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Reviews in American History 31.4 (2003) 633-637



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The Vietnam Fiasco Is Still An Orphan

Itai Sneh


Howard Jones. Death of A Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. x + 456pp. Photos, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

Historians began debating the reasons for America's defeat in Vietnam well before the full scope of the self-deception and the subsequent military failure became fully known and accessible to scholars through archival research, personal interviews, and critical reading of substantial memoirs. This emotionally and politically charged dispute will be waged for generations to come, but the continued release of new batches of documents proves ever useful to the historiography. Counterfactuals, although speculative in nature, can help formulate standards that bring us closer to deciding which political and diplomatic junctures were more important than others. In this regard, Death of a Generation makes interesting contributions, even if its insiders' micro-history argument does not constitute a thematic breakthrough.

It is easy to see a parallel between the analysis presented in Jones's previous book Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (1999)—which Jones completed only a few short years before embarking upon his research on the Vietnam War—and the volume under consideration here, albeit in a different era with a distinguishable matrix of facts, issues and personalities. In this 1999 text, Jones contended that because emancipation was so popular in the countries that mattered abroad—Britain and France—President Lincoln was compelled to liberate African-Americans from their inferior legal status in order to generate support for the Union and mitigate against substantial foreign help for the Confederacy. Thus, what led Lincoln to the Emancipation Proclamation was neither primarily domestic considerations nor Lincoln's belief in racial equality, but a realpolitik need to maintain support from influential progressives in Western Europe. A similar kind of argument is made in Death of a Generation regarding the widely known linkage between President Johnson's ambitious agenda at home after 1963—the Great Society, the War on Poverty, and supporting the civil rights movement—and his concomitant need not to lose a prestigious and costly war that would render him [End Page 633] politically impotent. The problem with this kind of analysis is that Kennedy, who was unable to pass most of his agenda during his term, would have faced a similar predicament. The overall difference between JFK and Johnson might be viewed as tangential, although by temperament and experience the former was more inclined to resolve or at least manage conflicts rather than creating and prolonging them like the latter.

The American-inspired coup of November 1, 1963 led to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. South Vietnam surrendered on April 30, 1975. In Death of a Generation, a heavily documented monograph on U.S.-South Vietnam diplomacy during the Kennedy Administration, Jones, while far from espousing conspiracy theories, contends, as the title denotes, that the deaths of the United States and South Vietnamese leaders—three weeks apart—are to blame for the eleven and a half extra years the conflict persisted. The political volatility in the United States and South Vietnam precluded a rational path, i.e., the withdrawal of U.S. troops, and resulted in full-scale military escalation that deteriorated into death and destruction while not changing the outcome.

Jones argues that had U.S. president John Fitzgerald Kennedy not been assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, America's involvement in the Vietnam War would have been severely curtailed, possibly totally eliminated within months, rather than escalated as it was under Johnson. Jones's focus is on why and how what began in the early 1950s as logistical support to the fledgling French colonial rule against perceived Communist subversion escalated, especially from 1961 to 1964, into the most controversial—and the perhaps most inevitably unsuccessful—deployment of American troops abroad.

This nuanced book offers a behind-the-scenes analysis about...

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