Faculty of Arts
The Vietnam War 1965-72 (2)
Lecture:
Thursday 6 October: The Americans and Vietnamese
Lecturer:
Greg Bankoff
Seminar topic:
Thursday 6 October & Wednesday 12 October:
Who won the Vietnam War?
The Paris Peace Accords were a shameless sell-out?
Required Readings:
Anderson, David (1998) ‘The United States and Vietnam’. In Peter Lowe (ed) The Vietnam War. Macmillan, pp.95-114. ISBN 0333658310
Kimball, Jeffrey (2003) ‘The Panmunjon and Paris Armistices: Patterns of War Termination’. In Andreas Daum, Lloyd Garner and Wilfred Mausbach (eds) America, the Vietnam War, and The World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp.105-121. ISBN 052100876X
Nixon, Richard (1973) ‘Peace with Honor.’ Radio-Television broadcast, President Nixon re: initialing of the Vietnam Agreement, 23 Jan. 1973
http://greene.xtn.net/~wingman/docs/nixon2.htm
Primary sources:
Kennedy's Television Interviews on Vietnam http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kentv.htm
The transcripts of what Kennedy said about Vietnam during two interviews he gave in September 1963.
Foreign Relations of the United States. Kennedy Administration Volumes, 1961-1963 http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/frus_list.html
Volume I http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_i_1961/index.html and Volume II http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_ii_1961-63/index.html give insight into the workings of the Kennedy Administration and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Letter from Ho Chi Minh to LBJ
http://cnn.org/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/11/documents/ho.chi.minh.letter/ The text of the 1967 letter in which Ho Chi Minh spells out his intention not to engage in negotiations until bombing ceased.
Lyndon B. Johnson’s nomination withdrawal speech
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/680331.htm
This is a copy of Johnson’s speech in March 1968, in which he outlined the policy towards Vietnam and announced that he would not be seeking re-election that year.
Nixon’s speech on Cambodia
http://www.nfe.com/massacre/presiden.htm
In which Nixon explains why his administration has decided to expand the war into Cambodia.
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/library/exhibits/vietnam/vietnam.htm
A selection of recently declassified papers from the Gerald Ford Library, mainly regarding the end of U.S. direct involvement in the region.
Various primary sources http://greene.xtn.net/~wingman/docs.htm
A personal website’s selective list of certain key documents from the conflict, including the text of Jane Fonda’s radio broadcast from Hanoi and Nixon’s famous ‘Peace with Honor’ speech.
The Vietnam Archive Oral History Project
http://www.lib.ttu.edu/vietnam/OralHistory/vietnam_archive_oral_history.htm
This site gathers together oral testimony from a range of participants in the Vietnam War.
Echoes from the Wall http://www.teachvietnam.org/
This extensive site provides a large number of primary documents regarding the Vietnam War.
Recalling the Vietnam War http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/PubEd/research/vietnam.html
This site gathers together a range of contemporary opinion regarding the Vietnam War from officials, strategists and journalists.
The Vietnam War Internet Project http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/shwv/shwvhome.html
The site provides information about the various Indochina Wars, using the memoirs and oral archives of those who served in and opposed these conflicts.
Recommended Readings:
Larry Addington, America's War in Vietnam: A Short Narrative History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. xii, 191 pp. Not recommended; in the sections I skimmed, the number of errors was excessive.
Joseph A. Amter, Vietnam Verdict: A Citizen's History. New York: Continuum, 1982.
Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did. New York: Morrow, 1985.
Elizabeth Becker, America's Vietnam War: A Narrative History. New York: Clarion, 1992. Aimed at junior high and high school readers; said to be pretty good.
Joseph Buttinger, A Dragon Defiant: A Short History of Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1972. 147 pp.
Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: The Unforgettable Tragedy. New York: Horizon Books, 1977. 191 pp.
William Colby with James McCargar, Lost Victory. Chicago & New York: Contemporary Books, 1989. 438 pp. Colby was head of the CIA station in Saigon early in the war; before the end of the war he became Director of Central Intelligence (head of the CIA). He argues that the United States erred in applying massive military force in Vietnam, when what was really needed was counterinsurgency at the village level.
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, The Indochina Story. New York: Pantheon, 1970. xxxv, 347 pp.
Gen. Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History 1946-1975. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1988. xii, 838 pp. The author was chief of US military intelligence in Saigon, 1967-69. This book is a fascinating illustration of the mindset with which he guided military intelligence; he does not seem to be very interested in guerrilla warfare, or indeed in anything that happened in Vietnamese villages. His main concern is for the activities of generals and of regularly organized military units.
Gerald J. DeGroot, A Noble Cause? London: Longman, 1999. 402 pp.
William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam. Boulder: Westview, 1981. xvi, 393 pp. 2d ed. Boulder: Westview, 1996. xvi, 435 pp.
William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995. xx, 289 pp.
Anthony O. Edmonds, The War in Vietnam. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. 232 pp.
David Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000 (forthcoming). 1200 pp. This study, covering the period from 1930 to 1975, should be enormously important.
George Esper and The Associated Press, The Eyewitness History of the Vietnam War, 1961-1975. New York: Ballantine, 1983. 209 pp. Esper began covering Indochina for AP in 1965; he became Saigon Bureau Chief in 1973, and remained until after the end of the war.
Bernard Fall, The Two Viet-Nams. New York: Praeger, 1963 and later editions. This used to be the standard history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War up to about 1963. Fall was anti-Communist but not particularly pro-American.
Bernard Fall, Viet-Nam Witness, 1953-66. New York: Praeger, 1966. A collection of essays originally written between 1954 and 1966.
Bernard Fall, Last Reflections on a War. New York: Doubleday, 1967. 288 pp.
Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1972; paperback (slightly revised) New York: Vintage, 1973. Best-selling history of the war, from a liberal viewpoint. Over-rated, in my opinion.
James Harrison, The Endless War: Vietnam's Struggle for Independence. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. 374 pp. This was one of the first overall histories of the war that made any serious effort to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the Communist organization in Vietnam. The main problem is that, when describing quite genuine strengths of the Communist organization, Harrison quotes very extensively from Communist descriptions of those strengths. These descriptions are often seriously exaggerated. There exists a danger that readers who notice the exaggeration will fail to notice the underlying element of truth. If even a tenth of what the Communists said about the intimate relationship between themselves and the South Vietnamese peasants had been true, that would have been enough to have a significant affect on the war. In fact much more than a tenth was true.
Patrick J. Hearden, The Tragedy of Vietnam. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. New York: Wiley, 1979. Second edition New York: Knopf, 1986. 3d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996. xiv, 354 pp. A standard, middle-of-the-road view, focussed more on the Americans than on the Vietnamese.
Martin F. Herz, The Vietnam War in Retrospect. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. 80 pp.
Gary R. Hess, Vietnam and the United States: Origins and Legacy of War. Boston: Twayne, 1990.
Hoang Lac and Ha Mai Viet, Blind Design: Why America Lost the Vietnam War. Privately printed: Sugarland TX, 1996. xiv, 388 pp. By two senior ARVN officers.
Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xv, 428 pp. An effort to explain the Vietnam War by reference to underlying Vietnamese cultural patterns, based on extensive research in Vietnamese sources.
George M. Kahin, Intervention: How America became Involved in Vietnam. New York: Knopf, 1986. A well-documented account, based on a lot of digging through declassified documents, bitterly critical of U.S. policy.
George Kahin and John Lewis, The United States in Vietnam. Delta, 1967. 465 pp. A history covering events up to the mid 1960's, from a mildly left-wing viewpoint. Pretty good, except that the authors were under the impression that the Viet Cong were more independent of Hanoi than they really were.
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking, 1983, 750 pp. (some of the errors in the original hardback were corrected in the paperback: New York: Penguin, 1984).
Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1985. xvi, 628 pp. This very extensively researched study, paying much more attention to the Vietnamese than most recent works published in the United States, takes a left-wing viewpoint.
Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army in Vietnam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. 318pp. This extremely important study constitutes a vital antidote to Col. Summers' book On Strategy, which is so fashionable these days. Krepinevich, an Army major in the Strategic Plans and Policy Division of U.S. Army staff, argues very convincingly that U.S. Army doctrine in the 1950's was oriented to a major conflict in Europe. Doctrine called for large units of very heavily armed troops, who could crush an enemy by overwhelming firepower and thus minimize their own casualties. When the Vietnam War came along, the Army was unwilling to abandon or even seriously to modify the doctrine it had built up. It was determined to use, as much as possible, the units, the weapons, the tactics, and the doctrine that it had devised for use in Europe, while paying a minimum of lip service to ideas of "counterinsurgency" warfare.
A.J. Langguth, Our Vietnam/Nuoc Viet Ta: The War 1954-1975. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. 754 pp.
Alan J. Levine, The United States and the Struggle for Southeast Asia, 1945-1975. Westport: Praeger, 1995. 200 pp.
Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 540 pp. This book has a reputation for being very objective, but in fact it has a strong pro-American bias. Lewy's underestimate of the number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. military operations is preposterous.
Michael Lind, Vietnam the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict. New York: The Free Press, 1999. xix, 314 pp.
Timothy J. Lomperis, The War Everyone Lost--and Won: America's Intervention in Viet Nam's Twin Struggles. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. x, 192 pp. pb Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1987. Rev. ed. Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1993. xix, 203 pp.
Timothy J. Lomperis, From People's War to People's Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xvi, 440 pp.
Peter Lowe, ed., The Vietnam War. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. Essays about the role of the US, North and South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and Britain.
Martin McLaughlin, Vietnam & the World Revolution. Labor Publications, (1991?). Said to be from the Trotskyist viewpoint.
Michael Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam: 1945-1975. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981. 368 pp.
Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. viii, 663 pp. (Indiana University Press is planning to publish a new edition in 2001). A study, based on extensive interviews, of the way the Vietnam War affected the generation that came of age in the 1960s--both those who served in Vietnam and those who did not.
Albert Marrin, America and Vietnam: The Elephant and the Tiger. New York: Viking, 1992. Intended for juveniles? Reputed to have a pro-war bias, but a glance at the section on Tonkin Gulf showed errors of an anti-war type.
Wilbur H. Morrison, The Elephant and the Tiger: The Full Story of the Vietnam War. New York: Hippocrene, 1990. 703 pp
George D. Moss, Vietnam: An American Ordeal, 2d edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. x, 454 pp.
Bernard C. Nalty, The Vietnam War. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2000. 384 pp. The publisher's blurb advertising the book on the web has a bizarre exaggeration on the MIA issue; this does not inspire confidence in the book itself.
Nguyen Khac Vien, Vietnam: une longue histoire. Hanoi: The Gioi, 1993. Reprinted Paris: l'Harmattan, 1999. 504 pp.
Edgar O'Ballance, The Wars in Vietnam: 1954-1973. Ian Allen, 1975; New York: Hippocrene, 1975.
Edgar O'Ballance, The Wars in Vietnam: 1954-1980. New York: Hippocrene, 1981.
The Officer. Monthly magazine of the Reserve Officers Association of the United States. Supported the war.
James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945-1990. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1996, viii, 326 pp. The authors are not very knowledgeable on the subject.
General Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984.
Dave Palmer, The Summons of the Trumpet. Presidio, 1978 (now widely available in a Ballantine paperback). 354 pp. Palmer was a colonel when he wrote this; he has since reached major general. The section on the 1950's is quite inaccurate; note in particular the wild exaggeration of the extent Hanoi was pushing insurgency in the South from 1957 to 1959 (pp. 19-21). He also underestimates the US combat role (p. xii) and greatly overstates the quality of ARVN leadership (pp. 17-18).
Pham Kim Vinh, The Politics of Selfishness: Vietnam--The Past as Prologue. San Diego: n.p., 1977. By a former lawyer, journalist, and ARVN officer, originally North Vietnamese, very anti-Communist.
Jacques Portes, Les Americains et la guerre du Vietnam. Paris: Complexe, 1993. 360 pp.
Ken Post, Revolution, Socialism and Nationalism in Viet Nam, 5 vols. Brookfield, VT: Dartmouth Publishing Co., 1989-94. Vol. I: An Interrupted Revolution, 1989, 368 pp. Vol. II: Vietnam Divided, 1989, 416 pp. Vol. III, Socialism in Half a Country, 1989, 408 pp. Vol. IV, The Failure of Counter-Insurgency in the South, 1990, 432 pp. Vol. V, Winning the War and Losing the Peace, 1994, 416 pp. A good study written from a Marxist perspective.
Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War: Why we Lost in Vietnam. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998.
D. R. Sardesai, Vietnam: The Struggle for National Identity. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992.
Peter Scholl-Latour, Death in the Rice Fields. New York: Penguin, 1986. English translation of a 1979 book by a German journalist who was in Vietnam off and on from 1945 to the 1970's.
Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 432 pp.
Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution: The U.S. in Vietnam, 1946-1966, rev. ed. New York: Harper Colophon, 1966. Journalistic writing, excellent on Saigon politics, sometimes a bit naive about what was happening in the countryside.
Robert Shaplen, Time Out of Hand: Revolution and Reaction in Southeast Asia. New York: Harper Colophon, 1970.
Robert Shaplen, The Road From War: Vietnam 1965-1971. New York: Harper Colophon, 1971.
Robert Shaplen, Bitter Victory. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Based on Shaplen's visit to Vietnam in 1985, but includes information about the war.
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1988. 861 pp. John Paul Vann first began to attract attention as an adviser to the ARVN 7th Division in the northern Mekong Delta in 1962, and was the senior US adviser for the whole of II Corps by the time he was killed in a helicopter crash in 1972. Sheehan uses Vann's career to illuminate the whole pattern of the US war in Vietnam. This book won the Pulitzer Prize, and very much deserved it. One of the best books ever written about the war.
Anthony Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War. Longman, 1989. 347 pp. Runs up through Johnson's decision to escalate.
Lester A. Sobel, ed., South Vietnam: U.S. - Communist Confrontation in Southeast Asia, 7 vols. New York: Facts on File 1966-73. Vol. 1, 1961-65, is careless in matters of detail; later volumes may be better.
Col. Harry Summers, On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982 (originally published by the U.S. Army War College).
Thomas C. Thayer, War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985. xxvii, 276 pp. A systems analysis view of the war. Thayer studied the war first in Vietnam working for ARPA, and later in Washington working for the assistant secretary of defense for systems analysis. Numerous statistical tables.
Truong Vinh-Le, Vietnam: Ou est la verite? (Vietnam: Where is the Truth?). Paris: Lavauzelle, 1989. 325 pp. The author was President of the National Assembly under Ngo Dinh Diem, and was briefly Nguyen Cao Ky's running mate in the presidential election of 1971.
Spencer Tucker, Vietnam. University Press of Kentucky, 1999. 256 pp.
William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954-1975. Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1986. Very short but good, especially for its coverage of Communist policy decisions. Sometimes careless about accepting things that are "common knowledge"; Turley spent his research time checking the answers to questions that are not answered in other books on the subject; he should have spent more time making sure that the questions that had been answered in all the other books had been answered correctly.
Sanford Wexler, The Vietnam War: An Eyewitness History. New York: Facts on File, 1992. Supposed to be good.
Justin Wintle, The Viet Nam Wars. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.
Mark R. Woodruff, Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, 1961-1973. Arlington: Vandamere Press, 1999. 338 pp. I am not optimistic.
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. 386 pp.
The Vietnam Experience. Boston: Boston Publishing Company and Addison-Wesley. This heavily-illustrated series contains twenty-three volumes, some devoted to particular topics such as the air war, others to particular chronological sections of the war.
Links:
General Histories:
Introduction to the Vietnam War
http://www.vietnampix.com/intro2.htm
A site with basic text and accompanying pictures.
Tet Offensive
http://www.vwam.com/vets/tet/tet.html
A discussion of quite possibly the most famous battle of the Vietnam War.
Useful resources:
Vietnam bibliography
http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~eemoise/bibliography.html/
A bibliography of Vietnam-related books, compiled by a U.S. academic. Note however that it only goes through until 1996, thus ignoring those books that came out on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
Foreign policy:
The ‘domino theory’
http://cnews.tribune.com/news/story/0,1162,cltv-nation-60519,00.html
An article that discusses whether or not the ‘domino theory’ was a valid justification for the foreign policy conducted by the U.S. in Indochina.
Rhetoric and foreign policy
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/goldzwig.htm
This articles discusses the notions of idealism and pragmatism as found in U.S. foreign policy rhetoric, in regards to JFK and Vietnam.
The Kennedy Administration and the downfall of Diem
http://www.museumsworld.com/tapes_show_kennedy_regretted_vie.htm
Brief article that suggests that Kennedy regretted the U.S. role in the 1963 coup that brought about Diem’s death.
Johnson’s policy for disengagement
http://www.thehistorynet.com/Vietnam/articles/1998/0298_text.htm#top
An article that considers Johnson’s attempts from 1967 to de-escalate the war.
Participants:
Women and Vietnam
http://www.illyria.com/vnwomen.html
This site considers the role that women played during the conflict.
Ethnicity and the Vietnam War http://www.cdi.org/adm/Transcripts/552/
A round table discussion of the issues surrounding ethnicity and U.S. involvement in Vietnam, mainly on the question of African-American participation.
Tunnel Rats
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/leuhusen/nam/fire7.htm
A site dedicated to the U.S. soldiers who attempted to paralyse the underground network created by the North Vietnamese.
Missing in Action
http://geocities.com/pentagon/2527/
This site is an example of one brother’s belief in a cover-up of American MIAs in Indochina.
Would you have been drafted?
http://europe.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/13/the.draft/
An interesting CNN article that contains a counter for your date of birth that can let you see if you would have been drafted.
Vietnam Vets today
http://www.vwam.com
This is the website of Vets with a Mission, who undertake humanitarian projects that attempt to improve the life of the Vietnamese.
Remembering Vietnam:
Vietnam twenty-five years on.
http://www.speakout.com/Content/ICArticle/2910/
An example of the articles that appeared on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam
Vietnam Films
http://members.aol.com/warlib/10viet.htm
An alphabetical list of films about Vietnam, a substantial popular response to the conflict.
Vietnam: Yesterday and Today.
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~wittman/
This site provides material for those teaching and studying the subject of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam War ‘Myths’
http://www.rjsmith.com/war_myth.html#top
While this site is not short on rhetoric that attempts to justify U.S. actions in Vietnam, it does set out some of the major popular ‘myths’ surrounding Vietnam.
For another site of this type, click here http://www.vhfcn.org/stat.htm.
After Combat Report 19 December 1969 at
http://www.soft.net.uk/entrinet/home.htm
