To review a volume such as this in this journal is a bit tricky. I am not an historian of the United States nor of its diplomatic history. Rather I am a pre-modern historian of Vietnam looking at a book on American legislative history that deals with Vietnam and our war in that country. I shall seek to examine it from a more Vietnamese point of view.

The volume is a collection of individual essays that can be divided into three sections. The initial two essays, following the introduction, provide, first, a general background on American anti-imperialism, then a look at the Second World War and the emergence of our foreign policy thereafter. The second section contains seven essays, each focusing on an individual senator and examining the personal context for and consequent acts in his anti-war stance. These senators (Gruening, McGovern, Church, Fulbright, Mansfield, Gore, and—the lone Republican—Cooper) emerged from a variety of backgrounds and brought numerous different motivations (intellectual, political, personal, etc.) to bear on their opposition to this conflict. The final section of two essays turns from the opposition in the Senate to the Executive and the two major presidents who were opposed by these senators: Johnson and Nixon. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of the war and the opposition to it as we reiterate the same years (the 1950s to the 1970s) nine different times.

On the American side, this discloses to us the varied motivations against and for the war, all within the broader context of American traditions concerning both internal and external matters. For a Vietnam specialist, it confirms all too strongly how little it mattered how little we actually knew about Vietnam and Southeast Asia at the time. American expertise on the country and the region have really only developed since the events discussed here, indeed in part because of them. There has always been the thought: if only we had known then what we came to know subsequently about that area. Reading this volume tends to confirm my feeling that the extent of actual knowledge on the area really did not matter that much. What counted, as detailed here, were the perceptions and experiences brought to the debate from other times and other places.

Only Mike Mansfield had any real Asian experience and expertise, as both a soldier and a scholar, enhanced by quicky “fact-finding missions” to the region invariably taken by American legislators. As far as I can tell, only the Republican Senator Mark Hatfield had actually lived for a time in Vietnam (in 1945), and unfortunately he was not included here. Otherwise, no such regional knowledge existed among those discussed. Gruening's expertise was in Latin America. Fulbright read up on Vietnam during a long propeller-driven flight across the Pacific. The other senators picked up what they wanted for their positions on the fly, and the two presidents had their own specialists to inform them. In general, personal knowledge of Vietnam appears to have been incidental to the decisions each made concerning the war.

The essays, while occasionally looking at the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, concentrate on the period of major American commitment under Johnson and Nixon, that is, from 1964 to 1973. Starting with the Tonkin Gulf resolution and how nearly all (reluctantly) voted for it, until American troops left Vietnam amidst strong calls for the end of the war, we relive the era through the numerous personal observations of these seven senators and two presidents. This approach is quite enlightening for understanding the American dynamics at play in the ongoing debates over our involvement in Vietnam. In the end, the strength of this collection is the contextualization of the varied individual stances, mainly anti-war. It shows us how little actual knowledge of the Vietnamese political tradition meant in the decision-making concerning the war, its beginnings, and its debates.