America in Vietnam: The War That Couldn't Be Won (review)

Herbert Schandler's book The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977) ranks as one of the best early histories of the Vietnam War. Written at a time when the wounds to America's psyche were still raw, the book showed greater dispassion than most histories, and it presented a range of valuable insights. In his latest book, America in Vietnam: The War That Couldn't Be Won, Schandler promises to enhance our understanding of the Vietnam War by incorporating the thinking and decision-making of North Vietnam's leaders during the war. Expectations should therefore be high.

Unfortunately, the new book fails to deliver either important revelations from the other side or new insights about the war's character. The Vietnamese Communist sources that Schandler touts consist almost entirely of interviews he conducted in 1998 and 1999 with former senior North Vietnamese officials as a member of a delegation to Hanoi organized by Robert McNamara. Schandler accepts the comments of these officials at face value, making no effort to compare their statements against known facts. Such faith in interviewees is always dangerous but is especially perilous when dealing with the leaders of a one-party state with a long record of twisting history to serve their own interests or those of the state.

The book's other sources are also thin, comprising very few primary sources beyond the Pentagon Papers. The secondary sources consulted do not include many recent U.S. works that would have corrected some of the book's defects. Nor do they include the voluminous histories published by the Vietnamese Communists, many of which demonstrate greater objectivity than Schandler's interview subjects and directly contradict what those interviewees told him.

Owing to the overreliance on North Vietnamese interviewees and the under-reliance on better sources of information, the book's interpretations differ little from the standard fare provided by countless U.S. historians and journalists opposed to American involvement in the war. Schandler begins with Ho Chi Minh's political aspirations, claiming that Ho was primarily a nationalist rather than a Communist. As evidence, Schandler asserts that Ho Chi Minh himself said as much, but he provides no citations to this effect. He also quotes some interviewees who said the same about Ho and maintained that North Vietnam was not part of a conspiracy with China or the Soviet Union to spread Communism. Because Ho was mainly a nationalist, Schandler argues, the principal U.S. rationale for intervention in Vietnam—saving the Asian "dominoes" from an international Communist menace—was entirely wrong.

This interpretation does not stand up to what we now know about Ho Chi Minh's words and deeds. Ho rarely claimed to be more of a nationalist than a Communist, and then only to deceive and propitiate gullible Westerners. In a great many other instances, both public and private, he professed to putting Communist internationalism ahead of national interests, and he closely collaborated with his Communist allies, especially China, in spreading Communism not only to South Vietnam but to other countries in Southeast Asia.

The interpretation of Ho as a nationalist not aligned with the Communist great powers leads Schandler to conclude that "Hanoi's strategy of achieving its twin objectives—replacing Diem with a neutral government able to reunify the nation and avoiding an American war—was in many respects the mirror image of Washington's strategy." According to Schandler, the United States should have reached agreement with the North Vietnamese to form a neutral coalition government in the South, modeled on the neutralization of Laos in 1962. Yet it was the Laotian model that proved the bankruptcy of this idea. The North Vietnamese violated the neutralization agreement from the beginning, keeping large numbers of troops in Laos, and the Laotian Communists refused to join the Laotian national army and instead collaborated with the North Vietnamese in furtherance of the international revolution in Southeast Asia.

Schandler's treatment of the...