Triumph Forsaken? A Forum on Mark Moyar's Revisionist History of the Vietnam War, 1954-1965: Introduction

November/December 2007 · Historically Speaking 29 Triumph Forsaken? A Forum on Mark Moyar's Revisionist History of the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 Introduction Mark Moyar believes the standard accounts of the Vietnam War are deeply flawed. It was not a "wrongheaded and unjust" conflict. His Triumph Forsaken : The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), the first installment of a two-volume project, makes the case that our understanding of the war would benefit from a more open debate about a number of important issues. The result is a thoroughgoing and copiously footnoted revisionist account of the war up to LBJ's July 28, 1965 announcement that he was authorizing a massive increase in American troop strength in Vietnam. American leaders, Moyar contends, were by no means as fumbling and ignorant of Southeast Asian realties as the standard interpretation intimates. He criticizes the view that Ho Chi Minh stood firmly in the Vietnamese nationalist tradition of resisting foreign aggression and that Ho, who despised all foreigners including the Chinese, could have become an Asian Tito if the Americans had only understood Vietnam 's history better. On the contrary, Moyar argues that "[djriving out foreign invaders was not the main chord of Vietnam's national song; infighting was___" Relations between China and Vietnam since the end of the 10th century had been basically amicable . Ho, moreover, was a dedicated communist who "never would have turned against his Chinese Communist neighbors . . . had the United States allowed him to unify Vietnam." South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem emerges as a far better leader in Moyar's account than in most histories of the Vietnam War. Diem, to be sure, was an authoritarian who believed—correcdy , according to Moyar—that Western-style democracy would not work in South Vietnam. In the early years of his regime, Diem "brought order to a demoralized, disorganized, and divided South Vietnam ." Historians, moreover, do not give him enough credit for his effectiveness in combating the communists . Moyar claims that in the late 1950s Diem virtually eliminated communist networks in the South, prompting Hanoi to launch a major insurgency to rescue the situation. Unable to convince U.S. ambassador Elbridge Durbrow to fund adequately the South's counter-guerrilla capabilities, Diem's government was hard pressed to respond efPresident John F. Kennedy and Mayor Willy Brandt of Berlin at the White House. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-134151]. fectively to the North-directed insurgency. Still, in 1960 Diem's forces succeeded in cutting the first Ho Chi Minh trail, located entirely within North and South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese countered Diem's move by entering eastern Laos and establishing a much more secure route for infiltration. This enabled them to intensify the insurgency in 1961. The Kennedy administration attempted to solve the Laotian crisis by neutralization rather than intervening militarily. When the North Vietnamese failed to withdraw its troops from Laos in the fall of 1962,JFK chose not to send American forces to stop the infiltration. Moyar is very critical of this decision; failure to interdict the insurgency at this relatively early stage had disastrous consequences for South Vietnam and the United States for the remainder of the war. Despite this, South Vietnam's war effort dramatically improved in 1962 and 1963, the result of a significant increase in American military support and improved leadership in the South. Diem was done in, according to Moyar, because anti-Diem Americans, especially high-profile journalists like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, repeatedly emphasized his shortcomings. The negative press undermined South Vietnamese confidence in Diem and, Moyar argues, encouraged rebellion. It also encouraged Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who agreed with Halberstam and Sheehan 's assessment, to instigate a military coup against JFK's orders. Kennedy caught wind of the plot a few days before the actual coup, but failed to act because he worried that decisive action against Lodge might be construed as a political move to embarrass the leading Republican presidential candidate for the 1964 election. Moyar concludes that ousting Diem was "by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War." He argues that the war was proceeding satisfactorily prior to Diem...