A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement, and: A Companion to the Vietnam War (review)

These are fertile times for the study of the Vietnam War. The growing availability of Vietnamese sources permits unprecedented coverage of the war on the "other side." Meanwhile, culturally oriented scholars are asking new questions of U.S. documentary material, highlighting the importance of race, gender, and other aspects of ideology in understanding America's war in Vietnam. For their part, traditional diplomatic and political historians of U.S. foreign policy are using newly declassified American documents to explore the Nixon administration's policy in Vietnam and to reevaluate earlier phases of the war.

Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco's volume of essays, A Companion to the Vietnam War, offers a helpful overview of all these trends. The book's twenty-four chapters, mostly extracts or overviews of book-length studies that have appeared in recent years, display some of the finest recent scholarship dealing with the development of Vietnamese nationalism and especially the course of U.S. policymaking regarding Vietnam from the 1930s through the end of the American war. As the editors promise at the outset, the volume includes well-established scholars as well as rising stars. It also lives up to its promise to provide a solid overview of current thinking on traditional topics—policymaking under Lyndon Johnson or the antiwar movement, for example—while also offering "intelligent and creative new ways to look at the war" (p. xii).

Of the book's more innovative essays, five provide a sample of recent scholarship drawing on Vietnamese sources. Most of them have a tentative, superficial quality, leaving little doubt that far too few Vietnamese sources have become available to make possible bold conclusions about the revolutionary side of the war. Yet the essays suggest that research undertaken by linguistically skilled historians is gradually making possible a multisided narrative of the war. For example, the anthropologist Shaun Malarney illuminates one of the areas of the war that have remained opaque for Western historians—the experience of the North Vietnamese population during the confrontation with the United States. Malarney's study of a North Vietnamese village demonstrates the complicated blend of patriotism and regimentation that maintained Hanoi's war effort in the face of enormous destruction.

Several other essays merit special attention for asking new questions about U.S. decision-making. Most strikingly, Robert Dean's essay shows how notions of manly honor and pervasive fears of appearing weak propelled U.S. policymakers toward war despite the obvious problems of achieving victory.

A lifetime of immersion in masculine competition and a culture celebrating neo-stoic warrior-manhood gave many highly educated, privileged, and powerful men the conviction that "duty" and the protection of both their own power and that of the nation demanded a military defense of imperial boundaries in Vietnam,

asserts Dean in one of the book's most energetically written chapters (p. 380). In another notable essay, Michael E. Latham demonstrates how American social scientists, with their overweening faith in modernization theory, pushed the United States deeper into Vietnam, only to realize the error of their ways in later years as they came to question the close partnership between universities and the government forged during the early years of the Cold War.

As with any edited collection, one can always quibble. Oddly, the book omits any sustained attention to Soviet and Chinese involvement in the war, surely one of the most intriguing fields of research opened up by innovative scholars in recent years. Nor does it include much analysis of the war's legacies in either the United States or Vietnam, another fruitful area of inquiry. Additionally, the book suffers from its inclusion of a handful of essays that, while valuable to specialists, seem excessively narrow in a book intended to reflect...