Quick Take: A Revisionist Look at the Vietnam War

Revisionism can be extremely illuminating, in small doses

On April 30, 1975, the last American helicopter took off from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. It was a historical moment: after two decades of military support and a decade of military operations on the ground leaving 58,000 American and perhaps two million Vietnamese dead, Vietnam was reunited.

A cynic could describe the Vietnam War as a grand fireworks display with massive death and destruction causing no major international impact, even after the fall of the pro-Western regime in the South: instead of two Vietnams, there is now only one that, like China, calls itself Communist without actually being so. Really bad things happened in tiny Laos and Cambodia, things that might or might not have happened in the absence of American intervention in Indochina. The dreaded “domino effect” that would lead pro-American regimes to crumble in places like Thailand and Burma never happened.

This assessment would imply that the Vietnam War, while more costly for the US and its allies, was not so different from the two decades of occupation of Afghanistan, ending with the Taliban back in power in 2021.

Vietnam could thus be described as the first great American imperial war. In Korea in 1950-1953, the US was only the main part of a UN force empowered by a Security Council resolution to expel North Korean Communists from South Korean territory; by the time the Vietnam conflict reached the hallowed halls of the UN, the Soviet Union did not fall into the trap again and made sure that there was no resolution against its allies — so the US intervened, not as an international champion, but as an interested party in the conflict, allied with the South Vietnamese government.

That the Vietnam adventure was a whim from the start, an unneeded quagmire, a self-inflicted wound, has become a sort of consensus or near-consensus view, as illustrated in recent, hugely popular documentaries about the war like Ken Burns’. In 2006, Mark Moyar pushed back against this view hard, and fairly successfully, with his book “Triumph Forsaken, The Vietnam War 1954-1965.”

An excellent overview of the choices available for American policymakers, and the decisions made at the time, Moyar’s book argues that an American intervention in Vietnam was essentially unavoidable given Cold War conditions, since the US couldn’t let an ally be overwhelmed by Communist insurgents without at least making a visible effort to defend it.

Moyar has a great eye for telling details and scenes. He describes how the Viet Cong guerrillas banned all talk of collectivization to not alienate local peasants, their biggest source of support in the South, and how the John F. Kennedy administration lost control of Laos — a landlocked neighbor of both Vietnams that could have served as a barrier to Communist infiltration southwards — even before it took office, because Dwight D. Eisenhower preferred not to act there during his “lame duck” period in his last few weeks in office. Gentlemanly restraint is no recipe for imperial success.

Despite the later penchant of JFK’s fans to tell the world that he would have never countenanced military escalation in Vietnam, Kennedy called South Vietnam "the finger in the dike" in 1956 (p. 120). Support for the South during his administration was so significant and blatant that Moyar describes (p. 146) a moment in 1961 when — just as JFK is telling everybody in DC that he’s keeping the South at arm’s length — a huge American aircraft carrier docked in Saigon to unload military material, in full view of a party of journalists and officials then having drinks.

"Is that a carrier?" one of the journalists asked.

"No comment," was the reply from an embassy official.

Moyar notes (p. 184) that, after Averell Harriman (then undersecretary of State for the Far East) secured a “neutralization” deal that surrendered Laos to Communist control in 1962, the Ho Chi Minh trail sneaking through Laos and Cambodia to supply Communists in the South received a new nickname from US critics: "the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway."

Throughout the book, Moyar is most incensed by two facts he amply documents: one, that American journalists in Saigon were, on the whole, opposed to US involvement in the war and reliant on sources who often were Communist agents; and two, that the JFK administration committed the biggest blunder of the war when it blessed a CIA-inspired military coup against Southern strongman Ngo Dinh Diem that ended with Diem’s death in 1963, causing endless chaos in the Southern administration and army.

Despite these difficulties, Moyar actually has a recipe for how the US should have won the Vietnam War, that he took from a Soviet cable by Anatoly Danilov, an official at the Soviet embassy in London, in conversation with an American diplomat (p. 360):

The US "should increase its force by five divisions in Vietnam, seal off the 17th parallel, cut off the Viet Cong from their northern logistics, then ignore the North and wait for the Viet Cong to come to terms because they're 'starved' of Northern support."

Given these priors, it’s not surprising that Moyar ends up with the conclusion (p. 416, in the last sentence of the book) that “the war in Vietnam... was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints."

Mind you, that year of 2006 when Moyar’s book was published was perhaps the peak of neocon influence on American policymaking, with Dick Cheney as Vice (President) and the “Sons of Iraq” (Sunni Muslims armed by the US to patrol the countryside) providing a glimpse of hope that American occupation there wouldn’t be a complete disaster. Talk about lucky timing.

The Sons of Iraq of course went on to be the seed from which the Islamic State later emerged, but by that time Moyar’s whole public persona had become that of the guy who thought Vietnam — and perhaps every other war — was winnable if the right steps are taken. I don’t get the impression that his follow-up to “Triumph Forsaken” (“Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968”) had anything like the impact of the first book and Moyar, who secured an appointment with the first Trump administration, appears to have been left out of the second.

It’s not impossible that, shortly before his assassination, Kennedy could have contemplated a total withdrawal from Vietnam, as many have claimed; in any case, with the presidency in the hands of a guy with a low profile among the general public, Lyndon Johnson, the easiest thing for the new president was to follow policy inertia: thus, the year of 1965 when he actually won a presidential mandate from voters was the year when the US sent ground troops to Vietnam, to avoid the South’s collapse.

Moyar’s “Triumph Regained” (which I haven’t finished yet) is a full-throated defense of the idea that Johnson’s enforcement of earlier “foolish constraints” to the use of American ground and air power led to disaster.

As Moyar sees it, the much-maligned William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968, was a fine general who fought to the best of his ability within the parameters forced upon him. Westmoreland, later infamous for his “body count” targets on American troops roaming the Southern countryside while shooting at people and burning stuff, should have been given leeway to shoot at people and burn stuff all over Indochina instead of just Southern Vietnam, and was thus a misunderstood figure, Moyar claims.

Such an assessment puts Moyar squarely in conflict with Lewis Sorley, author of my second favorite revisionist book about Vietnam, “A Better War.” Published in 1999, when China and Russia were dirt poor and the US was such a hyperpower that not even the War on Terror was on the horizon, A Better War does a great job of explaining just how much “Body Count” Westmoreland sucked as a soldier and as a human being.

Admittedly, Sorley was greatly incentivized to attack Westmoreland, because his book focuses closely on his successor as US commander, Creighton Abrams — to the point that the whole thesis of the book could be summarized as “Westmoreland Bad, Abrams Good.”

I wouldn’t endorse that simplified summary, though. A Better War is a great look at a period, that between 1968 and the final US withdrawal in 1975, that few people wanted to look at. The war in Vietnam had been hotly debated and was a burning issue in 1965-1967. In early 1968, it become a regrettable subject to be avoided after the Tet Offensive, a spectacular general attack by the communist Vietcong, supported by troops from the North, all over the South.

The offensive was a military defeat for the Communists (they lost tens of thousands of their best men) but it also was a propaganda victory, since it made a mockery of Johnson's and Westmoreland’s announcements that the war was practically won.

The following months were just as disastrous for the US, with heightened military activity across the South leading to May 1968 becoming the deadliest month for the American troops in the country for the whole war. The US, meanwhile, was in the midst of the whole chaos and assassination (Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, etc. ) era that characterized the late 1960s.

It’s no coincidence that Abrams was appointed in June 1968 to replace Westmoreland and clean up the mess. Unlike his predecessor, Abrams could expect no endless troop and supply increases, but understood immediately that his work was to wind down the American commitment, help the South stand on its own and wait for developments.

Sorley’s greatest claim to revisionism is in that he makes a decent case that Abrams and the people around him were so good that they might have just pulled it off, and won the Vietnam War altogether — meaning that South Vietnam would have survived as an independent state — if only a couple of things had gone their way: like, for example, the American Congress that in 1975 decided to shut down aid to Saigon for good. But everyone in the US was sick and tired of the whole thing by then, and there was nothing that Abrams could have done to change that.

It’s worth reflecting on the parallels between the last US election and that of 1968. Donald Trump ran on a platform of making peace with Russia, placing him squarely against his Democrat opposition and practically the whole Blob (the DC foreign policy establishment). In 1968, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, like the Blob, were basically in agreement that the US had to leave Vietnam and lower the Cold War’s temperature — in fact, it was Nixon, the relative hawk of the two, who won on the later popular slogan “peace with honor.”¹

This was a shit detail for Abrams, and everybody knew it. The title of Sorley’s book derives from a comment made by Robert Shaplen, a “New Yorker” correspondent in Vietnam, who is quoted as saying:

You know, it’s too bad. Abrams is very good.

He deserves a better war.

Like Moyar, Sorley has plenty of illuminating details about a relatively obscure phase of the war. My favorite is his story about a morality campaign conducted by American officers in the An Khe Base in South Vietnam, targeting a whorehouse with the suggestive name of “The million magic fingers massage parlour, laundry and tank wash”.

After a complaint on moral grounds, the establishment’s name was duly changed to: “No more whorehouse, only laundry.” Which to me has an aura of practicality that should define those years and Abrams’ tenure as supreme commander.

It’s been fifty years since Vietnam and, funnily enough, the period discussed by Sorley came up recently in the news, when former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, compared that war with the one in the Ukraine. Bannon reminded Trump of how Nixon, by spending years of negotiations to achieve his Peace with Honor instead of finishing the whole thing outright, ended up adding 20,000 American dead to the final tally (between 1969 and 1975) and being blamed by many for the whole sorry mess. This anniversary is a great excuse to reflect on the comment.

1. Nixon actually didn’t utter those words until years later. In 1968, he spoke of “honorable end” to the war.