| This “Interchange” discussion took place online over the course of several months in the fall of 2005. We wanted the “Interchange” to be free flowing; therefore we encouraged participants not only to respond to questions posed by the JAH but also to communicate with each other directly. What follows is an edited version of the very lively online conversation that resulted. We hope JAH readers find it of interest. | 1 |
| The JAH is indebted to all the participants for their willingness to enter into an online conversation: | 2 |
| David Anderson is dean of the College of University Studies and Programs at California State University, Monterey Bay. He is the author of The Vietnam War (2005) and The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (2002). He is a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and a U.S. Army veteran of the American war in Vietnam. Readers may contact Anderson at [email protected] . | 3 |
| Christian Appy is associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (2003) and Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (1993) and editor of Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (2000). Readers may contact Appy at [email protected] . | 4 |
| Mark Philip Bradley is associate professor of history at Northwestern University. He is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (2000) and is the coeditor, with Marilyn B. Young, of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (forthcoming), a collection that brings together leading scholars to explore the local, national, and transnational dimensions of the Vietnam conflict. Readers may contact Bradley at [email protected] . | 5 |
| Robert K. Brigham is Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College. He is author of numerous books and essays on the history of American foreign relations, including Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (2006). | 6 |
| Ted Engelmann, who contributed the illustrations to “Interchange,” is a Vietnam War veteran and a photographer. He has taught at the middle school, high school, and college levels in Vietnam and the United States. He is working on his first book, Wounds That Bind: Four Countries after the American?Viet Nam War, a collection of his original photographs of the war and its legacy in Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, and the United States. Readers may contact Engelmann at [email protected] . | 7 |
| Patrick Hagopian teaches in the American studies program at Lancaster University, England. His recent work includes “Vietnam War Photography as a Locus of Memory,” in Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, edited by Annette Kuhn and Kirsten McAllister (2006), and “The ‘Lessons’ of the Vietnam War,” in Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics, edited by Max Friedman and Padraic Kenney (2005). Readers may contact Hagopian at [email protected] . | 8 |
| Luu Doan Huynh is one of the most important scholars of the Vietnam War in Vietnam. In 1948 he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Vietnamese resistance government led by Ho Chi Minh. He served the ministry as an analyst and diplomat until 1987. In 1987–1993 he was a senior research fellow at the Instititue of International Relations in Hanoi, where he continues to work part time. His publications include President Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam’s Diplomacy (co-authored with Vu Khoan and others, in Vietnamese, 1990) and “The American War in Vietnamese Memory” in The Vietnam War, Vietnamese and American Perspectives, ed. Jayne Werner and Luu Doan Huynh (1993). | 9 |
| Marilyn B. Young is professor of history at New York University. Her most recent publication is The New American Empire (2005), a collection of essays she coedited with Lloyd Gardner. A second volume, dealing in part with comparisons between the war in Vietnam and the current war in Iraq, is forthcoming. Readers may contact Young at [email protected] . | 10 |
| JAH: In your view, what is most exciting and new about historical approaches to the American war in Vietnam? | |
| Mark Philip Bradley: I am most struck by the fact that we are finally starting to know something from the Vietnamese side about the nature of the French and American wars and their impact on Vietnamese (and American) history. It is odd that this development has been so long in coming. The historiography of colonial-era Vietnam is among the richest in the discipline. One thinks of works by David Marr, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, and more recently Peter Zinoman and Shawn McHale. Increasingly, the postwar period has been the topic of important scholarship, particularly on war and memory. But the writings largely bookended what remained a void from roughly 1946 to 1975. There were always exceptions, for instance, Jeffrey Race’s and David Elliott’s work. But the literature on the wartime period was surprisingly thin. In part, this was a problem of sources. Only recently have Vietnamese archives opened up. But that opening has been only partial, and there were always plenty of materials historians could work with: published sources, documents in French and American archives, the Vietnamese-language press and, importantly, the incredibly sophisticated world of Vietnamese arts and letters. 1 | 11 |
| My own sense is that scholars of Vietnamese history—at least, American scholars—bracketed the war for more complicated reasons. For some senior scholars their own place in the war and the complicated political dynamics in, and outside of, the academy in the 1960s and 1970s may have acted as a constraint. But for other American scholars of Vietnam there were also frustrations with how the American War came to dominate apprehensions of Vietnam in the United States, prompting a turn to precolonial and colonial Vietnamese history in part to redress that perceived imbalance. And in an important sense they were right. We, not only as Americans but as American historians, know about as much about Iraq’s long history today as we did about Vietnamese history in the 1960s. |
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On the American side, I am struck by the importance of several kinds of new work. One takes seriously the linkages between culture and diplomacy. I think especially here of Seth Jacobs’s America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam, which examines American policy toward Diem against the domestic racial and religious climate of the 1950s, and a recent thesis by Michael Allen that recasts the pow/mia (prisoner of war/missing in action) story as one about the tensions between Vietnam policies in Richard M. Nixon’s era and the complicated cultural politics of grass-roots conservative activists. Equally impressive is the global turn in Mark Lawrence’s excellent Assuming the Burden, which fundamentally reconsiders Harry S. Truman’s decision to support the French in 1950. Mark draws on British and French sources, the latter used almost as infrequently as Vietnamese sources by American historians of the war, to argue that American decision making was shaped in powerful ways by transnational conversations among like-minded conservative elites in Washington, London, and Paris. Finally I think of Fred Logevall’s Choosing War, which opened up the notion of contingency in the making of American policy toward Vietnam. I don’t always agree with Fred’s conclusions, but after countless books and essays in which the quagmire or containment “made them do it,” his fluid and refreshing efforts to reexamine decision making by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are terrific. 3
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While I am enthusiastic about those works, much of the seemingly endless and voluminous literature about the war in Vietnam strikes me as repetitive and excessively narrow. If one more editor lets one more former war correspondent, veteran, or policy maker tell his (and usually it is his) story about Vietnam, I may not be able to cope! But of more concern is the way too much American work on the war detaches Vietnam from larger and newer narratives of domestic and international history that are reshaping our understanding of the United States in the world after 1960. The works I mention here strike me as important exceptions, and I look forward to seeing more. On both the Vietnamese and American sides, I think there is a tremendous need to “normalize” the war if we are to understand not only its particularities but also its significance in the history of the twentieth century.
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Patrick Hagopian: My own interests lie largely in the domestic repercussions of the war in the postwar United States: the “lesson learning” process, commemorations, and the way Americans came to terms (or did not) with the war’s moral and political entailments.
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The most important recent work from this point of view is the research by journalists at the Toledo Blade, published in a series of reports beginning October 19, 2003, about atrocities committed by the U.S. Tiger Force in 1967 and the U.S. Army’s flawed investigation of those crimes in 1971. This establishes a widespread pattern of war crimes that some (such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War) have charged and that many more suspected or wondered about—and the cover-up the journalists document may also explain why the charges remain controversial. 4
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Two posters in the War Museum in Hanoi, Vietnam, show North Vietnamese artists’ ongoing anger at the United States over the war and their sense of triumph at having defeated both the United States and China. The poster above was created by Huynh Van Gum and printed in 1965. The flag attached to the bayonet is the flag of the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF). The top half is red, representing Communism, and the bottom half is blue, the color of brotherhood, referring to the NLF fighters’ ties to their “brothers” in South Vietnam. The caption to the poster on the facing page (date unknown) reads, “The Vietnamese Army defeated the Chinese during the war.” Vietnam and China fought a brief war in early 1979, in response to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978. Photos by Ted Engelmann. Courtesy Ted Engelmann.
One of the most important legacies of the war was the U.S. armed forces’ and government’s failure to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of war crimes in Vietnam rigorously and exhaustively. Many were convinced that William Calley, found guilty for killings at My Lai, was a scapegoat. They felt that responsibility also lay with others higher up the chain of command. Vietnam veterans for years felt tainted by the stigma of unallocated blame because of the failure to prosecute the guilty, no matter how numerous or high ranking. The eventual, unsatisfactory “resolution” was for the public to “welcome home” veterans who had been in many cases unjustly stigmatized. That resolution has sunk public understanding of the Vietnam War into a moral void. Although at one time there were plenty of voices—historians’ and others’—who challenged the legality of American troops’ conduct in Vietnam, this now seems passé, irrelevant, and hardly considered by scholars. Is this because we share the shame that tinges these questions, reminded of our own impotence in the face of a U.S. government that daily continues to flout international law?
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The Toledo Blade journalists break into this vacuum and allow us to glimpse the possibility of living as moral beings. But the reaction by historians has been negligible, and I wonder why. Every month brings news of investigations into the truth of Japanese atrocities during the Asian wars of the 1930s and 1940s; Turkish admission into the European Union seems to hinge in part on that nation’s acknowledgment of twentieth-century crimes; investigators continue to hunt down the last surviving perpetrators of Nazi crimes against humanity. There is no shortage of tribunals and commissions covering events on almost every continent since the 1980s. Yet about United States–perpetrated crimes in Vietnam, there is still an embarrassed silence.
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I am interested to know what influence these historical events and moral problems have in the recent historiography to which Mark refers. Are they all old news, or do they have any currency? Am I the last crank fighting forgotten political battles of an earlier age against ghostly antagonists who have now sensibly moved on? If so, why? How did that happen?
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Of other recent work, Gerald Nicosia’s Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement is extraordinary in its breadth and in the extensiveness of its research. It embraces Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the emergence of post–traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), and the Agent Orange trials, and it brings them together in a coherent way as few other works do. A recent work that is interesting in approach is David Maraniss’s They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967. It winds its narrative around events in Wisconsin, Washington, and Vietnam during a particular period, and this “slice of time” narrative approach is unusual. It relates, as an interestingly quirky kind of narrative, to Paul Hendrickson’s The Living and the Dead, which also defamiliarizes a seemingly well-worn subject—Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s agonies about the war in the context of the fighting and the “war at home”—in that it weaves several strands of the story around one another. Those works are not by academic historians. I am not certain what that signifies. Some historical works appear to indicate that we are at a synthetic moment, gathering and assimilating existing knowledge; others burrow away along familiar lines of inquiry; Mark Bradley’s post indicates that there are still gaps in scholarship and that we have not yet reached a plateau where we can simply take stock of where we are. The works that I cite add that this is just as true of the war at home as it is of international events and the political and military struggles in Vietnam. 5
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Christian Appy: My first thoughts connect those of Mark and Patrick. As Mark indicates, we have an astonishingly impressive body of work about the war in a wide variety of fields—history, fiction, poetry, art, film (especially documentary). And more and more of it comes from Vietnamese sources and includes international perspectives. Yet, as Patrick suggests, depressingly little of this work has made its way into the broadest channels of American public memory. Of course, this is a complaint that might well be made by scholars in any field, but there is no denying the ample evidence of willful amnesia that has effectively erased, excluded, or distorted a vast range of Vietnam War experience.
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Patrick is right, I think, to suggest that we have not come close to confronting the topic of American war crimes in Vietnam. Indeed, perhaps the most important criticism to be made of the Toledo Blade series (valuable as it was) is that it claimed the Tiger Force was a “rogue unit” whose atrocities were largely exceptional. Every time one of these revelations comes out, as with the news about former senator Bob Kerrey’s SEAL team (U. S. Navy Sea, Air, and Land Team) killings, there is an almost-habitual “We’re shocked, we’re shocked” reaction followed by an impulse to isolate the subject by failing to connect it to other examples or to broader American policies (free-fire zones, for example) or to the responsibilities of top civilian and military officials.
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If it’s any consolation, Patrick, you’re not the only crank. I recently read a thousand-page dissertation, produced by Nicholas Turse at Columbia University, called “‘Kill Anything That Moves’: U.S. War Crimes and Atrocities in Vietnam, 1965–1973.” Though recent books like David Anderson’s Facing My Lai have kept the topic alive in important ways (and introduced many students to it), Turse makes clear how far we’ve come since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when books on war crimes were pouring out. Some of them have been deservedly forgotten or discredited, but many important ones have long been out of print and ignored. 6
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That said, we also need to think about how to make better use of the historical memories that have survived both in educating ourselves and in finding new ways to communicate to students. I’m often surprised by how important historical “information” of one kind or another leaks through to the present in ways I wish I were more aware of and better able to understand. Let me offer just one example. The other day in class almost all of my sixty students said that they had seen the 1963 image of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc immolating himself in Saigon. What surprised me was not the familiarity with the image—I had noticed it reappearing in high school textbooks after a long hiatus in the 1980s—but the source of their familiarity. Many knew of it from the cover of a 1992 CD (compact disc) by Rage Against the Machine. That does not mean students had learned from the CD how to interpret the image historically, but they may have learned something equally valuable from lines like this:
The teacher stands in front of the class
But the lesson plan he can’t recall
The student’s eyes don’t perceive the lies
Bouncing off every fucking wall
His composure is well kept
I guess he fears playing the fool
The complacent students sit and listen to the
Bullshit that he learned in school. 7
Why did it take me thirteen years to see that this CD might relate to my lesson plans?
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Robert K. Brigham: For me, one interesting development has been the growing number of young scholars who have the language skills and interest to conduct research on the Vietnam War from the Viet perspective. For far too long, scholarly literature focused exclusively on high policy in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi. We now have some fascinating new studies that look at Vietnam’s modern revolution from a variety of vantage points. 8 It is exciting to attend scholarly conferences and see panels drawing on Vietnamese-language sources.
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Another significant development has been work by senior scholars who have only recently focused on the war proper. I think specifically of David Elliott’s two-volume history, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta. The use of microhistory to tell the story of the war is particularly attractive. 9
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As young scholars begin to revise our understanding of issues, I am sure that there will be a period of great uncertainty. Every revisionist work is going to be under close scrutiny. Is this an apology for the war? Is this work too sympathetic to the Saigon government? Does this author believe that the war could have been won if the United States focused on pacification earlier? We have to revise the current narrative substantially, but revisionism does not mean triumphalism or acceptance. This is a very interesting time to be writing about the war. For example, I have just finished a book on the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. It is a social history that looks at the lives of ordinary enlisted men outside the field of battle. After ten years of research, it seems clear to me that the ARVN is one of the most misunderstood armies in history. I wish that many people who write on the war could see the source material, diaries, letters, etc., that I found in Vietnam and the States. This army’s history tells us much about the declining influence of Confucianism (revising Paul Mus and Frances FitzGerald) in the village, but the increasing importance of family ties. It also helps us understand the problems associated with nation building (a good lesson for Iraq) and the negative racial stereotyping that helped Americans frame the ARVN in a particular way. 10
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Marilyn B. Young: Mark, I’d like to hear more about what you mean by normalizing the war—in what sense, or maybe in whose sense, of normal? Normalize in the sense of assimilating to the war that preceded it in Korea, rather than retaining the sense of Vietnam being aberrational, sure. But is that what you mean?
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Bob, I want to underline what you hint at, that new histories may run the risk of apologia because of what they take to be the polemical, knee-jerk, political thrust of earlier works. And I think apologetic histories of the war are not only bad history but, of equal concern, dangerously misleading about the present. Despite some comparisons to El Salvador, the war in Vietnam remains the prime comparison (on all sides) for the current war. So how Vietnam is remembered, by whom, and why is vitally important. In this regard, Patrick’s work (and also Chris’s) is terribly important. And yes, the way U.S. war crimes—there never was a single prosecution for a war crime during or after the war, by the way; that is not what Calley was charged with—remained unaccounted for during and after the war continues to haunt the country. 11
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Bradley: Be assured, Marilyn, I don’t mean to call up a Nixonian notion of normalization. As your comment suggests, equating Vietnam with any sense of normality has vexed connotations. What I don’t mean to convey is an approach that makes the war normal by making it a noble cause. This is the kind of revisionism I think Bob’s post alludes to: the recent reprise of claims that Vietnam was a good war, essential to the larger American goal of containing Communism; that our South Vietnamese allies offered a stable and democratic alternative to Ho Chi Minh’s Communism; and that the U.S. military won in the field but was undermined at home with the valor of American soldiers stolen by the media, politicians, and antiwar activists. Whatever the limits of an earlier generation of Vietnam War scholarship, one would have hoped its informed critiques of American wartime decision making would have long put those fantastical claims to rest. That they continue to resonate is both distressing and dispiriting, though perhaps not so surprising given the ongoing war in Iraq. The fact that they are again being argued with renewed vigor, and that they require strong and reasoned refutation, frustratingly crowds out the space for the kind of normalization I have in mind.
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In part, I do mean putting Korea and Vietnam into the same frame, but I mean more than that. One of the most important implications of seeing the war from a variety of Vietnamese perspectives is the possibility that it will allow us to approach its American dimensions from different starting points and with different questions. My book Imagining Vietnam and America began as an effort to explore the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam, particularly from the perspective of Vietnamese actors largely absent in the existing scholarly literature. But in retrospect, while the Vietnamese dimension was new, I was embarking on a relatively conventional Cold War history project. I began by seeing Vietnamese and Americans as inhabiting largely hermetically sealed worlds; when these worlds collided in the spheres of ideas or power politics, as they certainly did, I assumed the central actors on both sides talked past one another rather than in any kind of shared dialogue. 12
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That I saw the Vietnamese-American encounter in this way initially is no surprise given the ways American exceptionalism, undergirded by conceptions of post-1945 American hegemony, have structured so much of the writing on American diplomacy. In these works, the United States is not just portrayed as different from other state actors but somehow remains fundamentally apart from the historical relationships and processes that surround it and shape the states and peoples with which it interacts. Many existing accounts of American relations with Vietnam and Southeast Asia after 1945 had seen the period as a virtual tabula rasa. In them, the Cold War forms an almost axiomatic starting point, and local actors are quickly subsumed in the escalating global rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States.
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I should also add that historians of Vietnam have their own forms of exceptionalism. While the works of historians of colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia have been centrally concerned with indigenous actors, their predominant focus until recently has been on univocal, national, and—like the accounts by their American counterparts—sometimes triumphal narratives in which the significance of local and global interactions for the area’s past plays a marginal role, if any.
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As I began the research that formed the empirical base of Imagining Vietnam and America and worked my way through Vietnamese-language primary source material in Hanoi, Aix-en-Provence, and Paris as well as American archival materials, I began to see that the evidence didn’t really fit the well-established national narratives and their exceptionalist assumptions. Instead, it was clear that Vietnamese and American perceptions of one another and visions of postcolonial Vietnam drew on a common transnational vocabulary in which notions of social Darwinism, civilization, and modernity were just as resonant in Vietnam as they were in America, even if actors on the two sides appropriated and transformed them in different ways. And in the American case, where historical actors and historians alike have often been insistent on the exceptionalism of the United States as a colonial power, it was striking to discover how closely American discourse and policy on Vietnam paralleled perception and behavior by European colonial actors. Whether or not the claims I put forward in Imagining are fully persuasive, they would never have emerged without my having first immersed myself in Vietnamese source material. It was in trying to come to terms with what I discovered there that I was able to approach both Vietnamese and American history in a more expansive frame.
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Laundry dries at the Palace Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, March 1989. Photo by Ted Engelmann. Courtesy Ted Engelmann.
If writing and teaching about the war is to transform itself, we must step outside established frameworks and ask different, more capacious questions. What happens if we temporarily bracket the Cold War and the problematics and limitations of American policy to think about the place of the war in imperialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality? My sense is that not only will the war hold different meanings but so too will Vietnamese and American history and our sensibilities about the Cold War. But in suggesting that approach, I don’t mean to privilege a predominantly macro history of the war or flatten its particularities and the myriad ways it affected individual Vietnamese and Americans, state and society.
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In this context, I think of an excellent manuscript by the anthropologist Heonik Kwon that explores the complexities of local Vietnamese memories of the My Lai and Ha My massacres. Kwon offers a densely textured account of local memorial practices, and his ability to recover the most intimate dimensions of the lives of families and communities is most valuable. Kwon’s use of local evidence—oral history, family and village textual records, poetry and song, and his own fieldwork—allows him to analyze multiple local apprehensions of the war dead along with local contestations with state actors and official ideology in particularly revealing ways. But he also situates his work in a larger context than the Vietnamese case, framing his discussion within the historical literature on twentieth-century European and American war memory along with seminal texts in anthropological theory on death and commemorative practices. Those references do not emerge as intellectual window dressing; without them it wouldn’t have been possible for him to make meaning of Vietnamese memories of massacre. I wish there was a similar work on the American side that so fully traversed the local, the national, and the global in making sense of smaller and larger communities of memory in the United States. 13
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Marilyn, I don’t see all that much transformative excitement on the American side of the historiography beyond the works I mentioned earlier. Do you or others?
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Young: Mark, yes, I do: for example, Staging Growth, the fine collection of essays by David Engerman et al.; the collection David Ryan and Victor Pungong put together on decolonization; works by Michael Allen and by Seth Jacobs; Patrick’s work on memorials; Gareth Porter’s startling take on the national security bureaucracy; and Nick Cullather’s recent essays, for example. 14
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Brigham: Let me add a word about the revisionism I am thinking of. Yes, it is along the lines that Mark suggests. It seems to me that there are two dominant revisionist paths today. The first is led by the people who think Vietnam was a “good war,” a “winnable war,” and a war that teaches us how not to engage the world. These authors have lined up behind the invasion of Iraq, claiming that lack of resolve in Vietnam destroyed U.S. foreign policy until the United States got its nerve back in the first Gulf War. But even there, Eliot Cohen in Supreme Command and others elsewhere have argued, the United States did not “kick the Vietnam syndrome” for good because leaders in Washington failed to make the decision to march to Baghdad. A slightly different assessment comes from Michael Lind and others who claim that antiwar scholars so dominated the literature on the war that the standard Vietnam narrative is inaccurate and needs revising. 15
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Those revisionists’ works are not the kind now capturing my interest. Instead, I am intrigued by Mark’s work, by the work of Ed Miller, Lien-Hang, Jessica Chapman, Shawn McHale, and other scholars who use Vietnamese-language sources to tell us more about how the Vietnamese viewed the war and its surroundings. I am fascinated by how much we do not know about Vietnamese society at war. David Elliott’s new microhistory tells us much about the rise of middle-level peasants in the south and the difficulties the National Liberation Front had trying to harness their loyalties. That is excellent revisionism in my book. 16
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Young: I don’t think what either Bob or Mark is describing is revisionism, and I’d like to just junk the word. I think they are talking about the way the study of Vietnam has grown, how interesting and exciting it is, how much we have yet to learn. It resembles, then, the change in the study of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as more and more scholars were able to use Chinese easily, to spend time in China, and to use such archives as the Chinese allowed. Not revisionism, but better history.
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Luu Doan Huynh: In response to the first general question; at least in two articles published in 2005, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap recognized the merits of the Tet Offensive as a turning point in the war: It was “a general offensive at an unexpected time,” both creative and original. It aimed at breaking the U.S. will to aggression, which would, ideally, cause the United States to start the de-escalation and de-Americanization of the war. He also, however, openly criticized its shortcomings, namely, “subjectivism and voluntarism, [and] a poor grasp of the law on uprising and revolutionary war”: A general uprising was inappropriate because it “exposed all the revolutionary bases and assets.” And continued attacks on urban centers “when the surprise factor was no longer available” caused difficulties. He also criticized how slowly operations were shifted to rural areas; the delay caused many casualties. His public analysis shows that Vietnam is no longer intoxicated by victory and tries to be more objective in its analysis of the war. 17
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Let me mention another interesting sign of change. During the April 2005 celebration on the thirtieth anniversary of the NLF victory, a number of Vietnamese said that Gen. Duong Van Minh’s April 30, 1975, order to Saigon troops to stop fighting is an act that should be appreciated. It means they regard it as an act of patriotism. The statement not only shows that instead of monopolizing patriotism they are approaching things on their merits. This is also a positive signal about reconciliation (along with the welcome extended to former general Nguyen Cao Ky, at one time premier of South Vietnam, on his visit).
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Appy: I’ve been thinking about Mark’s comment on the insufficiencies of the Cold War as a narrative framework for understanding both the history of wartime policy making and the complex lived experiences of the war on all sides. Doing my interviews for Patriots, I was struck by how few people drew on Cold War axioms to support their viewpoints or to help explain their own experiences (aside from Walt Rostow, Alexander Haig, and a few others). Once-prominent metaphors such as the domino theory were mentioned, if at all, mostly as objects of derision or as tenets of an old faith long discarded. I vividly recall George Watkins’s describing his understanding of the war when he was drafted at age nineteen from Big Stone Gap, Virginia. (A year later, in 1968, he stepped on a mine near Hue and lost both legs and his eyes.) All he knew at the time, he said, is that “we was fighting over there against Communism, so-called.” It is the “so-called” that suggests so much about his postwar skepticism of official explanations. 18
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That said, it was equally apparent that most people, like George, don’t really have a clear sense of how to replace those old explanations. If anticommunism doesn’t explain American intervention in Vietnam or doesn’t explain nearly enough, what does? And more troubling for many is the question of why we prolonged the war for so long once it became so obvious that our policies were failing. I still don’t think we have good enough answers to those questions.
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I’d be especially eager to know what Bob has to say about the narrative frameworks of Vietnamese connected to the South Vietnamese government and military. What parts of American Cold War conceptions, if any, shape their understandings? And how do their ideas compare to the dominant Vietnamese view of the American War as a patriotic war of national liberation?
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I also want to add another title to Marilyn’s list of works from the American side: Robert Dean’s Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy. To ask a question Dean might ask, albeit in a very reductive way: Is it possible that Lyndon Johnson would not pull out of Vietnam in large measure because he feared people would think him personally weak and impotent? If so, shouldn’t historians make more of that? If not, what’s a better or further explanation? 19
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Young: Narratives of decolonization and modernization put post-1945 U.S. foreign policy in a context broader than the Cold War, one that would have mattered (as nsc 68 put it long ago) whether or not the Soviet Union existed. At the same time, the Cold War shaped the parameters in which decolonization occurred, as it did the competitive modernization schemes of the Soviet Union and the United States. To ignore the Cold War distorts as much as ignoring the larger context. But the longtime habit of taking the Cold War as an explanation—when it is the very thing to be explained—really needs to be abandoned. The work of Anders Stephanson is useful here—his pointed arguments about the Cold War as an “American project” go far to lifting it out of its standard frame. Dean’s work on gender and U.S. foreign policy or, more narrowly, his essay on escalation in Vietnam (in the reader Bob Buzzanco and I put together) are terrific—as is Kristin L. Hoganson’s book on gender and U.S. foreign policy in the late ninteenth century. But the approach I find most persuasive is that of Michael Sherry in his book In the Shadow of War, which demonstrates how one can analyze various vectors of power and causality, indicate their interactions, give each one its full due without feeling it necessary to take one as the explanation. My underlying concern is that in these new works a clear sense of what happened to (not just in) Vietnam, the destruction perpetrated, the lives lost, will get lost—or, anyhow, mitigated. It happened to the Korean War. It would be ironic if Bruce Cumings’s insistent detailing of that war’s toll (the tonnage of bombs dropped, the villages destroyed, the new weapons tried out, the destruction of the dikes, the atrocities, the number of the dead and wounded) had one day to be repeated for Vietnam. 20
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A Vietnamese boy stands with a sparkler at the Lunar Middle Moon (August) Autumn Festival in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), 2000. Photo by Ted Engelmann. Courtesy Ted Engelmann.
Bradley: I think the challenges of teaching the war are closely intertwined with thinking our way toward new narratives. I was reminded recently of the myriad ways Vietnam can emerge not only for college students but in the primary and secondary grades as well. A few nights ago, my eight-year-old son excitedly showed me his third-grade world communities text for social studies that had a section dealing with Tet. Not the offensive, but the celebrations of the Vietnamese New Year. It was very nicely done, conveying a layered sense of the sociocultural meanings accorded Tet by the Vietnamese. It also made me think about Chris’s earlier post on the Rage Against the Machine CD and the sometimes surprising ways our students’ perceptions of Vietnam are shaped. I was very pleased my son’s class would get what was probably their first introduction to Vietnam as a place rather than a site of war. I’d be curious to know more about how Vietnam and the war emerge in primary and secondary school curricula and textbooks in the United States (if they get to it) to get a better sense of the narratives our students enter the classroom with. I know Marilyn was involved in writing what I think was a middle school textbook on the war for Oxford, but perhaps others have had experience with this as well. 21
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It also made me realize I know very little about how the war is taught in Vietnamese schools. Given this moment of late (or post?) socialism in Vietnam and that so much of the Vietnamese population did not live through the war, the challenges of crafting a narrative in the Vietnamese context must be very great. In fact, the subject strikes me as an excellent one for a thesis and a valuable intervention into the cultural politics of war memory. Textbooks for tieu-hoc (primary school) or trung-hoc (secondary school) children might give us a sense of how the war is presented at those levels and how the presentation might have changed over time.
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The mention in my son’s text of Vietnamese Americans also reminded me how important it is that we talk about their narratives of the war. At an excellent conference last spring at the University of California, Riverside, I began to grasp the complexities of the generational contestations among Vietnamese Americans over the meanings of the war and its aftermath. If many first-generation Vietnamese Americans remain strongly anticommunist and suspicious of the Hanoi regime, the 1.5 generation (born in Vietnam but settled in the United States at a young age) and the second generation (born here) often see Vietnam and war quite differently. Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala is very good on this (and a book my students have really liked), but I was struck by a recent incident in Little Saigon that was discussed at the conference. A year or so ago a Vietnamese television network in southern California started to produce a life-style show for younger Vietnamese Americans, largely concerned with social and cultural rather than political issues. One show, however, did a short feature on a new documentary titled Saigon, USA. The feature simply talked about making the film. But within hours, the network was deluged with calls to say the documentary itself was filled with a pro-Communist bias that the feature did nothing to critique. Something, these callers said, needed to done. The result, which suggests how charged these issues remain in the Vietnamese American community, was that the entire show was canceled. Several producers of the show were at the conference and clearly remained puzzled and angry. But, interestingly, several 1.5- and second-generation Vietnamese Americans in the audience asked how in the world they could be surprised at the outcome and why hadn’t they been more attentive to the concerns of an older generation in presenting a report on a documentary they had to know would clash with that generation’s sensibilities. For me, it was a fascinating window on the construction of narratives about the war in the Vietnamese American community and something I want to use the next time I teach the war. But this also raises the larger challenge of presenting the South Vietnamese state and society during the war in the classroom, something I’d be curious to hear more about from Bob given his work on the ARVN. How, for instance, have people presented the demonstrable weaknesses of the top political and military leadership and the fundamental problems of the state’s legitimacy while conveying a sense of the heterodox southern perspectives on the war and the postcolonial moment? And what literature do we look to in helping students get a sense of those complexities? 22
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Brigham: It seems clear to me that the saber rattling in Orange County and elsewhere that Mark, Marilyn, and Chris have mentioned is a postwar construction. Sure, political leaders in Saigon and some ARVN officers spoke at length about the evils of Communism during the war, but for the ordinary Viet soldier the war was not defined by the Cold War or anticommunism. Most ARVN soldiers were ambivalent about service in the army because of the lack of proper ideological training and the recognition that the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) was not a legitimate political entity in Vietnam with cultural or historical precedent, two requirements for a viable future. Furthermore, because of their experiences in the service of the rvn, many ARVN troops distrusted their own government. Once this occurred, the ARVN created a subnational culture that redefined the meaning of the war. Believing fully that Saigon was no match for Hanoi and that the Americans had pushed the ARVN aside, ARVN troops focused on their families’ survival. The war, in a sense, became about keeping their families intact. (Demographics support this thesis: the ARVN left Vietnam with extended families in numbers previously unknown during refugee flight.)
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Furthermore, I was surprised to see how many ARVN soldiers viewed the army as a third force—something quite different from the government in Saigon or the party.
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Of course, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) troops were not trained with the Cold War in mind either. Instead, Communist training manuals and political commissars made sure that PAVN and People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) soldiers understood how the concepts of dan toc (nation, or the people) and ai quoc (patriotism, or love of country) merged to form a political ideology that put the cause of national liberation first. The PAVN and PLAF were organically connected to society, and the Communists’ support came directly from people in liberated areas. The connection to the national cause had been underscored throughout the cadres’ basic training and was constantly reinforced by political officers. While Saigon supported limited political training, the PAVN and PLAF had an elaborate system for political training. At the heart of this training was the notion that the PAVN and PLAF were armies “of the people” that supported national liberation. However, national liberation was always couched in historical terms that had little to do with the Cold War proper. This is one reason Ho Chi Minh so infuriated the Chinese and the Soviets.
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Still, I am wrestling with the war in a context outside the Cold War. I think Mark is the only one to get this right so far. While I find Gareth Porter’s book Perils of Dominance refreshing, I also find it lacking in some basic areas. His notion that U.S. policy leaders—vaguely described as the national security state—sought to take advantage of the balance-of-power inequality is problematic. Instead, I see fear as the dominant factor in U.S. decision making. If that is so, can we look at the American side of the war, especially policy decisions, outside the Cold War context? Probably not. 23
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Young: Bob, if they were afraid, why? And of what? U.S. power was, as Gareth demonstrates, far greater than that of the Soviet Union and PRC combined. American fears, like anticommunism, like the Cold War, all need to be explained. They do not, as such, explain anything.
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And another question for Bob: Absent the Cold War, would the United States have invested in Diem, the ARVN, and the Saigon economy as it did? And if so, on what grounds, exactly?
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Brigham: Marilyn, despite (or even because of) the hubris and arrogance, U.S. Cold War policy makers were fearful that they were losing ground to the Soviet Union and PRC in the newly emerging postcolonial nations. I think they were fearful that modernization would not appeal to nationalists. I think they feared that there were limits to U.S. power and influence.
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If we accept Porter’s claims that some in the national security state went to Vietnam because they smelled weakness in the socialist camp and wanted to crush it in Southeast Asia to provide an example to the Soviets and the PRC, what policy flows from this confidence? Surely, it is not the Vietnam War policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Although both did choose war, neither did so with confidence. John McNaughton (McNamara’s assistant secretary of defense for international affairs) adopted Tom Schelling, Robert Osgood, and Mort Halperin’s theories on limited war for Vietnam because he clearly understood that the United States could not crush the PAVN using means that were acceptable in Washington. The risks were too great, and Kennedy and Johnson responded as they did in Vietnam out of fear that anything more would widen the war and anything less would give Vietnam away. I just do not see any policy that proves Porter’s point. Marilyn’s point on the Cold War and U.S. aid to the rvn is well taken. I suspect that the United States would not have supported Diem and then successive rvn administrations if it had had any other alternative (in the policy makers’ own limited minds). Again, I think U.S. policy makers were afraid that if they did not support the rvn, there would indeed be many more Vietnams. Does the United States intervene in Vietnam because it thinks the balance of power is so much in its favor that it can crush the PAVN and its socialist allies? I do not think so.
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Huynh: Vietnam also has the kind of revisionism you describe. I mentioned last time the criticism of the Tet Offensive made by General Giap and the comments of some Vietnamese about Gen. Duong Van Minh’s order to Saigon troops to cease fighting on April 30, 1975, which are in essence scattered attempts to improve our views of history. A Vietnamese novel entitled Lom (Inmost feelings), which was refused publication from 1977 until 1994, wrote that the Tet Offensive was a military setback and that in 1969 and 1970 many NLF members defected to the Saigon government side, with most harmful consequences. But the NLF devised new ways to cope with the situation. Opinion is divided over Bao Ninh’s novel Sorrow of War. Some praised it as being the first literary work that spoke about the recent Vietnam War in a different way: not from the angle of the fate of a nation, a national community, but from that of the fate of an individual, who says, “My future has been left far behind in the rain forests of the war.” Others condemn the novel, particularly the sentence “If Vietnam has another war, let another person provide the shoulder.” Personally, I sympathize with the author’s feelings about the death of his companions, his inability to adapt to postwar civilian life, his broken love, which unfortunately caused him to have a distorted view of the war and to forget the immense significance of the war for the fate of the nation, and I agree with him that the victory should be credited first of all to the patriotism of the whole Vietnamese nation. He failed to grasp the two thousand–year historical traditions of Vietnam: If he had been a boy of sixteen–seventeen in 1945, he would have volunteered for the army as many of my friends and I did, and I suspect he did precisely the same thing in the 1960s, and most Vietnamese young men would do the same in the future. When I read Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” I felt some vague similarity. The American novelist emphasized too much, perhaps out of personal experience, the cruelty and the tricks of war and forgot the great significance of the U.S. Civil War in the abolition of slavery and the enhancement of labor mobility for economic development. 24
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Van Tein Tung stands in front of a memorial in Tam Ky, Vietnam (a few kilometers south of Da Nang). It honors 135 Vietnamese women and children killed by Republic of Korea soldiers in March 1968. Van, Ted Engelmann’s driver, became emotional thinking of the deceased children as he had just become a new father himself (2003). Photo by Ted Engelmann. Courtesy Ted Engelmann.
David Anderson: I am struck by many salient points in our conversation. One is the interesting issue of fear. Related to this is Chris’s question about why U.S. military intervention persisted for so long. In my view there was genuine fear at the base of much of U.S. Cold War policy, and on an individual level, there was also a fear of appearing weak on Communism and on national security on the part of American presidents from Harry S. Truman through Gerald R. Ford. The fear of appearing weak is also another way of expressing the old concept of credibility, still very relevant in understanding U.S. policy not only in Vietnam but also in Iraq.
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How Ho and the Vietnamese Communists were a threat to the United States was complex and had as much or more to do with the legacy of Western colonialism as with democratic ideology, as Mark Lawrence’s Assuming the Burden demonstrates. Lawrence’s rich transnational history notes that U.S., French, and British officials “viewed the turmoil in Indochina as an expression of the binary Cold War tensions.” As Robert Schulzinger asserts in A Time for War, “Had American leaders not thought that all international events were connected to the Cold War, there would have been no American war in Vietnam. American leaders consistently believed that their credibility was at stake there.” It seems to me that, the more we learn about the inner working of both American and Vietnamese decisions for war, the more we understand how fear of consequences that had little to do with local realities in Vietnam shaped the Vietnam policy making of American leaders. 25
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On the question of atrocities, I think Patrick is correct that academically the war has been sanitized. However, the war presents tremendous opportunities for moral reflection that have been realized by novelists such as Tim O’Brien and poets such as W. D. Ehrhart. Fiction and poetry often have an emotional substance and level of moral rectitude difficult for historians to attain. When I was working on my book on My Lai, I had several discussions with Ron Ridenhour, the soldier whose anguished letter to various public officials started the army’s belated investigation of My Lai, and also with the poet Elizabeth Weber, whose brother Bill’s death by sniper fire was cited by some My Lai participants as their reason for rage against the Vietnamese. Ron, Elizabeth, and others insisted that there are many truths about American conduct in Vietnam that the archival research of historians cannot discern because moral misconduct was overlooked or covered up. Mike Sallah and the journalists at the Toledo Blade working on the Tiger Force story experienced the same challenge of trying to corroborate oral histories. An excellent scholarly discussion of this challenge is Michal Belknap, The Vietnam War on Trial. As a Vietnam veteran and a historian of the war, I know that this war and all wars place soldiers individually and the nation collectively at moral risk. Frank confrontation with this moral dimension must be part of the historical analysis and the teaching of the war. 26
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Brigham: I am not convinced that the United States would have stayed the course absent the Cold War. I think that the United States might have intervened in an effort to replace “old Europe” in the newly emerging postcolonial world, but not at the cost in treasure (human and otherwise) without the Cold War.
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I believe that in 1963, before Diem was overthrown, his days were numbered, with or without the United States. He was losing control of the National Assembly daily, and the number of generals who had it in for him is staggering. In my view, in an asymmetrical war governments are measured on whether they can deliver the goods, rather than on whether they win or lose battles. Diem was not delivering the goods, even with massive amounts of U.S. aid. I think there would have been a coup on purely economic and social grounds without U.S. complicity.
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Bradley: The plainspoken twilight of the cold warrior Melvin Laird’s misguided brief for Vietnamization in a recent Foreign Affairs (who would have thought that Nixon’s policies in Vietnam were so successful?) and the respectful attention it has garnered even from some leading American diplomatic historians reminds me why I remain wary about directing too much attention to the relationship between the Cold War and the war in Vietnam. The Laird piece and reactions to it suggest that “we could have won if Congress hadn’t snatched away victory” Vietnam revisionism doesn’t operate on the margins of popular and scholarly discourse. How many times must we walk people through, as Bob has eloquently done, the ways American efforts to build up South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself were not the successes Laird and other revisionists would like us to believe? Ben Kerkvliet’s excellent recent exploration of the North Vietnamese state, The Power of Everyday Politics, reminds us of the sharp contrast between the capabilities of the northern and southern Vietnamese states. Kerkvliet is not uncritical of the North Vietnamese state. Indeed, much of his book focuses on the failure of the state to collectivize agriculture in the countryside. But he also makes clear the trust and legitimacy many Vietnamese peasants accorded to North Vietnam. Almost nothing we know about South Vietnam suggests that trust and legitimacy aptly characterize the southern state’s relationship with most of its citizens. 27
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Without question the Cold War provided the larger frame that shaped American involvement in Vietnam. In its absence, it is hard to imagine the conditions for intervention. But if one accepts the premise that Vietnam was the wrong place to fight the larger Cold War battle (as I and I think many others do), you have to look elsewhere to understand the forces shaping American commitment and policy toward Vietnam. Laird’s defense of Vietnamization suggests a vision of the world that might better be illuminated by the repeated American insistence throughout the twentieth century that high-modernist solutions—whether Cold War–era modernization theory, fin-de-siècle embraces of social Darwinism, or contemporary global neoliberalism—provide the key to local problems in unfamiliar places. The particularities of the local quickly collapse into the willed insistence that American power can manage and control revolutionary forces of change. The ways such certainties could overcome the racialized fears of American policy makers about chaos and disorder on the periphery emerge with particular clarity in Matt Connelly’s excellent study of the French war in Algeria, A Diplomatic Revolution. The religious and messianic dimensions of these inclinations in the post-1945 period are also an important part of the story and are just starting to get the attention they deserve. 28 If the Cold War doesn’t get us that far in understanding the fictive appeals of Vietnamization, it also poses interpretative limits for approaching the decisions to escalate American intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s. Here Fred Logevall’s work is particularly helpful. As Fred convincingly demonstrates, there was considerable evidence available to Kennedy and Johnson administration policy makers that Vietnam might not be the place to fight the Cold War. And while I don’t find fully persuasive his “if Kennedy had lived things might have been different” scenario, Fred makes a strong and reasoned case that containment and America’s geopolitical credibility were less central than Johnson’s concerns about his domestic political and personal credibility. Masculinity figures in Fred’s argument, as it does in Dean’s Imperial Brotherhood, but not in a simple “my manhood made me do it” formulation. Rather a gendered construction of the political and the social conditioned how Johnson and other policy makers saw America’s place in the world and in Vietnam. Again, the Cold War isn’t unimportant to all this, but attention to other forces begins to point us toward a more complex and satisfying narrative of American intervention. 29
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I don’t think a fully formed alternative narrative of American policy in Vietnam has emerged to replace that of the Cold War. A moment of synthesis isn’t quite here yet. For myself, I’m keen to explore the war and the U.S. place in it in the context of the post-1945 global processes of decolonization and postcolonial state making: challenges as important and revolutionary for the international system as the Cold War and too often obscured by it.
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Anderson: Mark Bradley’s post captures a number of threads that must be woven to create the tapestry of the American war in Vietnam. He agrees with Bob Brigham that the Cold War provided the framework for U.S. policy. Consistent with that perspective, I believe that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations’ initial commitment of U.S. resources and prestige to support first France and then the Diem regime against Ho’s Vietnamese Communist movement were part of a global strategy to contain Soviet ideological and political influence. If containment provided the framework, Western colonialism, as Young and Bradley note, influenced much of the American approach to the Vietnamese. French colonial oppression had so decimated moderate Vietnamese political alternatives that the radical nationalist option, the Vietnamese Communists, remained about the only effective avenue of Vietnamese resistance. Diem was a Vietnamese patriot in many ways, but he had no popular base. Both Hanoi and Saigon could be ruthless in their treatment of political opponents. Both were Machiavellian, but it was the Vietminh who captured the political high ground in Vietnam during the war against Japan and kept it in their war against the French. American policy makers missed the significance of the historical developments in Vietnam as they had missed the historical course of events in China in the twentieth century. The American leadership was itself too imbued with Western colonial attitudes to understand Mao Zedong’s or Ho’s appeals. Add to that colonial mind-set the fear of the expansionist ideology and material power of the Soviet Union as the leader or ally—take your pick—of the Asian Communists, and America was on the course of intervention in Indochina. Once on that course, the arrogance of power, as William Fulbright later termed it, set in, and the United States became convinced that it had the one design for postcolonial Vietnam. 30
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I continue to see the persistence of the United States in Vietnam as an American phenomenon and one not easily reversed by any chief executive. Mark suggests that Johnson was less moved by diplomatic credibility than by political and personal credibility. I am not sure that credibility can be separated in that fashion. Preserving diplomatic, political, and personal credibility weighed heavily on every U.S. president facing the issue of Vietnam, from Harry Truman through George W. Bush. Mark notes Melvin Laird’s article as one of the latest iterations of the Nixon administration’s postwar mantra that Vietnamization could have won the war for the rvn and the United States but that Congress did not give it the chance. Mark says these arguments make him wary of Cold War explanations, but I see the “win theory” revisionists as uncritically accepting the official containment rationale for the American role in the war. Their critique of U.S. performance focuses on how Washington conducted the war and not on why. I explore this point in greater depth in my presidential address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), published in the January 2006 issue of Diplomatic History. 31
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Young: I find David’s summary very useful. I agree that the line between national and personal credibility was no line at all—though this may state the point more forcefully than Dave intended. Kennedy may have articulated the content of the identification differently, but it was there. And in the case of Lyndon Johnson it was everywhere—and addressed, more often than not, to a domestic audience. He would not be the first president to lose a war. The fact that the United States has committed power to a situation means it must continue to commit such power or else no one will believe that it will. Thus the bane of the U.S. way of doing foreign policy becomes clear. U.S. foreign policy is like one of those prescription drugs retailed on TV. First, a brave announcement of its benefits; next, in a rapid murmur, the deadly side effects. Do you want to bleed the Soviet Union dry? Then aid and comfort an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency in Afghanistan. Do you want to demostrate to your recent allies that no one can mess with the United States? Then invade an irrelevant (albeit oil-rich) country and create an army of terrorists.
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Huynh: The discussion of the Cold War is very instructive for Vietnamese. The Cold War was instrumental in causing the United States to launch a massive intervention in Vietnam. But all of you have not mentioned the anticommunist hysteria in the United States and its negative impact on U.S. policy making, particularly with respect to Vietnam. Professor Anderson has said that U.S. leaders failed to understand the appeal of Mao and Ho in China and Vietnam. While the ignorance on China is difficult to understand because the United States has had very substantial scholarly resources on China, when Chinese Communist forces swept southward in 1949 no one in the United States, including the Republicans, advocated direct U.S. military intervention in China, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson made very wise comments on the incapacity and lack of honesty of the Guomindang (KMT) government and army. But the United States was determined to swim and sink with a similar government in South Vietnam and to carry out direct military intervention there. Ignorance of Vietnam’s history and situation is not enough to explain that, and perhaps something else should be added: contempt for Vietnam as a small, weak, and backward country, the Sino-Soviet rift, and U.S. overconfidence in its military technology and might.
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Anderson: Mr. Huynh raises fundamental questions about the different applications of U.S. containment strategy in China and Vietnam. As Mark and Marilyn have noted, U.S. Cold War behavior has to be understood as a product of anticommunist ideology but also of a cultural arrogance and overconfidence in material strength consistent with Western imperialist attitudes toward Asians. I would argue that shifting strategic assessments and the time when various decisions were taken also has to be considered. Mr. Huynh rightly points out Acheson’s “wise comments” about the KMT, which I understand to be a reference to the China White Paper of 1949. 32 With Japanese power in Asia broken in 1945 and with the Cold War in Europe emerging, U.S. strategists did not see China or Indochina as a high strategic value. Knowledgeable American observers even understood the principle of self-determination inherent in the Chinese civil war and the Vietminh war against the French. The internal political struggles in China and France’s moves to restore its empire in Indochina initially produced a hands-off or neutral posture by the Truman administration.
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By 1950 a number of developments had changed U.S. strategic assessments of Vietnam. Republicans had seized on the “loss” of China as a partisan issue against the Truman administration, the Cold War in Europe had grown much more dangerous, the Soviet Union possessed the atomic bomb, and, in February 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy began his Communists-in-the-State Department demagoguery. These developments, even before the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, had led officials in Washington to give increasing strategic and political value to the French war against the Vietminh. As a continuation of this policy trend after 1954 (when Dwight D. Eisenhower used the metaphor of falling dominoes to describe the strategic value of Indochina), the United States increasingly aided the anticommunist regime in South Vietnam. The international strategic and domestic political decisions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to increase the U.S. military presence in Vietnam until it constituted full-scale military intervention were heavily influenced by those administrations’ recollection of the loss of China and the stalemate in Korea. By that time, reactions to the arms race, the Cuban revolution, and other international factors were also at work in U.S. strategic thinking in the form of flexible-response and limited-war doctrines.
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Young: We must also be sensitive to the varying views within the State Department, the rivalries between the Southeast Asia people and the European desk. Yes, Acheson was totally focused on Europe, and policy toward Indochina would be shaped by French necessities—but that wasn’t true for everyone in State, including Dean Rusk throughout his career, from the time he was deputy assistant secretary of state to his term as secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson. China was not just a minor issue—before, during, or after its “loss.” It was too big a geopolitical fact, too much a part of pre–World War II U.S. thinking about Asia.
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Anderson: Marilyn is quite correct to note that Asianists were also at work in the State Department. In his essay in Michael Hogan’s The End of the Cold War, Bruce Cumings describes U.S. Cold War policy as the “containment project” and the “hegemonic project” and goes so far as to say that the U.S.-Soviet conflict was a “shadow conflict” and that “what the Cold War was really about for Americans [was] interventions in the Third World, from Korea through Iran, Guatemala and Cuba, to the debacle in Vietnam.” It should be noted that, of the twenty-one essays in Hogan’s book, only those by Cumings and Walter LaFeber bring discussion of U.S. intervention in Asia into their reflections on the meaning of the end of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. 33
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Huynh: It is interesting that during and after the Cold War the United States carried out direct military intervention only in small and weak countries such as Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq. In 1979 Vietnamese troops overthrew the Khmer Rouge, but the United States did not carry out military intervention to punish Vietnam or liberate Cambodia. Can the Vietnamese be certain that from now on the United States will desist from war against Vietnam, preferring to use diplomatic, economic, and cultural means to deal with Vietnam? I would like my American colleagues to give their comments on this point, which is of interest to many Vietnamese.
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So far, the United States has also refrained from direct military intervention in nearby Cuba (even after the demise of the Soviet Union) and Nicaragua, but how long such cases can remain as exceptions is still uncertain. Afghanistan is a different case and should not be lumped with Iraq: the government led by Hamid Karzai is seen by many in the world as a legitimate government that replaces the barbarous Taliban regime and is trying to promote unity, peace, and development in the country. No matter how much the United States hated Communism, it was reluctant, in a nuclear age, to fight Communist powers such as the Soviet Union and China (in the latter case, an initial miscalculation in Korea was soon corrected). When the war in Vietnam proved unsuccessful and contrary to U.S. strategic interests, it withdrew, even though its anticommunist feelings were not diminished. The traditional realism and pragmatism of the United States, which were absent in U.S. policy making in the early 1960s, came back in 1968, even when Mr. Nixon was in power. I am afraid this kind of behavior will go on for a long time.
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Anderson: Mr. Huynh is a perceptive observer of the history of international conflict. I agree with his observation that, despite ideological rhetoric, the United States has often shown prudent respect for the military power of potential opponents. I don’t know that it follows, however, that the United States was particularly eager to fight smaller and weaker states. It is clear that U.S. leaders (regardless of presidential administration) worked to avoid direct conflict with the Soviet Union and China. Instead, the United States chose to conduct limited wars in Korea and Vietnam in efforts to prevent political success by states perceived to be allies of the Soviet Union and PRC. Today, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and Vietnam and China are not allies. The geopolitical calculations of how to contain global Communism are no longer operative. What, then, has become the standard by which U.S. strategists determine where and why to resort to military force? The size and strength of the adversary is an important consideration, but that calculation does not mean that the neoconservatives in charge of American foreign policy are practicing realism and pragmatism. In June 2002 President George W. Bush admonished the graduating cadets at West Point that “we fight, as we always fight, for a just peace—a peace that favors human liberty.” The confidence of American leaders in the military power of the United States combined with an expansive Wilsonian vision of human liberty suggests that a muscular idealism has become the standard for deciding when and against whom to fight. Since the days of John Hay’s Open Door notes about China, expressions of idealism have often been expressions of American self-interest, but it is this linking of idealism and power, of right and might, in official U.S. thinking that can be so dangerous. 34
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Huynh: May I thank Professor David Anderson for his observations. I should be grateful if he and others would also reflect on the “decent interval” thesis. (JAH: According to many scholars, the Nixon administration was determined to preserve a non-Communist South Vietnam to the very end. Yet, many of those scholars believe that Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and later secretary of state, viewed a decent interval as the next best thing. If a Communist victory proved unavoidable, they reasoned, let there be a significant period—a decent interval—between the withdrawal of the last American troops and the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime. That gap would allow the U.S. government to distance itself from the debacle. What remains controversial is whether Nixon and/or Kissinger believed well before war’s end that a decent interval was all they could achieve. In their memoirs both deny it, but considerable scholarship refutes their denials.)
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Anderson: Trying to understand the decent interval strategy is an exercise in trying to read the inscrutable mind of Richard Nixon. There are three interpretations or versions of such a strategy. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s memoirs maintain that the administration had achieved “peace with honor” in the 1973 Paris agreement. They argue that the outcome was honorable because the United States ended its military intervention in Vietnam with the government of the Republic of Vietnam in place and a process established that, if followed, could have allowed for an eventual political resolution of the conflict. That version has allowed Nixon, Kissinger, and their supporters to blame the collapse of the peace on Hanoi’s violation of the agreement and on the U.S. Congress’s failure to approve sufficient financial aid to America’s South Vietnamese allies to obtain fuel, food, spare parts, and other essentials for their survival. This interpretation maintains that the administration did not have a decent interval strategy because Saigon’s collapse was avoidable. 35 A second interpretation, documented by the historian Jeffrey Kimball, is that Nixon and Kissinger had an explicit decent interval strategy at the time the president made his “silent majority” speech on November 3, 1969. Kimball’s The Vietnam War Files details Nixon’s plan to announce a punitive operation code named Duck Hook and designed to force Hanoi into diplomatic concessions. Instead, Nixon and Kissinger decided not to proceed. Moreover, and tellingly, they chose not to define “successful conclusion” and “honorable peace” as gaining a political settlement with Hanoi but rather as America’s leaving Vietnam with a Saigon government strong enough to defend itself. (This definition of success is ironically similar to the current Bush administration’s characterization of success in Iraq.) Pulling back from Duck Hook and redefining success marked the beginning, according to Kimball, of the decent interval strategy separating American military withdrawal from the final political fate of the rvn. After sending U.S. troops into Cambodia in 1970, the administration again defined success as buying time for Vietnamization or the strengthening of the Saigon government, rather than a final settlement. In 1971, when Kissinger was preparing for his secret meeting in Beijing that would begin the China rapprochement tied to extracting the United States from the war, Kissinger made a marginal note in his briefing book: “We want a decent interval. You have our assurance.” This comment was next to draft language for an assurance to Zhou Enlai that “if the Vietnamese people themselves decide to change the present government, we shall accept it.” 36
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A third interpretation is that of Larry Berman in his No Peace, No Honor. He finds that Nixon was entirely serious about his secret instructions to the Pentagon to prepare plans for B-52 strikes over Hanoi and renewed mining of northern harbors. If the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) violated the agreement being prepared at Paris, the U.S. response would be “all out.” Berman points out that Nixon did not let the American people or Congress know of his plans for prompt retaliation in the event of serious DRV treaty violations. In fact, he did not inform the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he had made written pledges to South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu that the United States would retaliate. In Berman’s words, “there are at least two words no one can use to characterize the outcome of that two-faced policy. One is ‘peace.’ The other is ‘honor.'” Berman, then, sees Nixon’s strategy, not as pursuit of a decent interval, but as continued determination to achieve a military solution, although he and Kissinger were presenting themselves publicly as peacemakers. 37
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Both Kimball and Berman draw their evidence from heretofore highly confidential White House records. It appears that Nixon and Kissinger, after learning, as had their White House predecessors, that Hanoi was not easily intimidated or bluffed, adopted a decent interval strategy, as Kimball argues. Nixon may well have never abandoned his so-called madman strategy of wanting his adversary to believe he might order massive retaliation, but Kissinger seems to have accepted the pragmatism of a decent interval approach, and Nixon went along with it for domestic political reasons. Nixon was probably serious about wanting contingency planning for the use of extreme force in Vietnam (he continued bombing in Cambodia well into 1973). Not only did the Watergate scandal debilitate his leadership, public and congressional opinion clearly would brook no resumption of an American military role in Indochina. When Gerald Ford sought to increase aid to the rvn in 1975, he met a virtually unmovable resolve on Capitol Hill to let events in Vietnam follow their own course. Kissinger remained as secretary of state in 1975, and he continued to be concerned about the appearance of decency. As Congress considered what were clearly token White House requests for aid to Saigon in its final days, Kissinger urged approval more as a final gesture of U.S. commitment to an ally than as a real answer to the rvn’s failure to govern effectively and to respond successfully to the challenge of the DRV.
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Huynh: I find the decent interval theory quite interesting. I wish to receive more explanations about the following: One, 1969 and 1970 were marked by the frantic efforts of Nixon to threaten and pressure the DRV and NLF to cave in and seek peace on military terms (the “madman” theory, B-52 bombing of Cambodia in 1969, invasion of Cambodia in 1970 to destroy NLF forces and headquarters, renewed bombing of North Vietnam in 1970). How can one demonstrate that while engaging in such actions, Nixon might have been moved by considerations of decent interval, or did he think that in case of failure he would turn to decent interval? Is there any dialectical link between decent interval and these manifestations of excessive use of force? There is now written proof that during Kissinger’s July 1971 visit to Beijing and Nixon’s visit to Beijing and Moscow in 1972, Nixon and Kissinger openly told China and the Soviet Union about the decent interval theory. Kindly show that there are concrete and convincing proofs about the theory in 1969 and 1970, including in Nixon’s “silent majority” speech. Two, should I understand that this is a theory of Kissinger, not of Nixon? Three, is there any other argument from Professor Berman that can challenge seriously the findings of Professor Kimball about the decent interval theory?
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Anderson: My friend Mr. Huynh raises some significant questions about the decent interval strategy. First, he notes that the bombing campaigns that Nixon waged in Cambodia and North Vietnam and the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 seemed to indicate that the United States was still intent on using military power to force diplomatic concessions from Hanoi. Nixon and Kissinger both believed that the United States possessed the power, if it had the political will to use it, to break the DRV’s resistance to political compromise. Where historians differ is on the extent Nixon and Kissinger held fast to this belief in the face not only of Hanoi’s recalcitrance but also of the mounting American domestic opposition. In October 1969, as Duck Hook was being planned, the massive Moratorium demonstrations against the war occurred. Larry Berman contends that Nixon and his top aides pulled back from Duck Hook because the domestic timing was bad for such a bold move, but he maintains that the president and Kissinger never gave up on the eventual resort to massive force. It is clear from Berman’s account that neither Nixon nor Kissinger had any real faith in Vietnamization and considered it a rhetorical strategy to ease the political pressure on them for a U.S. withdrawal. Both Jim Willbanks and Lew Sorley see greater earnestness in the administration’s Vietnamization plan. They disagree sharply on the potential for its success, but both accept the idea that public opinion forced a change in Nixon’s initial impulse to go for broke with U.S. military power. Kimball notes this same shift in the Nixon-Kissinger strategy in November 1969 and traces its course through to the end of the war. The evidence that Kimball presents in The Vietnam War Files comes in part from an analysis of the drafting of the “silent majority” speech. In Kimball’s nuanced account, Nixon still wanted to maintain his madman image to keep Hanoi uncertain of his intentions. The president doubtless continued to believe that U.S. air power could defeat the DRV, but his behavior indicates that he used that power (and the U.S. ground action in Cambodia) to protect Vietnamization and with it the middle ground in U.S. politics. A dramatic escalation of U.S. military action could hand an issue to his opponents that would risk his defeat in the 1972 election. Thus, in Kimball’s view, the decent interval had become a de facto U.S. strategy. The president and Kissinger did not believe that Vietnamization would work, but they found it politically advantageous to advocate it. 38
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On Mr. Huynh’s second point, it seems from the scholarly evidence that only Kissinger used terms such as “reasonable time” and “decent interval.” I would not interpret that evidence to indicate that the decent interval was Kissinger’s theory rather than Nixon’s. It may mean that Kissinger was more resigned to it than was Nixon. Nixon did make secret assurances to Thieu of U.S. intervention if the DRV grossly violated the Paris agreements, and those assurances seemed to be at odds with Kissinger’s comments to the Chinese. In the actions of both Nixon and Kissinger there is a large suggestion of expediency (Nixon wanted Thieu’s cooperation and Kissinger wanted the PRC’s cooperation), and how one correlates these private statements is open to numerous interpretations. With regard to Mr. Huynh’s question about arguments that challenge Kimball’s thesis, one should see an exchange between Kimball and Berman that appeared after the publication of Berman’s book and before the publication of Kimball’s. There Berman writes that the references he finds from Kissinger and Nixon about their intention to bomb the DRV in the spring of 1973 (after the U.S. prisoners were all released) overwhelm the few references Kimball finds to a decent interval strategy. A more recent review of Kimball’s book by Pierre Asselin characterizes the book’s thesis as circumstantial. Neither Berman nor Kimball presents a definitive case, and much room remains for difference of opinion. Personally, I find persuasive the pattern of Nixon’s behavior that Kimball has chronicled. 39
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Huynh: To the question of my friend Mark Bradley about how Hanoi saw the Nixon and Kissinger strategy and how these issues are interpreted by Vietnamese historians, may I say the following: Vietnamese leaders and officials saw Nixon as extremely bellicose and dangerous, and therefore they had been preparing for a big military offensive (to be launched in March 1972) since 197l and had been giving instructions to the armed forces to make preparations for coping with a big B-52 assault before any agreement could be signed in Paris. Nixon and Kissinger explained their decent interval theory to China and the Soviet Union in 197l and 1972, but when Chinese and later Soviet representatives came to Hanoi to brief us, they only advised us to reach an agreement with the Nixon government soon by giving up the idea of replacing the Thieu government with a coalition government. They did not say anything about the other parts of the U.S. statements in these summits, which reflect more directly and clearly the decent interval theory.
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On October 4, 1972, well after the two summits in Beijing and Moscow, the Vietnamese politburo sent the following secret instructions to its delegation in Paris: “We must shelve some other demands on the internal affairs of South Vietnam. Even if we continued to negotiate until after the U.S. elections, we would not be able to reach an agreement on these issues. But if we put an end to the U.S. military involvement in South Vietnam, then in the subsequent struggle against the puppet regime we would be able to achieve a solution to these issues and win even greater victories.” Those instructions mean that Vietnamese leaders assumed that in the Paris talks the United States would never agree to discard Thieu. So they said, let us shelve this issue to reach a quick agreement with the United States, because after the withdrawal of all U.S. troops and the end of all U.S. military involvement in South Vietnam, it would be easier to overthrow the Saigon regime with a different tactic. The new tactic was also motivated by an urgent need to reach an agreement in Paris in order to prevent collusion between two or three big powers in a solution that might harm the revolution. 40
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Accordingly, on October 8, 1972, Le Duc Tho proposed that both sides agree to set up an “administration”(not government) in South Vietnam to implement the already-concluded agreements, achieve national reconciliation, and hold general and local elections while the existing two governments and armies remained in their respective territories. This proposal meant that Vietnam was retracting its former demand that Thieu be replaced with a government of national reconciliation. (In the negotiations the “administration” ultimately became the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, as agreed between the two sides.) Thanks to, among other things, this basic concession, negotiations could go forward rapidly, and a general agreement could be reached.
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The concession was motivated mainly by Vietnamese calculations that the new tactic would prevent big-power collusion. The concession was somewhat in keeping with U.S. calculations (the United States would sign the Paris agreement and withdraw from the war while the Thieu government was still intact; it would no longer be responsible for subsequent events, and this would protect its credibility as a trustworthy ally) but was not based on any knowledge of the decent interval theory. Would you say that this was something like groping in the dark but managing to open the right door? When making this concession, Vietnamese leaders proceeded from the conviction that Nixon was very bellicose but that it was necessary and possible to reach an agreement because both sides, for different reasons, needed to reach an agreement. The fact that following his reelection Nixon attempted to negotiate changes in the above agreement further reinforced the above conviction about Nixon, and active preparations were made to repel possible B-52 attacks on Hanoi in order to pave the way for an agreement.
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Bradley: I find Mr. Huynh’s discussion of Hanoi’s perceptions of Nixon and the instructions to shift negotiating tactics in Paris in October 1972 fascinating. I wonder if he could say a bit more about why the Vietnamese felt the need to reach an agreement beyond fears of big-power collusion and views of Nixon. For instance, can one see any legacies of the anti-party affair of 1967 as important in shaping strategies on the ground and in Paris? (This was a sharp ideological debate among Hanoi policy makers over the future direction of the war—framed by planning for the Tet Offensive, the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, and the deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and China—which included the arrest and detention of approximately three hundred Soviet-trained cadres and military people for “counterrevolutionary crimes.” Limitations on Vietnamese-language sources for this period have made historians wary of offering definitive interpretations. Beyond the exact nature of the debates, that they took place at all suggests that the oft-repeated claim that the collective top leadership of the North Vietnamese state viewed the war in a uniform way oversimplifies policy making in the north.) Were competing views being aired in the politburo or elsewhere in the party in the early 1970s on negotiating strategies and the eventual collapse of the Thieu regime that mapped onto dimensions of those earlier conflicts? Was it also possible that war weariness in the north, both among civilians and soldiers, played a role in the leadership’s decision-making calculus in 1972?
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Huynh: Fears of big-power collusion and the eagerness of the leadership (as also the whole nation) to liberate/reunify the country after 116 years of foreign rule and partition are the main motivations. The victims of the 1967 repression did not hold different views on reunification. At the beginning of the war, 1964–1965, some did say that fighting the United States is like riding tigers, but by 1968 they all recognized their mistake, including Hoang Minh Chinh (one of those punished in 1967).
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JAH: Some of you have already mentioned ways the current war in Iraq reminds you of similar conditions in Vietnam. Let’s focus on this: Why or why not is Vietnam an appropriate historical analogy for thinking about current U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Young: Well, the same country is involved in fighting in all three places, no? And all officials insist they learn from the past—certainly the administration has in terms of media control and seizing the commanding heights of public rhetoric (support our troops, make sacrifice meaningful, fight them there not here, do not betray the troops through expressions of doubt, etc.). As for the military—there is an immense amount of total crap being published on the issue of counterinsurgency and what was and wasn’t done in Vietnam; what the military refuses to learn, etc. People now point to El Salvador as an example of the true model for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan/Iraq, insisting that Iraq is not Vietnam, it is Central America. But Iraq is Iraq and not any other place, and the same is true for Afghanistan, countries with which the United States has long, unacknowledged histories, countries shaped by those histories (with the United States as well as with the full range of colonial powers).
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Bradley: I am most struck by how little we know as Americans and American historians about Afghanistan and Iraq as real places with complex and contingent histories, and how much this parallels American understandings of Vietnam. Maybe seven universities and colleges taught Vietnamese history and language during the war. A handful of scholars produced work on Vietnamese history, society, and culture informed by Vietnamese sources. And many of those who did had to look beyond American shores for employment and venues for publication during the war. When we consider the field of United States–Middle East relations in the academy, the parallels to the Vietnam situation during the war are distressingly similar. How many of us have a real sense of Afghan history and society? Or of Iraq’s? Or of the complex interplay of relations—political, economic, and cultural—between the Middle East and the United States? For myself, my honest if embarrassed answer is very little. I suspect the same might be said for many American historians and the public at large.
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There are also problematic parallels in what passes for “culturally informed” understandings of the Vietnamese and Afghan pasts, suggesting a little local “knowledge” can be a dangerous thing. Frances FitzGerald’s 1972 Pulitzer Prize–winning Fire in the Lake quickly emerged as one of the leading popular interpretations of Vietnamese history and society. Whatever its virtues, FitzGerald’s book was organized around a concept of Vietnam that obscured as much as it revealed. FitzGerald argued that the “traditional” notion of the mandate of heaven continued to shape Vietnamese political consciousness into the twentieth century and helped explain why Ho Chi Minh rather than the leadership of South Vietnam enjoyed Vietnamese popular support. In doing so, she borrowed from earlier French orientalist scholarship and its static notions of Vietnam as a smaller and reified China, a set of assumptions that ignored the heterodox character of premodern Vietnam (and China!) and the political, social, and cultural transformations that shaped urban and rural Vietnamese societies during the colonial and postcolonial periods. 41
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Similarly, recent Western commentators on Afghanistan and the construction of its postwar government have directed sustained attention to what they often call the “time-honored institution” of the loya jirga though which, purportedly, tribal elders mediated issues and problems. Like FitzGerald’s mandate of heaven in Vietnam, a focus on the loya jirga’s “centuries-old” genealogy collapses local particularities of political and social change into a single and enduring vehicle. It elides not only more complex understandings of Afghan politics but also the ways the practice of the loya jirga reflects invented traditions that were a common element of European imperialism, such as the durbars of British India, whose “ancient lineages” served as useful and dramatic, if ultimately unsuccessful, propaganda efforts to legitimate and naturalize British colonial rule. American and other Western commentators, whether from the Right or the Left, appear unaware of these ironies and contradictions. 42
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One could simply decry all this. Or put it down to a more general American parochialism about the wider world. But as historians we can and should pledge ourselves to recognize that these are serious problems and work toward redressing them. Those of us who have learned Vietnamese and French may not be the right people to now take on Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, or Pashto. But we can encourage our undergraduates and graduate students to do so. And to cast their reading and research in the capacious ways that have increasingly allowed us to explore the complexities of American engagement in Vietnam, ways that depart from exceptionalist notions of United States history. At the graduate level in particular, if we are to encourage such work, we need to give our students some space, time, and institutional support to learn languages and to master multiple local, national, and regional historiographies. These tools will enable a new generation of scholars to craft a richer, more sophisticated narrative of American relations with Iraq, Afghanistan, and other states and peoples in the Middle East.
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Anderson: One analogy between American policies in the Vietnam War and the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is that, in both cases, American strategists assumed that, in the name of American national security, American material power and democratic ideals could overcome and redirect the internal history of these areas. Consequently, U.S. officials paid little attention to the local origins of the regional conflicts and trusted that American might and moral rectitude would prevail over weaker foes. U.S. leaders have a responsibility to identify and protect American security interests against aggressive and hostile enemies, but careful thought must be given to the means to that end based on historically sound knowledge and not arrogant and ill-informed assumptions. The policy makers themselves are accountable for how they use or abuse history, but, as Mark observes, historians, too, should reflect on what and how we are teaching undergraduates and preparing graduate students. It is part of the responsibility of history faculties in universities to help future leaders understand U.S. foreign policy in the context of international history and to appreciate and respect the history of other peoples and nations.
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Brigham: Although there are few operational or strategic similarities between Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam, I do think that there is one important factor present in all three: there is no political corollary to U.S. military power. In all three cases the most difficult task remains nation building. Here is where I think Mark and Marilyn’s concern about lack of empathy and understanding is vitally important. Without a sophisticated reading of the political culture in Iraq—as was true in Vietnam—the United States is likely to have a very tough go of it as Washington tries to reconstruct the nation. My guess is that we will see a decent interval strategy employed shortly.
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Hagopian: In the post–Vietnam War period, the Vietnam analogy for a time eclipsed the Munich analogy as a way of encapsulating the principles that should govern the use of American military force. As a way both to codify and to mitigate military resistance to the use of force, presidential administrations’ uncertainty about public and congressional support for military interventions, and the public’s mistrust of its leader, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger enunciated principles governing the use of force. They included the principle that troops should not be used for nonmilitary purposes, that force should be used as a last resort and then overwhelmingly, and that there should be an exit strategy, a clear consensus, and good prospects for continuing public and congressional support. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later secretary of state in George W. Bush’s administration, adopted those principles, and they came to be known as the Powell doctrine. Each of those principles corrected what the doctrine’s proponents thought had gone wrong in Vietnam. Hence, the absence of an exit strategy in Vietnam would not recur; troops would not be deployed in an incremental escalation, as in Vietnam, but in overwhelming numbers; troops would not be committed to perform nation building, but would be tasked with a military mission, and so on. Presidential administrations and their critics had different definitions of what “no more Vietnams” meant, but all agreed that “another Vietnam” was something to be avoided. Vietnam was not so much an analogy as a negative example—or perhaps both. Any situation that might become “another Vietnam” caused both politicians and the public to become nervous, and the Weinberger/Powell orthodoxy was a means of ensuring that no more Vietnams would occur and of managing the anxieties that America’s role as a world power entailed in the post–Vietnam War period.
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Weinberger’s principles and the Powell doctrine were not as rigorously adhered to by President Bill Clinton’s administration as by its predecessors, Ronald Reagan’s and George H. W. Bush’s. Although the Clinton administration was generally reluctant to send troops overseas (and this was reinforced by the Somalia debacle), it was prepared to engage in nation building operations, and it said that it would assess each situation on its own merits. The use of troops in Haiti and the former Yugoslavia arguably departs from the Weinberger/Powell orthodoxy.
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Policy makers attempted a radical and deliberate departure from the Weinberger/Powell doctrine during the George W. Bush presidency. A feature of policy debates during the first George W. Bush administration was that it included not only the person who gave the Powell doctrine its name but opponents of the doctrine—Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and some of Rumsfeld’s deputies. The whole approach to the invasion of Iraq implicitly repudiated the Weinberger/Powell orthodoxy. So a lean, highly mobile force achieving “shock and awe” would be used rather than overwhelming numbers; no exit strategy was required because the troops would be welcomed as liberators; and this would obviate the need for a durable political consensus at home. The war would not, administration officials insisted, be another Vietnam.
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As the occupation dragged on, however, we began to hear that it was becoming a Vietnam-like “quagmire,” and this started to happen as early as August of 2003, following the spring invasion. Now, the use of the Vietnam analogy has become more commonplace. One can see even right-wing commentators such as Pat Buchanan on The McLaughlin Group broadcast accepting its applicability.
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The use of the Vietnam analogy involves not just a historical question, therefore, but a political one. As time has gone on and as it has clearly been seen to be impossible to dislodge an entrenched insurgency using military means, the similarities (superficial or not) between Vietnam and Iraq have increased and the use of the Vietnam analogy appears therefore more justifiable. As George W. Bush’s administration has to contend with growing public discontent, the parallels with Vietnam might appear to be still greater. However, the growing perception among commentators and the public that Iraq is or might become “another Vietnam” involves not just a judgment about the resemblance of two sets of military events. It is also a political judgment about the wisdom of American policy in Iraq and the index of the growing public impatience with the steady toll of casualties in a questionable cause without an immediate prospect that the United States will achieve its stated goals.
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So the thing that seems most important to me about the Vietnam analogy is not whether it is accurate or not, but the sheer fact that it is being used and that its use is becoming more frequent. Historical analogies go in and out of fashion. The Vietnam War has clearly not yet reached the stage of irrelevance, and so long as opposition to subsequent military operations is couched in the Vietnam analogy, it will continue to have its mitigating and chastening effect on leaders who might prefer to have a free hand in the use of force.
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Appy: There is a danger that any effort to compare current events with historical antecedents will badly distort both past and present. I agree that Iraq and Vietnam are vastly different, and as Mark rightly argues, comparing those histories in any depth is beyond most historians, never mind commentators and policy makers. But surely there are commonalities, at least in a general sense, in the way U.S. officials justified their policies in the two countries, and these analogies can serve public debate. After all, as David indicates, one important connection is that U.S. policy makers then, as now, believed detailed local knowledge was largely irrelevant except in narrowly tactical terms (that is, where are the “bad guys”?) because Washington clung to the hope (in spite of massive contrary evidence) that U.S. technology and military firepower could hold the line long enough for modernization (or nation building) to draw each country into a stable global system amenable to U.S. economic and political power.
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At the risk of gross oversimplification, I’d like to list a few linkages. Then as now, the president claims: —We face a global threat (Communism/terrorism).
—The enemy we fight is part of that global threat.
—We fight far away from home so we won’t have to fight in our own streets.
—We want nothing for ourselves, only self-determination for them.
—We are doing everything possible to limit the loss of civilian lives.
—We are making great progress, but the media isn’t reporting it.
—Ultimately, the war must be won by them with less and less U.S. “help.”
—Immediate withdrawal would be an intolerable blow to U.S. credibility and would only embolden our enemy and produce a bloodbath.
—Antiwar activism must be allowed but demoralizes our troops and encourages our enemy.
Then, as now, the president does not say:
—The enemy in Vietnam/Iraq actually does not pose a threat to U.S. security, but we’re fighting anyway.
—We do indeed have geopolitical and economic interests in the region and will never tolerate a Communist/radical Islamist government.
—We are using weapons and tactics that don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
—We will stretch and break the law to spy on and sabotage antiwar critics.
—We won’t ask the nation as a whole to make a major sacrifice but will continue to send the working class to do most of the fighting.
—The progress we report is contradicted by our own sources.
—Troop morale is going downhill.
—Most of the people over there don’t want us in their country.
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JAH: What are the enduring legacies of the war for Vietnam and the United States?
Young: That the United States fights with disproportionate force; that its leaders insistently return to the use of force, by preference, as an expression of will, of civic virtue even; that from the Vietnam War the political leadership has learned much about the manipulation of the public, avoidance of too much pain for the public (privatization of the military, no conscription), and the persuasive dissemination of lies, but nothing whatsoever about what was at issue in Vietnam for Vietnamese, nothing about what it means to destroy other societies out of ignorance, indifference, lack of imagination, and greed, nothing whatsoever about itself and its immense capacities for destruction.
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Appy: Since the Vietnam War, American nationalism and imperial assertion have been mobilized around a sense of national victimhood. It is certainly true, as many people have pointed out (Michael Sherry, for example), that throughout our history our leaders have routinely claimed that war has been forced upon us, that we have been the victims of unjustified insults or attacks of one sort or another (“Remember the Maine,” for example). 43
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But I don’t think victimhood has ever had such a deep purchase in our culture as it has over the past thirty years. 9/11 no doubt deepened the impulse, but I’d argue that it was a key to Reagan’s election. It should be noted that he and others on the right successfully persuaded many Americans that we were the victims not only of foreign aliens, but domestic enemies (irresolute liberal politicians, feminists, a near-treasonous “liberal media,” etc.). That we are under siege by envious others and internal dissidents underlies almost every claim of global beneficence or righteous mission. One sign of this victim posture is the way the dominant culture has redefined heroism beginning with the Vietnam War. The mere survivors of ordeals by agents of state power—veterans, pows, hostages—have, since Vietnam, been automatically defined as heroes.
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On the other hand, there are also legacies of resistance to, and public skepticism of, official depictions of reality.
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Anderson: I am a little uncomfortable with the term “enduring legacies,” since, in my view, the legacy of the war has become conflicting mythologies that don’t so much endure as continue to battle with each other. Drastically simplified, the debate is over the concept of “no more Vietnams.” One interpretation of the term is that the United States must abjure virtually all types of military intervention abroad (the term “Vietnam syndrome” came into use to describe a pathological aversion to the use of force). The other understanding of the term “no more Vietnams” is that the United States must never again “lose” when defense of the nation’s security requires military intervention (that is, get over the Vietnam syndrome and the lack of political will to use America’s massive power). In both cases, there is an implication that the United States, because of its power and global interests, can choose where and when to engage its military force. The Vietnam War was a war of choice. The Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations chose to define the survival of South Vietnam as a vital strategic interest in the global policy of containment. Official American rhetoric increasingly exaggerated the value of the objective as domestic opposition to the war questioned the choice and the cost of intervention. There is a proclivity to overpromise to the nation the results of the intervention and to understate the costs to the nation in order to justify continuing the intervention. One example of such an overpromise is the couching of the reason for continuing the intervention in terms of America’s international “credibility.” Wars of choice leave a gap between ends and means that almost invariably produces division, dissatisfaction, and domestic debilitation.
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These repatriated remains of unknown Vietnam War soldiers were formally signed over to the United States before being flown to Hawaii for dna testing. Hanoi, Vietnam, January 1999. Photo by Ted Engelmann. Courtesy Ted Engelmann.
Hagopian: Legacies of the war in Vietnam include the environmental damage done to the war zone by Agent Orange. There are high concentrations of toxins such as dioxin in the soil as a result of its use. Decades after the end of the war, their effects are felt in unusually high rates of birth defects among children born to those exposed to these poisons. This is America’s gift to the generation of those not yet born—literally a legacy. It is doubtful that anything could compensate for the harm done on the scale of the poisonous destruction that the United States rained down on Vietnam. Recently, Vietnamese people have launched a lawsuit against the companies who manufactured the defoliants contaminated with dioxin. It would behoove the United States’ citizenry to appeal to their government to make restitution for the contamination that resulted from American government policy. 44 Unexploded ordnance still lies buried in the Vietnamese countryside. When farmers or children at play stumble across the bombs, they cause death and injury. Many of America’s military veterans bear the burdens of wartime injury. Amputees, paralyzed or blind veterans, and those with other debilitating injuries are affected by the war every day, forgotten by those who led the country into war—and politicians who avoided service. A higher proportion of people with serious injuries survived Vietnam than survived any previous American war because of the speed with which helicopters could evacuate casualties from the battlefield and because of the very high survival rates of those who reached the operating theater alive. There is almost no public discussion or acknowledgment of those who survive warfare with debilitating injuries—yet the legacy of medical procedures practiced in Vietnam will be a high proportion of such casualties of this and subsequent American wars.
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Defeat and dishonor in Vietnam made overcoming the political aftereffects of the war problematic because attitudes to American military policy interacted with the deeply entrenched sense of loss, betrayal, and grievance that Americans of all political persuasions felt after the war. Depending on their political perspective, Americans might have very different sets of people toward whom they felt anger and very different reasons for their feelings of loss and disappointment. However, they all seem to partake of an emotional tenor of resentment compounded by uncompensated grief.
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A lasting intellectual legacy of the war is a new understanding of postwar psychological injury. Whereas diagnostic manuals acknowledged “shell shock” and “battle fatigue” after previous American wars, astonishingly, there was no listing for any postcombat psychiatric condition in the second edition of the official psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM II, published in 1968) of the American Psychiatric Association, current during the Vietnam War. It took the efforts of practitioners who treated and advocated for Vietnam veterans to have post–traumatic stress disorder included in DSM III (1980). Without that advocacy, there would have been no PTSD in the diagnostic and statistical manual. 45
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Vietnam veterans have been an extremely vocal group. Supposedly, the country went through a period of sustained “amnesia” during which its experience in Vietnam was forgotten. In fact, it is doubtful that the amnesia was ever complete. In an echo of the structure of Michel Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis,” Americans talked incessantly about the war by complaining about the amnesia into which they had fallen. 46 But even if there was a lapse of attention in the immediate postwar period, this ended in 1980 not only with the acceptance of PTSD in psychiatric vocabulary, but with the signing of legislation authorizing construction of a Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall, which in turn set off a great wave of memorial construction in the 1980s. Compare this with the post–Civil War period, when the peak decades for the construction of memorials were from the 1880s to the 1900s—the time lag for the commemoration of the Vietnam War in the United States was at least a decade shorter.
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The attention that Vietnam veterans demanded and received has helped shift the prevalent discourses surrounding veteran status. Veterans of the “good war,” World War II, returned to a jobs-rich economy and received more practical help from the government in the form of the G.I. Bill of Rights, which provided educational benefits and low-cost housing loans; on the emotional front, though, they were silent veterans who never achieved recognition of the emotional and psychological burdens they suffered after service. In contrast, Vietnam veterans’ practical assistance had been eroded by inflation; however, all the burdens that they suffered, whether material or emotional, gave them license to complain. The “plaintive style” and the tenor of resentment mentioned above connect with the notion of national victim status to which Chris Appy refers. This new discursive development has many potential political repercussions, and it can lead, as others have said, to ferocious military attempts to take revenge on the world. It has multiple cultural ramifications domestically as well. Among other things, it has permitted the expression of mass emotion—for example, public grief at events such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11, 2001, attacks. In fact, the verb “permitted” is too weak. The public expression of mass emotion seems obligatory now, as though an event has not been sufficiently marked by the public unless thousands of teddy bears, bouquets, and banners are displayed on the streets. This plaintive and emotive style has many roots but at least one of them is the experience of the Vietnam War and its postwar commemoration.
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Myra MacPherson wrote in Long Time Passing that the My Lai massacre told America and the world a painful truth: that Americans, like others, can perform evil acts in wartime. The Vietnam War also proved that, for all its power, America can be defeated. One lesson of that war is that if one creates enemies faster than one kills them, one is bound to lose. A legacy of the Vietnam War for the United States and the world might be that America’s leaders recognize this truism and begin belatedly to act on it. Like Marilyn, I am not at this moment filled with hope—but the hopes of the world depend on this possibility. 47
Notes
1 David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley, 1995); Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Peter Zinoman, Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley, 2001); Shawn Frederick McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (Honolulu, 2003); Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley, 1972); David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (2 vols., Armonk, 2003).
2 Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham, 2002); Kim N. B. Ninh, A World Transformed: The Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Vietnam, 1945–1965 (Ann Arbor, 2002); Lien-Hang Thi Nguyen, “Between the Storm: The End of the Vietnam War in International Perspective, 1969–73,” in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives, ed. Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young (New York, forthcoming 2007); Robert K. Brigham, Guerilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (Ithaca, 1998); Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence, 2006); Edward Miller, “Vision, Power, and Agency: The Ascent of Ngo Dinh Diem, 1945–54,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 35 (Oct. 2004), 433–58.
3 Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham, 2004); Michael Joe Allen, “‘The War’s Not Over until the Last Man Comes Home’: Body Recovery and the Vietnam War” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2003); Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, 2005); Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, 1999).
4 For the Toledo Blade‘s articles on the atrocities committed by the Tiger Force special fighting unit, see Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, “A Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths,” Toledo Blade, Nov. 19, 2003, http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SRTIGERFORCE . See also Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War (New York, 2006).
5 Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York, 2000); David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (New York, 2003); Paul Hendrickson, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (New York, 1996).
6 Nicholas Turse, “‘Kill Anything That Moves’: U.S. War Crimes and Atrocities in Vietnam, 1965–1973” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005); David L. Anderson, Facing My Lai: Moving beyond the Massacre (Lawrence, 1998).
7 Rage Against the Machine, “Take the Power Back,” performed by Rage Against the Machine (compact disc; Epic ZK 52959; 1992).
8 Ninh, World Transformed; McHale, Print and Power.
9 Elliott, Vietnamese War.
10 Brigham, ARVN; Paul Mus, Vietnam, Sociologie d’une guerre (Vietnam: Sociology of a war) (Paris, 1952); Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York, 1972).
11 Patrick Hagopian, “The Social Memory of the Vietnam War” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1994); Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York, 2003).
12 Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, 2000).
13 Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley, forthcoming 2006).
14 David C. Engerman, ed., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst, 2003); David Ryan and Victor Pungong, eds., The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom (New York, 2000); Allen, “‘War’s Not Over until the Last Man Comes Home'”; Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam; Hagopian, “Social Memory of the Vietnam War”; Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, 2004); Nick Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State,” Journal of American History, 89 (Sept. 2002), 512–37; Nick Cullather, “‘The Target Is the People’: Representations of the Village in Modernization and U.S. National Security Doctrine,” Cultural Politics, 2 (March 2006), 29–48.
15 Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York, 2002); Michael Lind, Vietnam, the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York, 1999).
16 Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America; Miller, “Vision, Power, and Agency”; Lien-Hang, “Between the Storm”; McHale, Print and Power; Elliott, Vietnamese War.
17 Vo Nguyen Giap, “Comrade Le Duan, The Firm and Staunch Communist, The Outstanding Leader of Vietnam’s Revolution,” Tien Phong (Vanguard) Daily, May 12, 2005, pp. 3, 11; Vo Nguyen Giap, “The Great and Victorious Anti-US War of Resistance, Historical Lessons,” Xua va nay (April 2005), 7–13, 37.
18 Appy, Patriots, 22.
19 Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, 2001).
20 See Ernest R. May, ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston, 1993). Ryan and Pungong, eds., United States and Decolonization; Anders Stephanson, “Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War,” in Rethinking Geopolitics, ed. Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby (New York, 1998), 62–85; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood; Robert Dean, “‘They’ll Forgive You for Anything except Being Weak’: Gender and U.S. Escalation in Vietnam, 1961–65,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, ed. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden, 2002), 367–83; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998); Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, 1995); Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War (2 vols., Princeton, 1981–1990); Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York, 2003).
21 Marilyn B. Young, John J. Fitzgerald, and A. Tom Grunfeld, The Vietnam War: A History in Documents (Oxford, 2002).
22 Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (New York, 1999). Saigon, USA, dir. Lindsey Jiang and Robert Winn (2003). On the controversy over the airing of Saigon, USA, see “Roundtable: Political Intimidation of the Vietnamese Media—The Saigon USA-VAX Case Study,” from the “Thirty Years beyond the War Conference,” Vietnamese, Southeast Asian, and Asian/American Studies, University of California, Riverside, April 20, 2005 (in Mark Bradley’s possession).
23 Porter, Perils of Dominance.
24 Son Tung, Lom (Inmost feelings) (1994; Ho Chi Minh City, 2001), 40–168, 278–95, 427–31. On The Sorrow of War, by Bao Ninh, see Murray Hiebert, Vietnam Notebook (Hong Kong, 1993), 97–99. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, by Ambrose Bierce (San Francisco, 1891).
25 Lawrence, Assuming the Burden, 13; Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (New York, 1997), 329.
26 Tim O’Brien, Going after Cacciato (New York, 1978); Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston, 1990); W. D. Ehrhart, To Those Who Have Come Home Tired: New and Selected Poems (New York, 1984); Anderson, Facing My Lai; Sallah and Weiss, “Blade Investigation: Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths”; Michal R. Belknap, The Vietnam War on Trial: The My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Lieutenant Calley (Lawrence, 2002).
27 Melvin R. Laird, “Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, 84 (Nov.–Dec. 2005), 22–43; Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy (Ithaca, 2005).
28 Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post?Cold War Era (Oxford, 2002).
29 Logevall, Choosing War; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood.
30 J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York, 1966).
31 Laird, “Iraq”; David L. Anderson, “SHAFR Presidential Address: One Vietnam War Should Be Enough and Other Reflections on Diplomatic History and the Making of Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History, 30 (Jan. 2006), 1–21.
32 U.S. Department of State, United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949 (Washington, 1949).
33 Bruce Cumings, “The Wicked Witch of the West Is Dead: Long Live the Wicked Witch of the East,” in The End of the Cold War: Its Meanings and Implications, ed. Michael J. Hogan (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 87–101; Walter LaFeber, “An End to Which Cold War?,” ibid., 13–19.
34 For George W. Bush’s speech to the graduating class at the United States Military Academy on June 1, 2002, see “President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point,” speech, Teaching American History, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=916 ; John Hay, “Negotiation of the Powers for the Restoration of Order in China,” July 3, 1900, in United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, with the Annual Message of the President Transmitted to Congress, December 3, 1900 (Washington, 1900), 299.
35 Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston, 1979), 1470; Richard Nixon, In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal (New York, 1990), 337–45.
36 Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy (Lawrence, 2004), 24–28, 106, esp. 187.
37 Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York, 2001), 204.
38 Berman, No Peace, No Honor, 57; James H. Willbanks, Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (Lawrence, 2004); Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (San Diego, 1999); Kimball, Vietnam War Files, 112, 27. On Duck Hook and Nixon’s global strategy in the fall of 1969, see William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, “Nixon’s Secret Nuclear Alert: Vietnam War Diplomacy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969,” Cold War History, 3 (Jan. 2003), 113–56.
39 “Letters—A Difference of Opinion, Kimball and Berman,” SHAFR Newsletter, 33 (March 2002), 37–44; Kimball, Vietnam War Files; Pierre Asselin, “Kimball’s Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History, 30 (Jan. 2006), 163–67.
40 On the Vietnamese politburo’s secret instructions to its delegation in Paris, see Nguyen Khac Huynh, “Nghe thuat dam phan va phuong cham gianh thang loi tung buoc” (Art of negotiation and guideline on gradually winning victory), in Mat tran ngoai giao voi cuoc dam phan Paris ve Vietnam (Diplomatic front and Paris negotiations on Vietnam) (Hanoi, 2004), 442.
41 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake; Mus, Vietnam.
42 “Q&A;: What Is a Loya Jirga?,” BBC News, July 1, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1782079.stm ; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake.
43 Sherry, In the Shadow of War.
44 On lawsuits by Vietnamese people against manufacturers of dioxin-contaminated defoliants, see William Glaberson, “Agent Orange, the Next Generation; In Vietnam and America, Some See a Wrong Still Not Righted,” New York Times, Aug. 8, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/nyregion/08orange.html (May 31, 2006); and Ngoc Nguyen and Aaron Glantz, “Vietnamese Agent Orange Victims Sue Dow and Monsato in US Court,” Japan Focus, May 16, 2006, http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2126 .
45 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM II (Washington, 1968); American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM III (Washington, 1980), 236–9.
46 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 10–12.
47 Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (Bloomington, 2002).
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