularity of the books by Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow, and within a few years it faded into obscurity. One reason is that she contracted black fever and died shortly after the book was published. Another is that the turn of the American intelligentsia against the war in the late 1960s made Higgins's views into the most dangerous sort of heresy.

The orthodox historians of the late 1970s and 1980s largely adhered to the narrative passed down by Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow. Histories covering John F. Kennedy's presidency echoed the journalists in depicting South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem as a hopeless reactionary whose tyranny deprived the South Vietnamese government of legitimacy and whose discrimination against Buddhists brought his government to a much-deserved ruin. ¹³ Those covering Lyndon Johnson's presidency repeated the view that America's vital interests were not at stake in Vietnam and that the war could not have been won by any means and hence Johnson should not have intervened in 1965. ¹⁴ Some of the histories modified the image of Johnson and other top figures as documentary evidence made clear that the media's portrayal of these figures were gross caricatures, but these changes did not alter the main features of the narrative. Rather, they augmented it and were incorporated into the books by Karnow and Sheehan. ¹⁵

Historians who addressed American military performance accused the U.S. military of fighting unlawfully and unsuccessfully against a wily adversary that regularly outwitted it, and they alleged that the war inflicted long-term psychological damage on huge numbers of American veterans. ¹⁶ These claims made the war appear even more reprehensible, which also made draft dodging appear more sensible. Nothing was said about the psychological impact on the enemy, enhancing the impression that the North Vietnamese did no wrong in sending hundreds of thousands of young men to die in countless military defeats in South Vietnam.

A small but strong group of revisionist books emerged during this same period. Although a substantial proportion of their authors had doctorates, few had permanent academic appointments, and the only one of those who worked in a history department was employed in Britain, which has not been as badly afflicted by faculty politicization as the United States. Robert F. Turner, a Vietnam veteran and Hoover Institution fellow who later obtained a non-tenured position at the University of Virginia Law School, disputed the portrayal of the Vietnamese Communists as devoted nationalists in his book Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development. ¹⁷ In an international history of the war, distinguished British professor Ralph Smith argued that Vietnamese Communism posed a serious threat to the United States and hence the United States was right in trying to hold the line in South Vietnam. ¹⁸ Norman Podhoretz, the American pundit, made the same argument in a work geared more for the public than academia. ¹⁹ The works of Ellen Hammer and William Colby, an American scholar living in France and a former CIA director, respectively, charged that South Vietnam was viable under Ngo Dinh Diem and that the United States erred catastrophically in encouraging his overthrow. ²⁰ Reiterating points made during the war by senior U.S. military officers, veterans like Harry Summers and former politicians like Richard Nixon argued that the war could have been won had the United States taken more aggressive military actions, such as severing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and bombing North Vietnam massively from the start instead of escalating the bombing gradually. ²¹ A different group, led by a military officer with a Ph.D. named Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., concluded that the war could have been won had the United States been more delicate, rather than more forceful. According to the Krepinevich school, the United States focused on fighting a conventional war in the hinterlands because the U.S. military had been designed to fight such a war, when in fact much greater attention should have been given to securing the populous areas. ²²

The most influential of the early revisionist books was Guenter Lewy's America and Vietnam, the only work of its vintage that remains highly important to historians today. ²³ Of Lewy's many contributions, his greatest was the refutation of antiwar arguments about the immorality, inhumanity, and illegality of American military actions in Vietnam. A political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Lewy never received the open acclaim from academia or the media that he deserved, but he effected great changes to the war's history in quiet ways. After the appearance of his book, countless fashionable antiwar arguments stopped appearing in the articles and books written by those who continued to adhere to the antiwar orthodoxy.

Since 1990, the quality of scholarship, both orthodox and revisionist, has improved as more documentation has become available and scholars have been able to make use of previous discoveries. The orthodox history, however, has not ventured very far from the Halberstam-Sheehan-Karnow narrative. Much of that narrative has continued to evade serious questioning from orthodox historians, who have preferred to remain focused on a fairly narrow set of questions. Orthodox scholars have continued to assert that Vietnam was not strategically important without examining most of the relevant information that has become available. In one of the most celebrated of recent orthodox histories, Cornell University history professor Fredrik Logevall announced that most scholars, himself included, consider it "axiomatic" that the United States erred in deciding to intervene in Vietnam. ²⁴ The United States did not need to fight Ho Chi Minh, proponents of the orthodoxy still maintain, because he would have become an Asian Tito had the Americans not pestered him. ²⁵ Hanoi's dedication to conquering the South, they add, ensured that no American strategy would have succeeded. ²⁶ For orthodox scholars, Ngo Dinh Diem remains a poor leader who senselessly antagonized his people. ²⁷ The portrayal of American veterans as perpetrators of horrible actions during the war and psychological wrecks after the war has continued. ²⁸

The areas that have received the greatest attention recently from orthodox historians possess considerable historical significance but relatively minor import in the orthodox-revisionist debate. Amongst prominent orthodox historians there is an ongoing debate over whether Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he not been assassinated. ²⁹ They also disagree about why Johnson intervened. ³⁰ Their biases and lack of knowledge on other aspects of the war, however, have allowed revisionists to overtake them on these topics. The most lasting orthodox contributions since 1990, therefore, are books of even narrower scope. Although largely wrong about the big picture, these books provide some valuable small pictures. Clemson history professor Edwin Moïse unearthed a large amount of new information on the Tonkin Gulf incidents, ³¹ and George Herring, who recently retired from the University of Kentucky history department, did the same for Lyndon Johnson's relations with the U.S. military. ³² Harold P. Ford, a former CIA officer, incorporated into his history documents that are not normally available to researchers. ³³ In a relatively favorable history of Ngo Dinh Diem's nation-building enterprises, Professor Philip Catton of Stephen F. Austin State University went the farthest in challenging conventional views without chopping down the overarching tenets of the orthodox school. ³⁴

Some other valuable books have provided new insights into smaller matters while largely steering clear of the big points of disagreement between orthodox and revisionist historians. Of these, several of the best have incorporated important evidence from Soviet and Chinese archives to illuminate the roles of the Soviet Union and China. ³⁵ Studies of other countries and regions have enhanced understanding of the international dimensions of the war. ³⁶ As Vietnamese and French sources have become more accessible, new publications on Vietnamese Communism have appeared. ³⁷ Recent biographies of American leaders have brought new discoveries on strategic decision-making. ³⁸

The recent revisionist histories, in contrast to some earlier revisionist works, have generally been backed by voluminous research, captured in numerous footnotes. Although not all of their authors are excellent scholars, they are generally more rigorous in their analysis than their orthodox counterparts, because they are so often challenged that they have become adept at anticipating and countering contrary assertions. Because experience has given revisionists a better understanding of the importance of wrestling with differently minded people, they have also been much more willing than orthodox historians to invite the opposing side to conferences they organize.

The lengthiest contribution of recent revisionism, coming in at over eleven hundred pages, is Arthur Dommen's The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Dommen had worked as a journalist in Vietnam and Laos during the war, but, as the length of his book indicates, he was closer to a scholar than a journalist by temperament, and after the war obtained a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. Having spent many years gathering information, including a considerable amount on the Vietnamese side, Dommen shot some sizeable holes in the Halberstam-Sheehan-Karnow account. He highlighted nefarious aspects of Vietnamese Communism that orthodox historians had missed or ignored, and concluded that Vietnamese nationalists like Ngo Dinh Diem offered a viable alternative to Communism. He was also among the first to note that the Buddhist protesters, whose charges of religious oppression crippled the South Vietnamese government from 1963 to 1965, had fabricated evidence of oppression and were more concerned with gaining political power than religious freedom. ³⁹

Col. H.R. McMaster, a highly distinguished U.S. Army officer who holds a Ph.D. in history, attracted much attention with his 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, in which he showed that Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara disregarded and abused the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a time when they had much sounder ideas on American strategy than the civilian leadership did. ⁴⁰ In the late 1990s, Francis X. Winters, a professor emeritus at the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and Geoffrey Shaw, a Canadian with a Ph.D. who has been unable to land a tenure-track position, further advanced the interpretations of Ellen Hammer and William Colby on the Diem government and the 1963 coup. ⁴¹ Think tank fellow Michael Lind of the New America Foundation and political scientist C. Dale Walton of the University of Reading offered strong challenges to the conventional wisdom, although they did less historical research than other revisionists because they were policy analysts by background rather than historians. Lind's book was particularly strong on the domino theory, demonstrating that there really was an international Communist conspiracy to take Vietnam and then other countries in succession. ⁴² Walton concluded that the United States would have done much better had it chosen different strategic options. ⁴³

As with orthodox historians, revisionists have tended to focus on select aspects of the conflict rather than covering the war holistically. In designing my recent book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, I sought to fill the gap by analyzing every significant facet of the war, from military to diplomatic to political to social, and every country that had a significant influence on the war, of which there were many. Because too few reliable histories had been written previously, I relied almost entirely on primary sources for information, which required much more time than the research for the average general history but also yielded many more discoveries than I would otherwise have found. Some of my research produced solid evidence for assertions that other revisionists had made previously but without supporting facts, for instance the commitment of Ho Chi Minh to global Communist revolution or the feasibility of severing the North Vietnamese supply routes through Laos, the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail. Other parts revealed new facts that have forced alteration of central interpretations, such as the remarkable success of South Vietnam's counterinsurgency initiatives in 1962 and 1963, or the strong support for American intervention in Vietnam among the other nations of Asia and Oceania. ⁴⁴

Some of the most important discoveries involved the behavior of Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow during the war and its impact on what they later wrote in their best-selling books. In 1963, unlike later, the American journalists in Vietnam generally favored U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but believed that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem had to be replaced because he was not liberal enough in handling the press and non-Communist oppositionists, especially Buddhist protesters who were calling for huge concessions from the government. They disbelieved Diem's assertion that the Communists had infiltrated the Buddhists, an assertion that the Communists, much later, admitted to be true.

In the fall of 1963, Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow publicly derided the Diem government and suggested that South Vietnam would be better off if Diem were removed from power. Both South Vietnamese and American officials, they claimed, desired the ousting of Diem. Their reporting relied heavily upon biased and dishonest sources, including two who, unbeknownst to the reporters, were Vietnamese Communist agents. Translated rapidly into Vietnamese, their anti-Diem stories were read by the Vietnamese elites, who mistakenly thought they were expressions of official U.S. policy. These articles did much to convince both South Vietnamese generals and U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that Diem had to go, and that replacing Diem would lead to major improvements in the war effort. Those generals, with Lodge's blessing, overthrew and murdered Diem on November 2, 1963.

Instead of improving the war effort, however, the coup resulted in a dramatic downturn, for the new leaders were weak and purged huge numbers of good officers for their past loyalty to Diem. Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow now faced accusations that they had helped wreck the South Vietnamese government. They cunningly devised a defense that deflected the criticism and profoundly influenced everything they, and many others, wrote thereafter. They asserted that the South Vietnamese war effort had been ruined before Diem's death, something they had not claimed before the coup, and therefore their support for overthrowing Diem made little difference. Later, they would use this point to argue that the war was hopeless from the beginning, for in the latter stages of the war they backed away from their earlier support of American intervention and, in Halberstam's case, denied that they had ever supported it. By sifting through masses of American and North Vietnamese documents as well as American press reports, I determined that South Vietnam was actually winning the war until Diem's death, and began losing as soon as he was gone.

The books by Halberstam, Sheehan, Karnow and nearly every other orthodox author concentrated on the period from the division of Vietnam in 1954 to the Tet Offensive of 1968, providing minimal coverage of the years 1969 to 1975. Revisionists began fixing that problem in the late 1990s with histories arguing that the South Vietnamese government grew much stronger during this period and that by the early 1970s it had, with the help of the United States, wiped out the Viet Cong insurgents. In my first book, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey, I examined how South Vietnamese and American forces destroyed the insurgency at the village level, and showed that the counterinsurgency programs supported by the United States were not the exercises in indiscriminate murder of antiwar legend. ⁴⁵ Lewis Sorley, a veteran of the U.S. Army and the CIA who also has a Ph.D. but no academic affiliation, addressed both the regular and irregular elements of the war during its latter years in his book A Better War. As American forces gradually withdrew, Sorley showed, South Vietnamese forces improved to such a degree that they were able to defeat a massive offensive by fourteen North Vietnamese divisions in the spring of 1972-an event that orthodox historians have almost completely ignored. ⁴⁶ These revelations have bolstered the interpretation of some earlier revisionists that South Vietnam was a viable country and could have survived had the United States not cut aid to the South Vietnamese government in the war's final years.

B.G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran and a stockbroker by profession, demolished most of the mythology surrounding Vietnam veterans in one fell swoop. Burkett's book, Stolen Valor, extraordinary for both its detailed research and its nationwide popularity, revealed that several hundred supposed Vietnam veterans in the public spotlight were frauds. Many of these false veterans had appeared on TV and in books to recount stories of atrocities and psychological injuries, providing the evidence desired by antiwar historians. In addition, Burkett used statistics and detective work to disprove long-held generalizations of orthodox historians about Vietnam veterans, such as that these veterans had much higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, and suicide than non-veterans. ⁴⁷

Slowly but surely, the revisionist view is gaining ground. The official reading lists of the U.S. armed forces are peppered with books by revisionists. In recent speeches, President Bush has invoked some revisionist arguments. Substantial elements of the American media have espoused or provided a forum for revisionism. Only among college faculties are there large blocs of people who still refuse to give serious consideration to revisionists and try to prevent others from hearing what the revisionists have to say. Of course, these faculties have not yet caught up with the rest of humanity in fully accepting the ramifications of Soviet Communism's collapse, so one should expect that a good deal more time must pass before the truth will permeate their corridors.

Image: "Vietnam War Memorial" by Little Koshka // CC BY-SA
_____________________________________ Notes

1. Colin Gordon, "The Cloak of Power," New Internationalist (September 1993), http://www.newint.org/issue247/cloak.htm.

2. Mark Bauerlein, "History Department at U of I Flunks Test of Political Diversity," Des Moines Register, 10 October 2007.

3. John Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998); Edward Miller, "Grand Designs: Vision, Power and Nation Building in America's Alliance with Ngo Dinh Diem, 1954-1960" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2004); Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). This note and most of the other notes contain only a representative sample of sources, for the great volume of Vietnam books renders a comprehensive listing impractical in an article of this size.

4. Kim N. B. Ninh, A World Transformed: The Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Vietnam, 1945-1965 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Shawn Frederick McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003).

5. William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988); William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett-Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (New York: Times Books, 1995).

6. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).

7. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988).

8. Joseph Alsop, "The Crusaders," Washington Post, 23 September 1963.

9. Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War, 397-98.

10. William Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986); Herring, America's Longest War.

11. Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986).

12. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: William Morrow, 1985); James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).

13. Robert Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1975).

14. Ralph B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War, vol. 2 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).

15. Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

16. Ellen J. Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987); William Colby with James McCargar, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America's Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989).

17. Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982); Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985); Norman B. Hannah, The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1987); Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam At War: The History, 1945-1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988).

18. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

19. Guenter Lewy, America and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

20. Logevall, Choosing War, xiii.

21. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Jonathan Shays, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994).

22. Recent histories alleging that Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam include John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992); Jones, Death of a Generation; Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Opponents of the withdrawal thesis include Larry Berman, "NSAM 263 and NSAM 273: Manipulating History," in Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., Vietnam: The Early Decisions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 177-203; Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Logevall, Choosing War.

23. Edwin Moïse, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

24. George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).

25. Harold P. Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968 (Langley, VA: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998).

26. Philip E. Catton, Diem's Final Failure: Prelude to America's War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

27. Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted. Gittinger, eds., International Perspectives on Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999); Ronald Bruce Frankum, The United States and Australia in Vietnam, 1954-1968: Silent Partners (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001); Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse, La guerre du Vietnam et l'Europe, 1963-1973 (Bruxelles: Bruylant, 2003); Thomas Alan Schwartz, LBJ and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

28. Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

29. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

30. Francis X. Winters, The Year of the Hare: America in Vietnam, January 25, 1963-February 15, 1964 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Geoffrey Shaw, "Ambassador Frederick Nolting's Role in American Diplomatic and Military Policy toward the Government of South Vietnam" (Ph.D. diss., University of Manitoba, 1999).

31. Michael Lind, Vietnam, The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999).

32. C. Dale Walton, The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam (London: Frank Cass, 2002).

33. Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

34. Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997); Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam, new ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

35. Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

36. B.G. Burkett, Stolen Valor (Dallas: Verity Press, 1998).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mark Moyar holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the U.S. Marine Corps University, Quantico, VA 22134; moyars@mindspring.com By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict.

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Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Scholars have long argued about why the United States pursued a conventional military strategy during the Vietnam War rather than one based on counterinsurgency principles. A recent article in this journal by Jonathan Caverley presents a bold challenge to the historiography of the Vietnam War. Rejecting the standard historical focus on the organizational culture and strategic perspective of Gen. William Westmoreland and the U.S. Army, Caverley argues that the roots of the United States' strategy in Vietnam can be traced to the direct influence of civilian leaders and the strong constraint of public opinion. Caverley's main arguments are a welcome challenge to the established wisdom, but they are not supported by the historical evidence. Civilian officials in Lyndon Johnson's administration did not instruct the military on how to fight the ground war within the borders of South Vietnam. Westmoreland did not want to change U.S. military strategy to focus on pacification at the expense of search and destroy tactics and the main force war. Both U.S. civilian and military officials were convinced that counterinsurgency was a South Vietnamese responsibility that U.S. ground forces should not assume. Public opinion was a weak, rather than a strong, constraint on the specific decisions of the Johnson administration during the pivotal years of the Vietnam War. Democracies may not be able to win certain counterinsurgency conflicts, but the primary source of this failure is not a civilian aversion to casualties.

The full text of this publication is available at the original publication source.

For Academic Citation: McAllister, James. "." Quarterly Journal: International Security, vol. 35. no. 3. (Winter 2010/11): .

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