The New International History of the Wars for Vietnam

Twenty years ago, the historian Gary Hess wrote a review essay on the literature of the Vietnam War titled “The Unending Debate.” In this essay, he focused on the much-discussed divide between “orthodox” (antiwar) and “revisionist” (pro-war) perspectives on Vietnam, before concluding that “with the opening of more documents and the coming of more reflective scholarship . . . eventually a fuller synthesis will emerge.”¹ We have reached that moment with the publication of these three important books by Fredrik Logevall, Edward Miller, and Jessica M. Chapman (along with other recent offerings by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen [Hanoi’s War, 2012], Heather Marie Stur [Beyond Combat, 2011], and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu [Radicals on the Road, 2013], as well as slightly older studies by Mark Bradley [Imagining Vietnam and America, 2000], Robert K. Brigham [Guerilla Diplomacy, 1999], and Mark Atwood Lawrence [Assuming the Burden, 2005]). It is time to retire the reductionist pigeonholing—never a good idea—of orthodox and revisionist historians and to focus instead on a mature literature that treats the Vietnam wars on their own terms and locates them within their full international context.

One of the first things that an international perspective allows us to appreciate is that there was no such thing as “the Vietnam War.” There were, in fact, many wars for control of Vietnam: certainly the Viet Minh contest first with France and then later with the United States, but also the Viet Minh struggle against the anticommunist South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem and various politico-religious groups in the South, to say nothing of Diem’s own battles against those groups for control of the South. These books make it clear that we should probably stop referring to “the Vietnam War,” substituting instead “the wars for Vietnam.” U.S. historians searching for a better title for their lectures might use “the American War in Vietnam,” which is how the Vietnamese describe the period of U.S. involvement.

Although each of these three books makes a significant contribution to the new international history of the wars for Vietnam, they do so in very different ways. Logevall gives us a masterful synthesis of the transition from French dominance to American involvement in Southeast Asia—a synthesis based partly on archival sources but largely on secondary sources—while Miller and Chapman have written monographs focused on South Vietnam during the Diem years. Both models are impressive in their own way. As many readers surely know, Logevall has already won the Pultizer Prize for his volume; I suspect Miller and Chapman will probably win prizes as well.

In Embers of War, Logevall attempts to give a 360-degree view of the conflicts in Vietnam—the first “full-fledged international account” (p. xv) of how we got from World War I to 1965, the moment of a full-scale U.S. military intervention. He focuses at various points on the Russians, Chinese, British, French, Americans, and of course the Vietnamese—although the Western powers get the bulk of the attention since Logevall bases his account on a huge secondary literature in English and French, as well as archival sources from Great Britain, the United States, and (to a lesser extent) France. It should also be noted that the vast majority of the text addresses the period from 1945 to 1954, covering the French effort to reassert control over Indochina after World War II up to their decision to abandon this project. The period from World War I to 1945 gets...