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  • America’s Lost War. Vietnam: 1945–1975
  • David Hunt
America’s Lost War. Vietnam: 1945–1975. By Charles E. Neu. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2005. ISBN 0-88295-232-3. Maps. Photographs. Table. Notes. Bibliographical essay. Index. Pp. xix, 272. $18.95.

Charles Neu's book joins an already long list of surveys of the Vietnam War. It aims to prove that, given the Cold War context, U.S. intervention in Vietnam was "inevitable" and that its defeat by "an enemy of strength, fanaticism, and staying power" was also to be expected (p. xv). President Truman's engagement was prompted by advancing Communism in Asia and betrayed an ignorance of the "deep rooted nationalism and xenophobia" of the Vietnamese people (p. 13). The U.S. backed French colonialism from 1950 on, until French withdrawal after the fall of Dien Bien Phu made possible the creation of a friendly government in South Vietnam. President Eisenhower's "hatred of communism was so strong and indiscriminate, and his understanding of the revolution in Vietnam so flawed that he committed the United States to a course that would have fateful consequences" (p. 27). When war resumed in the South in 1960, President Kennedy increased the level of U.S. involvement, but without developing a clear strategic perspective. Befuddled and vacillating, he could do no better than send "one fact-finding mission after another, hoping that some combination of advisers would resolve his doubts" (p. 68). President Johnson was even more at sea. Uncritical about Cold War shibboleths and alarmed by threats to his masculinity, he, too, was drawn more deeply into what, from the beginning of the book, is portrayed as a "quagmire" (p. 14). The Tet Offensive spread antiwar sentiment both within the elite and in the population at large, and, after casting about for new ways to isolate and crush the enemy, Nixon and Kissinger concluded that a "decent interval" was the best that could be hoped for (p. 179). The Paris Peace Agreement was the result, to be followed in predictable fashion by the victory of the North Vietnamese in 1975.

This is a workmanlike narrative, but perhaps I will not be the only reader to find that it contains few surprises. The insistence on the inevitability [End Page 278] of what happened removes much of the onus from policy makers who, according to other recent treatments, were always free to choose. Splits between civilian and military decision makers and quarrels within the armed forces are not in evidence here. Also missing is the bombing and shelling of the countryside to "generate refugees," and other seeming war crimes. Vietnamese allies are slighted, with only a few passages on Saigon corruption and nothing on the people of the GVN. As for the revolutionaries, references to "surveillance and thought control" in the North are not thoughtful (p. 107), and the southern movement is assigned only a cameo role. In a number of passages, the author ignores the Main Force units of the National Liberation Front, making it seem as if every combatant in a "pith helmet" came from the North and that GIs were trying to "win the war against the North Vietnamese" (pp. 105 and 112). No book on a subject this vast can touch all bases. But on U.S. decisionmaking at the top, which is the address chosen here, George Herring, America's Longest War, is a more deeply researched and probingly analytic treatment.

David Hunt
University of Massachusetts at Boston
Boston, Massachusetts
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