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Book Review
| The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964–1968. Ed. by Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. vi, 406 pp. $40.00, ISBN 1-58544-342-5.)
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| While there are countless numbers of works on the war in Vietnam, there is much less about efforts to secure peace there, so this book—a collection of papers from a 2001 conference at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas—is an attempt to address that issue. Of the twenty chapters, however, only a few add substance to our understanding of the war. Since the U.S. effort to negotiate a peace was never well developed or really even serious, it is not surprising that much of the literature would be light on it as well. |
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Some topics, however, do provide useful background and historical analysis, such as Marilyn Young's comparative look at efforts to end the Korean and Vietnamese wars. Negotiations, Young pointed out, had only bad outcomes because U.S. officials were reluctant or unwilling to talk when victory, and thus credibility, was still possible, and they were just as stubborn when their war strategies were not going well and they had to negotiate from a position of weakness. In either case, talks were short-lived and futile. |
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