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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]

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"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]

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"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]

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McNamara believes that he and other officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were guilty of mirror-imaging. He recognizes that U.S. leaders often assumed that the North Vietnamese would act the way Americans would act, that the heavy loss of life and property caused by the bombing campaign after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 would bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table or that the deployment of more U.S. ground forces would signal to Ho Chi Minh that a communist takeover of South Vietnam was not a possibility the United States would accept. Yet, judging from the testimony of North Vietnamese officials in "Argument Without End," the bombing campaign had the opposite effect and in fact stiffened the resolve of the North, while the deployment of U.S. ground troops was not seen as particularly threatening given the initial American and South Vietnamese ineptitude in dealing with Viet Cong guerrilla activity.

What is most striking about McNamara's recent book is the degree to which he and other Americans remain unable to listen to what the Vietnamese were saying. Twenty years after the fall of Saigon, an exasperated McNamara still can't quite grasp "how the North don't owe you an apology when you devastated our country in a war designed to deny the Vietnamese people their right of self-determination. We tried to negotiate with you, but you wouldn't even agree to a neutral solution, so convinced were you that communism in Vietnam would mean communist domination throughout Southeast Asia. So we fought, we paid the price, and we won."

McNamara wants a quid pro quo, an "I'm sorry/no, I'm sorry" dialogue. The Vietnamese will have none of it. McNamara and his co-authors conclude with a devastating indictment of the American war effort, including a painful look at the missed opportunities for negotiation and an effective point-by-point deconstruction of the canard that, had the military been unfettered by the timidity of civilian commanders, it could have won the war.

Lind agrees that the conventional war envisioned by General Westmoreland wasn't suited to the realities of the Vietnam conflict, and he harshly rebukes conservative critics who believe that it was liberal policy-makers alone who prevented the army from winning. But Lind vehemently denies that the so-called windows for negotiation were anything more than clever mirages projected by devious North Vietnamese leaders. That analysis stands in direct opposition to the argument made by Fredrik Logevall of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who asks in "Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam" whether the war was inevitable -- and answers that it wasn't.

Logevall argues that at numerous points during the crucial two years before Lyndon Johnson ordered a massive deployment of ground troops in the summer of 1965, the United States government could have pulled back with only a minimal loss of international prestige and domestic support. The role of the South Vietnamese government was pivotal. The ultimate success of the American war effort depended on a Saigon leadership that could cobble together a government that enjoyed the active support of the Vietnamese. That never happened, and it left the Americans in the position of fighting on behalf of a South Vietnam that functionally ceased to exist after 1965.

As Logevall shows, not only is that fact clear in hindsight, it was clear at the time to U.S. officials. Even more astounding, Americans policymakers prevented the South Vietnamese leadership from negotiating with the North in 1963 and 1964. So adamant were the Americans that South Vietnam remain non-communist that they allowed and even facilitated coup after coup in Saigon rather than permit leaders in Saigon to broker a political settlement with Ho Chi Minh.

Logevall punctures the myth that Johnson's hands were bound by the actions of the Kennedy administration. Marshaling an impressive amount of evidence, he underscores that at numerous points between November 1963 and the summer of 1965, the Johnson administration chose escalation and war over less bellicose options. Logevall's book amounts to one of the most effective indictments of the Americanization of the Vietnam War that has yet been written.

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