Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives (review)

Most of the essays in this wide-ranging compilation mix surveys of the existing literature with presentations of the authors’ own findings.

Sophie Quinn-Judge’s “Through a Glass Darkly: Reading the History of the Vietnamese Communist Party, 1945–1975,” is an extremely interesting look at factional divisions within the Vietnamese Communist movement. She shows, for example, that there was more opposition to Ho Chi Minh than most readers will have realized.

Edward Miller’s “Tradition, Power, and Agency: The Ascent of Ngo Dinh Diem, 1945–1954,” questions the traditional view that Ngo Dinh Diem was a passive figure, isolated from Vietnamese politics until U.S. pressure made him premier of the State of Vietnam in 1954. Miller points to the lack of documentary evidence of a U.S. effort to make Diem premier and traces in considerable detail the maneuverings of Diem and his brothers to elevate Diem to that position.

David Hunt’s “Taking Notice of the Everyday” looks at the social history of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Dinh Tuong Province. The Rand Corporation’s interviews of prisoners and defectors from the NLF constitute a rich source of information for this chapter. The NLF, Hunt shows, was not made up of simple peasants whose horizons were limited to their native villages. Many of them had experienced life in towns and even cities. They wanted social mobility, and the choices they made, either to join the revolution or to abandon it, were often shaped by desires to better their lives in a complex and unstable environment.

Heonik Kwon’s “Co So Cach Mang and the Social Network of War” looks at formal and informal networks in one community in the Danang area. The formal organizations of each side discouraged any collaboration with the other, but realities on the ground were more complex: “[I]n the streets of a violent bipolar conflict under crossfire, only those who collaborated well across the drawn boundary of political loyalty survived, both physically and morally” (p. 207). Women assigned by the revolutionary authorities to establish maternal relationships with lonely young South Vietnamese soldiers, to gather information from them and encourage them to desert, were effective in both tasks. But they censored the intelligence they passed on to their superiors, omitting information that might cause the deaths of the young soldiers.

Seth Jacobs’s “‘No Place to Fight a War’: Laos and the Evolution of U.S. Policy toward Vietnam, 1954–1963,” asks why President John Kennedy, after almost committing U.S. forces to combat in Laos in early 1961, abruptly shifted course and negotiated an agreement for neutralization. Jacobs argues that the crucial factor was U.S. policymakers’ contempt, which he convincingly documents, for the Royal Lao Army. Kennedy chose not to fight in a country in which he did not believe he would have useful local allies. This is important but seems logically insufficient. Contempt for the Laotian forces could as easily have become a reason for sending U.S. forces, so that they could do what the Laotians could not.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen’s “Cold War Contradictions: Toward an International History of the Second Indochina War, 1969–1973,” discusses the interactions of the contending parties in Vietnam and their outside backers. The chapter contains some interesting material but also reflects carelessness. The sources cited do not always support the statements made in the text, and this reviewer doubts that Lyndon Johnson’s administration “firmly set into place . . . the de-Americanization of the ground war by ensuring troop withdrawals after the Tet Offensive” (p. 242 n. 31).

Michael J. Allen’s “‘Help Us Tell the Truth about Vietnam’: POW/MIA Politics and the End of the American War” presents an interesting picture of how the issue of U.S. prisoners of war was exploited not just by President Richard Nixon but also by antiwar elements in the United States and...