Download The American experience in Vietnam, 1941-75

Part II, Paper 26
The American Experience in Vietnam, 1941-1975
Latimer Room, E Staircase, Clare College
Wednesdays 3-5pm
Prof. Andrew Preston, amp33
The Vietnam War stands as one of the defining events of the twentieth century. Four decades after its
end, the war continues to reverberate through the international system. While its emotional impact has
eased somewhat, it still haunts the American imagination and exerts a profound influence upon U.S.
domestic politics, foreign policy, intellectual life, media, and culture. Needless to say, the war has also
had a lasting effect on the people of Southeast Asia.
This paper aims to provide students with an understanding of the causes, course, and consequences of
American involvement in Vietnam between 1941 and 1975. In doing so, it will explore all of
Vietnam’s major conflicts—the First, Second, and Third Indochina Wars—and complicate much of the
conventional wisdom about “the Vietnam War.” It will also address a number of questions that are still
contested among historians: Why did the United States perceive Vietnam as integral to American
national security? What was the relationship between the wars for Vietnam and the processes of
decolonization and the Cold War? Why did the initial commitment, sustained at a relatively low level
for nearly fifteen years, escalate dramatically in the 1960s? Did American and Vietnamese leaders
stumble into war by misunderstanding each other? Was the conflict a national civil war or a major
international war? How did the war complement, and in many ways accelerate, the many social
changes affecting the United States and other countries in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s? How did other
countries view and react to the war? Was the war winnable? What are the war’s legacies, in Vietnam,
the United States, and the world at large?
This paper has the United States and Vietnam as its main subjects, but it will also explore in depth the
Vietnam wars as seminal events in twentieth century international history. Thus we will also
investigate, when relevant, the actions of the Soviet Union, China, France, the rest of Europe, etc.
Moreover, while this paper will examine the military history of the war, it will pay equal attention to
its political, diplomatic, social, cultural, and historiographical aspects.
Teaching
Aside from an introductory lecture, this Specified paper will be taught in weekly 2-hour discussion
classes. Each student is expected to attend every class. Each student will give one 15-minute
presentation at some point during the year. Each student will also receive 4 supervisions (for which
they’ll write a standard supervision essay) either individually or in groups ranging between two and
four; each student may also join an existing supervision on their presentation topic. The emphasis of
Paper 26 is on discussion and debate based on readings and student presentations. Presentations and
supervisions will be assigned at the beginning of Michaelmas Term.
2
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Reading List
Each week has required and recommended readings assigned to it. Every student is expected to do
the required readings; recommended readings provide a pool of relevant readings for those doing a
presentation or writing a supervision essay on that topic. Readings which have an M attached to it are
available in a pdf on the Paper 26 Moodle site. Journal articles are available on various databases via
the UL’s online catalogue.
The required weekly readings predominantly come from a small selection of books:





Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam at War (2009)
William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (1995)
George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (either the 4th
edition [2002] or the 5th edition [2014] is fine)
Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2008)
Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Andrew Preston, eds., America in the World: A History
in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror (2014)
Michaelmas Term
Week 1, October 12: Introduction and overview
Below are more broad surveys in addition to those listed above; although they are not often listed
again below, their individual chapters are invariably relevant for topics covered in the weekly classes.
Readings marked with a * are particularly relevant and highly recommended.
Required:
 Fredrik Logevall, “The Indochina Wars and the Cold War, 1945-1975” in Vol. 2 of Melvyn P.
Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010): Available in
almost every Cambridge library as well as an ebook via the UL catalogue
Recommended:
*Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015)
Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National,
and Transnational Perspectives (2008)
*Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (1999)
Timothy Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 19551975 (1993)
David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945 (1991)
Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, Wilfried Mausbach, eds., America, the Vietnam War, and the
World: Comparative and International Perspectives (2003)
William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (1996)
* John Dumbrell, Rethinking the Vietnam War (2012)
George C. Herring, “‘Peoples Quite Apart’: Americans, South Vietnamese, and the War in Vietnam,”
Diplomatic History (January 1990)
Gary R. Hess, Vietnam and the United States: Origins and Legacy of a War (1990)
*Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968 (1996)
Hy V. Luong, Revolution in the Village: Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam, 1925-1988
(1992)
3
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (1993)
George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (1986)
Benedict F. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in
Cambodia, 1930-1975 (1985; 2004)
Peter S. Kindsvatter, American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam (2003)
Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience
(1985; 1994)
A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam/Nuoc Viet Ta: A History of the War 1954-1975 (2000)
Craig A. Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History (2009), chapters 7-11
*Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Asia since World War II (1999)
Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent Into Vietnam (2001)
Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2006)
James S. Olson and Randy W. Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995 (5th
ed., 2008)
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (1997)
——, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (2005)
John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (1995)
——, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009)
Andrew J. Rotter, ed., Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology (1999; 2010)
Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (2000)
*Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (1997)
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988)
*Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
(2005), chapter 5
*Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991)
*Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco, eds., A Companion to the Vietnam War (2002)
Week 2, October 19: WWII, the Vietnamese Revolution, and the First Indochina War, 1940-54
American involvement in Vietnam—which, directly and indirectly, helped bring about the three
Indochina Wars—began in response to Japanese expansionism in Asia and the Pacific. Although
Indochina itself played little role in the war effort, Vietnam would pose new problems once the war
ended and the Cold War descended. How exactly did Vietnam influence U.S. foreign policy?
Conversely, how did U.S. foreign policy affect Vietnam? How did Vietnamese and Americans
perceive one another in the war years and early Cold War? How did Americans perceive, and
Vietnamese resist, French colonialism? How did the emergence of the Cold War, both in Europe and
Asia, shape events in Southeast Asia? By first supporting the French in the Franco-Vietnamese War
(1946-54, aka the First Indochina War), and then succeeding the French as the main sponsor of anticommunism in Indochina, the United States deeply entrenched itself in the political affairs of Vietnam.
How did this happen? Why did the United States “assume the burden” of the European colonial
powers, especially France, when it had previously opposed French colonialism and supported decolonization? To what extent did racist or Orientalist views of Indochina shape U.S. policy towards the
region?
Required:
 Herring, America’s Longest War, chapter 1 or Lawrence, The Vietnam War, chapters 1-2
 Bradley, Vietnam at War, chapters 1-2 or Duiker, Sacred War, pp. 22-89
4
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam



Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration,
and the Cold War (1992), pp. 164-74, 374-83, 469-76: available as an ebook via the UL
catalogue
Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Emergence of an American Grand Strategy, 1945-1952,” in Vol. 1 of
Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010):
available in almost every Cambridge library as well as an ebook via the UL catalogue
[if you have time, it is well worth also reading the chapters by David Engerman, “Ideology and
the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1962,” and Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global
South, and the Cold War, 1919-1962,” both of which are also in Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History
of the Cold War]
Recommended:
Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000)
Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II through Dienbienphu, 1941-1954 (1988)
Gary R. Hess, “Franklin Roosevelt and Indochina,” Journal of American History (September 1972)
Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (1987)
Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (1991), chapter 7
Walter LaFeber, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina, 1942-1945,” American Historical Review
(December 1975)
Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in
Vietnam (2005)
Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold
War Crisis (2007)
Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (2012)
Erez Manela, “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt
Against Empire in 1919,” American Historical Review (December 2006)
David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (1971)
——, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (1981)
——, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (1995)
——, Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945-1946) (2013)
Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (2002)
Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to South-East Asia (1987)
Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (2007)
Stein Tønnesson, Vietnam 1946: How the War Began (2010)
James Waite, The End of the First Indochina War: A Global History (2012)
Week 3, October 26: The settlement at Geneva and the two Vietnams, 1954-60
Just as they did in China and Korea, U.S. officials sponsored a local nationalist, anti-communist,
autocratic leader to govern the part of the country that had not come under communist rule. Known
derisively as “America’s mandarin,” Ngo Dinh Diem was criticized, at the time and since, as both an
elitist who was out of touch with his own people and a puppet created by a foreign power. Similarly,
South Vietnam itself has been criticized as an artificial state that could not survive without American
backing and protection. Are these criticisms accurate or do they over-simplify political life in South
Vietnam? How did theories of development and modernization shape U.S. policy? What did
Washington and Saigon mean when they spoke of “nation-building”? How did that differ from
political development in North Vietnam? Why did the period from 1954 to 1961 mark a time of
relative peace? What did events in the 1950s indicate about the future of Vietnam, and of America’s
role?
5
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Required:
 Herring, America’s Longest War, chapter 2 or Lawrence, The Vietnam War, chapter 3
 Duiker, Sacred War, pp. 89-137 or Bradley, Vietnam at War, pp. 77-94
 Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam
(2013), Introduction (pp. 1-18): available as an ebook via the UL catalogue
 Engel, Lawrence, and Preston, America in the World, pp. 256-257
Recommended:
David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam (1991)
Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2013)
James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building in Southeast Asia, 1954-1968
(2008)
Philip E. Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (2003)
Jessica M. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, The United States, and 1950s Southern
Vietnam (2013)
David A. Conrad. “‘Before It Is Too Late’: Land Reform in South Vietnam, 1956-1968,” Journal of
American-East Asian Relations (2014)
Jessica Elkind, “‘The Virgin Mary is Going South’: Refugee Resettlement in South Vietnam, 19541956,” Diplomatic History (November 2014)
Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963 (2003)
Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955): the best edition is by the Viking Critical Library, ed. John
Clark Pratt (1996), which has Pratt’s insightful introduction plus over 300pp of external criticism,
commentary, and analysis from the 1950s to the 1990s
Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention
in Southeast Asia (2004)
Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold
War Crisis (2007)
Steven Hugh Lee, Outposts of Empire: Korea, Vietnam, and the Origins of the Cold War in Asia 19491954 (1995)
Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (2012)
Matthew Masur, “Exhibiting Signs of Resistance: South Vietnam’s Struggle for Legitimacy, 1954-1960,”
Diplomatic History (April 2009)
Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (2005)
Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (1972; 2010)
Tony Smith, “New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War,”
Diplomatic History (Fall 2000)
Week 4, November 2: Reading Week
Week 5, November 9: The “Best and the Brightest” and the Cold War
For both U.S. foreign policy in particular and the international system in general, the great paradox of
the early 1960s is that when the Cold War reached its climax in 1961-62—during crises over Laos,
Cuba, and Berlin—Vietnam remained relatively calm, and when Cold War tensions eased after 1963,
fighting in Vietnam intensified. How central was Vietnam to the Cold War after all? How was U.S.
policy toward Vietnam affected by crises in other areas of the world, and in other parts of Indochina?
And what does this reveal about great power politics in general? Why did the precedent of neutralism
negotiations over Laos not apply to South Vietnam? We will also use this class to examine John F.
6
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson’s foreign policy advisers, the so-called “best and the brightest,” and
the theories they relied on, such as gradual escalation, signaling, and modernization, in the escalation
of the war.
Required:
 George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (2008), pp.
702-729 (from chapter 16): available as an ebook via the UL catalogue
 Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (2006), chapter 3 M
 ——, “John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson,” in Steven Casey and Jonathan Wright, eds.,
Mental Maps in the Early Cold War Era, 1945-68 (2011) M
 Engel, Lawrence, and Preston, America in the World, pp. 209-219, 231-254
Recommended:
Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms (1998)
James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
(2005)
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (2000), parts I-IV
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy, and
the Cuban Missile Crisis (1997)
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National
Security Policy (1982; 2005), chapter 7
Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (2008)
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972)
David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (2008)
Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (1993)
Thomas W. Zeiler, Dean Rusk: Defending the American Mission Abroad (1999)
Week 6, November 16: From Taylor-Rostow and Project Beefup to the Buddhist Crisis, the fall of
Diem, and the death of JFK
From the number of “advisers” (i.e., soldiers) to the amount of military aid, American intervention in
Vietnam escalated dramatically under Kennedy. Simultaneously, relations between Saigon and
Washington deteriorated dramatically, and North Vietnam decided to play a direct role in expanding
communist/nationalist influence in South Vietnam. What do U.S.-South Vietnamese relations tell us
about the origins of the Second Indochina War? What were Kennedy’s alternatives? Did the overthrow
of Diem make war inevitable?
Required:
 Herring, America’s Longest War, chapter 3 or Lawrence, The Vietnam War, pp. 67-85
 Duiker, Sacred War, pp. 138-64 or Bradley, Vietnam at War, pp. 94-104
 Engel, Lawrence, and Preston, America in the World, pp. 258-261
Recommended:
James G. Blight, janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK
(2009), plus my assessment in the Michigan War Studies Review (May 2011):
http://www.miwsr.com/2011-019.aspx
Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (1996)
Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., Vietnam: The Early Decisions (1997)
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (2000), Part V
7
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam
War (2003)
David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000)
Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the
Kennedy Era (2000), chapter 5
Fredrik Logevall, “Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been,” in Mark J. White, ed.,
Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited (1998)
Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (2006)
——, “A Game of Cold War Chess: Kennedy, Forrestal, and the Problem of Laos in the War for
Vietnam,” in Christopher Goscha and Karine Laplante, eds., L’Échec de la paix en Indochine/The
Failure of Peace in Indochina (2010)
William J. Rust, Kennedy in Vietnam (1985)
Week 7, November 23: Escalation and Americanization, November 1963-July 1965
This session examines the critical events of what Fredrik Logevall has called “the Long 1964.” When
Lyndon Johnson succeeded Kennedy as president, he inherited a rapidly deteriorating situation in
South Vietnam. Johnson was renowned for his domestic policies and success as a politician, especially
for his tenure as Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s, but he was not known for his skill in matters of
foreign policy. Determined to continue and extend the Kennedy legacy, both at home and abroad,
Johnson found himself escalating America’s military role in Vietnam. But he did so gradually,
uncertainly, even reluctantly. How, then, did Vietnam become “Lyndon Johnson’s war”? What other
factors, besides geopolitics, played a decisive role in the Johnson administration’s decision-making?
Was Johnson indeed a “reluctant warrior”? Was Americanization inevitable after Pleiku, if ever? If so,
why did Johnson continue to hesitate? What influence did the passage of Great Society and civil rights
legislation have on LBJ’s Vietnam policy-making? Were the “great debates” of July 1965 simply setpieces because the real decisions had already been made earlier?
Required:
 Herring, America’s Longest War, chapter 4 or Lawrence, The Vietnam War, pp. 85-96
 Duiker, Sacred War, pp. 164-175 or Bradley, Vietnam at War, pp. 104-113
 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in
Vietnam (1999), chapter 12 M
 Engel, Lawrence, and Preston, America in the World, pp. 261-270
Recommended:
Francis M. Bator, “No Good Choices: LBJ and the Vietnam/Great Society Connection,” Diplomatic
History (June 2008), plus subsequent commentaries
Robert Dallek, “Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: The Making of a Tragedy,” Diplomatic History (1996)
Gaddis, Strategies of Containment
James G. Hershberg and Chen Jian, “Reading and Warning the Likely Enemy: China’s Signals to the
United States about Vietnam in 1965,” International History Review (March 2005)
David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000)
H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That
Led to Vietnam (1997)
Edwin E. Moïse, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (1996)
Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (2006)
Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (1991)
8
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Randall B. Woods, “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam,” Diplomatic
History (January 2007)
Week 8, November 30: “Waist deep in the Big Muddy”: U.S. and Vietnamese military strategies
Americanizing the war prevented the immediate collapse of South Vietnam, but it also committed the
United States to waging a protracted limited war for uncertain objectives on hostile, unfamiliar terrain.
And the more difficult the war became, the more soldiers Johnson had to commit. Within three years,
more than half a million U.S. troops were in South Vietnam and U.S. aircraft had dropped more bomb
tonnage on Vietnam than it had during all of World War II. Why did the U.S. military find it so
difficult to wage war in Vietnam? Why did Johnson decide not to invade North Vietnam, bomb PAVN
sanctuaries in China, or expand the war to the rest of Indochina? How did other difficulties—for
example, in financing the war—affect military strategy? What advantages, both tactical and strategic,
did the NLF and PAVN have? How did other countries perceive the war, and what role did third
parties and non-belligerents play? Why was the Tet Offensive such a pivotal turning point?
Required:
 Herring, America’s Longest War, chapters 5-6 or Lawrence, The Vietnam War, pp. 98-136
 Duiker, Duiker, Sacred War, pp. 175-218 or Bradley, Vietnam at War, pp. 114-154
Recommended:
Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (1993)
Pierre Asselin, “‘We Don’t Want a Munich’: Hanoi’s Diplomatic Strategy, 1965-1968,” Diplomatic
History (2012)
Larry Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam (1989)
Robert K. Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (1999)
——, ARVN: Life And Death in the South Vietnamese Army (2006)
Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (2001), chapter 8
Patrick Coffey, American Arsenal: A Century of Waging War (2014), chapter 13
Gregory A. Daddis, No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam
War (2011)
——, Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (2014)
John Dumbrell and Sylvia Ellis, “British Involvement in Vietnam Peace Initiatives, 1966-1967:
Marigolds, Sunflowers, and ‘Kosygin Week,’” Diplomatic History (January 2003)
Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (1996)
Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (1994)
Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., International Perspectives on Vietnam (1999)
——, The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968 (2004)
Marc Jason Gilbert, ed., Why the North Won the Vietnam War (2002)
George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (1994)
James G. Hershberg, Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (2012)
David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War, 1959-1968 (2009)
Meredith Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (2011)
Lorenz Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (2008), chapter 10
Edwin A. Martini, Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (2012)
Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (2006)
Mary T. Sarnecky, A History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps (1999), chapter 10
Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (2011)
Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013)
James H. Willbanks, The Tet Offensive: A Concise History (2007)
9
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (1991)
Lent Term
Week 9, January 25: Nixon, Kissinger, and détente
When Richard Nixon entered the White House in January 1969, American power was at its lowest ebb
in three decades. In addition to its disastrous war in Vietnam, the United States was beset by foreign
policy crises abroad, an incipient economic crisis wrought by inflation and deindustrialization, and
race riots and political strife at home. Even its allies, such as France and West Germany, challenged
U.S. policy. Under these circumstances, and with the Sino-Soviet split offering him an opening, Nixon
sought to rebalance America’s role in the world by defusing Cold War tensions, restructuring the U.S.dominated bases of the world economy, and withdrawing American forces from Vietnam. In doing so,
Nixon relied heavily on his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger—so much so that some
historians refer to them together as “Nixinger.” What overall principles guided the Nixinger foreign
policy? Did it really mark such a radical break from previous U.S. foreign policy?
Required:
 Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon in the World: U.S. Foreign Relations, 19691977 (2008), Intro and chapters 1, 3, 5-6: available in the Seeley and most college libraries as an
ebook via the UL catalogue
 Engel, Lawrence, and Preston, America in the World, pp. 281-304
Recommended:
Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (2012)
William P. Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (1998)
Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (2007)
Mario Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy
(2010)
Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The
1970s in Perspective (2010), chapters 2, 10-14
Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan
(1994)
Jussi M. Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (2004)
Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern
Era,” American Historical Review (June 2000)
Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (2007)
Week 10, February 1: Nixinger’s war, from Cambodia to Paris
Just as Johnson had inherited the war from Kennedy, Nixon found his presidency immediately
besieged by the fighting in Vietnam when he assumed office in January 1969. Nixon had campaigned
for president on a vague pledge to end the war, but once he became president he seemed as committed
to attaining victory—that is, the survival of a non-communist South Vietnam—as Eisenhower,
Kennedy, and Johnson had been before him. What exactly did Nixon’s plan for “peace with honor”
mean? Did he sincerely pursue “peace with honor” or merely a politically convenient “decent interval”
in between an American withdrawal and the collapse of South Vietnam? How successful was
Nixinger’s use of linkage and triangulation in ending the war? How effective was Vietnamization?
10
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Could Nixon and Kissinger have achieved the same peace in 1969 as they eventually did in 1973?
How did Hanoi and the PRG respond to Nixinger’s policies of simultaneous military withdrawal and
escalation?
Required:
 Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 271-340 or Lawrence, The Vietnam War, pp. 137-168
 Duiker, Duiker, Sacred War, chapter 6 or Bradley, Vietnam at War, pp. 154-174
 Engel, Lawrence, and Preston, America in the World, pp. 278-280
Recommended:
Pierre Asselin, A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (2002)
Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam (2002)
Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy, chapters 6-7
William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, “Nixon’s Secret Nuclear Alert: Vietnam War Diplomacy and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969,” Cold War History (January 2003)
Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (1998)
Lorenz M. Lüthi, “Beyond Betrayal: Beijing, Moscow, and the Paris Negotiations, 1971-1973,” Journal
of Cold War Studies (Winter 2009)
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (2012)
Stephen P. Randolph, Powerful and Brutal Weapons: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive (2007)
Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in
Vietnam (1999)
Special Issue on “The Politics of Troop Withdrawal,” Diplomatic History (June 2010)
Week 11, February 8: The war at home: antiwar protest and the crisis of legitimacy
The war in Vietnam triggered the largest antiwar movement in American—if not world—history.
Initially confined to the university campus, antiwar protests eventually included other important
groups, such as the clergy and middle classes. Even the U.S. Senate became a forum for debates about
the war and a place to announce antiwar positions. The antiwar movement also spread to other
countries, eventually touching most major cities on every continent. Moreover, the antiwar movement
overlapped considerably with other social protest movements of the 1960s, such as the civil rights and
women’s movements. What is less clear is the war’s ultimate impact on the Johnson and Nixon
administration’s decision-making. Did the movement bring the war to an end or prolong it
unnecessarily? We have already examined how the Vietnam War helped bring about America’s
geopolitical “crisis of hegemony,” but how did the antiwar movement help trigger the nation’s “crisis
of legitimacy”?
Required:
 Simon Hall, Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement (2012): available in the Seeley and
most college libraries as an ebook via the UL catalogue
 Engel, Lawrence, and Preston, America in the World, pp. 270-277
Recommended:
David C. Carter, The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson
Administration, 1965-1968 (2009), chapter 6
Steven Casey, When Soldiers Fall: How Americans Have Confronted Combat Losses from World War I
to Afghanistan (2014), chapter 5
Michael S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War (2003)
11
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Katrina Forrester, “Citizenship, War, and the Origins of International Ethics in American Political
Philosophy, 1960-1975,” The Historical Journal (September 2014)
Adam Garfinkle, Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (1995)
John Hagan, Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada (2001)
Walter L. Hixson, “Containment on the Perimeter: George F. Kennan and Vietnam,” Diplomatic History
(April 1988)
Simon Hall, Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s (2005)
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (1999; 2012)
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (1999)
Andrew L. Johns, Vietnam’s Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (2010)
Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006),
chapters 7-8
Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen, The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American
Wartime Inequalities (2010), esp. chapter 6
David W. Levy, The Debate Over Vietnam (1991; 1995)
Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
(2013)
David Maraniss, They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967
(2003)
Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (2001)
Seth Offenbach, “Defending Freedom in Vietnam: A Conservative Dilemma,” in Laura Jane Gifford and
Daniel K. Williams, eds., The Right Side of the Sixties: Reexamining Conservatism’s Decade of
Transformation (2012)
Shawn Francis Peters, The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (2012)
Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012),
chapter 26
——, “Tempered by the Fires of War: Vietnam and the Transformation of the Evangelical Worldview,”
in Axel R. Schäfer, ed., In and Of the Times: New Perspectives on American Evangelicalism and
the 1960s (2013)
Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights
Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (2006), chapter 8
Dominic Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism (2004),
chapters 7-10
Sandra Scanlon, The Pro-War Movement: Domestic Support for the Vietnam War and the Making of
Modern American Conservatism (2013)
Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (2003)
John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (2011), chapter 5
Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and
Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (2004)
Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (1994)
Randall B. Woods, J. William Fulbright, Vietnam, and the Search for a Cold War Foreign Policy (1998)
——, ed., Vietnam and the American Political Tradition: The Politics of Dissent (2003)
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the
Vietnam Era (2013)
Week 12, February 15: The media, the New Journalism, and public perceptions of the war
In America’s previous wars, the media operated under tight government and military controls. But,
ironically, such controls were hardly needed, as journalists readily practiced a form of self-censorship
that reflected official views. The Vietnam War changed things. Newspaper and television reporters,
12
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
both in the field and in the Washington press corps, challenged rather than corroborated the official
view. When these newly-aggressive investigative journalists exposed inconsistencies and outright lies
in the official narrative on the war, it led to the emergence of the “credibility gap,” which in turn fed
domestic unrest about the conduct of the war. What explains these changes in media practice? Were
they a result of new military transportation technology, particularly the widespread use of the
helicopter in Vietnam? Were they simply the result of generational differences? What influence did
photojournalism have on public perceptions? In challenging the official narrative, did journalists
distort the war in other ways? How did the Pentagon Papers case emerge? How did it affect the war, if
at all? More broadly, and with the more recent Wikileaks and Edward Snowden controversies in mind,
do people with access to official documents and decisions have a moral duty to leak secret information
if they feel it is wrong?
Required:
 Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (1986), pp. 3-12, 211-215 M
 Chester J. Pach, Jr., “‘We Need to Get a Better Story to the American People’: LBJ, the Progress
Campaign, and the Vietnam War on Television,” in Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank,
Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (2010)
M
 John Prados, “Daniel Ellsberg: The Man Who Uncovered the War,” in David L. Anderson, ed.,
The Human Tradition in the Vietnam Era (2000) M
 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Recommended:
NB: see also the books on the antiwar movement from Week 11
Chapters by Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, and Nicholas Tomalin in Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, eds.,
The New Journalism (1973)
Chapters by Malcolm Browne, Bernard Fall, David Halberstam, and Neil Sheehan in Library of America,
Reporting Vietnam (1998)
Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis
of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (1977; 1983)
Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (1986)
William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War (1998)
Joyce Hoffmann, On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam (2008)
William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles
(1995)
David Rudenstine, The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case (1996)
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)
Kathleen J. Turner, Lyndon Johnson’s Dual War: Vietnam and the Press (1985)
Clarence Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (1993)
Week 13, February 22: Reading Week
Week 14, March 1: Cambodia’s killing fields and the Third Indochina War
In April 1975, the North Vietnamese captured Saigon and reunified all of Vietnam under communist
rule, bringing an end to the Second Indochina War. And yet war still stalked the region. From
neighbouring Cambodia, the ruling Khmer Rouge launched raids against Vietnam. Vietnam responded
by invading Cambodia in 1978, which triggered a Chinese invasion of Vietnam the following year. In
the midst of all this emerged one of the worst instances of genocide in human history, when the Khmer
13
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Rouge slaughtered nearly a quarter of the Cambodian population. What was the American role in the
wars that followed their official military departure? Who was responsible for the Khmer Rouge and the
“killing fields”? Did Nixon and Kissinger bear any responsibility? Why was peace in Indochina so
elusive?
Required:
 Benedict F. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (1996; 2002; 2008), pp. 1-27 M
 Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (2003), pp. 144-189 M
Recommended:
Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War After the War (1986)
David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945 (1991)
T. Christopher Jespersen, “The Bitter End and the Lost Chance in Vietnam: Congress, the Ford
Administration, and the Battle Over Vietnam, 1975-76,” Diplomatic History (Spring 2000)
Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia,” The Walrus (October 2006),
http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf
Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (2011),
chapter 5
Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge, eds., The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China,
Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972-79 (2006)
Ralph Wetterhahn, The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War (2001)
Julian Zelizer, “Conservatives, Carter, and the Politics of National Security,” in Bruce J. Schulman and
Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (2008)
Xiaoming Zhang, “Deng Xiaoping and China’s Decision to go to War with Vietnam,” Journal of Cold
War Studies (Summer 2010)
Week 15, March 8: Legacies
As the presidential election of 2004 demonstrated, the legacy of Vietnam continues to haunt
Americans. The war itself has had a profound impact on U.S. foreign policy, while the antiwar
movement fueled a conservative counter-revolution that lives on in the presidency of George W. Bush.
Yet in Vietnam, which suffered incalculably greater physical and psychological damage, the war is a
distant memory, and anti-Americanism has all but disappeared. Why, even after the triumphalism of
Reagan, the end of the Cold War, and the 1991 Gulf War, have Americans found it so difficult to move
beyond Vietnam? How has Vietnam affected the international system? Does its influence still exist?
Was Afghanistan or Iraq another Vietnam? Does it matter?
Required:
 Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 340-368 or Lawrence, The Vietnam War, pp. 168-185
 Duiker, Sacred War, 259-271 or Bradley, Vietnam at War, pp. 174-196
 Robert J. McMahon, “What Difference Did It Make? Assessing the Vietnam War’s Impact on
Southeast Asia,” in Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., International Perspectives on
Vietnam (1999) M
 ——, “Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975-2001,” Diplomatic
History (Spring 2002)
 Walt W. Rostow, “Vietnam and Asia,” Diplomatic History (Summer 1996)
14
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Recommended:
Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (2009)
Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015), chapters 811
Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (2009)
Thomas A. Bass, Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home (1996)
Milton J. Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (1996)
Stephen Biddle, “Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006)
Robert K. Brigham, Iraq, Vietnam, and the Limits of American Power (2008)
Casey, When Soldiers Fall, chapter 6
Denise Chong, The Girl in the Picture: The Kim Phuc Story (1999)
Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name (1995)
Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation
(1995; 2007)
H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2000), chapters 6-9
Gary Gerstle, “In the Shadow of Vietnam: Liberal Nationalism and the Problem of War,” in Michael
Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, eds., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal
(2006)
Christoph Giebel, Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of
History and Memory (2004)
Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of
Healing (2009)
George C. Herring, “America and Vietnam: The Unending War,” Foreign Affairs (Winter 1991/92)
Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (2014)
Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace (1997)
Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (2006)
——, Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008)
Scott Laderman, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory (2009)
Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini, eds., Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the
Legacies of the Second Indochina War (2013)
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998)
Charles Neu, ed., After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War (2000)
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, “The Vietnam Decade: The Global Shock of the War,” in Niall Ferguson, Charles
S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in
Perspective (2010)
David Ryan and John Dumbrell, eds., Vietnam in Iraq: Lessons, Legacies, and Ghosts (2006)
Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War (2006)
Christina Schwenkel, The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and
Representation (2009)
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (1997)
Week 16, March 15: Historiography, debates, and reflections
Unsurprisingly, interpretations of the war—its causes, course, and consequences—have also proven to
be controversial among historians. In this final week, we’ll examine various historiographical
interpretations, assess the impact of “the new Cold War history,” and reflect on the meaning of the war
ourselves.
15
Paper 26: The American Experience in Vietnam
Required:
 Duiker, Sacred War, 251-258
 Robert A. Divine, “Vietnam Reconsidered,” Diplomatic History (January 1988)
 Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995), preface and
chapter 11 M
 “Mr. McNamara’s War,” New York Times, April 12, 1995 (available online on the ProQuest
database via the UL online catalogue)
 “As Wrong as McNamara,” Washington Post, April 19, 1995 (ditto)
 Edward Miller, “War Stories: The Taylor-Buzzanco Debate and How We Think About the
Vietnam War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2006)
 Edward Miller and Tuong Vu, “The Vietnam War as a Vietnamese War: Agency and Society in
the Study of the Second Indochina War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies (Fall 2009)
Recommended:
David L. Anderson, “No More Vietnams: Historians Debate the Policy Lessons of the Vietnam War,” in
Anderson and John Ernst, eds., The War that Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War
(2007)
John Dumbrell, Rethinking the Vietnam War (2012)
Gary R. Hess, “The Military Perspective on Strategy in Vietnam,” Diplomatic History (January 1986)
——, “The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History (April 1994)
——, Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War (2009)
Jeffrey P. Kimball, ed., To Reason Why: The Debate About the Causes of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam
War (1990)
Fredrik Logevall, “Bringing in the ‘Other Side’: New Scholarship on the Vietnam Wars,” Journal of Cold
War Studies (Fall 2001)
Andrew Preston, “Decisions for War,” in Mitchell B. Lerner, ed., A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson
(2012)
——. “Vietnam,” in Marc J. Selverstone, ed., A Companion to John F. Kennedy (2014)
Keith Taylor, “How I Began to Teach about the Vietnam War,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2004)
——. “Robert Buzzanco’s ‘Fear and (Self) Loathing in Lubbock,’” Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2006)
Andrew Wiest and Michael Doidge, eds., Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War
(2010)
Easter Term
April 27: Revision class
May 4: Revision class