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To the Editor:

Arthur Herman’s views about Vietnam suffer from the same defect as those of his opponents: his primary interest is contemporary politics and not the truth about the past [“Who Owns the Vietnam War?,” December 2007]. He does not care so much about what went on in Vietnam as he does about scoring points against liberals who oppose President Bush today over Iraq. Calling on history to orchestrate political commitments in the present is hardly new, but it is not the only use of the past, and surely not the most honorable.

The title of Mr. Herman’s essay, “Who Owns the Vietnam War?,” calls attention to his supposition that history is a piece of intellectual property that politicians can acquire for their campaigns. It bothers him that liberals have taken over this piece of the past, and he wants to reclaim it for his own purposes. But as Herman is only too willing to point out in the case of the liberals’ history, bad things happen when the past is suborned to the present. Only Mr. Herman’s determinedly selective reading of recent scholarship on the war could suggest that there is compelling agreement on anything.

Anyone who thinks that the 1954 Geneva Accords established a new republic in the south of Vietnam has not read them. If Mr. Herman believes that Richard Nixon withdrew American troops because of success on the battlefield, or persuaded China and Russia to turn off the spigot of support for Hanoi, he has not looked at the evidence. He is certainly not entirely wrong on these and other issues, but he pushes, indeed shoves, the evidence in the direction he wants it to go. He does not see the ambiguities, and slips easily into simple moralistic judgments about what could have or would have happened. His vision of the war in Vietnam is as mythic as that of his adversaries.

For one interested in historical truth, the last people to listen to about Vietnam are political men like President Bush, Senator John Kerry, and Daniel Ellsberg, whom Mr. Herman cites in setting the stage for his discussion. One does not, however, expect statesmen to be primarily engaged in truth-telling, and so their distortions can be dismissed. But because the moral obligations of would-be scholars are different, the intrusion of politics into their writing is more upsetting. Unless we maintain some respect for the aim of establishing the complexity of what really went on in the past, we contribute to the debasement of public understanding.

Bruce Kuklick
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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To the Editor:

By one measure, the last four years have been a bonanza for historians like myself who teach and write about the Vietnam war. The Iraq conflict, so reminiscent of the American struggle in Vietnam, has sparked enormous interest in the subject among publishers and students. By another measure, however, it has been a thoroughly depressing time. Politicians and pundits have frequently played fast and loose with history—and misrepresented the findings of recent historical scholarship—in order to score points in the ongoing debate over the Iraq war. The gap between academic and popular discussion of the war has rarely yawned so wide.

Polemics like Arthur Herman’s “Who Owns the Vietnam War?” are part of the problem. Mr. Herman claims to show how recent scholarship has demolished the old shibboleths about the war held sacred by the “liberals and leftists” who have led the charge against George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq. While the Left-leaning establishment views Ho Chi Minh as a dedicated nationalist, Mr. Herman contends, new research reveals him to have been a craven Communist. While the Left sees South Vietnam as an illegitimate Potemkin village, new scholarship indicates it was a viable nation that commanded impressive support among its people. While the Left views American veterans as drug-addled misfits abused by their government, new writing reveals them to be successful citizens. And so on.

Unquestionably, Mr. Herman has a point. Critics of American policy in Vietnam have too often advanced a hopelessly one-dimensional view of the war that has not stood up to scholarly investigation. But he merely replaces the Left’s caricature of the war with a new, equally far-fetched caricature that gratifies conservatives by making the U.S. intervention in Vietnam seem eminently sensible. He accomplishes this feat by drawing heavily on a handful of highly tendentious works by conservative authors.

Some of these studies, notably Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, have been well received across the political spectrum. Others, especially Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken, have been subjected to withering criticism outside conservative circles. The important issue, however, is not the quality of these works as much as the fact that they represent just one current in a vast outpouring of writing on the Vietnam war in recent years. To claim, as Mr. Herman does, that the “new generation” of historians “overwhelmingly agrees” with his point of view—or, for that matter, with any single point of view—is simply wrong.
On the contrary, recent studies point in various interpretive directions, making it more difficult than ever to defend blanket generalizations about the war. The multiplicity of viewpoints undoubtedly owes something to the diversity of ideological agendas informing them, but it owes far more to the fact that newly accessible documentary evidence from Vietnam, China, and Russia, as well as the United States, leads to no easy conclusions.

Mr. Herman is right that Ho Chi Minh was a convinced Communist for much of his life, but evidence from around the world also confirms that (contrary to what he writes) Hanoi was no simple puppet of Beijing or Moscow. Mr. Herman is on safe ground in suggesting that the South Vietnamese government enjoyed greater independence and legitimacy than historians have usually allowed, but evidence from Vietnam suggests that (again, contrary to what he writes) the Saigon regime never truly rivaled the Communists for the support of the bulk of the population. One could go on.

Left and Right will no doubt continue to clamor for “ownership” of the Vietnam war, which is too bad for those interested in fair and detached treatments of the subject. One hopes that sensible readers, tired of brazen grabs to control history, will recognize that the best case for ownership of the Vietnam war and its lessons lies with those who are able to see beyond the myths, and appreciate the immense complexity of the past.

Mark Atwood Lawrence
University of Texas
Austin, Texas

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To the Editor:

Arthur Herman’s otherwise excellent essay appears to downplay the devastating effects of Nixon’s bombing campaigns in Cambodia. He describes the precision of smart bombs and claims that “the collateral damage caused by American bombing [in Vietnam] . . . was actually very limited.”

Philip Short, Michael Lind, Elizabeth Becker, and others have offered clear evidence that the bombing created enormous hardship for Cambodia’s rural populations, causing large peasant migrations to both Phnom Penh and the forests. Regardless of how “smart” the bombs were, there were a lot of them—according to some accounts, more than were dropped in all of World War II—and many Cambodian villages were destroyed. The bombing was also an effective recruiting tool for the Khmer Rouge, although the banditry of the South Vietnamese troops in Cambodia was also important in creating support for the Communists.

Although the bombing might have been justified by Cambodia’s violation of its claimed neutrality, the collateral damage made it easy for the antiwar Left to condemn everything we did in Indochina by pointing to an apparent lack of sympathy for the civilian population.

On the other hand, Mr. Herman is right to dismiss attempts to hold the American bombing accountable for the Cambodian genocide that followed. Some have proposed that the “savage” American bombing drove the Khmer Rouge to respond with savagery of their own—but no other population in history subjected to bombing has reacted by murdering millions of compatriots. Pol Pot was a follower of Marxism-Leninism who adopted the terror strategies of Stalin and Mao. They were called Red Khmers for a reason.

Peter Wilson

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