Entering and Exiting the Vietnam War: Cowardly Generals and Courageous Soldiers

Perhaps like many readers of this journal, I approach new scholarship on the Vietnam War with a wary and weary sense that the subject poses special obstacles against saying anything fresh and persuasive. Grand arguments usually seem ponderous, unconvincing, or familiar. Novel ones seem narrow or bizarre.

This problem must reflect the subject more than the limits of historians, since the field has drawn a large, diverse, and talented group of scholars. In American history, especially when large matters of public policy and national experience are at issue, scholarship usually mirrors its subject. What do today’s scholars say about the Civil War or the New Deal that does not echo, albeit with changes in perspective and sensibility, contemporaries’ judgments? The difference is that Vietnam lacked the apparent clarity of divisions and outcomes that the Civil War or the New Deal possessed. At least for a long time, historians will be stuck with what they inherited from the Vietnam experience—a history bereft of the linear trajectories (except the obvious one of escalation and deescalation), bipolar divisions (except the mythologized “hawk” versus “dove”), and decisive outcomes that inhered in, or at least easily get imposed retrospectively upon, earlier national crises. The Vietnam War and the Vietnam era were protracted, complicated muddles that generated an enormous outpouring of often intelligent, often ugly public responses—as well as a flood of once-secret documentation by late in the war. Historians can only do so much to impose order and meaning on those muddles. Often, their best work recaptures the conflicted sensibilities of this period rather than neatly sorting them out. Relatively rare has been the opportunity to seize on some dimension of the period that was vital but relatively obscure in public discourse at the time—scholarship on the gendered aspects of the era has found one of the few opportunities.

Addressing two extremes of American war making—top-level policymakers and bottom-level military personnel—these books offer only modest insights into the complexity of the Vietnam era because both focus on aspects of the experience well publicized at the time and both display typical problems of dissertations turned into books. Moser’s account is earnest and informed, but also weakly argued, repetitive, badly edited, and burdened by lengthy quotations from primary sources. Better edited, at least for grammar and syntax, and resting on extensive research, Buzzanco’s account is also excessively detailed and repetitively argued. Neither is an easy or wholly persuasive read.

Buzzanco presents the sorry story of strategic indecision and political buck-passing among military and civilian policymakers in the 1950s and 1960s. His most sustained contribution comes in showing how great were the doubts among military men, from the late 1940s on, about entering combat in Southeast Asia, and in turn how impossible it is to pin American escalation on their enthusiasm for it. Their reservations were indeed striking for their volume, insight, occasional sharpness, and durability over time, and by 1965 they embraced almost every point that critics outside the armed forces would offer in the coming years—the dismaying example of France’s war in Vietnam, the hopelessness of South Vietnam’s government, the skill and appeal of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese cause, the dangers of revolutionary war, the likelihood that intervention would provoke anti-Americanism, the futility and inhumanity of high-tech warfare, and the sheer economic and military burden of waging war in Southeast Asia.

At the same time, Buzzanco shows, these reservations had little impact, and not only because civilian superiors ignored them. Often military criticisms canceled each other out because they were aimed more at rival branches of the armed forces than at the war itself—the Army could...