Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam. by Gregory A. Daddis (review)

A few days after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, John F. Kennedy famously declared that "victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." The implication was obvious: Nobody in Washington was going to claim responsibility for the failed invasion of Cuba. Kennedy ended up becoming the father of the Bay of Pigs, but by his sardonic reference to an "orphan" he made clear that defeat, just as much as victory, also has a hundred fathers.

As far as we know, Kennedy never thought of his other great foreign policy disaster, Vietnam, in patrilineal terms, but this has not stopped historians from doing so. The war in Vietnam is by no means an orphan—there are many who share the blame. The conflict is commonly known as "Lyndon Johnson's war," after Kennedy's successor as president; it has also been called "McNamara's war," after the irrepressible secretary of defense for both Kennedy and Johnson, Robert S. McNamara. Both nicknames are used as accusatory epithets, and both Johnson and McNamara spent a good deal of time afterward trying to salvage their reputations by shifting some of the blame to their contemporaries.

That we now have a book called Westmoreland's War is no surprise. General William C. Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in South Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, is perhaps the only figure who can rival Johnson's and McNamara's notoriety on Vietnam. Westmoreland was a figure of hate for many in the United States even before he departed Saigon in 1968, and historians, orthodox and revisionist alike, have piled their derision on ever since. The most common charge is that Westmoreland had little appreciation for the different type of war he faced in Vietnam. As a result, his strategy was based on methods better suited for conventional warfare in Europe, such as the kind he experienced in World War II. The deployment of indiscriminate firepower in Vietnam did little to defeat a guerrilla insurgency but did a great deal to antagonize civilians. Historians allege that in this new type of warfare, more political than territorial, Westmoreland was completely out of his depth. He has thus been blamed for orchestrating a poor military campaign that resulted in the worst-ever U.S. humiliation overseas (until Iraq). Even worse, his strategy of "search-and-destroy," based on the presumption that the United States could win a war of attrition, is said to have caused unnecessary civilian suffering. His most recent biographer, Lewis Sorley, has criticized Westmoreland for losing a war that could have been won. The subtitle of Sorley's biography perhaps best sums up the historiographical consensus: Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (2011). According to Sorley's argument in a previous book, A Better War (1999), the U.S. military turned its campaign around after Westmoreland's departure and was actually in the process of winning the war.

One would therefore expect a book titled Westmoreland's War to be another attack on Westmoreland's record. However, thanks to Gregory Daddis, we instead have something altogether more subtle, original, and important. To be sure, Daddis is not a Westmoreland apologist. His purpose is not to portray the general as a misunderstood genius; nor is it to argue that Westmoreland was right all along. Instead, Daddis seeks to understand the general, to situate him within his proper context, and above all to evaluate the difficulties he faced not only in Saigon but in Washington as well. The result is the best historical analysis of U.S. military strategy in Vietnam for quite some time.

In reassessing Westmoreland's reputation, Daddis is particularly adept at reaching back to Westmoreland's career before he went to Vietnam. The war naturally overshadows everything Westmoreland did before it—the same is true of most of the Vietnam policymakers—but Daddis is careful to avoid this pitfall. Westmoreland throughout his career, ranging from the Korean War to...