Escalation And Stalemate – Lien – Hang T Nguyen

But there’s one thing you ought to know. Vietnam is like being in a plane without a parachute, when all the engines go out. If you jump, you’ll probably be killed, and if you stay in you’ll crash and probably burn. That’s what it is.’ Then, without wait- ing for a response, the tall slumped figure rose and left the room.

“If that’s how he feels, I thought as I watched the door close behind him, then why are we escalating the war; what’s the point if he thinks it’s hope- less? Maybe he’s going to end it. There was truth – rational truth – in what Johnson had said, a moment of illumination. Yet reflecting on the President’s startling statement, I realized that the seeming objectivity of his descrip- tion also revealed the inward struggle: No matter what course he took, the result would be disaster, total and irrevocable.

He was trapped; he was help- less – conclusions that were closer to his own fears than to external reality. Admittedly there was, by now, no easy way out. We had raised the stakes and increased our commitment; American boys were dead and American resources wasted.

But still there were choices – to continue the unwinnable war, to withdraw, or to seek some kind of jerry-built compromise. These choices were all unpleasant, but they were not, equally, disasters of fatal magnitude.” So writes Richard Goodwin, a White House aide and speechwriter under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, in his memoir Remembering America, which appeared three decades ago, made a modest splash, and then was quickly forgotten.1 Goodwin’s anecdote serves as a useful way to begin this reexamination of the US military intervention in Vietnam, which was by far the largest and most consequential intervention in the Johnson years (the other being the Dominican Republic).

For one thing, the account underscores Dominoes Abroad and at Home Fredrik Logevall 1 Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (Boston, 1988), 403–4. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316225264.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press Fredrik Logevall a key point amply supported by the archival record and the tapes now avail- able: that Johnson and his aides were not optimistic when they Americanized the war in 1965; they were gloomy realists who knew what they were getting into.

The hubris so often ascribed to them – thanks in part to the influence of David Halberstam’s monumental, sprawling, brilliant work, The Best and the Brightest2 – is seldom seen in that record, at least with respect to the long- term prospects in the fighting. Johnson, the evidence shows, experienced deep doubts not only about whether the war was winnable but whether the outcome really mattered to American national security.

In great depth, Volume II examines the escalation of the Vietnam War and its development into a violent stalemate, beginning with the overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 to the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive. This five-year period was the fulcrum of a three-decade struggle to determine the future of Vietnam and was marked by rival spirals of escalation generated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States.

The volume explores the war’s military aspects on all sides, the politics of war in the two Vietnams and the United States, and the war’s international and transnational dimensions in politics, protest, diplomacy, and economics, while also paying close attention to the agency of his- torical actors on both sides of the conflict in South Vietnam.

Andrew Preston is Professor of American History at Clare College, University of Cambridge. A specialist in the history of US foreign relations, he is the author or editor of nine books, includ- ing American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction (2019) and Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012). In 2020–1, he was President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Published online by Cambridge University Press Published online by Cambridge University Press The Cambridge History of THE VIETNAM WAR General editor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen Split into three volumes, The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War brings together seventy-five leading experts on the war from across the world, covering the late colonial era to present-day leg- acies, using diverse methodologies and approaches.

When did the fighting begin, why and how did it escalate, and in what manner did the violence end and the legacies endure? These are some of the fundamental questions that have consumed scholars, whose works trigger more questions than offer definitive answers. The volumes seek neither to reconcile past arguments, enflame ongo- ing disputes, nor set off new debates – instead, they intend to cel- ebrate the diversity and differences in scholarship and attest to the indisputable importance of this conflict in global history.

From decision-making in the corridors of power, to everyday life at war on the battlefront and homefront, to cultural legacies of the war on a global level, the three volumes present the most exhaustive and authoritative treatment of the seminal conflict.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• ISBN: 9781107105102, 9781316225264, 9781107105157, 9781107105089, 9781107105126
• Pages: 713
• Language: English (en)

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