| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspective. Ed. by Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xii, 318 pp. Cloth, $74.00, ISBN 978-0-19-531513-4. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-19-531514-1.)
This volume gathers together a group of distinguished scholars to bring fresh perspectives to the question, "Why Vietnam?" Their contributions address the factors that led the United States to intervene militarily in Vietnam and the reasons (other than military strategy and feats of arms) that the conflict developed and concluded as it did; they also demonstrate the liveliness of current historiographical debates. The emergence of new interpretations results in part from the availability of new Vietnamese-language archives, the declassification of documents in the United States, and the release of materials in China, Eastern Europe, and Russia.	1
The book is organized in three sections. The first deals with the decisions leading to American intervention in Vietnam. Mark Atwood Lawrence explores three major decisions that set the stage for intervention in the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower administrations. Seth Jacobs explains why the U.S. government saw Laos as unpromising ground on which to hold the line against Communism. Next come a pair of essays by Gareth Porter and Fredrik Logevall, each of which challenges the "Cold War consensus," which asserts that the Cold War explains U.S. intervention. Logevall argues that that the Vietnam War was a "war of choice" that Lyndon B. Johnson could have avoided. Porter points out discrepancies between actual events and what U.S. policy makers "should have" been saying and doing if the Cold War consensus paradigm were true.	. . .

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