[NOTE: My previous post on Moyar’s earlier work, and on the battle among historians about the history of the Vietnam War, is here. For those of you who are unaware of my own history with the Vietnam War – which consists of having had a boyfriend in heavy combat there in 1968-1969 – please see my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, especially the many posts included in Part 4. You can also do a search for the word “Vietnam” on this blog.]
These days we know Victor Davis Hanson as a pundit and columnist with an academic background. But that academic background is as military historian. As such he is uniquely positioned to review the second in Mark Moyar’s planned 3-part series on the Vietnam conflict. VDH’s take can be found here.
Some excerpts:
Moyar’s controversial argument in volume one centered on the disastrous decisions of these two administrations that ensured Americans would be sent into an uninviting distant theater of operations in the dangerous neighborhood of both communist China and Russia. Worse, they would be asked to fight under self-imposed limitations of the nuclear age in which their leaders could not achieve victory or perhaps even define it.
Still, Moyar argued that there was nevertheless a chance to achieve a South-Korean-like solution at much less cost, one that was thrown away through a series of American blunders. Most grievous was the American support for the 1963 coup that removed South-Vietnamese strongman president Ngo Dinh Diem and led to his almost immediate assassination‚ even as he was evolving into a viable wartime leader.
Moyar additionally deplored the biased and lockstep reporting of anti-war media, including its icons David “The Best and the Brightest” Halberstam and Neil “A Bright, Shining Lie” Sheehan, who operated on ideological premises far different from reportage in World War II and Korea. Both characteristically exaggerated American shortcomings consistent with their theme that Vietnam was an anti-colonialist war of liberation rather than a Cold War proxy fight over unilateral communist aggression.
I discussed some of that in my previously-linked post on Moyar’s first book on the subject.
More from VDH, on the second book:
Still, Moyar shows that too often the United States lacked a comprehensive strategy of victory and was shackled by unworkable rules of engagement—a now familiar dilemma in the half-century that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most grievously, the military was too often blocked from fully interdicting supplies and manpower of the communists at their sources in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Yet the more enemy men and materiel entered the theater unimpeded, a frustrated administration sought to compensate by single-mindedly increasing the numbers of American soldiers, purportedly in the fashion that had finally brought a stalemated “victory” in Korea.
Moyar’s President Johnson at times seems a tragic Hamlet-like figure. LBJ always claimed that he did not wish initially to send troops to Vietnam. But he was purportedly persuaded to do so by his hawkish Kennedy-leftover advisors—only eventually to be lectured to exit ignominiously by the very former zealots who advised him to escalate in the first place.
Those were “the best and the brightest.”
Also:
There was no real “Viet Cong,” a construct that Moyar shows was not much other than a few thousand communist agents in the South who posed as a large popular resistance movement. In truth, most hostiles in the South of any size were always North Vietnamese infiltrating communist troops and they had almost no popular support among the South Vietnamese.
The media continued to peddle fake news. Despite the claims of journalists and antiwar activists (often the same players), American public opinion supported the war for years. The people did not begin to turn against Vietnam until they tired of futile policies that either could not or would not unleash the military to win the war. Moyar suggests Americans were willing to assume enormous costs in the Cold War, but not in ossified theaters where their sons’ sacrifices were not in the service of victory.
I think that’s been pretty clear for decades to anyone who has studied the war in any depth, rather than following the popular MSM coverage.
Next:
Far from the Tet Offensive being a pivotal communist victory as reported by the media, the 1968 North Vietnamese holiday surprise attacks proved a veritable bloodbath for the North.
I covered that in some depth many years ago, particularly when discussing Peter Braestrup’s 1978 book Big Story (see this post, for example). But how many people know anything about Braestrup’s findings? A very small percentage, would be my guess.
More:
The disconnect between the American media and the realities of the war, evidenced in the North Vietnamese official archives remains striking. Moyar juxtaposes a media assuming the inevitable victory of the North Vietnamese with the communists despairing they were losing the war to the Americans. Each evening at home, as the American public was told we were being systematically killed and crippled by far more adept “jungle fighters,” the communists were mired in depression as they saw their mounting losses as unsustainable and found no other alternative than to go to Paris to negotiate a reprieve. The American military leadership that the media mocked as inept, and the soldiers who were caricatured as drug-ridden, crazed, disobedient, and near insurrectionary were never seen as such by “Charlie” who had to fight them….
An elected Republican hawk Richard Nixon, inheriting a war that already had cost 35,000 dead, was now opposed by the same Democrats who started it. A growing number of frustrated Americans wanted either to win the war or to get out. Nixon would soon take the gloves off, ensuring that a nearly defeated North would be subject to greater bombing pressures—even as the anti-war Left enjoyed complete control of a Congress that was suddenly liable to cut off aid to Saigon, could more easily mobilize against a now oppositional and conservative White House—and the ingredients of the Watergate debacle were on the distant horizon.
The Vietnam War isn’t important only to Boomers who remember it or who fought in it. It is important because – much like January 6th, only on a larger and more deadly scale – the left grabbed hold of the “narrative,” seized it, and ran with it. And that narrative has affected our history ever since.
