Southeast Asian History, United States History - 20th Century - Wars & Conflict, Vietnam War/French Indo-Chinese War

The Phoenix Program

Name: The Phoenix Program
Author: Douglas Valentine
ISBN: 9780595007387

by Douglas Valentine

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Overview

Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade reviews The Phoenix Program: "This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians."

Synopsis

"No book to date conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam War as thoroughly as this one."

—Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

A CIA operation, the Phoenix Program aimed at destroying the Vietcong infrastructure. Former Phoenix and CIA director William Colby contended in his book Lost Victory that the program's reputation for brutality is undeserved. Valentine ( The Hotel Tacloban ) counters that claim in this shocking expose of the origins, rationale, methods and results of a program that was responsible for the execution of some 40,000 Vietnamese and the death, torture and imprisonment of countless civilians. The author describes how entire families and whole villages were wiped out in the cause of ``Vietnamization.'' He explores the question of how Americans, from a nation ruled by laws and the ethic of fair play, could have created a campaign of such systematic savagery. No book published to date conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam War as thoroughly as this one. Photos. (Oct.)

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Library Journal

Designed to destroy the Vietcong infrastructure and ostensibly run by the South Vietnamese government, the Phoenix Program--in fact directed by the United States--developed a variety of counterinsurgency activities including, at its worst, torture and assassination. For Valentine ( The Hotel Tacloban , LJ 9/15/84), the program epitomizes all that was wrong with the Vietnam War; its evils are still present wherever there are ``ideologues obsessed with security, who seek to impose their way of thinking on everyone else.'' Exhaustive detail and extensive use of interviews with and writings by Phoenix participants make up the book's principal strengths; the author's own analysis is weaker. This is a good complement to Dale Andrade's less emotional Ashes to Ashes (Lexington, 1990) and such participant accounts as Orrin M. DeForest and David Chanoff's Slow Burn (S. & S., 1990).-- Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.