The diplomatic historians who study the Vietnam War often gravitate toward niche topics, such as the role of American universities in Vietnam, Vietnamese and American ideas of nation building, or the operations of the National Security Council. Notes Some of this scholarship is simply an extension of the ideological debates that raged on during the conflict, but there has also been a number of recent studies that complicate the war and its meaning. Hundreds of thousands of American troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan have received more instruction on Vietnam than on any other historical subject. He was also among the first to note that the Buddhist protesters, whose charges of religious oppression crippled the South Vietnamese government from 1963 to 1965, had fabricated evidence of oppression and were more concerned with gaining political power than religious freedom.39, Col. H.R. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) was founded in 1967 and quickly became one of the most visible antiwar groups of the 1960s and 1970s. Political correctness has also banished certain crucial ideas from the academic discussion of Vietnam. Orthodox scholars have continued to assert that Vietnam was not strategically important without examining most of the relevant information that has become available. Vietnam: Historians at War Mark Moyar Published online: 18 April 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008 By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict. Download Citation | Historians and the origins of the Vietnam War | This chapter examines some of the most important books on the Vietnam War published in … He has spent some time reviewing the historiography on the Vietnam War and produced a wonderful addition to that body of work. Black Americans were more likely to be drafted than White Americans. Edit. These pages contain a selection of Vietnam War quotations. The recent revisionist histories, in contrast to some earlier revisionist works, have generally been backed by voluminous research, captured in numerous footnotes. Some of my research produced solid evidence for assertions that other revisionists had made previously but without supporting facts, for instance the commitment of Ho Chi Minh to global Communist revolution or the feasibility of severing the North Vietnamese supply routes through Laos, the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail. ), Lori Maguire (Univ. The only real American heroes of the war were the reporters and the few servicemen who recognized that the enterprise was doomed from the start. Those generals, with Lodge’s blessing, overthrew and murdered Diem on November 2, 1963. In 1968, America was a wounded nation. and panelists Lubna Qureshi (Independent Historian), David Prentice (Oklahoma State Univ. The orthodox historians of the late 1970s and 1980s largely adhered to the narrative passed down by Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow. Although not all of their authors are excellent scholars, they are generally more rigorous in their analysis than their orthodox counterparts, because they are so often challenged that they have become adept at anticipating and countering contrary assertions. Another is that the turn of the American intelligentsia against the war in the late 1960s made Higgins’s views into the most dangerous sort of heresy. The Vietnam War Reexamined - December 2017. For example, at the University of Iowa history department, of which Professor Gordon is the chair, Democrats outnumber Republicans 27 to 0.3  As analysts of group-think have observed, people in such environments are led toward the conclusion that every reasonable person shares their views, and hence any outsider who disagrees is not reasonable. Protests about the Vietnam war began almost as soon as the US became involved. Burkett’s book, Stolen Valor, extraordinary for both its detailed research and its nationwide popularity, revealed that several hundred supposed Vietnam veterans in the public spotlight were frauds. Category page. Other parts revealed new facts that have forced alteration of central interpretations, such as the remarkable success of South Vietnam’s counterinsurgency initiatives in 1962 and 1963, or the strong support for American intervention in Vietnam among the other nations of Asia and Oceania.44. There have, however, been serious revisionist histories of the Vietnam War: Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam (1978) was an excellent early example, and like Lewy before him, the sheer scholarship behind Moyar’s book demands that we take his views seriously. Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this book to your organisation's collection. These articles did much to convince both South Vietnamese generals and U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that Diem had to go, and that replacing Diem would lead to major improvements in the war effort. The most influential "anti-war" films were Taxi Driver (1976), Apocalypse Now (1978), and The Deer Hunter (1978). Burkett, a Vietnam veteran and a stockbroker by profession, demolished most of the mythology surrounding Vietnam veterans in one fell swoop. It appears increasingly difficult for scholars to tell the entire story of the war. Studies of the American media in Vietnam generally devote little attention to South Vietnamese culture and politics.7  Yet it is wrong to judge the American press or American press policies without understanding South Vietnamese politics and culture. One reason is that she contracted black fever and died shortly after the book was published. This # VirtualAHA event will feature chair/commentator Thomas Alan Schwartz (Vanderbilt Univ.) Promises and commitments to the people and government of South Vietnam to keep communist forces from overtaking them reached back into the Truman Administration. Amongst prominent orthodox historians there is an ongoing debate over whether Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he not been assassinated.29  They also disagree about why Johnson intervened.30  Their biases and lack of knowledge on other aspects of the war, however, have allowed revisionists to overtake them on these topics. As recently as 30 years ago, historians were limited to U.S. and West European sources, making it impossible to write with authority about Vietnam itself or decision-making by North Vietnam’s allies, China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European nations. Since 1990, the quality of scholarship, both orthodox and revisionist, has improved as more documentation has become available and scholars have been able to make use of previous discoveries. Historians who oppose the orthodoxy on Vietnam, or on other politically-charged subjects like Soviet espionage in America or feminism are likely to be received by these departments as if they were crank propagandists or foolish eccentrics. Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnam War. In one of the most celebrated of recent orthodox histories, Cornell University history professor Fredrik Logevall announced that most scholars, himself included, consider it “axiomatic” that the United States erred in deciding to intervene in Vietnam.24  The United States did not need to fight Ho Chi Minh, proponents of the orthodoxy still maintain, because he would have become an Asian Tito had the Americans not pestered him.25  Hanoi’s dedication to conquering the South, they add, ensured that no American strategy would have succeeded.26  For orthodox scholars, Ngo Dinh Diem remains a poor leader who senselessly antagonized his people.27  The portrayal of American veterans as perpetrators of horrible actions during the war and psychological wrecks after the war has continued.28, The areas that have received the greatest attention recently from orthodox historians possess considerable historical significance but relatively minor import in the orthodox-revisionist debate. Vietnam on Television Protest movements in the USA, 1968–1973. Peter Zinoman, “Vietnam-Centrism, the ‘Orthodox’ school and Mark Bradley’s Vietnam at War,” H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Volume XII, No. B.G. Learn about Vietnam War protests, the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, the Pentagon Papers and more. A political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Lewy never received the open acclaim from academia or the media that he deserved, but he effected great changes to the war’s history in quiet ways. Due to the time period and nature of the Vietnam War historians today consider it to be a Cold War era proxy war between the United States and Soviet Union. At the other end of the spectrum political history stands at moderate incorrectness, diplomatic history at serious incorrectness, and military history at maximum incorrectness. Hess finds that the historiography of the Vietnam War departs from the ‘traditional model’ of historical appreciation of the United States’ wars. David L. Anderson, the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and an orthodox historian of the Vietnam War, stated in his 2005 presidential address that revisionists interpret the war based on an “uncritical acceptance” of American cold war policy rather than analysis of the facts, whereas orthodox historians rely exclusively on “reasoned analysis” in reaching their conclusions.1  Some orthodox scholars have maintained that the revisionists’ primary ambition is not to find the truth but to twist the facts of the Vietnam War to justify contemporary wars or other policies. At its left end, denoting maximum political correctness, lies the history of race, class, and gender. The Vietnamese had suffered under French colonial rule for nearly six decades when Japan invaded portions of Vietnam in 1940. The Civil War and World War II were the wars that historians were advised to United States President Dwight Eisenhower supported the Diem regime, as the United States was interested in stopping the spread of communism in the region. These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. Gittinger, eds.. History faculty tirelessly profess commitment to “diversity,” but within their own ranks one finds near uniformity of political sentiment. In this new situation, and especially by 1969, Mennonites’ views on conscientious objection, the Vietnam War, and war in general had become muddled. Mark Moyar holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the U.S. Marine Corps University, Quantico, VA 22134; [email protected]. I made the chart below to prepare for my comprehensive exams. The outcome was the Second Indochina War or Vietnam War, a conflict that lasted ten years and claimed more than two million lives, including 58,000 US soldiers. Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow now faced accusations that they had helped wreck the South Vietnamese government. As the historian Jessica Chapman of Williams College puts it, “The Vietnam War was, at its core, a civil war greatly exacerbated by foreign intervention.” Others have described it … Much of that narrative has continued to evade serious questioning from orthodox historians, who have preferred to remain focused on a fairly narrow set of questions. Adopted from Roger Canfield’s Comrades in Arms: How the Americong Won the War in Vietnam Against the Common Enemy—America.. SAM ANSON. A complete history of political-military involvement by the US in the region was selected and put into a file which served as an “encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War”. But perhaps there is a third arena encompassed by military history, one that now stands besieged and vulnerable. University of Iowa history professor Colin Gordon, for example, said with respect to revisionists and those who based foreign policy decisions on their interpretations, “History is temporarily useful to those who willfully misinterpret it, but genuinely useful only to those who make an effort to understand it. Two books examine the United States’ war in Vietnam from different perspectives. Fractured Identity: The Best Vietnam War Books Some forty years after American withdrawal from Vietnam, the U.S. continues to be haunted by the impact of the war. Robert F. Turner, a Vietnam veteran and Hoover Institution fellow who later obtained a non-tenured position at the University of Virginia Law School, disputed the portrayal of the Vietnamese Communists as devoted nationalists in his book Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development.17  In an international history of the war, distinguished British professor Ralph Smith argued that Vietnamese Communism posed a serious threat to the United States and hence the United States was right in trying to hold the line in South Vietnam.18  Norman Podhoretz, the American pundit, made the same argument in a work geared more for the public than academia.19  The works of Ellen Hammer and William Colby, an American scholar living in France and a former CIA director, respectively, charged that South Vietnam was viable under Ngo Dinh Diem and that the United States erred catastrophically in encouraging his overthrow.20  Reiterating points made during the war by senior U.S. military officers, veterans like Harry Summers and former politicians like Richard Nixon argued that the war could have been won had the United States taken more aggressive military actions, such as severing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and bombing North Vietnam massively from the start instead of escalating the bombing gradually.21  A different group, led by a military officer with a Ph.D. named Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., concluded that the war could have been won had the United States been more delicate, rather than more forceful.