The Search for Peace in Vietnam 1964–1968 (review)

The Vietnam War was a tragedy of epic proportions for both the United States and the two Vietnams, but was it a tragedy rooted in missed opportunities for peace and a negotiated settlement? The former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara has advanced the argument in recent years that the Vietnam War was a tragedy for precisely that reason, but this excellent collection of essays definitively refutes this common misconception about the war. Although the Johnson administration and the North Vietnamese regime might have done many things to improve the prospects for peace, not a single essay in this volume provides strong support for the idea that the 1964–1968 period was filled with missed opportunities for peace. Both the United States and North Vietnam consistently advanced peace terms that amounted to little more than capitulation for the other side. A few countries worked hard to advance the diplomatic process of negotiations from 1964 to 1968, but they received very little support from the two combatants. The major Communist powers also did little to bring about a quick end to the Vietnam War. As Ilya Gaiduk shows, the Soviet Union supported the efforts of other states to get negotiations started but was generally unwilling to play a leading role in bringing the two sides to the table. The Chinese stance on the war, as Qiang Zhai demonstrates, was completely antithetical to the achievement of a negotiated settlement. A protracted conflict in Vietnam was exactly what Mao Zedong wanted, and he did his best to ensure that efforts by the French to resolve the conflict would fail.

Like many edited volumes, The Search for Peace in Vietnam would have benefited from more dialogue and debate between the contributors. For example, Edwin Moise's fine essay on the illusion of a diplomatic settlement to the Vietnam War shows quite persuasively that "there had never been any possibility—and please note that I am saying absolutely no possibility whatsoever—of a genuine compromise settlement. And where no genuine compromise is possible, diplomacy is very difficult" (p. 73). Implicitly or explicitly, some of the contributors to the volume would take issue with the emphatic nature of Moise's conclusion. A wealth of archival material on the various peace initiatives and backchannel negotiations during the Vietnam War is available, but a few essays in The Search for Peace in Vietnam tend to focus on the documents without ever really addressing the actual importance of these diplomatic efforts. This volume is indeed the most comprehensive source on peace efforts during the height of the Vietnam War, but many readers will come away with the feeling that they know a great deal about initiatives that may never have been all that important. An essay that took explicit issue with Moise's persuasive dismissal of these efforts would have improved the structure of the book.

The Search for Peace in Vietnam is fairly comprehensive in its scope, but, like too much other recent scholarship on the Vietnam War, it focuses excessively on peripheral actors and insufficiently on truly important actors. Was France really such an important actor in the Vietnam conflict from 1964 to 1968 that we need three chapters detailing its role? Is South Vietnam's perspective on issues of peace negotiations and diplomacy so unimportant that it does not merit even a single essay in this volume? One could easily reach that conclusion by looking at what subjects the editors chose to include and exclude. John Prados contributes a fine essay on Nguyen Van Thieu's diplomacy after 1968, but no essays examine how South Vietnam thought about these issues during the height of the conflict. It is indeed important for historians of the Vietnam War to examine the conflict from an international perspective, but it is still regrettable that this focus tends to put more weight on relatively peripheral European actors and even less on the South Vietnamese regime.

Because many of the contributors deal...