Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (review)

Mark Moyar has written a big, sprawling, ambitious book. He intends, in two volumes, of which this is the first, to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War. Ideologically he carries out his task from the vantage point of what he calls "the revisionist school which sees the war as a noble but improperly executed enterprise" (p. xi). In the process, he aims to take on, and take down, "the orthodox school, which generally sees America's involvement in the war as wrongheaded and unjust" (p. xi).

As it turns out, Moyar fails to achieve his objective, at least in this volume, because his revisionist hypothesis, as a historical argument, does not satisfactorily explain critical events. His book will please those who believe that the United States government failed South Vietnam—morally, politically, and, indeed, in every way—by allowing President Ngo Dinh Diem to be overthrown and killed in late 1963, thus stopping his successful prosecution of the war against the Viet Cong, and then by refusing to take military steps in 1964 and early 1965 to defeat North Vietnam, which would have obviated the need for the huge, controversial, and divisive American intervention of 1965–73. However, this finger-pointing approach to the past is not that of the historian and objective researcher but of the ideologue and true believer. The historian asks questions of the evidence the past has left and then does his or her best to assemble the evidence into coherent answers; that is, the historian tells what happened, why it happened, and places the event into a larger context.

While the book is generally well written, especially the chapters on 1962–64, Moyar's prose occasionally becomes unfortunately purple. For example, on p. 289, he characterizes the Secretary of State in these terms: "Rusk was now an opinionated waiter rather than a bus boy stocking the buffet." And on p. 352 he states that Nguyen Khanh "did not stand up to the Buddhists but instead yielded to their demands once again, like a man dropping his food in the hope of satiating the beasts."

Moyar's approach is straightforward. He narrates the events of the war chronologically and at each significant point reinterprets the event under review in terms of his revisionist hypothesis as he explains why the orthodox school is wrong. Because the book is so long and covers so many events, a discussion of the argument on one key topic in which Moyar powerfully challenges the "orthodox" view of the war must stand in for the rest.

Generally, historians see Diem as an authoritarian Asian ruler who became, for want of a better word, a tyrant as he solidified his own and his family's hold on the government as well as on the political society of South Vietnam, and as he fought the growing Communist insurgency. Additionally, these historians maintain that as he became a tyrant he also became a less effective ruler, less able to deliver goods and services to the South Vietnamese and, more importantly, to fight the war. Thus, while it is deplorable that South Vietnamese Army conspirators killed Diem when they overthrew his government, the fact that his government was overthrown surprised few.

Moyar fiercely disagrees. In Triumph Forsaken he develops a portrait of the man and the period diametrically opposed to the one just described. Although allowing that Diem was an authoritarian ruler, he sees this as a plus because: (a) South Vietnam was, from the late 1950s on, fighting a war of survival and needed a strong leader; and (b) Asians expected a ruler to be authoritarian. Moreover, he stoutly denies that Diem was or ever became a tyrant. On the contrary, throughout his time in office Diem was an effective ruler and overwhelmingly supported by those in South Vietnam who mattered (the silent majority in the villages, not the Westernized urban intellectuals). More to the point, Diem had in...