There are so many texts on American involvement in Vietnam now that one might expect the market to be flooded. This volume demonstrates that there is always room for a fresh, stimulating evaluation of the state of the field. Hess sets out to provide a guide to the debate surrounding US failure in Vietnam by describing works from the “orthodox” school of thought, which believes that the war was a “mistake” and “unwinnable,” and contrasting them with the “revisionists” who argue instead that it was a “necessary” and “winnable” war. The book is organized around the seven issues where Hess believes “the debate is now focused” (x): the debate over whether the war was “necessary” or a “mistake,” the movement toward war from 1961 to 1965, the Clausewitzian alternative, the “Hearts-and-Minds” prescription for victory, the media and the war, the Tet Offensive, and Nixon–Kissinger and the ending of the war.

Interestingly, several of the chapters demonstrate how the two schools of thought have influenced each other and how, on some issues, there is now a degree of agreement. Most notably, in chapter 2 Hess demonstrates that scholars on both sides of the divide agree that the war need not have been Americanized. And yet, as he points out, this convergence, as with many of the others, relies on counterfactual arguments. So, for some orthodox scholars, the American war could have been avoided “if only” President Kennedy had lived because he would have withdrawn from Vietnam; while for the revisionists, “if only” the Kennedy administration had backed Diem and stood up to North Vietnam more forcefully in the early 1960s, then victory could have been achieved before the need for a major US military commitment.

An acknowledged “dove,” and therefore more sympathetic to the orthodox view, Hess manages to maintain a careful balance when presenting opposing views on the war. Nevertheless, after examining the principal areas of debate, he still finds the orthodox position most convincing overall, particularly its insistence that the US was always unlikely to achieve a victory because of the strength of support for nationalist/communist forces in South Vietnam. He finds the revisionist case strongest in terms of the war being “necessary” in the context of the Cold War struggle of the time, admitting that the abandonment of South Vietnam to communism “remains difficult to imagine within the context of domestic and international politics in the early 1960s” (46). For Hess, the weakest revisionist arguments are those that blame the “liberal media” for turning the American public against the war, making the media “a ‘scapegoat’ for the policies of the nation's civilian and military leaders” (152). He concludes by acknowledging that, at present, the two schools of thought remain divided on many of the key debates, and that the development of a synthesis school remains in the distance. While this volume does not provide an in-depth examination of key works on the Vietnam War, it offers something more useful to many readers, a lively and clearly elucidated introduction to a complex scholarly debate.