Weekend Warrior - Review

Mr. McMaster, a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is author of Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Vietnam: The Necessary War, by Michael Lind (Free Press, 336 pp., $25)

Even now, the legacy of America's war in Vietnam remains uncertain. Of those Americans who were of age in the 1960s and '70s, many chose to serve in the armed forces. Others preferred to avoid the hardship, risks, and sacrifices of war. The misdirected ire of those who opposed the war toward those who did their duty, under challenging and difficult conditions, inspired a sense of betrayal among veterans. This has made reconciliation elusive.

The shadow of Vietnam likewise hangs over contemporary foreign-policy debates and decisions involving the use of military force. We continue to debate the causes of the war, its nature, what went wrong, and what we might learn from it. Only in recent years has enough of the historical record become available to permit accurate and comprehensive answers to such questions. Revelations based on new evidence, including tapes of telephone conversations and meetings among high officials, have challenged much of what was conventional wisdom on the subject.

Michael Lind, who is Washington editor of Harper's, has produced a radical reinterpretation of the war in Southeast Asia. According to him, Americans have misunderstood Vietnam and have learned the wrong lessons from it. In Vietnam: The Necessary War, Lind argues that "it was necessary for the United States to escalate the war in the mid 1960s in order to defend the credibility of the United States as a superpower"; but "it was necessary for the United States to forfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the American domestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts." To his credit, Lind casts many of the controversial issues of the Vietnam War in a provocative light. But the author's lack of research and shallow understanding of the historical record lead him to flawed conclusions.

Claiming to "set the historical record straight," Lind is correct in his observation that many misleading and dogmatic books have been published about Vietnam. The early literature was fraught with emotion and based largely on conjecture. Memoirs by those involved with planning the struggle, such as Robert McNamara's In Retrospect, have tended to be selective in the evidence they present, with a propensity to manipulate history consistently with the author's predilections. Lind goes too far, however, in his assertion that "almost everything written by Americans about the Vietnam War in the past quarter century has conformed to one of the three scripts of radical leftism, anti-Cold War liberalism, or conservatism." He often misrepresents or caricatures a book's main arguments to fit his own pre-constructed categories or bolster his assertions. The works of historians such as George Herring, William Conrad Gibbons, Michael Hunt, and Lloyd Gardner do not even appear in his notes. Because he did not conduct primary research, his critiques often amount to little more than assertions.

Lind argues that, owing to the "Cold War grand strategy of global military containment of the Communist bloc," an American war in Vietnam was "unavoidable." He stresses the need at the time to preserve America's credibility and "the basis of its rank in the regional and global hierarchy." That need left American policymakers with no alternative to war. Lind's argument stems from his determination to offer a "centrist perspective more sympathetic to American Cold War policymakers than that of their critics on the left and right." Evidence now available shows that the imperative to contain Communism was indeed an important factor in Vietnam policy but did not make inevitable either American entry into the war or the manner in which the war was conducted.

In his determination to sympathize with American military planners, Lind overlooks the Johnson administration's lies and deceptions. These set the stage for an American war in Vietnam. As early as May 1964, LBJ understood that the situation in Vietnam demanded a difficult choice between war and disengagement. Motivated by short-term expediency, however, Johnson refused to make that decision. He feared that doing so would alienate key constituencies on which the success of his domestic priorities (the 1964 election and the 1965 Great Society legislation) depended. He thus pursued a middle course in Vietnam. This meant gradually escalating the military effort while pledging "no wider war" and promising not to send "American boys" to Southeast Asia. As American involvement deepened, the gap between the truth about what was going on and Johnson's depiction of it to the public widened. In 1965 Americans found themselves at war, without ever having made a clear decision to enter such a conflict. LBJ's behavior was not only undemocratic, but also removed an important corrective to what was an unwise policy.