What makes a book read is its statement about some aspect of life and its environs. In the Vietnam War context, the authors's views as found in their manuscripts fit into several categories ranging from criticism to defense of our government and its policy execution. Their interpretations of the system harken back to each author's own belief of right and wrong. Individual beliefs are influenced by environments in which they grow. Society in the late 1960s and early 1970s fostered a growth of pessimism that eventually centered on the national government and its leaders. A distinct radical, verbal, and written assault developed into a school of scholars labelled the "New Left." Their revision of Cold War era foreign policy gained direction from William Appleman Williams's interpretations. At the other extreme, historians began reincorporating social science techniques into their histories and a new school of neo-conservatives rose to defend the institutions under attack. Historians reflect, like society at large, the cultural environment in which they mature.

This paper relies on lectures and readings to form a critical analytic method used in examining the books included in this survey. Of prime importance from an historical perspective is Gerald N. Grob and George A. Billias's Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives, v. 2, (1987). Two articles, Thomas J. McCormick's "Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History" found in Reviews in American History 4 (December 1982): 318-30, and Michael Roskin's "From Pearl Harbor to Vietnam: Shifting Generational Paradigms and Foreign Policy," written for the Political Science Quarterly 89 (Fall 1974): 563-88, offer analytic constructs useful in understanding diplomatic and political history.

Seven excellent bibliographies and readers listing over three-thousand titles in various disciplines exist. Readers are directed to Richard D. Burns and Milton Leitenberg's The Wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, 1945-1982 (1984), Christopher L. Sugnet and John T. Hickey's Vietnam War Bibliography (1983), John Chen's Vietnam: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1973), and John Newman's Vietnam War Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of Imaginative Works about Americans Fighting in Vietnam (1982). Especially helpful in the preparation of this article is Edward Eckert's bibliographic essay "The Vietnam War: A Selective Bibliography" found in Choice 24 (September 1986): 51-71. For an inside view of the military's official rendition, specifically the United States Marine Corps, consult The Marines in Vietnam, 1954-1973: An Anthology and Annotated Bibliography (1993). Also, George D. Moss, edited A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays (1991) which provides a broader perspective of media coverage of the war.

Of the many general histories available, George C. Herring's America's Longest War (1986), and Gabriel Kolko's Anatomy of a War (1985), [Kolko's The Roots of American Foreign Policy (1969) is combined in the review below] offer scholarly approaches and analyses. Readers will profit also from Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (1983), and Michael MacClear's The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam, 1945-1975 (1981). Any of these volumes will give the reader an excellent chronological exposition of events as they unfolded. Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning Bernard B. Fall's contribution of six books outlining the French involvement in Vietnam. Fall's analysis of French military tactics aided by political blunders is a constant reminder of how overlooking historical lessons insures future failures.

American Indians participated in overwhelming numbers, percentage-wise, yet the literature surrounding their involvement is sparse. The majority of Indian writing concerning their personal Vietnam experience is found scattered throughout poetry chapbooks, essays found in anthologies (some quite obscure), or in oral history collections (equally obscure), accessible to only the dedicated researcher/reader. The South Dakota Oral History Center maintained by the Institute of American Indian Studies located on the University of South Dakota campus holds several audiotapes with individual warrior's recollections of their wartime duty. South Dakotans In Vietnam (1986), edited by Thomas Magedanz is a collection of transcribed oral interviews that includes a small sample of American Indian Vietnam Veterans' experiences in the war. An article written by Tom Holm (Tsalagi-Creek), entitled "Culture, Ceremonialism, and Stress: American Indian Veterans and the Vietnam War," printed in the Armed Forces & Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (Winter 1986): 237-251, is helpful in explaining American Indian reasons for participation in the war. Holm explicates a rationale for Indians going to war for their country (and tribe), then explains a selected few tribal ceremonies that bring the Indian veteran back into society through a process of expiation. [Ed. note: Holm's book, Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: The Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War (1996), lays unread before me as of the date of this essay]. Strands of Indian thoughts on service in the Vietnam war can be found throughout Simon J. Ortiz's poetic works. An Army veteran from Aacqumeh hanoh (Acoma), Ortiz includes many veteran narratives in his thoughts including non-Indians, perhaps most succinctly told in "To Change in a Good Way," found in Woven Stone (1992). In the telling, an Indian gives sacrificial materials to a non-Indian couple who have lost a relative in Vietnam, killed by stepping on an American-made land mine. The gift enables the couple to continue their life with the pain of knowing the irony of their relative's death by the land mine made in his country.

Combat veterans, both American and Vietnamese, as well as newsmen, offer firsthand insights to the burgeoning historiography of American involvement in Vietnam. Their contributions seldom follow traditional historical methodology, usually offering only personal accounts with little interpretation. This is not to denigrate the input--it qualifies as bottoms up history--only to say that their books are generally used as secondary works. As with all oral histories, dates, facts, and personal opinions must be tempered by the realization that oftentimes the authors or informants are relying on memory, which is sometimes faulty and can be self-serving. Three books in this category cover the My Lai massacre (1968), North Vietnam's Tet Offensive (1968), and the fall of Saigon (1975); significant events that altered America's policy of intervention in Vietnam.

Seymour M. Hersh, a journalist from Washington, D. C., won a Pulitzer Prize for the publication of My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (1970). His merciless pursuit of facts uncovered the Pentagon's twenty month coverup of the March 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians by the United States Army's Americal Division. Eventually, several company level officers received courts-martial. [No indictments against the President and his assistants within the chain of command were officially issued]. The Pentagon coverup reveals another facet of the government's devious strategies, for only two months earlier the North Vietnamese launched their 1968 Tet Offensive. As the attacks against major provincial cities progressed, newsmen hastened into South Vietnam. Don Oberdorfer detailed a firsthand account from Saigon in his book Tet! (1971). Americans received television coverage on their home screens, and negative reactions immediately surfaced. A majority of public opinion demanded a reassessment of Southeast Asian policy, a fact that contributed to Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to not seek reelection. Another firsthand account, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War (1977), offers readers a vicarious thrill by taking them along with Marine riflemen into the field (grunts in the bush). Lieutenant Caputo assaulted Danang's Red Beach with the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade in 1965, (greeted, incidentally, by beautiful Vietnamese ladies wearing traditional aodais and offering flowers), served eighteen months in country, took his discharge in the land of the big PX, then drifted back in April 1975 as a newspaperman to cover the fall of Saigon. Caputo evokes images of John F. Kennedy's Camelot, the self-righteous attitudes prevalent among American youth, the turmoil wrought by disillusionment, and finally acceptance of things as they are.

An early protest against American intervention in Third World countries is found in J. William Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power (1966). From his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Fulbright addressed the growing arrogance of the United States and the potential for abuse. His tacit acceptance of a communist Vietnam is predicated on understanding the linkage of nationalism and communism there; either choice will require fighting. Perhaps his conclusions about arrogance came from working with the elitist "New Mandarins" who swelled the civil servant ranks during the war period.

Intellectuals, especially liberals connected with the best and brightest serving in government positions, received sharp criticism in Noam Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins (1969). This polemic centers on realpolitik as developed by scholars trained in sociology, psychology, systems analysis, and political science. In short, intellectuals who have distanced themselves from the public. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy (1966), an apologia of the Kennedy administration, personifies the elitist intellectual Chomsky accuses of abandoning objectivity and seeking self-aggrandizement and material gain. Both authors spoke early truths: the elitist policy makers won the systems analysis battle but lost the war; Kennedy's troop and ideological escalations fulfilled Schlesinger's prophecy of a divided national community.

Elitist New Mandarins and Cold War Warriors surrounding Presidents Kennedy and Johnson consistently advised a policy of escalation, a situation that continued until Robert McNamara's resignation in 1968. In Townsend Hoopes's account, The Limits of Intervention (1969), the former government official outlines the discussions, hawkish and dovish, presented to the presidents and critiques their responses. Hoopes is an apologist for Kennedy, imagining that had Kennedy lived, his intelligence and flexibility would have formulated a more humane foreign policy. Instead, Johnson, more the politician, let himself be led into a stance that minimized his options. Clark Clifford, who succeeded McNamara as Secretary of Defense, chaired a task force that investigated the rationale and conduct of the war. The committee's recommendation called for a bombing halt, deescalation of combat, and negotiations with Hanoi. The president accepted the results. When the Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam informed him at the end of March, 1968, that the majority found his policy ineffective, Johnson exercised his last option by announcing his non-candidacy in the upcoming election.

America received a shock when the New York Times's 13 June 1971 issue published the first installment of the top-secret "Pentagon Papers." The study, commissioned in 1967 by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, encompassing seven-thousand pages in forty-seven volumes, revealed how decisions and policy were made. The papers, written by a team that political scientist Leslie H. Gelb (Harvard Ph.D., one of the "best and brightest"?) headed, covered American involvement in South Asia from the end of World War II to mid-1968. Two more editions appeared in response to Neil Sheehan and his The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times (1971), a summation of the original study. The government first offered the Unpublished Diplomatic Volumes: United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967, then the Senate printed the "Senator Gravel Edition," Pentagon Papers: Defense Department History of the United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam. The papers revealed the uncertainties that plagued policy-makers and their often-times hypocritical approach in formulating and executing the policies. Though biased by their institutional nature, the impact of the Pentagon Papers is reflected in subsequent literature relative to Vietnam.

Focusing on the dynamic personalities surrounding the president, David Halberstam wrote his controversial and best-selling book, The Best and the Brightest (1972). Based on the Pentagon Papers and personal interviews with Cold War Warriors Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Walt Rostow, Halberstam's book offers little interpretation, no footnotes, and approximates an ingratiating chronicle of the adventures of Washington's decision-making elite. How could such bright, well-educated men make such neanderthal decisions? He does not answer that question. His earlier book, The Making of a Quagmire (1971), a critical evaluation of Kennedy's Asian policy, surpasses the later work in quality.

Another study concerning American-Vietnam relations, Fire In the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972), earned author Frances Fitzgerald a Pulitzer Prize. Her book surveys traditional Vietnamese culture and political structures and details how United States intervention from 1954 onward affected Vietnam, its people, and its institutions. Fitzgerald's passionate anti-war sentiment oversteps her sources, and the depiction of Vietnamese culture borders on idealism. Boat-people fleeing from a unified Vietnam after 1975 discredit her conclusions but do not detract from her outstanding cultural study. We cannot deny that American peasant relocation camps and combat in the centuries old cemetaries altered their culture, yet neither can we assess the effect, positive or negative, of Vietnam's centuries old war with China and various civil wars within its own society.

A conservative defense of American policy is found in Norman Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam (1982). His argument stems from the September 1938 Munich Conference when England and France signed an appeasement agreement with an expansionist, totalitarian Germany. From this grew the conviction that nations are justified in fighting limited wars to avoid later full-scale battles. Translated into foreign policy after World War II, America sought to halt communist aggression (postulated in the domino theory), firmly committed to non-negotiation with the opposing side. The mistake was the lack of total commitment to force communist containment in Vietnam.

Another conservative defense of United States involvement in Vietnam is articulated in Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam (1978). Lewy contradicts Fulbright's conception of arrogance and Fitzgerald's respect for Vietnamese culture, and subscribes to the Cold War Warrior logic of Schlesinger, Halberstam, and others of their ilk who advocated the righteousness of American imperialistic notions. His rigorous defense of American intervention and his conclusion that military tactics allowing unlimited destruction was legal and moral verges on immorality. Sources obtained through limited access laws (i.e., Richard Nixon's Executive Order 11652), allowed him to incorporate classified material into his argument. Whether his narrative was censored or reviewed by those in charge of the archives he utilized is unanswered.

A critique of the United States domestic decision-making apparatus but failure in Southeast Asia appeared in Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts's book, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (1979). Profiting from his work on the Pentagon Papers, Gelb's analysis of elite policy-making isolates the absence of checks and balances on executive foreign policy functions. But a contradiction arises. The authors assert that the Vietnam failure rested in ideology rather than bureaucratic politics, then conclude that "the need for pragmatism" instead of "doctrines, formulas, and ideologies" is the lesson that evolved from the war. Fundamentally, elitist pragmatism and ideology, working within constitutional bounds, failed. They were the system, how can Gelb and Betts justify the statement that it worked?

Professor Gabriel Kolko's two books offer revisionist criticism of American intervention in Southeast Asia. Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience, written in 1985, is essentially an expansion of the argument found in his collection of four essays published under the title, The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose (1969). Controlled by a power system elite composed of business interests, the policy of communist containment was implemented to protect potential markets and raw materials sources. Anatomy of a War is a ponderous examination of Vietnamese social and political institutions and their evolution through the trials of colonialism. Preoccupation with economic interests and failure to understand the revolutionary nature of Vietnamese society doomed the American effort. Kolko's study of Vietnamese society and culture parallels that of Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake. George C. Herring's America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (1986), is an even synthesis that deemphasizes the domino theory and concentrates on American escalation. His criticism, though bland, rests on a continued pragmatic approach by policy-makers to solve the military problem in Vietnam. Because of the war's length, American society passed through a generational shift and began reevaluating its interventionist attitude. He questions whether American society has outgrown its fear of spreading communism.

American leaders and foreign policy bear the brunt of criticism in the literature reviewed. Conspicuously absent is an Annals approach to evaluating United States intervention in Southeast Asian affairs, perhaps suggesting a future method of evaluating the after-effects on the protagonists. With the passage of time, improved relations between the powers who fought in Vietnam might lead to an exchange of information. Such a positive step will contribute to a better understanding and perhaps forestall any future attempts to solve issues by military intervention on the scale of the Vietnam War. With the advent of improved relations, literary works will begin to include the Vietnamese, both southern and northern, side to the story. However the effects of the Vietnam war influence future generations, we cannot ignore the sacrifices made by all protagonists.

24 June 1997. I will update this essay when time permits. Rich "Rabbit" Fox, Al Nygaard, and I taught a class, "Legacies of Vietnam: Living with the Aftermath," about three or four semesters ago. During the planning stages we compiled much more fresh literature surrounding our war. I will include that in the next installment which occupies memory space (seldom visited lately), on the machine I manipulate to share this information with you.

I must say something about the piece below. I was reading an unremembered book and found this poem. The citation might not be correct, but that too is part of the next installment. It is important enough to me to share Mr. Earhardt's words at this time. And, I think, appropriate.

        Making the Children Behave
 
   Do they think of me now 
     in those strange Asian villages
     where nothing ever seemed
     quite human
     but myself
     and a few grim friends
     moving through them
     hunched in lines?

     When they tell stories to their children
     of the evil
     that awaits misbehavior
     is it me they conjure?
                 From "The Awkward Silence and Other Poems" by
                 W. D. Ehrhart