Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 [Hardcover]

"If you do nothing enough, something's bound to happen" - Benjamin Daniel Katz

In his new book, Triumph Forsaken, Mark Moyar refers to this interpretation of Vietnam as the "orthodox" school of thought. So entrenched is this orthodox interpretation that its proponents consider axiomatic their premise that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was at best a lapse in judgment, at worst a criminal enterprise, and in any case a tragic mistake. The "revisionist" school, a growing insurgency in military history that Moyar explicitly represents, sees Vietnam as "a worthy but improperly executed enterprise."

Moyar's focus is on the formative years of the conflict, before the major commitment of U.S. combat forces in 1965. He considers the key assertions that undergird the orthodox interpretation of events, and shows their weaknesses, if not outright inaccuracies. The story focuses on Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam, who came to power (as prime minister) in 1954. The U.S.-backed 1963 coup that resulted in Diem's death was by most accounts the watershed event in the history of the war; it led inexorably to the large-scale commitment of U.S. ground forces two years later.

The orthodox histories present Diem as a clueless tyrant who was losing control of the country -- as a Catholic aloofly ruling a land of Buddhists, influenced by the Marie Antoinette-like attitude of his sister-in-law Madame Nhu. Moyar convincingly argues that this depiction of Diem is false, the product of U.S. press bias and the cultural illiteracy of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. Diem was in no wise an ineffectual leader. Unlike those who followed him, he was able to make order. Diem neutralized the vast organized-crime empires that initially threatened his authority. He kept a lid on the militant Buddhist movement that was in league with the North. Moreover, with the help of U.S. advisers -- including former OSS operative Edward Lansdale and Lt. Gen. Samuel "Hanging Sam" Williams -- he was able to mount an effective campaign to diminish the influence of the Communists in the South. Internal Communist-party documents from the North show that the party suffered massive defections and defeats in the late 1950s, in some areas losing 90 percent of its cadres. Diem's success was no secret; in 1959 the New York Times dubbed his rule since 1954 "a five-year miracle."

By then Diem was at his zenith. In 1960 Ho Chi Minh, frustrated at the failure of the party to foment an uprising in the South, declared a renewed armed struggle and began dispatching waves of soldiers and supplies southward. Diem's internal opponents were given new confidence. When Lodge arrived, he took an instant dislike to Diem, primarily because Lodge thought he knew better how to run South Vietnam, and Diem had the temerity to think otherwise. The U.S. pushed Diem to make conciliatory gestures to various protest groups, particularly the Buddhists, which played into the hands of the Communists. A noteworthy State Department cable from this period observed that one of Diem's concessions "appears to have had no effect on militants." In fact, Diem's U.S.-mandated acts of conciliation had emboldened his enemies, since they read compromise as weakness. This contributed to the self-reinforcing story line that led to the coup -- fear of losing control of the situation in South Vietnam on the part of those who did not know how to keep order led them to hobble the one man who did. Increasing disorder fed Lodge's propensity to micromanage, which stiffened Diem's resistance. He was finally removed for not being the puppet ruler his adversaries accused him of being.

One very effective enemy psychological operation was the use of Buddhist demonstrators. Diem, a Catholic, was charged with oppressing the more numerous Buddhists. Moreover, with their exotic robes and regalia the Buddhists were well suited to garnering the attentions of the press. They presented an attractive story line, one that played to the American sense of religious freedom and fair play. For example, when Diem sought to close some Buddhist pagodas that had become subversive headquarters, it raised the same kinds of concerns one hears when contemporary authorities scrutinize the similar abuse of mosques.

The Buddhists were portrayed as well-intentioned reformers with no ties to the Communists, a notion central to the orthodox critique of Diem; but the most important of the militant Buddhist leaders, Tri Quang, was the brother of the North Vietnamese Communist official in charge of subversion in the South. Many of the protesters were Communist provocateurs who had simply shaved their heads and donned saffron robes.

A key contributor to the downfall of the regime was anti-Diem press coverage, the type written by Stanley Karnow, David Halberstam, and Neil Sheehan, among others. One might think that reporters who spent their time covering a country from the inside might be counted on to offer significant insights, but a congressional fact-finding mission in 1963 found the in-country American reporters to be "arrogant, emotional, unobjective, and ill-informed." Karnow, Halberstam, and Sheehan all relied a great deal on a Vietnamese journalist named Pham Xuan An, a stringer for Reuters. He helped the journalists interpret political events, always in a light unfavorable to Diem. The Americans did not know that Pham was a Communist agent who had been instructed by the party to become a journalist in order to influence Western media views of Vietnam. (Today, many news services rely on Iraqi stringers, and it is common practice for insurgents and their sympathizers to produce staged videos and concoct anti-Coalition stories to feed to the credulous Westerners. One example is Bilal Hussein, an AP photographer who is said to have strong insurgent ties and was taken into custody in a terrorist safe house.)

Moyar is sympathetic to President Kennedy, downplaying his desire for and knowledge of the coup, and placing most of the blame on Lodge, who was pursuing a private vendetta. The coup was generally hailed by the liberal establishment: The New York Times called it "inevitable . . . and highly desirable." But Moyar argues (and even some orthodox historians agree) that the coup was a momentous blunder. It ushered in a series of weak governments, which in turn emboldened Hanoi to make a major push toward victory. Moyar takes effective aim at the orthodox argument that the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident was engineered by Lyndon Johnson as an excuse to pursue escalation in Vietnam. In fact, at the time, LBJ was criticized for not responding vigorously enough, and the first large-scale U.S. combat actions did not take place until the summer of 1965, a year after Tonkin.

Johnson himself said, as early as April 1965, that "our restraint [after the Tonkin Gulf incident] was viewed as weakness; our desire to limit conflict was viewed as prelude to our surrender." But he did not internalize this lesson, and the use of "graduated force" in Vietnam, which was intended to convey U.S. resolve, had the opposite effect. This is a common critique in military circles, credited to Harry Summers. The proper response to provocation is not to dole out force in small doses; rather, it is to employ the traditional American way of war, sudden, unrestrained violence in pursuit of total victory. Where Americans have fought wars that way, we have won. Where we have not, we have lost. The accepted wisdom in the Vietnam period was that had the U.S. extended the ground war to the North (as many military leaders wanted), China would have intervened, leading to a second Korean War. Moyar notes that newly obtained Chinese sources fail to support this notion. One might add that the "Second Korean War" scenario looks pretty good compared with what actually happened, since in Korea we suffered two-thirds the casualties of Vietnam (killed and wounded), and we maintained the South's freedom.

Throughout the book Moyar takes up the contentions that form the bulwark of the orthodox interpretation. Would JFK have withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived? No, if anything he would have escalated the American commitment. Was Ho Chi Minh just a nationalist leader seeking the peaceful reunification of his country? No, he was a hard-core Leninist who sought to extend his rule as far as it would go, whether the people he ruled wanted it or not. The book is meticulously documented; it draws on the substantial U.S. documentary record of the war, bringing fresh perspectives to familiar evidence. Moyar augments and supports his analysis with extensive use of North Vietnamese archival material, most of which was unavailable to the orthodox historians of the 1970s and '80s.

In sum, Triumph Forsaken is an important book -- not only as an interpretation of the Vietnam War, but also as a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to believe that the culture of the New England town meeting can be easily exported and take root overnight in new soil. The U.S. tried to force too much, too fast, on South Vietnam. We wanted American-style democracy to flourish in a culture that could not sustain it; we wanted a free and independent South Vietnamese government that would do what it was told. By 1965 we had taken full ownership of a wrecked system, prompting President Johnson to complain: "I can't get out. I can't finish it with what I have got. And I don't know what the hell to do!"

I read Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken with full admiration. As an avid

reader of Vietnam war history --in both in Vietnamese and in English --it's delightful to see Mr. Moyar comes up with a fresh look at, among

others, what we Sough Vietnamese consider the most turbulent times of the

Republic of Vietnam . Aside from the book's main theme which advances

the premise that triumphs achieved by South Vietnam's first republic

were forsaken and the removal of President Ngo Dinh Diem was a mortal

mistake, Triumph Forsaken also provides a detailed picture of a rather

complex and chaotic times in South Vietnam .

The immediate four years after the coup d'R(tm)etat that brought down Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in 1963 were tumultuous ones. The situation during

the period of 1964-1967 in Saigon had been discussed and written in many

books before, but none provided as much details as Mr. Moyar's. What

makes Mr. Moyar'book different from other books is that the author

abundantly supplies readers with references from books published in

Vietnamese from both sides of the war (North and South Vietnam ). This reader must admid that many times during reading Mr. Moyar'R(tm)s book, he has gone to his bookshelves to checked out those Vietnamese sources cited by the author. And on every instance the references are relevant and concise; translations from the Vietnamese sources are splendid as they were rendered into English.

Two chapters stands out from Triumph Forsaken: Chapter 16 (The Prize for

Victory: January-May 1965), and Chapter 17 (Decision: June-July 1965). The

periods described in those two chapters were the times when political and

military situations in South Vietnam were at their worst: in the home front,infighting between South Vietnamese rival generals for political control reached its apex. In the battle front, North Vietnamese military commanders began to test to see if they could employ big unit operations. And with the capability to wage regimental-sized battles they could. It's from these vicious and big battles of Binh Gia, Dong Xoai and Ba Gia in 1965, where the South Vietnamese ilitary suffered bad beatings, that the United Stated decided to send in the ground (combat) troops to stem the tide. In addition to many recently declassified documents used to prove the author's point, for a better comparison, Mr. Moyar also provides

plenty of sources and references from contemporary North and South

Vietnamese military books and memoirs. And that makes the book interesting.

Lastly, this may be aside from the focus of this review, but as a Vietnamese reader I can not fail to praise Mr. Moyar for his scholarship and his keen eyes for editing this Vietnamese-ladden book: of the 415 pages of text and 93 pages of references and index, sprinkled with Vietnamese names and Vietnamese titles, there were only five typos. Now, that's a remarkable achievement for a young Vietnam war historian. Triumph Forsaken is a must read for those who care to read Vietnam war literature. Read not one time, but a few times over.

Triumph Forsaken is the finest account published to date on the Vietnam War. The early histories of the War were produced by the journalists who covered the War. Their accounts reflect negative reporting, as well as the search for "Dirt" as Neil Sheehan called it. Thereafter followed histories of the War based on the negative journalism that characterized media coverage from the War Zone.

In the years that followed primary sources have been produced that include biographical accounts -- first person accounts of the diplomats, intelligence operatives, and soldiers who experienced the War first hand. Particularly useful have been the official military histories produces long after the guns were silent that record the message traffic, major speeches of key leaders, and intelligence summaries of the campaigns waged by both Hanoi and America. Finally there are the biographical accounts of the North Vietnamese Generals, who directed the War from Hanoi and fought the War in South Vietnam. Their accounts add much to our understanding of the War and in many respects show a remarkable similarity to the accounts of Senior American Diplomats and General Officers of the battles they waged from opposite sides of the skirmish lines.

It is these primary sources that Mark Moyar has used to write his fresh and very readable History of the Vietnam War. Such a work could not have been written twenty years ago, because the primary sources were still in production. Now that these sources have been published, it is possible for the first time to see the War as senior leaders on both sides saw the Conflict. Moyar's account is fascinating. It bring both new light to the events of the War, as well as it brings new analysis never before seen to evaluate the significance of the Vietnam experience and the meaning of the vast treasure, both human and military, that both sides poured into the War effort to shape our times. Serious students of the Vietnamese War, or the American War, as it in known in Hanoi, will not want to miss the seminal publication.

Published by Cambridge University Press and 512 pages in length, Triumph Forsaken is the finest work yet to emerge from among the many works covering the War. Covering the years from 1954 to 1965, the History will be followed by a follow-on edition covering the years from 1965 to 1975 that will provide new light on the final decade of the War based upon recently published primary sources. The reader who brings an open mind and willingness to hear the words of those who led the War will be rewarded many times over for the time spent engrossed in a beautifully written account of the most important war fought since the end of the Second World War.

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