Beginning and Ending War: The United States and the Vietnam War

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. ix + 308 pp. Notes and index. $25.00.

Fredrik Logevall. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xxviii + 529 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

Reading these two books, I am again struck by the continuing fascination--for the American public and historians--that the Vietnam War and its era seem to hold. The quantity and quality of publications on this topic appear to far outweigh its importance in American history, yet skilled and imaginative historians continue to find nagging questions about the conflict they want to answer. These two works demonstrate this point well, since both authors are accomplished historians who have asked important questions about the conflict. Both books also assume, probably correctly, an extremely high level of knowledge about the conflict among their readers and provide us with a level of detail about events and participants that it is difficult to imagine in books about other conflicts, arguably as important, such as the Korean War or U.S. involvement in the Middle East after 1945.

At first glance, these two books do not seem good candidates to be reviewed together. Jeffreys-Jones, in Peace Now!, argues that what he calls "outsider" groups, meaning students, African-Americans, women, and labor, initially supported the U.S. effort in Vietnam as a means of gaining acceptance by, implicitly, "insider" groups. Their eventual turn against the war demonstrated that each group had achieved its goal to some degree. He further argues that the opposition of these groups to the U.S. war in Vietnam helped to end that conflict. As this brief description suggests, Jeffreys-Jones rarely lifts his eyes from the U.S. social and political situation to consider international politics. By contrast, Fredrik Logevall, in Choosing War, argues that first President John F. Kennedy and later President Lyndon Johnson ignored opportunities to avoid a deeper commitment to a military solution in South Vietnam during the "long 1964," which lasted from August 1963 to February 1965. Among the greatest strengths of Logevall's impressive study are the attention to attempts by other countries to provide the United States with face-saving ways to escape from its commitment in South Vietnam and to the impact on U.S. decisions of the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. In addition, while Jeffreys-Jones argues passionately that foreign policies can be and were shaped by citizen protests, Logevall finds that Johnson acted largely on his own initiative to commit the United States to war. Logevall pays more attention to domestic context, especially during the election of 1964, than Jeffreys-Jones does to international context, but nonetheless, the approach of the two historians could not, in some ways, be more different.

In the flurry of books published recently on U.S. involvement in Vietnam, these two typify the major trends. Logevall, like scholars such as Mark Bradley and Robert K. Brigham, has conducted research in the national archives of several countries. ¹ Logevall makes a strong claim for the importance of the international context of U.S. decisions. The tendency to focus on "events as perceived in Washington" results in "a skewed picture of the environment in which key decisions were reached, [particularly] the sources and consequences of American officials' decisions, the options they faced, and the choices they did or did not have"(p. xiv). This realization by scholars of the American war in Vietnam that the views and actions of people in other countries also shaped the course of the conflict is welcome, although not completely new. Still, in the past such studies were the admirable exception, while now historians assume that the international context is crucial.

If diplomatic historians have increasingly internationalized their study of the war, social...