Historiography of the Vietnam War:
The traditional historical view of the Vietnam War, espoused by orthodox historians, argues that whilst military and political leaders, such as President Johnson, gave it their best efforts, American involvement in Vietnam was unjust, unwinnable, or unintentional from the start. These historians would argue that regardless of the impact of the Tet Offensive, U.S. intervention in Vietnam was doomed to fail from the start, though the Tet Offensive may have hastened it. Orthodox history remains the dominant viewpoint of the Vietnam War, although many of the original orthodox scholars wrote that the Vietnam War was still taking place. A prominent orthodox historian, David Halberstam, published 'The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During The Kennedy Era,' in 1965, leading to the creation of the 'quagmire theory,' which proposed that well-intentioned US government and military officials accidentally involved America in Vietnam one step at a time, due to their belief in the 'domino theory,' until eventually, it became 'mired in the conflict and couldn't get out.' It was largely accepted and developed by subsequent orthodox historians, such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who in his 1966 book, 'The Bitter Heritage,' called US involvement in Vietnam 'a tragedy without villains,' as the US inadvertently got militarily involved in the war.' He agreed with Halberstam by saying, 'We have achieved our present entanglement, not after due and deliberate considerations, but through a series of small decisions.'
However, another branch of orthodox historiography emerged in the 1970s, arguing that U.S. intervention was unjust and unwinnable due to an incompatibility between America and Vietnam. In her 1972 book, 'Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam,' American journalist and historian, Frances FitzGerald, proposes that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and unjust due to diverging attitudes and values between the Americans and the Vietnamese people. She says that America suffered from 'self-deception through self-interest' and shows that despite American battlefield successes, there was 'no way of saving the unsavable,' and U.S. involvement was unethical due to 'the use of disproportionate and corrupting means on behalf of an unreachable and utterly unrealistic if idealistic, goal.' The values of the South Vietnamese people turned them away from the Americans, as well as from their own government, resulting in the inevitable moment for 'the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society.' George Herring, a respected orthodox historian of the Vietnam War, published 'America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975,' in 1979. His focus was similar to FitzGerald`s look at a cultural clash, arguing that American intervention 'probably was doomed from the start.' This was because America was 'attempting to preserve a flawed social order in South Vietnam,' 'and there was no long-range hope of stability without revolutionary change.' Therefore the policy of containment was flawed and the Vietnam War was unwinnable as the communist change was inevitable in Vietnam.
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However, a revisionist challenge to this orthodoxy began to appear in the late 1970s, following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, making a moral case for U.S. intervention, but agreeing that events like the Tet Offensive contributed to the failure of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. For instance, the German-born American historian and political scientist, Guenter Lewy, defended U.S. policy and intervention in Vietnam by writing one of the first major revisionist books, 'America in Vietnam,' in 1978, 'The Attempt to Prevent a communist domination of the area was not without moral justification.' Lewy supports the policy of containment also, saying that a Communist victory anywhere appeared to threaten the U.S. because it represented a further extension of Soviet power.' Another early revisionist historian, Norman Podhoertz, wrote in his 1982 book, 'Why We Were In Vietnam,' 'In Vietnam now as in Central Europe then, a totalitarian political force - Nazism then, Communism now - was attempting to expand the area under its control. A relatively limited degree of resistance then would have precluded the need then would have precluded the need for massive resistance afterward. This was the lesson of Munich, and it had already been applied successfully in Western Europe in the forties and Korea in the fifties. Surely it was applicable to Vietnam as well.' Podhoretz, along with other revisionists such as Michael Lind, uses this 'lesson of Munich,' where the UK and France unsuccessfully tried to appease Germany in 1938, to justify early U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He argued that the U.S. was simply following the precedent, as they had successfully intervened early in Korea.
Harsher revisionist historians of the Vietnam War began to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, coinciding with the election of Ronald Reagan as US President in 1980 and the rise of neoconservatism. Like the early revisionists, they are known for promoting the 'noble cause' viewpoint of the Vietnam War, but make the case that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was not inevitable, and in divergence with early revisionists, they placed much of the blame on American political leaders and the media, rather than on the U.S. military or events like the Tet Offensive. Reagan himself subscribed to this view, commenting before and after his election win in 1980 that American troops 'were denied permission to win' and that 'we dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful.' This changed attitude to Vietnam lasted into 1990, as following a vote by the UN Security Council that authorised the use of force to expel the Iraqi military out of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush continued the Reaganite revisionist viewpoint by saying in a news conference, 'This will not be another Vietnam⦠if there must be war, we will not permit our troops to have their hands tied behind their backs⦠I will never - ever - agree to a halfway effort,' insinuating that political officials were never fully committed to the Vietnam War.
The revisionist historian, Harry G. Summers Jr., who served as a colonel in the United States Army in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, also agreed that U.S. defeat was not inevitable by saying in his 1982 book 'On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War,' 'Although in theory, the best route to victory would have been a strategic offensive against North Vietnam, such action was not in line with U.S. strategic policy which called for the containment rather than the destruction of communist power' But instead of orientating on North Vietnam - the source of the war - we turned our attention to the symptom - the guerrilla war in the South.' Summers was influenced by another revisionist historian and U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer (FSO), Norman B. Hannah, who in 1975, said 'In South Vietnam, we responded mainly to Hanoi's simulated insurgency rather than to its real but controlled aggression, as a bull charges to the toreador's cape, not the toreador.' Summers and Hannah argued therefore that the United States could have won in Vietnam, but political and military leaders failed by misjudging the nature of the war, fighting a counterinsurgency campaign in the South instead of waging a conventional war with North Vietnam. Summers places most of the blame on the earlier political policy of containment.
Mark Moyar, another revisionist historian, criticises the orthodox movement for being too biased, saying 'During the 1960s and 1970s, huge numbers of anti-war Americans entered academia. As a result, most academic and journalistic accounts of the war written during and shortly afterwards depicted Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should not have fought.' Moyar published 'Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965,' in 2006, and wrote, 'What would ultimately doom Johnson was neither the illness of the patient nor a faulty diagnosis, but a poor choice of remedy.' Moyar is therefore critical of Johnson's decision to commit U.S. ground forces to South Vietnam, instead pushing alternative strategies such as deploying forces in Laos which he believes would have been more successful. In Moyar's opinion, Johnson ignored these suggestions due to poor intelligence and advice, and if they had been implemented, the U.S. would have likely won the Vietnam War.
Since the 1990s, there has been a rise in post-revisionist historiography, following the release of new source material from the Vietnam War, which aggressively argues that the USA nearly did win the war but instead 'stole defeat from the jaws of victory.' This rise can largely be attributed to finding a way to attack then-President Bill Clinton for perceived 'excessive caution' and hesitation about intervention in the Balkans in the mid-1990s. Some post-revisionist historians do not even admit that the USA suffered defeat in Vietnam. By far the most significant post-revisionist work was published by the historian, Lewis Sorley, in 1999. His book, 'A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam,' looks at the leadership of General Creighton W. Abrams, who replaced General William C. Westmoreland following the Tet Offensive in 1968. Sorley argues that Abrams' different 'One War' strategy, 'demonstrated his understanding of the true nature of the war,' so that by 1971, the USA was actually winning the Vietnam War under Abrams' leadership, and would have won the war if his strategies had been used from the beginning.
Other post-revisionists look at how the U.S. could have acted differently in the years before U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War. The historian, Max Boot, considers the role of Edward Lansdale, an American CIA operative in Vietnam, in his 2018 book, 'The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.' He argues that Lansdale's work in helping Diem creating a secure Vietnamese state in the mid-1950s could have averted war altogether, but U.S. political leaders abandoned Diem and Lansdale's efforts. Boot writes of the Vietnam War, 'It might have conceivably been avoided if only Washington policymakers had listened to the advice of a renowned counterinsurgency strategist [Lonsdale].' Mark Moyar also showed streaks of post-revisionism in 'Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965,' arguing that the U.S. government and media 'failed South Vietnam morally and politically by allowing Diem's assassination.' Up until this point, South Vietnam had been successfully engaged in the war and were on the verge of victory, but the lack of American support for Diem caused everything to collapse in Vietnam and victory became unlikely from then on due to political and military failures like the Tet Offensive.
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