During its long and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to maintain an independent and non-communist South Vietnam, the United States spent in excess of $200 billion and lost 58,000 of its own citizens. The cost for the Vietnamese was far greater, in blood if not treasure, with more than a million dead. Commentators, veterans, and former policy-makers have since spilled much ink seeking to explain and analyse the causes of America's involvement in the Second Indo-Chinese War and the reasons for her eventual defeat. Three decades after the war's end, historians seem as far away as ever from achieving a consensus on many of the major questions raised by the conflict. Was America's cause in Southeast Asia a righteous one? Was the decision to wage war a tragic mistake or the product of a bloated, imperial presidency? Did Ho Chi Minh and the NLF represent the forces of anti-colonial nationalism or international communism? Should the blame for America's defeat be placed at the feet of her civilian or military leaders? For that matter, did the US snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Many of these issues, revisited in the works reviewed below, retain the power to generate fierce and intense debate; indeed those with only a passing interest in Vietnam War scholarship can hardly have failed to notice the recent war of words surrounding the publication of Mark Moyar's Triumph forsaken.

For those seeking to explore the reasons for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's ultimate triumph, Marc Gilbert's edited collection is a good place to begin. Why the north won the Vietnam War explores the diplomatic, political, military, economic, and social factors that contributed to the American defeat. Gilbert's introduction, which clearly sets out the broad historiographical terrain, is followed by essays that examine the DRV's foreign policy, America's diplomatic failures, the influence of the South Vietnamese communists, the weaknesses of America's military performance, the ‘intelligence war’ waged by both sides, the flaws in America's attempts at nation-building, the role of economics, and the importance of the peace movement. The volume is wrapped up with a succinct conclusion written by Rutgers University's Lloyd Gardner.

All the essays are interesting and informative. William Duiker draws attention to the masterful way in which the DRV waged the diplomatic war, manipulating the international environment to its own advantage. Not only was Hanoi able to navigate the increasingly bitter dispute between its two major allies – the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China – but it was also able to counter a worldwide diplomatic offensive by the United States, eventually winning an important measure of international sympathy and support. The diplomatic success of the North Vietnamese contrasts with the performance of the US. For George Herring, ‘America's failure in Vietnam was as much diplomatic as military’ (p. 77). Herring reveals that America's allies wondered whether ‘the stakes were really as high as the United States claimed, whether its credibility was in fact on the line’ (p. 79). While her Pacific allies did offer some military support, this was often driven by strong self-interest – and they often secured significant increases in aid and other concessions, including security guarantees, for their trouble. Within western Europe, rising anti-war protests from the street and the concern expressed, often in private, by political leaders ultimately pressurized President Lyndon Johnson to undertake bombing pauses and respond to dubious ‘peace-feelers’ that undermined the American war effort.

Robert Brigham emphasizes the critical role played by South Vietnamese communists. He explores both Southern influence over decision-making in Hanoi, and the South's own military contribution to the communist victory. Brigham pays particular attention to Le Duan and General Nguyen Chi Tanh, Southerners who argued successfully for taking the fight to South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and adopting ‘big-unit’ warfare to engage the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) aggressively and destroy its fighting capabilities. America's own military performance in Vietnam has long been contested, with some blaming civilian leaders for forcing the army to fight with one hand tied behind its back. Jeffrey Record acknowledges the civilian limitations that were imposed on the use of force by Washington's political leadership, but argues trenchantly that US military performance within these limitations was nevertheless ‘defective’ (p. 117). As well as lacking a coherent military strategy, Record also highlights inter-service rivalries, weak leadership from the joint chiefs of staff, poor ground strategy (which included an emphasis on attrition and a policy of rotating personnel quickly), and mistaken confidence in air power. Record states that, whether or not politicians back home were ‘stabbing the military in the back’, ‘fairness demands recognizing that the military … was shooting itself in the foot’ (p. 117). Although arguing that US military performance ‘aided and abetted’ (p. 119) the North's victory, Record argues that an improved performance would have increased the price of Hanoi's victory, not prevented defeat. As he points out, the ‘primary cause of the North's victory … was Hanoi's superior political will and commitment to total war against a United States whose interests in Indochina, and therefore political will, were, by contrast, limited’ (p. 133).

Essays by John Prados and Marc Gilbert explore the comparative intelligence operations of the DRV and the United States/South Vietnam, and America's ultimately flawed efforts at nation-building in the South. One of Gilbert's arguments is that the Americanization of the war in 1965 weakened South Vietnam. This is taken up by Andrew Rotter who shows how the large amount of American aid supplied to the South actually proved ruinous for attempts to create a stable, popular, and legitimate government there. American aid distorted the economy, often disastrously, not least by inflating wages and encouraging corruption. On one infamous occasion Saigon's sanitation system failed when workers abandoned their jobs there for higher-paid work on US military bases (p. 203). In the North, by contrast, there was a clear unity of purpose in both economic and military spheres, as the country embarked on a strategy of ‘total war’. Rotter's insightful and original essay demonstrates clearly the importance of economics to the war's eventual outcome.

The final interpretative essay, by Marilyn Blatt Young, explores the role played by the anti-war movement. As she points out, it is in the political interests of both the US left and right to accord it a critical role. For the left it demonstrates their effectiveness and importance, while for conservatives it preserves the notion of an invincible military that can only be defeated when betrayed at home. Young emphasizes the diversity of the anti-war movement – both in terms of its participants (young, old, left, liberal, religious, secular, countercultural, middle class, radical) and its activities (which included marches and demonstrations, vigils, draft resistance, local referenda, and teach-ins). Concluding that the peace movement ‘increased the price to the government of continued prosecution of the war’ (p. 222), Young is also at pains to point out that it would be ‘an act of supreme arrogance to imagine that without the antiwar movement, the Vietnamese would have fought less hard or less long’ (p. 225).

Given the title of the volume, one might have expected that rather more of the essays would focus specifically on the role of the Vietnamese in securing their own victory. In recent years writers such as Odd Arne Westad, Qiang Zhai, and Robert S. McNamara have sought to bring an international perspective to bear on Cold War scholarship, thereby broadening our conception and understanding of key events and conflicts. Despite the welcome contributions of William Duiker, Robert Brigham (who themselves have done much to demonstrate the benefits of moving away from Amerocentric approaches), and George Herring in particular, much of the material in this collection has a US focus. Nevertheless this is a tidy volume containing well-written, perceptive, and useful essays that should prove invaluable to scholars and students alike. Many of the questions that it raises – the effectiveness of America's military performance, the battle for ‘hearts and minds’, attempts to secure international support, and the nature and importance of domestic opposition to the war, are addressed in more detail in the other books reviewed below.

Like rolling thunder is a detailed and thorough overview of America's controversial air war in Southeast Asia. As Ronald B. Frankum, Jr, points out, ‘aircraft played a pivotal and unprecedented role in the Vietnam War’ and the use of air power ‘helped to shape the U.S. military and political strategy and tactics in Southeast Asia’ (p. xvii). Vietnam demonstrated both the advantages of aircraft and the limitations of air power. While there were remarkable achievements in terms of reconnaissance, search-and-destroy, tactical airlift, and medical evacuations, the overall effectiveness of the air war remains a matter of fierce debate. Frankum's argument is that, while successful in military terms, the air war failed to achieve the political goals that were necessary for an American victory. In part this was due to the flexibility and resourcefulness of the enemy, who re-calibrated their tactics where necessary and proved extremely adaptable. On 11 April 1966, for example, the important Mu Gia Pass in North Vietnam was attacked by thirty B-52s. 585 tons of bombs were dropped to devastating effect but, the next day, reconnaissance reported that ‘the craters from the 750- and 1,000-pound bombs had been filled in by the North Vietnamese, and trucks had already begun to run on the bombed roads’ (p. 47).

Challenging geography and topography, poor weather, a lack of sufficient air assets, and problems with the co-ordination of both military intelligence and the overall command structures helped to limit the effectiveness of the American air war. But more important were the civilian restraints under which the military were required to operate. Lyndon Johnson's support for limited war – demonstrating American resolve while leaving the DRV with options to negotiate – proved misplaced. The leadership in Hanoi interpreted the gradual escalation of bombing, combined with bombing pauses and peace overtures, as a sign of division and weakness in their enemy. There were other good political reasons behind some of the limitations, particularly the decision to restrict bombing to within twenty miles of the Chinese border and around Hanoi and Haiphong. As Frankum explains, the US ‘was not willing to risk an international incident that might precipitate overt Soviet or Chinese involvement in the war’ (p. 47).

The Americans also faced difficulties in training the South Vietnamese air force. Corruption, smuggling, and inefficiency made the process frustrating. On occasion it could be bizarre. Frankum cites one instance when a T-28 aircraft was declared ‘Not Operationally Ready’ because its Vietnamese crew believed it to be possessed by evil spirits. The United States Air Force paid $7.62 for an exorcism (the price included the ‘cost of candles and herbs for the ceremony and Salem cigarettes, toothpaste, and soap for the monks’) (p. 122).

The use of air power was extremely important to the American war effort – not least in allowing allied troops to ‘traverse the countryside and take the fight to the Viet Cong’ and in acting as a ‘powerful and reassuring ally’ (p. 108). In May 1972 the use of air power (Operation Linebacker) proved decisive in turning back the DRV's invasion of the South in the so-called Eastertide Offensive. In late December 1972, with the Paris peace negotiations apparently stalled, Operation Linebacker II (the so-called Christmas bombings) involved 2,700 sorties against major targets, notably in and around Hanoi and Haiphong. Henry Kissinger later claimed that this operation had broken the deadlock and made the Paris Peace Accords possible. Others have since argued that if such air power had been used earlier it could have secured an American victory. But as Frankum points out, this ignores the fact that by 1972 détente and the opening to China had altered dramatically the broader political context in which American military policy was shaped and, in the case of Linebacker II, that the show of massive force was designed as much to reassure the South Vietnamese government as it was to ‘break the will’ of Hanoi.

In concluding, Frankum declares that ‘[a]ssessing whether the air war over Southeast Asia was a success or failure is an invitation to a never-ending debate’ (p. 167). Dropping more ordnance than was used in the Second World War, extending the bombing to Laos and Cambodia and using more than 19 million gallons of herbicides (p. 90) on the Vietnamese countryside failed to avert defeat. Ultimately, ‘Washington officials failed to appreciate the perspective of North Vietnam’ and understand that ‘the bombings did not deter its people's focus – they only strengthened it’ (p. 168). Frankum is more positive when it comes to the technological advances that were spurred by the war. He also argues that a more sophisticated and intelligent recognition of ‘how and when to use American aircraft in combat, based upon the Vietnam experience, was one of the greatest legacies of the lessons learned’ (p. 170).

In her search for international support for the effort to maintain an independent, non-communist South Vietnam the United Kingdom, given both the ‘special relationship’ and her own interests and expertise in South Asia, was an obvious potential ally. In All the way with JFK? Peter Busch offers an in-depth analysis of Britain's Vietnam policy during the presidency of John Kennedy – a time which saw America's military commitment to South Vietnam increase significantly.

Based on detailed archival research, Busch explores four key episodes: Britain's policies as a member of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); her co-chairmanship of the 1954 Geneva Conference; Britain's involvement in the counterinsurgency effort through the British Advisory Mission (BRIAM); and Whitehall's attitude toward the regime of South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem. He presents a story in which Britain ‘ruled out a negotiated settlement’, ‘increased its involvement by sending counter-insurgency experts to Saigon’, and was generally supportive of Kennedy's policy of escalation (p. 6). Adopting the role of loyal Cold War ally Britain ‘did nothing to steer Washington away from the path that led to the Vietnam quagmire’ (p. 206).

As co-chair of the Geneva Conference that ended French rule in Vietnam in 1954, one might have expected Britain to seek to uphold the cease-fire agreement and caution America against intervention. However, Busch argues that between 1961 and 1963 Britain was not interested in making the Geneva agreements work. Instead, she sought to interpret the cease-fire agreement ‘in such a way that the American military intervention [in the Republic of Vietnam] could be justified’. The UK also privately advised the Americans to conceal her military build-up and tried to ensure that the International Commission for Supervision and Control would blame the collapse of the cease-fire on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (p. 63).

As the situation in South Vietnam deteriorated, Britain offered the United States the benefit of her own experience of fighting communist insurgents in Malaya. Struggling to overcome significant reservations from within the American military, the UK worked hard to persuade the United States to agree to BRIAM. From its inception BRIAM, led by Malayan counterinsurgency expert Robert Thompson, was designed not simply to offer useful advice to the Americans – it was also seen a means of improving the ‘special relationship’, increasing British knowledge of, and influence over, American policy in Vietnam, and demonstrating Britain's willingness and ability to defend her wider interests in Asia. Primarily a political asset, the high regard in which Thompson was held in the Kennedy White House and his privileged relationship with Diem made BRIAM a success in the eyes of Harold Macmillan's government. Moreover, BRIAM sent out a clear message to Britain's regional allies, especially Australia and New Zealand, that Britain cared about Southeast Asia and was prepared to take action.

Robert Thompson has often been given the credit for South Vietnam's strategic hamlet programme. However, Busch shows that this was a Vietnamese initiative, though Thompson did have an impact on the programme's development – not least in popularizing the concept and making it more acceptable to the Americans. While Thompson was well aware of the programme's weaknesses (Diem adopted a nationwide approach rather than concentrating on areas of strategic importance, and there were problems with corruption and a lack of civil–military co-ordination) he ‘tried to influence the strategic hamlet programme as best he could’ (pp. 132–3).

Thompson was a colourful character – his distinguished background in the Colonial Service was augmented by his love of horses, tennis, golf, and whisky. In the spring of 1963 he was optimistic about the prospects for victory against the communist insurgency. The British embassy in Saigon was more cautious – while it viewed BRIAM as a political success, it was keenly aware of the weaknesses of the Diem administration. At times, Thompson comes across as little more than a charming and effective salesman; indeed his judgement seems questionable. In late September 1963, for instance, Thompson had thought a coup against Diem unlikely and proceeded with plans to travel to New Zealand to go fishing and play golf. A keen supporter of Diem, Thompson opposed those pushing for a coup in the aftermath of the ‘Buddhist crisis’ that erupted in May. Yet Thompson retained his sunny confidence after Diem was overthrown, commenting ‘this augurs well for the future’ (p. 168). The coup, of course, proved disastrous. It also marked a turning point in British policy. The creation of Malaysia and its defence against an increasingly hostile Indonesia quickly became Britain's chief focus in the region, while the post-coup chaos made it more difficult for BRIAM to function effectively.

At times, Britain comes across as something of a lackey – wanting to be seen as a good ally and prepared to follow the American lead, but ultimately reluctant to become embroiled in a military conflict. Indeed, Britain used its involvement in Malaysia as a way of supporting America's broad policy of containment while simultaneously avoiding sending troops to South Vietnam. Busch shows clearly how wider political concerns shaped Britain's Vietnam policy – particularly the desire to maintain ‘great power’ status and to solidify the special relationship with the United States. Indeed, Busch concludes that ‘it can hardly be overemphasized how fundamental maintaining or even improving Anglo-American relations was to British deliberations on Vietnam’ (p. 201). It is hard to read Busch's conclusions and not think of more recent events. At a time when historians are only just beginning to analyse Tony Blair's support for George W. Bush's war with Iraq, All the way with JFK raises pertinent and troubling questions about the consequences of Great Britain's desire to maintain a ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

As Andrew Preston demonstrates in The war council, one cannot understand properly the origins of America's war in Vietnam without taking into account the role of McGeorge Bundy, who served as the special assistant for national security affairs between 1961 and 1966. Tough, pragmatic and fiercely intelligent, Bundy was a man who, in the words of his friend Isaiah Berlin, ‘clearly [did] not mind walking on corpses’ (p. 51). A protégé of American statesman Henry L. Stimson and former dean of Harvard University, Bundy transformed the role of what became known later as the national security adviser and was a key shaper of America's policy in Vietnam.

Created in 1947, the National Security Council (NSC) was conceived as an advisory body with the special assistant serving as an administrator, but under John Kennedy it was streamlined and evolved into a ‘Little State Department’ (p. 7). While these administrative changes were driven by the president, Bundy did much to remodel the role of special assistant – becoming a shaper of, and contributor to, foreign policy. Bundy's NSC was a well-organized unit whose key members enjoyed close relationships with the president, and it often out-manoeuvred the more unwieldy Departments of State and Defense and functioned as a ‘separate center for the making of American foreign policy’ (p. 43). The influence of the NSC, and Bundy in particular, was augmented further by Kennedy's informal, sofa-style of government and then by Lyndon Johnson's preference for concentrating key foreign policy deliberations at the highest levels.

Bundy's world-view was based on three tenets: the indispensability of military power to diplomacy; the futility of appeasement; and a sincere but ‘fervent, sometimes pragmatic, anticommunism’ (p. 25). For the entirety of his involvement with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and indeed beyond, Bundy remained convinced that ‘stemming the communist advance in Vietnam was integral to U.S. national security’ (p. 235). In his own words, he believed that America's decision to wage war in Vietnam was ‘both right and brave’ (p. 234).

According to Preston, January 1961 to March 1965 was a ‘highly fluid’ period in which ‘decisions on Vietnam could have favored withdrawal as easily as they did intervention’. However, holding the bureaucratic balance of power at key moments, Bundy and his staff were able to make decisive interventions and shape the terms of the debate in ways which led to the Americanization of the war. They ‘moved quickly and effectively to squash dissent and limit the president's choice of action to a very narrow one of how and when, rather than whether, the United States should wage war in Vietnam’. In other words, the ‘war itself … was largely dependent upon their actions’ (pp. 6–7).

One of the key turning points in America's road to war was the overthrow of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. As well as detailing the critical role played by the NSC's Michael Forrestal in setting in motion the forces that would result in the November 1963 coup, Preston also emphasizes that, by late August 1963, Bundy too played a decisive role in tipping the weight of opinion within the Kennedy administration against Diem. Then, as the situation deteriorated precipitously in the aftermath of the coup, Bundy was ‘in the vanguard of ensuring that the Johnson administration did not waver in its commitment to South Vietnam’ (p. 132).

Indeed after the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf crisis Bundy's role changed from adviser to advocate. Certain that the US needed to do much more militarily to avoid defeat, but not sure that LBJ shared this view, Bundy ‘began his own campaign to convince the President of the need for military escalation’ (p. 157). In January 1965 Bundy wrote the so-called ‘fork-in-the-road’ memo on behalf of himself and secretary of defense Robert McNamara informing the president that ‘our current policy can lead only to disastrous defeat’ (p. 165). LBJ was presented with two choices – deploy American military power to ‘force a change of Communist policy’, or negotiate in order to ‘salvage what little can be preserved’ (p. 166). The following month Bundy made his first, highly eventful, trip to Vietnam. On 7 February the NLF attacked a US air base at Pleiku, killing eight Americans. Visiting the base later that day, Bundy was shocked by the destruction that he witnessed. General William C. Westmoreland quipped that once ‘Bundy smelled a little gunpowder he developed a field marshal psychosis’ (p. 175) while LBJ lapped up stories of his special assistant losing his cool. On the plane home, Bundy wrote another memo for the president, in which he advocated the policy of sustained reprisal against the DRV – a policy which was adopted later that month. Preston reveals Bundy's key role in pushing this policy forward, despite opposition from the State Department, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, and even from two members of his own NSC, Chester Cooper and James Thomson.

When sustained reprisal, in the form of operation Rolling thunder, failed either to coerce Hanoi or to stabilize Saigon, Bundy was perturbed. Unsure about his own advice and disturbed by the vocal opposition to the bombing from the campuses of some of America's most prestigious universities, Bundy began to explore prospects for a negotiated settlement (on American terms: the non-communist status of South Vietnam was sine qua non) and re-emphasized the importance of non-military measures to improve the South. But, as Preston shows, Bundy was no closet dove: he saw the choice facing America as either massive escalation or limited escalation. In the spring and summer of 1965 Bundy put aside his doubts about the efficacy of American military power to support further escalation – this time in the form of US ground troops. Indeed, by the time he left the administration in February 1966 to become president of the Ford Foundation, he was quite optimistic about the war effort. While he advocated disengagement in the aftermath of the Tet offensive, Bundy never rejected the ‘underlying rationale and justness’ of the war; he simply accepted that the policy had failed and that therefore America should quit (p. 239).

The war council is a thoroughly researched, well-written, and engaging book that demonstrates the enormous benefits that political biography can bring to historical study. Full of prescient analysis, it handles its subject sensitively; Preston's thesis, that Bundy's role in marginalizing internal dissent and shaping the terms of the policy debate was ‘crucial to the escalation of the war’ and that ‘[w]ithout his efforts, the war would not have unfolded as it did; indeed, it may not have unfolded at all’ (p. 248), is a decisive and important historiographical intervention.

The home front has long been considered critical to achieving a fuller understanding of America's policy in Southeast Asia. It is now more than twenty years since Larry Berman emphasized the importance of domestic politics in the shaping of LBJ's Vietnam policy and, as Andrew Preston's The war council shows, political history remains a valuable interpretative tool for scholars seeking to understand the war more fully. Vietnam and the American political tradition focuses on opposition to the Vietnam War within the United States Senate. Declaring that political history matters, and that the Congress constitutes a ‘rich and perhaps unique matrix’ for exploring the causes both of American involvement and withdrawal from Vietnam (p. 3) the collection of essays explores why various senators came to oppose American policy, and the impact that their opposition had. Randall Woods's introduction is followed by two interpretative essays. The first, by Frank Ninkovich, sketches the ways in which ‘anti-imperialist principles and politics’ – especially the suspicion of militarism and ‘power-politics’ – ‘have evolved in the history of US foreign relations’ (p. 14). The second, by Woods, explores the roots of post-war American foreign policy. There then follow seven essays on individual senators. The Senate's two most prominent Vietnam dissenters, Minnesota's Eugene McCarthy and New York's Robert Kennedy, loom large in their absence here, which is certainly a weakness – though it should be recognized that these bitter rivals for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination have received a good deal of scholarly attention elsewhere.

Alaska's iconoclastic, septuagenarian Democratic senator, Ernest Gruening, was an early opponent of the war – and one of only two senators (the other being Oregon's Wayne Morse) to vote against the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. A long-standing opponent of imperialism, Gruening viewed American involvement in Vietnam as incompatible with the Republic's ‘revolutionary, reformist heritage’ and ‘commitment to the principle of national self-determination’ (p. 70). According to Robert Johnson, Gruening came to see Vietnam as embodying all that was wrong with American foreign policy – the blind application of containment, support of puppet governments and dictatorships, an emphasis on military power, and the shrinking of the Senate's constitutional role in the shaping of foreign policy. Increasingly obsessed with, and frustrated over, Vietnam, the Alaskan allowed himself to become identified with militant elements of the anti-war movement. In August 1966, for example, Gruening appeared with folk singer Joan Baez on a platform bearing the slogan ‘Shame America’, with ‘red, white, and blue bombs falling on a cowering nude woman clutching two infants’ (pp. 78–9). Gruening's failure to develop a pragmatic alternative to Lyndon Johnson's policy, and his own growing disillusionment, ultimately made him a polarizing figure, alienated him from his conservative constituency and cost him re-election in 1968.

Thomas Knock's chapter on George McGovern – the professorial Democrat from South Dakota – emphasizes that, like Gruening, McGovern viewed the Vietnam War as antithetical to American ideals. As early as September 1963 he was criticizing US policy in Vietnam, fearing that it would result in military defeat, and claiming that American resources were being used to ‘suppress the very liberties we went in to defend’ (p. 83). McGovern believed that America's policy of supporting authoritarian regimes that were anti-communist embodied ‘everything that is alien to our tradition of liberty and equality’ (p. 94). For McGovern, American domestic performance – delivering economic strength and justice (including African American rights) would boost her leadership of the free world more effectively than the application of hard military power. Voting for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution despite suspecting that Gruening and Morse might be correct, McGovern subsequently became an open critic of US military involvement in Vietnam, and worried that growing frustration over the war was harming the nation's political institutions. In 1970, along with the Republican Mark Hatfield, he led efforts to re-assert Congress's war-making powers by introducing an amendment to prohibit the use of funds to support the military effort in Southeast Asia and setting a timetable for withdrawal. While it went down to defeat (winning the support of 32 Democrats and 7 Republicans) it signified growing Congressional determination to re-assert its right to shape foreign policy.

In his essay on Idaho's Frank Church, David F. Schmitz argues that ‘no senator had a longer career of opposition to the Vietnam war or a greater impact on American foreign policy’ (p. 121). Church sought to re-align American foreign policy in accordance with the nation's democratic ideals and restore the Senate's constitutional role in the making of foreign policy. According to Schmitz, Church helped to legitimize the anti-war movement and led a decade-long struggle with the executive over the balance of power regarding foreign affairs. Influenced by the western Progressivism of William Borah, Church championed a democratic, open, and anti-imperialist foreign policy. Increasingly critical of America's actions in Vietnam, Church came to see the war not just as bad policy, but as symptomatic of wider problems – not least ‘executive dominance of the foreign policy-making process’ (p. 133). Along with his Republican colleague John Sherman Cooper, Church sponsored a series of amendments that imposed limits on American military action in Laos and Cambodia, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of America's political institutions and reining in executive power. Church, according to Schmitz, helped to force ‘vital questions into the mainstream of political debate’ and mobilized the ‘institutional power of the Senate to challenge the imperial policies of the nation and power of the president’ (p. 148).

As chairman of the influential Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Arkansas' J. William Fulbright was able to shape opinion on American foreign policy both within the Congress and among the broader public. Initially a supporter of LBJ's policy, by 1966 he had concluded that the conflict in Vietnam was, at root, a civil war and that America was wrongly supporting one side against the other. By 1969 he was of the opinion that America had no vital interests at stake in Vietnam, and that her continued military involvement was corroding her political institutions and corrupting public life. In working hard to erode national support for President Johnson's policies there were a number of motivations at play – his fear of the radical right, his commitment to détente with the USSR, and a love–hate relationship with LBJ. But, as Randall Woods argues forcefully, Fulbright's southern background (his paternalism; historical memory of the Civil War; sense of class, kinship, and place; streak of Ozark independence; and opposition to civil rights legislation) was critical in shaping his views on the war.

Montana's Mike Mansfield was Senate majority leader during the 1960s. ‘Taciturn, retiring, and contemplative’ (p. 171), he warned early on of the dangers of military involvement in Vietnam but never broke openly with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Despite advocating consistently a policy of multilateral diplomacy rather than unilateral military intervention, Donald A. Ritchie argues that Mansfield's advice was eclipsed by intelligence, military and foreign policy experts. Albert Gore, another Vietnam critic, was more than willing to break publicly with his president. The Tennessean was by 1965 an outspoken critic of LBJ. Gore's opposition to the war was, according to Kyle Longley, shaped by his Populist-Progressive political philosophy, the ‘maverick tradition’ of Middle Tennessee, and his personal distaste for presidents running foreign policy (p. 205).

Kentucky's John Sherman Cooper is the only Republican senator explored in this volume. According to Fredrik Logevall, liberal Republicans like Cooper ‘played an important part in the growing congressional dissatisfaction with the war in the last half of the 1960s’ (p. 238). Cooper – chain-smoking, tall, courtly, and absentminded – ‘ranks among the most important congressional dissenters on the war – from either party’ (p. 238). An excellent behind-the-scenes operator, between 1969 and 1973 he worked in partnership with Frank Church in successful Senate efforts to rein in and contain the war in Vietnam.

The impact of the Senatorial dissent is far from clear. According to H. W. Brands, Lyndon Johnson's brilliant legislative personality, with its emphasis on compromise and accommodation, meant that he could never be a great president. His inclination to chart the middle course, in an attempt to satisfy both sides, was ‘impossible and ultimately disastrous’ when it came to Vietnam, alienating both hawks and doves (pp. 260, 276). As for Richard Nixon, he ‘ignored, abused and fought’ with the Democrat-controlled Congress over Vietnam, though this did not prevent a dramatic growth in congressional assertiveness in foreign affairs. According to Robert D. Schulzinger, this represented a ‘sea change in the deference lawmakers had accorded presidents during the Cold War years’ (p. 283).

Overall this collection is of a high quality. The broader conceptual essays are extremely useful, while those that focus on specific personalities are entertaining and contain much thoughtful analysis. One is struck both by the prescience of Senatorial criticism of the war, and their collective concern that America's military intervention was incompatible with the Republic's democratic ideals and risked doing real damage to domestic political institutions. Political history certainly does matter, and one is left wanting to know more: more about the relationship between these Vietnam dissenters and their constituents; more about the effectiveness of the congressional ‘doves’ as a group; and more on their impact on presidential decision-making, especially given Lyndon Johnson's own highly distinguished senatorial career.

On 16 March 1968 two massacres were carried out in the South Vietnamese province of Quang Ngai by American soldiers serving with the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division. In the sub-hamlet of Xom Lang, in the hamlet of Tu Cung, in the coastal village of Son My, US troops (many serving with Charlie Company's first platoon under the command of Lieutenant William Calley) murdered 300 residents – mostly women, children, and old men. Some of the women were raped, while other victims were tortured and mutilated. About a mile away, in the sub-hamlet of My Hoi, Co Luy hamlet, around 100 civilians were killed by soldiers serving with Bravo Company. Known collectively as ‘My Lai’, the massacre was the most infamous atrocity committed by American forces during the second Indochina war.

In an important new book made all the more compelling by recent accounts of atrocities committed by US servicemen and women in Iraq, historian Kendrick Oliver seeks to explore not just the massacre, but also its wider political and cultural meaning. Despite an army cover-up in the aftermath of the killings news of what had happened eventually broke. Thanks partly to pictures of the massacre taken by GI Ronald Haeberle, testimony by GI Ronald Ridenhour, and the investigative journalism of the legendary Seymour Hersh, the massacre became headline news during November 1969. Calley was court-martialled and, in March 1971, convicted of murdering at least twenty-two civilians. Sentenced to life with hard labour, and quickly claimed by the American public as a scapegoat, President Nixon intervened to place him under house arrest while his appeal was heard. Reduced first to twenty, and then to ten years, he became eligible for parole in November 1974 and left military custody, moving to Columbus, Georgia, to manage a jewellery store.

At the time that the My Lai story broke, Oliver notes that commentators were ‘rarely inclined to understate its historical significance’, with theologian Reinhold Neibuhr describing it as a ‘moment of truth when we realize that we are not a virtuous nation’ (pp. 2–3). Forty years on, however, its pivotal status no longer seems so clear, and the memory of My Lai appears muted.

Oliver analyses the ways in which the US media, particularly in the years before the 1968 Tet Offensive, chose not to pay attention to the ‘casual, random violence which often characterized the U.S. war effort’ (p. 13) – a violence encouraged and exacerbated by battlefield practices (such as emphasizing the body count, technology-intensive warfare, and the command's failure to disseminate and enforce their own rules of engagement). This media reticence, while not particularly unusual in American war reporting, was re-enforced by the ‘professional ethos and routines of American journalism, and the formal and informal networks of relations through which they were practised’ (p. 20). There were also commercial concerns at work too, especially the potential reaction of advertisers.

Oliver also looks at the ways in which the contemporary debate about the ‘causes’ of the massacre was framed. Was My Lai the result of a broader culture of war-making in Vietnam, or was it the specific criminality of individuals? An emphasis on the latter was re-enforced by the investigations into, and courts-martial of, individual soldiers (most notably, of course, William Calley). Indeed, as Oliver notes, images of Calley became ‘the dominant visual context of the story’ and he acted as a ‘kind of lightning rod, attracting the rhetorical energies of most of those who held strong views about the massacre’ (p. 59). The use of first-hand accounts of what had happened also emphasized the agency of individuals. Moreover, there was a strong desire among the media to distinguish between the few ‘bad apples’ of Charlie Company and the US army as a whole. The Nixon administration, in the business of escalating parts of the war during the late 1960s, was also keen to make this distinction in order to shore up public support for its policies.

In their attempts to understand the My Lai massacre in a period in which deference to traditional sources of authority – the media, the army, the presidency – had waned, Americans lacked ‘clear, cooperative centres of moral authority, willing and able to direct the national debate’ (p. 104) about the causes of the massacre and to channel such debate into constructive efforts for reform. Ultimately, as Oliver argues, the public's judgement that the men of Charlie Company had been harshly singled out, while simultaneously resisting attempts to place ‘guilt’ on those individuals and institutions that had prosecuted the war or the nation as a whole for allowing it to happen, was ‘to allow responsibility to drift. Settling nowhere, it seemed to become elemental, as indefinite as the weather in its origins and resolutions’ (p. 147).

In their interest in the causes of My Lai, Americans were concerned primarily about what it said about the nation. Thus My Lai became ‘a story about Americans’, with the principal victims of the massacre (both the Vietnamese who had died, and those who had been left behind) written out. This Amerocentricity is revealed both in the New York Times's definition of the event as ‘An American nightmare’ and in the naming of the massacre itself (My Lai was an American nom de guerre) (p. 211). Oliver is sharply critical of what he terms the ‘lachrymose revisionism’ that ‘converts Americans into the principal victims of their own atrocities’ and quotes Vietnam veteran turned novelist, Tim O'Brien, stating angrily that ‘[t]o the Vietnamese people who lost whole families or lost legs and arms, we've healed [the wounds of Vietnam] too damn well’ (p. 265). As Oliver concludes, the lesson of My Lai – like that of Abu Ghraib in 2004 – is that ‘[M]ore than with any other nation, it matters how the United States conducts itself in the world’ because ‘Americans have usually expected the best of themselves, and have sought to encourage that expectation in others’ (p. 282).

Oliver does not simply explore the causes of the massacre and the wider social, political, and cultural reaction to it; he is particularly adept at linking My Lai to broader questions surrounding the Vietnam War and the wider political culture. Full of penetrating analysis, The My Lai massacre in American history and memory is a sensitive analysis of the troubling ways in which the Vietnam War has been consigned to the nation's historical memory.

Mark Moyar's Triumph forsaken: the Vietnam War, 1954–1965, the first of a projected two-volume history of the war, is an important if flawed book. A revisionist tour de force that aims its guns at what its author sees as the prevailing orthodox interpretations of the war, it also attacks those academics who see American involvement in Vietnam as ‘wrongheaded and unjust’ (p. xi). Based on extensive research, and highly readable, Moyar's interpretation is provocative and engaging. Moyar ultimately seeks to convince the reader that the war in Vietnam was not a ‘foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints’ (p. 416).

While not all of Moyar's claims are original, taken together they are bracing. Ho Chi Minh was no nationalist but a dedicated communist, a ‘true believer’ wedded solidly to the idea of an international communist revolution. Even had America been inclined to try, there was no hope that he could have been turned into an ‘Asian Tito’. Furthermore, America was right to intervene to defend the Republic of Vietnam. Though ‘not intrinsically vital to U.S. interests’, it ‘was vital nevertheless because its fate strongly influenced events in other Asian countries that were intrinsically vital’ (p. xxi). The Domino theory was sound, and if South Vietnam had fallen to communism in 1964 or 1965 then Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia would have been placed at risk immediately, with likely harmful consequences for America's national interests elsewhere in the Pacific. Rather than a reactionary and authoritarian dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem was a ‘very wise and effective leader’ who was ‘deeply dedicated to the welfare of his people’ (p. xiv) – in short, he was a ‘modern mandarin’ (p. 229). Western criticisms of his regime – which peaked after the ‘Buddhist crisis’ of May 1963 – were misplaced. Not only were such protests manipulated, even perhaps directed by communists or communist sympathizers, but Vietnamese culture expected a firm response to any public show of opposition. Moyar argues that ‘the Vietnamese people accepted and expected one-man rule as part of the natural order of the world’ (p. 75), therefore efforts to transport liberal democracy to the Republic of Vietnam were misguided and counterproductive. Not only was Diem a modernizer, but for much of its existence his regime was successful at combating the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong). The New York Times's David Halberstam and Saigon ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge are singled out and criticized heavily for their role in the November 1963 coup that toppled Diem – ‘one of the worst debacles in the history of American foreign relations’ (p. 275).

Echoing earlier claims made by Harry Summers and Larry Berman, Moyar argues that Lyndon Johnson, who admittedly inherited a complex and messy situation, only made things worse. He is particularly critical of LBJ's decision to state publicly that he did not seek a wider war and to campaign during the 1964 election as a ‘peace candidate’. Moyar contends that the president's lack of forcefulness in late 1964 and early 1965, in the face of North Vietnamese provocation, ‘squandered America's deterrent power’ (p. xvii) and, like Ronald B. Frankum, argues that his faith in civilian advisers who championed the concepts of ‘limited war’ and ‘gradual escalation’ proved disastrous.Footnote ¹ LBJ's refusal to take strong military action against North Vietnamese supply lines in Laos and to strike hard against strategic industrial and military facilities in North Vietnam are savaged. Moyar asserts that Johnson's fears of provoking a wider war with the Soviets and China were misplaced and that ultimately the president ‘forfeited opportunities to deny the Communists the great strategic advantages that they were to enjoy for the next ten years’ (p. 416). The American military had the correct strategy to defeat their communist enemy and had America reacted with more force, more foresight, and more gumption between 1963 and 1965 then they would have had every chance of achieving their goal of establishing a viable, secure, independent, and non-Communist South Vietnam. In emphasizing the importance of specific decisions taken by individual policy-makers, particularly during 1964, in the shaping of the war and its outcomes, Moyar shares common ground with recent Vietnam War scholars, such as Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, even as he draws very different conclusions.

There are problems with Moyar's interpretation. On several occasions he is guilty of deploying (counterproductive) hyperbole. The claim that David Halberstam did ‘more harm to the interests of the United States than any other journalist in American history’ (p. 170) seems to invite parody. In a cheap shot he (twice) relays an anecdote from Lyndon Johnson's college days in which the future president apparently lay on his bed kicking his long legs frantically in the air to keep a would-be adversary away, in order to highlight the president's shortcomings as a military leader.

More seriously, despite the impressive research, primary sources are sometimes used uncritically. For instance, a July 1961 article by Ho Chi Minh is used to demonstrate the close, even deferential relationship between the North Vietnamese leadership and the People's Republic of China. Ho is quoted declaring that ‘[t]he relationship between the Chinese revolution and the Vietnamese revolution is made up of a thousand ties of gratitude, attachment and love, a glorious friendship that will last forever!’ (p. 138). The source is taken more or less at face value, with little consideration for either the motive(s) behind it or its intended audience. A similar one-dimensional perspective is at work when Moyar discusses the position taken by America's Pacific allies on Vietnam. It is certainly true that leaders of countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines urged the Americans to defend South Vietnam, and the region as a whole, from international communist expansion. However, he does not consider that self-interest might have been at work here. Not only could they gain valuable increases in American aid and security guarantees in exchange for offering support to the American effort in Vietnam, as George Herring has noted, but they could also bolster their domestic political positions and deflect American attention from their own un-democratic and authoritarian practices.Footnote ²

Ultimately, Moyar does not deal with the wider question of Cold War ideology, especially America's claim to be defending the ‘free world’ against communist authoritarianism. Whether or not one accepts his problematic argument that the Vietnamese ‘expected authoritarianism and welcomed benevolent authoritarianism’ (p. 94), America certainly justified its policy of containing communism on explicitly democratic grounds. Moyar chooses to ignore what many of the war's contemporary critics understood only too well – that supporting authoritarian leaders like Diem was, in the words of Senator George McGovern, ‘alien to [America's] tradition of liberty and equality’.Footnote ³

Thirty years after the fall of Saigon the scholarly battles over Vietnam rage as intensely as ever; and at a time when thousands of young American men and women are once more engaged in controversial wars in faraway lands, many of the books reviewed here resonate strongly. As we await the next wave of Vietnam literature, we can be thankful for those talented scholars who write with perception and sensitivity on what remains a difficult and troubling subject.