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  • The War that Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War
  • Pierre Asselin
David L. Anderson and John Ernst, eds., The War that Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. viii 1 368 pp. $35.00.

This collection of essays “designed for college students” (p. viii) is a tribute to George C. Herring, author of the influential America’s Longest War, originally published in 1979 and now in its fourth edition. Contrary to the claim of one of the editors, not all the essays are original; many are recycled in whole or in part from the contributors’ [End Page 195] previous works. Nonetheless, this collection has ample merit. The contributors, most of whom are former students of Herring, examine various dimensions of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Marilyn Young attributes the war’s enduring resonance to the fact that “the central issues it raised about the United States in the world over four decades ago remain the central issues today” (p. 9). References to recent trends in U.S. foreign policy and especially to the ongoing involvement in Iraq abound in her essay and throughout the book. (An imaginary speech for President Lyndon Johnson written by Howard Zinn in 1967 is reproduced by Zinn with comments on President George W. Bush.) Herring echoes Young’s sentiments in his own contribution, claiming that Americans refuse to forget the Vietnam War because it was long, difficult, and divisive and ultimately “caused us as a nation to confront a set of beliefs about ourselves that forms a basic part of the American character” (p. 343).

The book includes two very good historiographical essays: one by David Anderson addressing the standard perspectives on the war that is sure to be of great help to students; the other by Robert Brigham exploring the treatment by Western and Vietnamese scholars of the relationship between Confucianism and Marxism in Vietnam. Walter LaFeber provides a sound synthesis of Washington’s approach to Vietnam from 1945 to 1975, highlighting the centrality of Cold War and economic concerns in shaping that approach. Gary Hess assesses the stance of America’s Cold War allies on the war and their motives for answering or, in most cases, rejecting the Johnson administration’s call for joining the anti-Communist effort in Indochina. Ironically, Hess asserts, “a war intended to strengthen America’s stature” ended up damaging relations with allies and “concluded with its leaders facing the challenge of rebuilding confidence in its leadership” (p. 71).

Several essays focus on U.S. policymaking and other domestic issues. Robert Buzzanco elaborates on high-level military dissent, a topic he discussed in his acclaimed Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). He states that U.S. military leaders foresaw the lack of prospects for military success in Indochina as early as the 1950s and repeatedly warned policymakers of the perils of military intervention there. Successive presidential administrations ignored those warnings, however, because they had “larger concerns about global politics and economics,” including the “reconstruction of capitalism and Japanese economic health in Asia” (p. 194).

Terry Anderson focuses on the antiwar movement, as does Joseph Fry, who argues in an illuminating essay that student dissenters remained a small minority even on college campuses throughout the war, but the media coverage of their activities helped to inspire the country to question the legitimacy of the U.S. intervention in Indochina. Clarence Wyatt deals specifically with the news media and contends that journalists who covered the war and openly criticized U.S. policy in Asia were motivated “not by political or ideological bias, but, rather, by the need to satisfy the imperatives of the American news industry” (p. 274).

In a well-researched essay Kyle Longley explains that Congress, despite having limited powers and relatively few members opposed to the war, at least initially, played a leading role in hastening the end of U.S. involvement in Indochina. His contention [End Page 196] that Congress was also instrumental in avoiding a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union and China over Vietnam is questionable, however. Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin and John...

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