Vietnam, the Necessary War

Robert G. Kaiser

Michael Lind is a bright, articulate and argumentative writer.
— Washington Post Book World

Sam Tanenhaus

...a substantial, challenging, even visionary work...
— NY Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In a very opinionated and sharply reasoned attempt to debunk three decades of conventional wisdom about Vietnam, Lind (The Next American Nation), the Washington, D.C., editor of Harper's, attacks both the right-wing contention that the U.S. could have won the war if only the politicians hadn't interfered with the military and the leftist orthodoxy that maintains the U.S. should never have become involved in the first place. Lind treats Vietnam as simply another battle in the Cold War, no different in principle from Korea or Afghanistan or any other Cold War confrontation. As such, it was both necessary and proper to intervene in Vietnam; a failure to do so, he asserts, would have permitted the Soviet Union and China to tighten their grip on the Third World. But once the U.S. committed itself, Lind argues, presidents Johnson and Nixon were obliged to fight a limited war in order to avoid the very real possibility of China entering the fray (just as it had done in Korea). If anything, Lind says, "the Vietnam War was not limited enough." Johnson allowed the U.S. military commanders to wage an expensive war of attrition that killed too many U.S. soldiers too fast and eroded public support for both the conflict in Vietnam and for the Cold War in general. The principal culprits in Lind's analysis are Johnson, General Westmoreland and other U.S. military commanders for their misguided tactics; Nixon, for his quixotic attempt to salvage "peace with honor," during which an additional 24,000 soldiers died needlessly; and the antiwar left, which swallowed much of Ho Chi Minh's propaganda. Lind's arguments, if not always persuasive, are always provocative. His book, with its intelligent analysis of U.S. intervention in Kosovo and other current foreign policy quandaries, is likely to shift the debate on Vietnam and to color future debates about U.S. military intervention abroad. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A single-minded interpretation of the Vietnam War based on the author's conviction that the conflict's overriding issue was a Moscow-directed international communist conspiracy. Retro cold warrior Lind (author of the novel Powertown, 1996, as well as works of nonfiction), resembling an intellectual Rambo, verbally machine-guns Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese communists, along with Americans who had any sympathies with them—everyone, in short, who disagrees with his proposition that the Vietnam War boiled down to a contest of American-led Western good versus communist evil. One purpose of this impassioned book is "to set the historical record straight," Lind says. But he only occasionally practices the historian's craft in this often shrill tome. Some sections—such as an examination of regional and ethnic influences in the antiwar movement—are well researched, backed up with solid sources, and convincingly argued. But too much here is made up of conjecture and opinion and venomous attacks, not only on Chairman Mao, Joseph Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh, but on Western journalists, historians, government officials, and members of Congress who had anything positive to say about communists. He further weakens his case by calling for censoring the media in future US wars and for "prosecuting American citizens whose actions bring them under the constitutional prohibition of providing `aid and comfort to the enemy.'Ê" The latter is a thinly veiled smear against the radical left of the Vietnam War peace movement. On the other hand, Lind convincingly undermines the right-wing "stab in the back" theory that holds that the US military could have defeated the North Vietnamese ifpoliticians hadn't tied the military's hands. Lind also correctly pegs Richard Nixon's Vietnam War policymaking as "a resounding failure in every way." But the author subverts his cause by presenting too many complex issues in oversimplified, good-versus-evil, terms. Much sound and fury signifying little more than a reprise of John Foster Dulles-like Cold War thinking.