Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Book Bag
The wild side
The author of "The Hours" picks five books from the edge that belong in the center.
By Michael Cunningham
[07/19/99]

Reviews
"American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party"
A new biography explores the life and legacy of America's premier fascist.
By Katharine Whittemore
[07/19/99]

Unrequired reading
Publishing jobs turn the pleasure of reading into a chore. Here's what editors read in their fantasies.
By Ray Sawhill
[07/16/99]

Ivory Tower
Young heroes in an ancient land
Iranian student protesters differ from American ones in two ways: They're risking their lives, and their nation trusts them.
By Carol Lloyd
[07/16/99]

Reviews
"Cinnamon Gardens"
An epic novel captures Sri Lankan high society at the turn of the century, starched but beginning to wrinkle.
By Akash Kapur
[07/16/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Vietnam: A Necessary War By Michael Lind The Free Press, 336 pages Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam By Fredrik Logevall Univ. of California Press, 443 pages Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy By Robert McNamara, James Blight, Robert Brigham, Thomas Biersteker and Col. Herbert Schandler Public Affairs, 479 pages In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam By Robert McNamara Vintage Books, 518 pages Once Upon a Distant War By William Prochnau Vintage, 546 pages Reporting Vietnam: Part One; American Journalism 1959 -1969 Library of America, 858 pages

That confession sparked intense debate and soul-searching. The wounds of Vietnam, many observed, were reopened with a vengeance, and though George Bush had proudly proclaimed at the end of the Gulf War that the United States had, once and for all, kicked the Vietnam syndrome, the publication of McNamara's book showed that this particular dog wasn't going to die so easily. Dozens of editorials denounced McNamara's confessional as too little, too late. Appearing at events publicizing the book, McNamara was subjected to verbal assaults. Speaking in front of nearly 1,000 people at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (an event I attended), McNamara was confronted by a veteran who demanded an apology, and when McNamara dodged the request, the questioner persisted by listing the names of his friends who had been killed in Vietnam and shouting at McNamara that he owed the nation an apology. McNamara quickly lost his cool and shouted back, "Shut up! You just shut up! You've had your chance to speak."

The publication of "In Retrospect" inaugurated the most recent round of Vietnam books. With some exceptions -- the most notable being Michael Lind's upcoming book, "Vietnam: A Necessary War" -- contemporary writers on Vietnam are united in their analysis that this was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most of the current wave of books amounts to a stunning indictment of the men who made policy for the United States and a persuasive demonstration of what many people suspected in the late 1960s but could not prove: that the war was utterly misguided, unnecessary and unwinnable. Given that the legacy of Vietnam continues to influence every military decision that the United States makes, and given that the entire leadership of today's armed forces adhere to what might be called the "Vietnam avoidance doctrine of military engagement," how Americans understand Vietnam shapes not just public consciousness about history, but the political and military decisions we make in places ranging from Kosovo to North Korea.

The new orthodoxy on Vietnam is aggressively countered by Michael Lind, the gadfly of the intelligentsia who works for both the New America Foundation and Harper's magazine. His implied rejoinder to McNamara is "We were right, mostly right." He rejects the view that the war shouldn't have been fought, and he asserts that the underlying reasons for the conflict were sound. Vietnam was a battle in the Cold War, which was a global struggle that used proxy conflicts in lieu of nuclear weapons to decide the outcome. Though Lind faults the way the United States military prosecuted the Vietnam War, he maintains that in every respect, U.S. officials were right to think of Vietnam as vital and right to try to defend South Vietnam against a Marxism-Leninist incursion led by Ho Chi Minh in alliance with the Soviet Union and China.

At every turn, Lind rebuts the view that the United States shouldn't have committed itself to Vietnam. Instead, he contends that the Johnson and Nixon administrations should have learned the lessons of the Korean War and kept American casualties to a minimum while still making a maximal effort to rebuff the Viet Cong insurgency. If the United States had backed down in Vietnam, the effects of its global position might well have been devastating, as events after the fall of Saigon in 1975 suggested.

Lind is especially dismissive of McNamara's Hamlet-like guilt, and he has little but scorn for the former defense secretary's historical revisionism. McNamara himself felt that "In Retrospect" left much unexamined and unfinished, and he organized a series of meetings between 1995 and 1998 that brought together American academics, military men and former policy-makers with their Vietnamese counterparts. The result of these half a dozen meetings is the book "Argument Without End." It's an odd combination of narrative, transcripts of the conferences and descriptions of the discussions between American and Vietnamese participants. Though the structure is unorthodox, it's actually a breezy, easy to follow read. McNamara was known for his methodical, scientific approach, and this book is full of six-point summaries and concluding paragraphs that restate central questions and posit new ones. He leaves no ambiguity about his conclusions, and therein lies both the book's strength and its weakness.

Next page | "A failure of empathy"