December 2005 Newsletter

Fear and (Self-) Loathing in Lubbock, Texas,
or How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Vietnam and Iraq

Robert Buzzanco, University of Houston *

The United States lost the Vietnam War because “the American people came to hate the war” and, hence, “they hated themselves.” One might expect such an observation from a talk-show host or new-age guru, yet those words were uttered not by television’s Dr. Phil, but by Dr. Keith Taylor of Cornell University, one of our more esteemed historians of Vietnam studies.(1) Dr. Taylor’s belief (which cannot truly be called an analysis) reflects an increasing trend in studies of the Vietnam War toward attempts at rehabilitating southern Vietnam(2) and its leaders, justifying the American war on Vietnam, and devising better excuses for the failure to defeat the Vietnamese Communists and retain a state below the seventeenth parallel.

Taylor expressed his views recently at the Vietnam War Symposium sponsored by the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech, where such ideas, which are increasingly popular in public discussions of Vietnam, have become the de facto party line. Separate from the professionally run archives there, the center clearly resembles a right-wing think tank, although it seeks academic legitimacy and claims to represent views on Vietnam, as its director James Reckner says, from across the political spectrum. While it is true that Reckner has given a voice to officials from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and some antiwar groups such as the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the vast majority of voices heard at center events represent the far right to the near right. In the past decade or so, the center has featured a laundry list of hawkish military and diplomatic officials, representatives of the southern Vietnam and Laos regimes, a number of representatives from POW-MIA groups, the Swift Boat Veterans, and a host of scholars defending the war and castigating those who opposed it. At the conferences(3) I have attended, well-established and respected scholars like George Herring, Randall Woods, and David Anderson seem to have constituted the left fringe of the proceedings—probably a unique experience for all of them. Since the center was established by a number of Vietnam veterans and has included a number of influential retired officers and government officials on its board, this bias is neither surprising nor illegitimate, but representatives of the center in Lubbock have a duty to make their mission and purpose clear.

Of course, the issue is bigger than what goes on in Lubbock. Over the past few years there has been a revival of Vietnam revisionism. While the war was undeniably unpopular while it was being fought, in the 1980s candidate Ronald Reagan called it a “noble cause,” and Army Colonel Harry Summers published the best-selling On Strategy to defend the war and give impetus to the “stabbed in the back” thesis that has become de rigeur among many conservatives. Just in the past half-decade or so, scholars and researchers like Michael Lind, Lewis Sorley, Ed Miller, Mark Moyar, Ron Frankum, B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, and Keith Taylor, among others, have argued that the war was indeed a noble cause, that Vietnam below the seventeenth parallel was a viable and stable state, that the war was not fought disproportionately by the poor, that the U.S. military won in the field but was undermined at home, and that poor decisions and leadership in the United States—not the skills and appeal of the Vietnamese Communists–were the main reason for American failure. Today, with the United States facing increasingly dismal prospects in Iraq, such messages cannot be dismissed merely as poor history, for they are being used in the political arena to justify not only the war in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s, but American foreign policy and intervention per se.

Refighting the Last War

The best-known scholarship on the Vietnam conflict produced in the decade or so after the war ended, such as the work of George Herring, George McT. Kahin or Gabriel Kolko, was highly critical of the war, and most of the books on the war published since then have tended to be critical of U.S. policy on many levels. In the early 1990s, however, historians began to reappraise and apologize for John F. Kennedy’s role in Vietnam, arguing that the young president was actually committed to withdrawing U.S. troops.(4) More recently, Philip Catton, Ed Miller, and others have suggested that America’s hand-picked leader in southern Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was actually a capable leader, and his ouster and death, sanctioned by the United States, was a major mistake, for he was developing a stable regime below the seventeenth parallel. Indeed, at a session chaired by Keith Taylor during the 2004 meeting of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), Ron Frankum and Mark Moyar spoke glowingly of Diem, with only a few concerned questions from the audience of experts.(5)

In the late 1990’s B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Lewis Sorley, and Michael Lind, among others, published forceful justifications of the war and revised existing interpretations of the men who led and fought it. In their view, American soldiers suffered from “stolen valor” and had their “history” and their “heroes” robbed from them by the media, politicians and activists who opposed the war. Moreover, Lind and Sorley contend that the United States actually won the war militarily but lost because weak politicians were unwilling to defend southern Vietnam against the 1973-1975 onslaught from the North. They also argue that American intervention in Vietnam was in fact essential to the containment of communism during the Cold War.(6)

Most of the recent work on Vietnam is still critical. However, it would be a mistake, perhaps a grave one, to write off the revisionist authors as a fringe element. The positions they have taken received powerful reinforcement in the public sphere during the 2004 campaign, when the Republican-funded Swift Boat Veterans for Truth successfully attacked, if not smeared, the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam vet himself and the recipient of three Purple Hearts. Though Kerry tried to highlight his Vietnam service, traveling with a “band of brothers” who had served with him on a swift boat in the Mekong Delta and turning his nominating convention into a military parade, the Swift Boat vets charged that he had lied to receive two of his medals and claimed his 1971 antiwar testimony (which Kerry ran away from) as spokesman for the VVAW was disloyal.

Nearly thirty years after the war ended in a victory for the National Liberation Front and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in April 1975, Vietnam was once again a compelling national political issue. Kerry had hoped to use his story of Vietnam to take him to the White House, but the Swift Boat vets created an alternative version of both Kerry’s service and the war. The battle over a war in Indochina that had been so painful and costly decades ago was once again joined.

Keith Taylor’s Vietnam: Emotions without Evidence(7)

Amid the power of the Swift Boat attack on Kerry, which was mounted, ironically, in defense of an administration headed by two draft-dodgers, questions about the history of Vietnam take on a new urgency and importance. If a tragic war that was so unpopular while being fought can be presented so positively and can affect a presidential campaign in a subsequent generation, then there are historical forces at work that need to be reckoned with.

Keith Taylor is not recognized as a leading scholar of the war period, but his views are well received and representative of a much larger body of scholars and public figures—from the Texas Tech people to the Swift Boat vets—who are spoiling for a fight, or a re-fight, over Vietnam. Accordingly, it is essential to look at the arguments Taylor makes and repudiate them forcefully and quickly.(8) As these new versions of Vietnam’s history gain currency and are taught in high school and university classes, they may facilitate more invasions. After Iraq, perhaps the United States will take on Iran, North Korea or Venezuela.

What is immediately striking about Taylor’s critique is its passion and anger. He is mad at Kennedy and Johnson for what he believes were half-hearted efforts to win in Indochina. He is upset at those without his “sense of honor” who dodged the draft, and he is disturbed by those who did not support the war, even if it was “a consequence of poor leadership.” His arguments, like those of many other revisionists, are based on emotions, on what he feels should have happened, on sympathy, pity, or hatred for the soldiers, Vietnamese, U.S. leaders, or antiwar protestors—hence his belief that self-loathing Americans caused the United States to fail in Vietnam. But it is a huge leap to say that virtually an entire nation and a generation hated America and hated themselves. The vast majority of those who opposed the war did so for well–considered reasons, and among them were “average Americans” such as ministers, businessmen, students, military officers, and many thousands of soldiers. Many of the most radical showed their respect for our society and customs by refusing draft induction and accepting the consequences. To say that Americans hated their society and themselves is intellectually immature and an insult to those who tried to stop the war because of the way it was ripping apart Vietnam and American society.

Yet Taylor maintains that he is proud that he is “not among the self-loathing Americans who notice people in other countries looking to us for leadership and see nothing but neocolonialism and imperialism.” Just where are all these people who are looking to “us” for leadership? Surveys often show that over 90 percent of people in other countries are hostile to American actions, institutions or symbols. Maybe Taylor should look at, say, southern Vietnam, where so many people were apparently so eager for U.S. leadership that they took up arms to attack those of their countrymen who collaborated with the Americans, staged a series of coups d’etat to oust American client regimes, and waged a brutal long-term war against U.S. forces. Taylor’s opinions on Vietnam sound much like those of George Bush and others who, in the aftermath of 9/11/01, decided that the attacks in New York and Washington occurred because “they” hate “us” because “we have freedom” or because “we’re so good.”

The emotional underpinnings of Taylor’s views surface once again when he takes up the subject of the way the war was fought. One of the bigger flaws in American planning for Vietnam, we learn, was a “lack of attention.” As Taylor says, “I believe that Kennedy made bad decisions about Vietnam because he was not paying sufficient attention and Johnson did so because it was not his priority.” Yet one of the problems for those researching Vietnam is the sheer mass of material dealing with the war, probably many millions of pages. This massive record testifies to the vast amount of attention given to Vietnam by national leaders and confirms its priority in state affairs. Yet Taylor “believes” that American leaders suffered from attention-deficit disorder, that Kennedy, who saw Vietnam as a way to reclaim credibility lost in Laos and Cuba, and Johnson, who agonized over the war daily and probably went to an early grave because of the stress it caused him, did not take Vietnam seriously enough.

Taylor also believes that the United States was trying to help the southern Vietnamese establish democracy, and he laments that the “governments opposed to a non-Communist Vietnam were able to mobilize their populations without regard to dissent.” Does he mean to say that the nations of Western Europe and Scandinavia opposed to the war were also “opposed to a non-Communist Vietnam” and did not allow political dissent within their systems? He goes on to assert that “one of the fundamental long-term aims of the United States was to develop the right to dissent” in southern Vietnam, as in other countries around the world. One cannot really mock this view, because it is too repugnant to be humorous. Are we to really believe that Castillo Armas, the Shah of Iran, Suharto, Pinochet, Middle Eastern monarchs, Israeli authorities in Palestine, the South African apartheid regime, Pol Pot and others supported by the United States were developing the right to dissent, or that the very authorities who produced McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, and Homeland Security were trying to extend democracy? One expects to encounter such opinions on right-wing talk radio or in the books of John Gaddis(9), but not in the lecture halls of Cornell.

Taylor’s tirades do not stop at Vietnam. He also emotes about 9/11 and the current war. Because we have hated ourselves ever since Vietnam, he says, we were vulnerable and the terrorists knew it. “9/11 happened because we were weak.” Now, with the war in Iraq foundering, Taylor is having a bad flashback, because he sees the so-called Vietnam Syndrome resurging: “I saw people at pointy-headed universities indulging as self-hating Americans,” and “it seemed awfully familiar.”(10) Again, emotions run into the brick wall of history. Even if a “Vietnam Syndrome” really existed (which is doubtful) or, if it did, lasted more than a few years, one cannot look at U.S. global policies for the past two and a half decades and proclaim them weak. Consider American arms sales to Iran, meddling in Afghanistan, and support for terrorism in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. From Reagan’s illegal wars in Latin America, to the Gulf War and sanctions afterwards, to the invasion of Iraq, the United States has not been reluctant to use military power in the past three decades, and military spending remains enormous. The Pentagon’s current $441 billion annual budget exceeds the rest of the world’s spending combined.(11)

More significant, however, is that when Taylor asserts that the terrorists struck on 9/11 because the United States was weak, he is substituting affective concepts like weakness and evil for historical analysis. Al-Qaeda’s actions are unjustifiable, but it is perilous to ignore the motives and history behind them. To untold numbers throughout the world, the proximate causes of 9/11—American bases in Saudi Arabia, U.S. support for Israel’s repression of Palestine, and the destructive sanctions against the people of Iraq—rang true. To most people across the globe, 9/11 did not happen because the U.S. was “too weak” but for precisely the opposite reason: because it so indiscriminately used its strength and power against weaker countries. Even if Taylor is right, and “pointy-headed” professors and activists (a category which apparently excludes mild-mannered professors of Vietnamese history at Cornell) are now upset because the United States has awakened from its weakness and is giving the world the leadership it seeks, it is folly to try to explain away the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and doubts about American policy in Iraq simply as products of self-loathing and weakness without examining the reasons for the enmity that so much of the world feels for the United States.

Even if the defense of Vietnam put forth by Taylor and the other apologists for the war is emotive and bathetic, emotions and symbols are powerful and real to believers, and therefore it is important to look critically at their arguments. Facts may be “stupid things,” as Ronald Reagan once said (in an alleged misstatement), but evidence does have more legitimacy in our epistemology than do values or desires. So what then are Taylor’s specific points along the continuum of self-loathing anti-Americanism?

He begins by claiming that there are “three axioms” in the dominant antiwar interpretation of Vietnam “subsequently taken up at most schools and universities as the basis for explaining the war.” They are, first, that there was no legitimate non-Communist government in Saigon; second, that the United States had no legitimate basis for intervention in Vietnam; and finally, that the United States could not have won the war under any circumstances. This is the “ideological debris” of the antiwar movement, not “sustainable views supported by evidence and logic.” But how did Taylor arrive at his conclusions? Were they the result of vast research in presidential libraries, poring over documents in the National Archives, long sojourns to study the holdings of military collections? No, he says. “What enabled me to do this,” to conclude that these axioms were “debris,” was “that I finally came to terms with my own experience.” So there we have it: Taylor’s long and intimate journey—from soldier, to grad student in Ann Arbor, where he “simply subscribed to the dogmas of the antiwar slogans then fashionable,” to professor at an elite university who has seen the light about America’s noble purpose in the world—is the basis for his “evidence and logic.” But let us test these axioms and Taylor’s other claims using the criteria of evidence and logic.

Taylor asserts that it is a “foundational tenet of the Communist version of national history” to say that Ho Chi Minh represented the only “legitimate or viable” government in Vietnam after 1945. He also claims that the southern government, under Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors, had established a real state. What does the evidence say?

If we are to believe George Herring, David Anderson, George Kahin, Gabriel Kolko, Dave Marr, William Duiker and many others, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, both nationalist and Communist, ultimately led the resistance to French(12) colonial rule and to Japanese occupation, politically and militarily. We know that Ho advocated inclusion, often defying his more sectarian comrades, and was willing to join forces with any individual or group opposing the French. We know that in 1945 and 1954 Ho declared Vietnam independent, quoting from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and made overtures through the OSS and in private letters to Harry Truman appealing for American support but was ignored.

We also know that virtually every American official understood that Ho was overwhelmingly popular and would easily win any real election, as even President Dwight Eisenhower conceded.(13) The subsequent history of the war testifies to the appeal and effectiveness of the nationalist-Communist coalition. By almost any “expert” standard, the contemporary consensus about Ho’s popularity, along with the durability of his appeal, would constitute evidence of legitimacy and viability.

Taylor’s argument about the viability of southern Vietnam as a state, which was the gist of the 2004 SHAFR panel mentioned above (with Philip Catton and others agreeing in print), is more troubling. Just as disturbing as the assertions that were made during that session, which the panelists essentially conceded were not backed by hard evidence, was the lack of critical commentary from the audience, which was full of scholars of the Vietnam War. Politeness has its place, but it would not have been bad form to point out that these assertions flew in the face of what we know and have no basis in fact.(14)

Lamenting the “good old days” of Ngo Dinh Diem is the first of the revisionists’ tactics. Diem, they argue, was not a puppet of the United States and was on the verge of developing a real state below the seventeenth parallel. But we know that while in office he created a kleptocracy, and the Ngo family put 78 percent of the American aid it received between 1956 and 1960 into the military budget, while using no more than 2 percent on health, housing, or welfare programs, which are essential to modernization.(15) To solidify their power, Diem and his brother Nhu formed the Can Lao, or Personalist Party, made the military responsible for protecting the family regime, closed newspapers, retook land that had been redistributed to peasants, militarized the civil order, and imprisoned and executed tens of thousands of alleged dissidents.(16)

By the early 1960s Diem’s repressive regime had set into motion two major lines of opposition. Clearly, his attacks had had an impact on the guerrillas, and besieged southern cadres pressured the Politburo in the north to establish the National Liberation Front (NLF). But more important, Diem had alienated so many southerners that he had also prompted a broad internal campaign against his rule that has been overlooked by the apologists. Not only did many southerners join the NLF, Diem’s own military and government officials began to seek his ouster. The opposition political parties and the coups d’etat staged against him were organized not by the Communists, but by his own people. Finally, it was his own generals who overthrew and killed him in November 1963, with U.S. acquiescence. And in the aftermath of the coup it was generals in the ARVN, not Ho or the Viet Cong, who staged an opera bouffe in Saigon featuring about a dozen governments over the next fifteen months. How does this add up to stability, legitimacy or effectiveness? How does providing the Ngo family junta with billions of dollars in aid and military equipment, and tolerating Diem’s repression until late 1963 constitute abandonment? How does the ouster of Diem, by his own people, constitute a grave turning point in a war that was inexorably headed toward failure from the first?

If the rehabilitation of Diem is the first of the revisionists’ tactics, then the claim that southern Vietnam was a viable state is surely the second. James Carter has shown compellingly in his dissertation, “Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State-Making in Southeast Asia,” that there never was a real state below the seventeenth parallel, one that could exist on its own without massive infusions of American military and economic aid, without Americans building both a political and physical infrastructure, creating a currency, covering up for the defects of its leaders, staging phony elections, dropping 4.6 million tons of bombs on an area the size of New Mexico, and so forth. Nationhood involves more than a titular head of state and an army. It requires sovereignty, a degree of consensus, development, and international legitimacy, among other criteria, and since southern Vietnam lacked the essentials, the United States had to try to invent them, with results that were really not surprising to those who were involved in decisions about Vietnam at the time.

Taylor would argue, of course, that Carter is merely one more “pointy-headed” scholar. But Senator Mike Mansfield was an expert on Vietnam and an early Diem supporter, and in 1965 he said that the United States was “no longer dealing with anyone [in Saigon] who represents anybody in a political sense. We are simply acting to prevent a collapse of the Vietnamese military forces which we pay for and supply.” That same year Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge said that there was “no tradition of a national government in Saigon. There are no roots in the country. . . . I don’t think we ought to take this government seriously. There is no one who can do anything. We have to do what we think we ought to regardless of what the Saigon government does.”(17)

In early 1965, Johnson, who was apparently giving Vietnam a modicum of attention, considered committing combat troops, but General William Westmoreland was skeptical, observing that “we would be occupying an essentially hostile foreign country.” General Victor Krulak, the Marines’ Pacific Commander, expressed himself more bluntly to the undersecretary of the Navy, saying that “despite all our public assertions to the contrary, the South Vietnamese are not—and have never been—a nation.”(18) Even more striking was the observation of a young congressman from Illinois in 1966. “Twelve years have elapsed since we began contributing economic assistance and manpower to . . .Vietnam, “ he said. “Yet, that nation continues to face political instability, lack a sense of nationhood, and to suffer social, religious, and regional factionalism and severe economic dislocations. Inflation continues to mount, medical care remains inadequate, land reform is virtually nonexistent, agricultural and education[al] advances are minimal, and the development of an honest, capable, and responsible civil service has hardly begun.” Thus Donald Rumsfeld laid out in some detail a strong argument against the viability of the southern state.(19)

Robert “Blowtorch Bob” Komer, pacification guru and hawk, did not pull any punches either. “Hell, with half a million men in Vietnam, we are spending twenty-one billion dollars a year, and we’re fighting the whole war with Vietnamese watching us; how can you talk about national sovereignty?” Paul Warnke, a defense department official and longtime establishment policymaker, agreed, pointing out that “the people I talked to [in Vietnam] didn’t seem to have any feeling about South Vietnam as a country. We fought the war for a separate South Vietnam, but there wasn’t any South and there never was one.”(20)

After the rehabilitation of Diem and “South” Vietnam, Taylor and his colleagues employ the last tactic of the revisionist campaign. They look at Vietnam from an American perspective and find that the United States had a legitimate basis for intervention and could have been successful had it chosen different strategies, political and military. But again, there are stupid facts in the way.

Taylor seems to argue that American intervention in Vietnam was legitimate because “nurturing baby democracies in a world awash with tyranny” is the duty of the United States. Calling the Diem regime “democratic” is a bastardization of the term, but more to the point, there are international conventions governing the rights of a nation to intervene in the affairs of another. On that score it is difficult to see any justification for the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Even if one accepts the legitimacy and viability of the southern state, Vietnam was at best (or worst) a civil war, and with no sanction from the United Nations or any other controlling body, America’s military invasion does not meet the test for accepted intervention.(21)

Of course, the right to intervene ultimately becomes a political question. For the Kennedy and Johnson invasion of Vietnam to have been legitimate, however, it would have had to have a coherent rationale, a clear goal, and a viable strategy. Perhaps most important, there would have had to have been international recognition of the need for such action. But those criteria just do not exist in the record. The U.S. failure to attract “many flags” to the war effort is well established.(22) Only through the carrot of military contracts and other economic compensation did the United States persuade South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand to join the war. There was no international support for the intervention, nor was there any definite goal in mind other than to prevent the people of Vietnam from choosing the leaders they wanted, because those leaders were almost certainly going to be Communists.

Folded into Taylor’s argument that the war was legitimate is the belief that it was winnable. He blames the outcome of the war on “poor strategic thought and deficient political courage,” and he throws several barbs at the antiwar movement. It is not clear how Taylor measures LBJ’s deficiency in courage, but he appears to believe that LBJ decided to “persuad[e] the enemy to give up rather than [do] what was necessary to obtain victory.” He refused to mobilize the economy for war and call up reserves, and he “allow[ed] war policy to be inhibited by a misreading of the likelihood of Chinese intervention.” This is pretty standard stuff, promoted by Richard Nixon and others since the early 1980s, and scholars have dealt with it all.(23)

I suspect it would surprise the millions of Vietnamese who lost loved ones to hear that LBJ merely decided to “persuad[e]” the enemy to give up rather than take measures “necessary to obtain victory,” whatever they might have been. Indeed, the claim that Johnson’s initial forays into Vietnam were “gradual” or “limited” ignores fundamental political and physical realities. What kind of commitment should Johnson have made in those crucial months of 1964 and 1965? 500,000 soldiers? Would Congress or, more important, the public have supported such a massive commitment to such a small, peripheral country? Even during the crucial July 1965 deliberations on the war, the military’s biggest disagreement was over the activation of reservists, not troop numbers. And where would all these troops and arms and equipment have gone, had Johnson not pursued “limited war” and “graduated escalation?” As late as 1966, with nearly 400,000 U.S. troops in country, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara still described Vietnam as “primarily an agricultural country; the only major port is Saigon. The deployment of large U.S. military forces, and other friendly forces such as the Korean division, in a country of this sort requires the construction of new ports, warehouse facilities, access roads, improvements to highways leading to the interior of the country and along the coasts, troop facilities, hospitals, completely new airfields and major improvements to existing airfields, communications facilities, etc.”(24)

Obviously, we have to judge the war by what we do know. We know that most military officials were never enthused or optimistic about the war and had grave misgivings about the political and military conditions in Vietnam. We are aware of the skill and tenacity of the enemy, and his ability to strike, melt back into the population, and quickly hit again. We agree that the Vietnamese enemy had an impressive capacity to withstand huge casualties and had a sturdy reserve that could be called on to replenish losses. We know that the physical infrastructure of southern Vietnam was so underdeveloped that it could not have sustained a more rapid or massive deployment of U.S. manpower. We know that the world—including traditional U.S. allies—either did not support or openly opposed the invasion. We know that the war took a huge toll at home. Over 58,000 Americans died, and government spending on the war led to a global financial crisis. We know that the United States unleashed the greatest concentration of firepower ever used against a small country and ended by training most of its destructive power upon its putative ally, Vietnam below the seventeenth parallel. And we know that southern Vietnam never had a stable government, billions of American dollars and half a million American soldiers notwithstanding.

What don’t we know? First, we don’t know how the People’s Republic of China would have reacted to a more aggressive war. It would have been folly to try to predict Mao Zedong’s actions during the Cultural Revolution. Nor do we know how American soldiers, who were beset by drug problems and racial conflict and were often opposed to the war themselves, would have responded to more aggressive missions and higher casualty rates. We cannot say for certain how the rest of the world would have responded to an even more destructive American intervention in Indochina. And, perhaps most important, we have no idea what the fallout at home would have been to a more rapid escalation of a war that never went well and was highly unpopular and costly. Just because Keith Taylor says that the war was winnable, that Kennedy and Johnson did not pay enough attention to Vietnam, that China would have sat idly by, that a more dynamic strategy or a strategy of pacification (which is it?) would have made the difference, does not make it so.

Finally, Taylor and the other revisionists take aim at the antiwar movement, antiwar politicians, and the media. Had Americans supported the war and not been so self–loathing, U.S. troops would have been able to fight without restraint or undue political considerations, with higher morale, and they would have succeeded in Vietnam. Again, this takes agency away from the Vietnamese Communists and places the outcome of the war squarely in America’s hands. It also substitutes right-wing apologia for research and evidence. As Taylor himself points out, the majority of the American people supported the war strongly up until the Tet Offensive in early 1968. In fact, the army’s own study of media matters found that the press was not unduly adversarial or aggressive for the most part, that, “government and media first shared a common vision of American involvement in Vietnam” until the war turned sour and journalists became more critical.(25) Similarly, most politicians were on board at the outset, as evidenced by the overwhelming votes in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. And public opposition to the war was and is not a clean-cut proposition. While millions of Americans from all walks of life opposed the war, plenty supported it as well, and many held negative views of both the war and antiwar protestors. Often, if the war seemed to be going well, more people supported it; when things seemed to be going badly, the numbers in opposition rose. The Vietnamese, not the Americans, held the initiative, militarily and politically.

But Taylor and others like Lind and Sorley persist in their analysis. Tet was a great American victory undermined at home, they contend, ignoring Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Earle Wheeler’s view that “it was a very near thing” and Army Chief Harold K. Johnson’s admission that “we suffered a loss, there can be no doubt about it.”(26) And so it goes. The withdrawal of 1973 and defeat of 1975, they argue, was another case of political officials and the American people, in effect, surrendering while on the verge of victory. Weak politicians, confused media, and self-loathing antiwar Americans dominate this ideological discourse. The Vietnamese could have had an effective government if only Ngo Dinh Diem had not been ousted. The government of southern Vietnam was stable and legitimate. Never mind that it was so internally riven that it changed heads of states and regimes on a regular basis and had to be maintained by American money and blood. Attention-deficit suffering U.S. leaders also deserve fault for not fighting to win, although no one seems to know what that means, nor can they describe it, since it did not happen.

Memory and History

“The struggle of man against power,” the Czech playwright Milan Kundera wrote, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” And so, thirty years after the liberation or fall of Saigon, we are still struggling to determine what we should remember about Vietnam and whether it has any lessons to teach us today. If Swift Boat partisans and self-loathing explanations come to dominate the discourse over this past war, if the ideological detritus of the Texas Tech Vietnam Center gains more public and academic acceptance, then the doors are open to the increased politicization of history in support of interventions and wars, and the legacies of those who fought the war and fought against the war are stained. If the war in Vietnam can simply be explained away by labeling its opponents as “self-hating” or accusing them of “weakness,” we have lost our history and abdicated our responsibility to learn from the mistakes of the past and to help create a better world. The distance between My Lai and Abu Ghraib, as we have seen, is not as great as it might seem.

If one of Taylor’s self-hating antiwar Americans were to stand up and say “all American soldiers in Vietnam were baby-killers and war criminals,” that person would, with justification, be summarily and harshly repudiated. Yet those who support the war can make ugly blanket statements about self-hatred and anti-Americanism among those who opposed the war in Vietnam or the invasion of Iraq and pass them off as Ivy League scholarship. I will continue to rely on evidence, the archives, the work of George Herring, George Kahin, Gabriel Kolko and others. I cannot help but conclude that Vietnam was a moral and political disaster, and that it is essential that we remind everyone we can of that, if only to make sure that those who would use Vietnam for other purposes, like justifying war and interventions and human-rights abuses, do not do so without challenge.(27)

* I would like to thank James Carter, Ginger Davis, and Bill Walker for their comments and suggestions on this article.

(1)Taylor is the author of The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley, 1983, reprinted 1991), which has become one of the standard histories of Vietnam up to the tenth century in English. His field is Vietnam studies, which is distinct from Vietnam War studies and generally focuses on Vietnam’s history before the arrival of European colonialists.
(2) As I have written elsewhere and will explain below, I think it is proper to describe the area of Vietnam below the seventeenth parallel, the demarcation line established by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, among others, at the 1954 Geneva Conference, as southern Vietnam rather than the Republic of Vietnam [RVN] or the Government of Vietnam [GVN]–as U.S. officials and, subsequently, U.S. scholars have. To call the area below the seventeenth parallel the RVN or GVN conveys a level of legitimacy that I believe does not exist. That southern Vietnam was a viable and real state is a key point in the analysis set forth by Taylor and others. Needless to say, I think otherwise, as do many other historians of Vietnam. On this point, see especially Gabriel Kolko’s Anatomy of a War (NY, 1985) and a dissertation recently completed under my supervision at the University of Houston by James Carter titled “Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State-Making in Southeast Asia.” Carter shows with impressive evidence that the United States did not conceive of Vietnam as an independent state but as a project, a country to be essentially invented both politically and physically–in terms of its government, infrastructure, currency, foreign affairs and other accouterments of a modern state.
(3) Information about the center and its past events can be accessed at http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/vietnamcenter/index.htm. Despite the appearance of some speakers critical of the war, it is hard to look at rosters of past events and not see a decided right-wing tilt.
(4) Arthur Schlesinger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Days (NY, 1965), which was published before the massive escalation that went terribly wrong, deals with Vietnam rather matter-of-factly, but in 1978, with the outcome known, he argues in Robert Kennedy and His Times (NY, 1978) that JFK was preparing a withdrawal or de-escalation. See also John Newman, JFK and Vietnam (NY, 1992); Howard Jones, Death of a Generation (NY, 2003); Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life (NY, 2003); Fred Logevall, Choosing War (Berkeley, 1999); David Kaiser, American Tragedy (Cambridge, MA, 2000); and Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars (NY, 2002). For a thorough repudiation of these Kennedy apologists, see Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot (Boston, 1993), and Lawrence Bassett and Stephen Pelz, “The Failed Search for Victory: Vietnam and the Politics of War," in Thomas Paterson, ed., Kennedy's Quest For Victory (NY, 1989), 223-52.
(5) Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure (Lawrence, KS, 2003); Miller and Moyar papers presented at Texas Tech conferences on Vietnam; Ron Frankum and Mark Moyar papers delivered at 2004 meeting of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, Austin, Texas. Unfortunately, the papers from that session have not been posted on the H-Diplo website at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/reports/.
(6) B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Stolen Valor (Dallas, 1998); Michael Lind, The Necessary War (NY, 1999); Lewis Sorley, A Better War (NY, 1999).
(7)I would like to thank my good friend William O. Walker III, now at the University of Toronto, for helping me develop my thoughts on this section. Taylor, by making an emotive argument resting on this concept of self-loathing, is engaged in what International Relations/Political Psychology scholars call attribution theory. If “we” don’t like a particular group, then “they” are “disposed” to act against “our” interests, like those who opposed the war. It then becomes only a short, illogical leap of faith to identify them as self-loathing, thereby creating an adversarial “other.” Those in "our" favor, the well-meaning Diem clique or American soldiers who “wanted to win the war,” for example, fail but are well intended. It is the "situation" in which they find themselves that makes failure more likely. That situation is compounded by the self-loathers. The responsibility for failure never rests with America's authoritarian clients or with U. S. officials.
The "self-loathing" paradigm has contemporary resonance as the spectrum of permissible dissent over U.S. adventurism increasingly narrows—and that is why the lines of thought opened by the Texas Tech crowd and Keith Taylor are in fact quite important, despite the small numbers of their proponents thus far. The recourse to seeking charges of treason, real or metaphorical, against those who oppose Bush's foreign policy is a way of stifling dissent in the name of the new American century. Terror is too dangerous for there to be freedom at home while it is pursued via intervention abroad.
(8) The subsequent critique of Taylor will be based on his article, “How I Began to Teach About the Vietnam War,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 2004, his talk at the Texas Tech conference, “When Americans Hate Themselves: Another Way to Remember the Vietnam War,” and an article about the Taylor presentation in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 19 March 2005, pp. A1 and A8.
(9) See John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA, 2004); and Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (NY, 1997). Even many establishment thinkers, such as David Kennedy and the late James Chace, have taken issue with Gaddis’s work, which puts the onus of the cold war solely on the Soviet Union, apologizes for apparent American misdeeds in that era, and contends that Americans have acted out of a desire to extend liberty and freedom globally. Listen to the Gaddis-Kennedy exchange at http://www.nytimes.com/audiopages/2004/07/25/books/20040725_GADDIS_AUDIO.html. See Chace’s review of Gaddis, “Empire, Anyone?” New York Review of Books, 7 October 2004, excerpt at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id’17454.
(10)Taylor in Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 19 March 2005, A8.
(11) See graph at http://www.globalissues.org/images/USvsWorld2004Top25.gif;
New York Times, 14 May 2005.
(12)See, for instance the older biography of Ho by Jean Lacoutre, or the more recent and comprehensive work of William Duiker.
(13) Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (NY, 1963), 337-38; see also Army Plans and Operations position paper, “U.S. Position with Respect to Indochina,” 25 February 1950, Record Group 319, G-3 0981 Indochina, TS, in National Archives. Also in Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 31.
(14) Lest anyone ask “well, why didn’t you speak out,” I have to admit to briskly walking out of the room just moments before the entire panel ended. On more than one occasion I have spoken up–“pissed in the punch bowl,” as a friend describes it–and frankly don’t like the role of crank. There were many others who could have contributed and I didn’t see the need to do so and begin the equivalent of an intellectual pie fight. Perhaps I was craven, but I’d probably do the same again. And in some way, this article is my penance for my silence in Austin.
(15) David Anderson, Trapped by Success (NY, 2002), 133.
(16) The following treatment of Diem is taken from my Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Malden, 1999), 56-58.
(17) Mansfield quoted in George Kahin, Intervention (NY, 1986), 345. Lodge quote in Foreign Relations of United States, Vietnam, III, 1965, 193, and also in Carter, “Inventing Vietnam.”
(18) Westmoreland and Krulak quoted in Buzzanco, Masters of War, 190 and 257.
(19) Rumsfeld in “An Investigation of the U.S. Economic and Military Assistance Programs in Vietnam,” 42nd Report by the Committee on Government Operations, October 12, 1966, 127.
(20) Komer quoted in Lloyd Gardner, Pay Any Price (Chicago, 1995), 303. Warnke quoted in Christian Appy, Patriots (NY, 2003), 279.
(21) See especially Telford Taylor [a prosecutor at Nuremberg], Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (NY, 1970), and Richard Falk, ed. The Vietnam War and International Law, 4 vols. (Princeton, 1968, 1969, 1972, 1976).
(22) See Christos Frentzos’s dissertation at the University of Houston, "From Seoul to Saigon: U.S.–Korean Relations and the Vietnam War."
(23) Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (NY, 1985). See also William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (NY, 1976); Harry Summers, On Strategy (Novato, CA, 1982); Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (NY, 1978); Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (NY, 1982).
(24) McNamara quote is in Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services and the Subcommittee on Department of Defense of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate, 89th Congress, 2nd Session, January – February 1966, 12.
(25) Quote is from promotional materials for William Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Military and Media at War (Lawrence, KS, 1998).
(26) On this topic, see chapter 10, “The Myth of Tet: Military Failure and the Politics of War,” in Buzzanco, Masters of War.
(27) The importance of this was reinforced recently when the editors of H-Diplo, the listserve in our field, refused to allow a colleague to post a referral to my original article in Counterpunch because, they said, it was inappropriate to the field and presentist. How can an article about a major research center on Vietnam and the way historians look at the war not be appropriate? The editors also refused even to engage my questions about this decision. With such gatekeeping, we should all be concerned about the nature of the history we do.