These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. Therein lies one of the worst problems concerning the study of the Vietnam War—the uncritical acceptance of the “big picture” presented in dated and dubious writings. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. I made the chart below to prepare for my comprehensive exams. This archive, containing 21,477 pages of documents received in response to VVAW’s Freedom of Information Act requests, chronicles the group’s organizing activities across the country. Scholars and historians continue to debate the justification – or lack thereof – for U.S. intervention. Protests about the Vietnam war began almost as soon as the US became involved. The Last Days in Vietnam is an Oscar-nominated documentary covering the very end of South Vietnam, in April, 1975. How Media coverage of Vietnam changed America. The War that Never Ends: Historians and the Vietna... Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy, Lessons of Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War, Imaging Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War, The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, Why Vietnam? 24-year-old Robert Sam Anson, a Time Magazine reporter who arrived in Vietnam in early 1970 was an experienced war protester who already believed the war was colonial, immoral, illegal and unwinnable. According to the Krepinevich school, the United States focused on fighting a conventional war in the hinterlands because the U.S. military had been designed to fight such a war, when in fact much greater attention should have been given to securing the populous areas.22. A leading possibility is the ideological imbalance among today’s academic history departments. This list may not reflect recent changes (). The wounds were moral ones; the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans' belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people. Of course, you need the 60’s soundtrack: Hendrix’s version of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Run Through the Jungle or Fortunate Son, maybe throw in some Rolling Stones and a Motown hit or two and you’ve got your soundtrack sorted. Vietnam: Historians at War. As such, many historians view the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement of the 1960’s as key reasons for the end of Johnson’s presidency. Among government officials, military officers, and political scientists, Vietnam was considered irrelevant, because the United States would never get caught in protracted counterinsurgency warfare again. 1), Althea Nagai debates the credibility of microaggressions, suggesting that higher education has blindly accepted their d... A study on the partisanship of liberal arts professors at America's top universities. In fact, the United States would enter the war militarily and play a large role in the conflict for several years. By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict. Some of this scholarship is simply an extension of the ideological debates that raged on during the conflict, but there has also been a number of recent studies that complicate the war and its meaning. The orthodox historians of the late 1970s and 1980s largely adhered to the narrative passed down by Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow. Again on the Vietnam decisions of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson between 1961 and 1965 Hess shows that there is, at least to some extent, a meeting of minds between revisionists and orthodox scholars because both believe that … Unfortunately, Higgins’s book did not achieve the popularity of the books by Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow, and within a few years it faded into obscurity. These articles did much to convince both South Vietnamese generals and U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that Diem had to go, and that replacing Diem would lead to major improvements in the war effort. In the Spring 2017 Academic Questions (vol. Common Core Standards: RH1, RH2, WHST1, WHST2 Introduction: From Matthew Masur, “Nationalism, Communism, and the Vietnam War,” in Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War, ed. The only real American heroes of the war were the reporters and the few servicemen who recognized that the enterprise was doomed from the start. In 1968, America was a wounded nation. Why, then, do historians keep making them? The United States was wrong to fight the war, the story goes, for American policymakers mistook Ho Chi Minh for a member of an international Communist conspiracy when in reality he was merely a proud nationalist who disdained his Chinese Communist neighbors. and panelists Lubna Qureshi (Independent Historian), David Prentice (Oklahoma State Univ. and panelists Lubna Qureshi (Independent Historian), David Prentice (Oklahoma State Univ. April 30,2000, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the real end of the Vietnam War: the "fall" of Saigon—which was quickly renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Since 1990, the quality of scholarship, both orthodox and revisionist, has improved as more documentation has become available and scholars have been able to make use of previous discoveries. There have, however, been serious revisionist histories of the Vietnam War: Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam (1978) was an excellent early example, and like Lewy before him, the sheer scholarship behind Moyar’s book demands that we take his views seriously. Michael G. Kort’s The Vietnam War Reexamined is US-centred in two ways: it concentrates on American political decisions and military actions and it engages with a postwar argument between rival ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ schools of thought among US historians. Due to the time period and nature of the Vietnam War historians today consider it to be a Cold War era proxy war between the United States and Soviet Union. One reason is that she contracted black fever and died shortly after the book was published. The result has been a steady increase in the number of scholarly monographs published on Vietnam, making it the war that never ends. Discover and share Vietnam War Quotes From Historians. The majority of African Americans who were drafted were not conscripted, with 70% of Black draftees rejected from … When a revisionist contends that the Vietnamese had an authoritarian political culture that allowed strong men like Ho Chi Minh to thrive and made democracy unfeasible, orthodox professors often hurl accusations ranging from insensitivity to racism. of Reims), and Pierre Asselin (San Diego State Univ. Revisionists began fixing that problem in the late 1990s with histories arguing that the South Vietnamese government grew much stronger during this period and that by the early 1970s it had, with the help of the United States, wiped out the Viet Cong insurgents. Normally, as in say the Spanish-American War or the First World War, an orthodox interpretation has emerged which rationalises American involvement in the conflict. In 1963, unlike later, the American journalists in Vietnam generally favored U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but believed that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem had to be replaced because he was not liberal enough in handling the press and non-Communist oppositionists, especially Buddhist protesters who were calling for huge concessions from the government. The Vietnamese had suffered under French colonial rule for nearly six decades when Japan invaded portions of Vietnam in 1940. Revisionist historians think the war was the calculated implementation of a North Vietnamese strategy based on Mao's three-stage model of Communist revolutionary warfare in China. The Vietnam War is one of the most controversial and traumatic events in American history. Vietnam: Historians at War Vietnam: Historians at War Moyar, Mark 2008-04-18 00:00:00 Acad. Their reporting relied heavily upon biased and dishonest sources, including two who, unbeknownst to the reporters, were Vietnamese Communist agents. At that time, the end of the Cold War and surging confidence about U.S. … The Civil War and World War II were the wars that historians were advised to Burkett’s book, Stolen Valor, extraordinary for both its detailed research and its nationwide popularity, revealed that several hundred supposed Vietnam veterans in the public spotlight were frauds. The first-stage was a VC guerrilla and terrorist insurgency. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. By sifting through masses of American and North Vietnamese documents as well as American press reports, I determined that South Vietnam was actually winning the war until Diem’s death, and began losing as soon as he was gone. At the time, the Vietnam War saw the highest proportion of African-Americans soldiers. They asserted that the South Vietnamese war effort had been ruined before Diem’s death, something they had not claimed before the coup, and therefore their support for overthrowing Diem made little difference. The Vietnam War Reexamined - December 2017. Robert F. Turner, a Vietnam veteran and Hoover Institution fellow who later obtained a non-tenured position at the University of Virginia Law School, disputed the portrayal of the Vietnamese Communists as devoted nationalists in his book Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development.17  In an international history of the war, distinguished British professor Ralph Smith argued that Vietnamese Communism posed a serious threat to the United States and hence the United States was right in trying to hold the line in South Vietnam.18  Norman Podhoretz, the American pundit, made the same argument in a work geared more for the public than academia.19  The works of Ellen Hammer and William Colby, an American scholar living in France and a former CIA director, respectively, charged that South Vietnam was viable under Ngo Dinh Diem and that the United States erred catastrophically in encouraging his overthrow.20  Reiterating points made during the war by senior U.S. military officers, veterans like Harry Summers and former politicians like Richard Nixon argued that the war could have been won had the United States taken more aggressive military actions, such as severing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and bombing North Vietnam massively from the start instead of escalating the bombing gradually.21  A different group, led by a military officer with a Ph.D. named Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., concluded that the war could have been won had the United States been more delicate, rather than more forceful. Register now for “The Vietnam War: A Diplomatic Contest,” on January 7 at 10 AM ET! ), Lori Maguire (Univ. Historians and the Vietnam War: The Conflict Over Interpretations Continues The Vietnam War, with the exception of the Civil War, was the most divisive conflict in American history. The Vietnam War and American Culture(s), Part 3: “Passionate Historians,” and Selected Sources on the Vietnam War Posted on November 2, 2020 by georgelamplugh [NOTE: It’s awfully easy to stereotype historians as calm, objective, even bloodless observers of the past, especially when you read a garden-variety history textbook. Ever since the outbreak of insurgency in the former empire of Saddam Hussein, people of all persuasions have been mining the history of Vietnam for information that will support their preferred Iraq policies. Orthodox scholars have continued to assert that Vietnam was not strategically important without examining most of the relevant information that has become available. They contain statements and remarks about the Vietnam conflict by notable political figures, military commanders, contemporaries and historians. He has spent some time reviewing the historiography on the Vietnam War and produced a wonderful addition to that body of work. History faculty tirelessly profess commitment to “diversity,” but within their own ranks one finds near uniformity of political sentiment. In fact, the United States would enter the war militarily and play a large role in the conflict for several years. Common Core Standards: RH1, RH2, WHST1, WHST2 Introduction: From Matthew Masur, “Nationalism, Communism, and the Vietnam War,” in Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War, ed. In designing my recent book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, I sought to fill the gap by analyzing every significant facet of the war, from military to diplomatic to political to social, and every country that had a significant influence on the war, of which there were many. When we talk about the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese refer to as the “American War”), we talk about the military intervention by … Vietnam: Historians at War Mark Moyar Published online: 18 April 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008 By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict. ). In this new situation, and especially by 1969, Mennonites’ views on conscientious objection, the Vietnam War, and war in general had become muddled. Pierre Asselin is Professor of History and Dwight E. Stanford Chair in American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University. While such comments may hold some truth with respect to a few individuals, they most definitely do not apply to the most prominent of the revisionists. 10 great prisoner-of-war films; 10 great First World War films; 10 great films set in the jungle; Alongside Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, released the same year, Michael Cimino’s 1978 Vietnam war epic The Deer Hunter marked the first serious attempt by a Hollywood studio filmmaker to explore the conflict’s lasting consequences from the perspective of surviving veterans. Promises and commitments to the people and government of South Vietnam to keep communist forces from overtaking them reached back into the Truman Administration. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965–1973, by Shelby Stanton; and two works by Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946–1975, and Secrets of the Vietnam War. In a September 1963 article, Joseph Alsop likened the American correspondents in Saigon to the American journalists of the 1940s who had denigrated Chiang Kai-Shek and praised Mao Tse-Tung as a “great and humane man,” as well as to Herbert Matthews, the reporter who had idealized Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution. Many of these false veterans had appeared on TV and in books to recount stories of atrocities and psychological injuries, providing the evidence desired by antiwar historians. It shapes the past for present purposes, retrieving only those historical fragments which reinforce present assumptions.”2. Marguerite Higgins, who had become the first female war correspondent to win the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the Korean War, found that Halberstam’s articles contained many glaring inaccuracies, most of which were intended to tarnish the image of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. Vietnam War. The Myth of the Media's Role in Vietnam. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. Although the history of Vietnam has been dominated by war for 30 years of the 20th century, the conflict escalated during the sixties. Hundreds of thousands of American troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan have received more instruction on Vietnam than on any other historical subject. By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict. Individually, some Mennonites were engaged in anti-war efforts on religious grounds, while others were more politically or morally motivated. Edit. Historians who addressed American military performance accused the U.S. military of fighting unlawfully and unsuccessfully against a wily adversary that regularly outwitted it, and they alleged that the war inflicted long-term psychological damage on huge numbers of American veterans.16  These claims made the war appear even more reprehensible, which also made draft dodging appear more sensible. The Vietnam War Reexamined - December 2017. A small but strong group of revisionist books emerged during this same period. Due to the time period and nature of the Vietnam War historians today consider it to be a Cold War era proxy war between the United States and Soviet Union. David L. Anderson, the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and an orthodox historian of the Vietnam War, stated in his 2005 presidential address that revisionists interpret the war based on an “uncritical acceptance” of American cold war policy rather than analysis of the facts, whereas orthodox historians rely exclusively on “reasoned analysis” in reaching their conclusions.1  Some orthodox scholars have maintained that the revisionists’ primary ambition is not to find the truth but to twist the facts of the Vietnam War to justify contemporary wars or other policies. Antiwar history of the Vietnam War thus acquired the label of “orthodox” history. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. A complete history of political-military involvement by the US in the region was selected and put into a file which served as an “encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War”. Substantial elements of the American media have espoused or provided a forum for revisionism. That same generation presided over two long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and events there no doubt increased public interest and debate over the conduct, outcome, and meaning of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War lasted about 40 years and involved several countries. In recent speeches, President Bush has invoked some revisionist arguments. The most impressive new source material, however, has emerged from countries other than the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s, huge numbers of antiwar Americans entered academia and the media, while few Vietnam veterans and other supporters of the war obtained jobs in those professions, in many cases because veteran status or pro-war sentiments were considered unacceptable. A political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Lewy never received the open acclaim from academia or the media that he deserved, but he effected great changes to the war’s history in quiet ways. Much of that narrative has continued to evade serious questioning from orthodox historians, who have preferred to remain focused on a fairly narrow set of questions. ). Alpha History’s Vietnam War website is a comprehensive textbook-quality resource for studying events in Vietnam, from the 1800s to 1976. (2008) 21:37–51 DOI 10.1007/s12129-008-9045-y ARTICLES Mark Moyar Published online: 18 April 2008 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008 By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the … But perhaps there is a third arena encompassed by military history, one that now stands besieged and vulnerable. American leaders were completely ignorant of South Vietnam and mindlessly optimistic about progress in the war. Essential Question: Is it more accurate to describe Ho Chi Minh as a nationalist or a communist? Although more than thirty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, historians today are as divided on what happened as the American people were during the war itself.