Top 5 Books On JFK & Vietnam

[Tom Gram]

1 hour ago, Michael Griffith said:

The point Mike, which is articulated by the reviewers in Triumph Revisited much better than I can, is that precise historical accuracy and verifiability of sources is critical in such a controversial book that explicitly defines its goal as debunking every core tenet of the orthodox view of the Vietnam War. 

You really should stop bluffing and posturing as though you know what you are talking about. You have read next to nothing about the Vietnam War. You uncritically embraced the negative reviews in Triumph Revisited (obviously before you read any of Moyar's responses therein); you have ignored Moyar's responses to those reviews; and you have ignored the numerous positive reviews of Moyar's book in other scholarly sources.

Instead, Moyar invented a fake conversation out of a State Department memo for dramatic effect, which also happened to help support his argument, and did the same thing at least one other time; 

I already addressed this vacuous attack. You just keep repeating claims from the negative reviews and ignoring my responses to them and ignoring Moyar's responses to them. Has it not occurred to you that attentive readers will wonder why you keep declining to answer the points made in responses to the claims you keep repeating? 

cherry-picked and misrepresented sources while deliberately omitting contradictory information, 

I already addressed these false claims as well, but you just keep repeating them and ignoring the facts I have cited that challenge these claims. I would note that you still have not explained Laderman's demonstrably false claim that Moyar misrepresented/misused McHale as a source. I have proved that Moyar did no such thing, and that Laderman had to know this when he wrote the accusation. I have asked you several times now to defend Laderman's attack in light of the evidence I have presented, but you still refuse to do so.

and chose a citation style [block citation] that makes it exceedingly difficult for anyone to verify his claims. 

LOL! You are even doubling down on this juvenile complaint??? Block citation is a standard, recognized style that is used in literally hundreds of thousands of books. And just exactly who finds it "exceedingly difficult" to verify a claim because the documentation for the claim is given in a block citation? A vision-impaired person? I mean, this is just comical. 

These are not my opinions. These are the opinions of top credentialed experts on the Vietnam war, so your repeated condescending comments towards me only reflect your rabid bias for Moyar and the revisionist view.

You keep trying to hide behind the authority of the negative reviewers in Triumph Revisited and in a handful of other sources, yet you still decline to address the many errors and distortions in their reviews that Moyar points out in his responses and that I have discussed in this thread. You also continue to simply ignore the fact that many other "top credentialed experts on the Vietnam War" have praised Moyar's books.

You are in the same predicament as a newcomer to the JFK case would be if he had read very little on the case and had only read pro-WC material. The JFK newcomer, if he were unaware of basic critical thinking principles, would get on this forum, would remind everyone that the vast majority of academic historians support the lone-gunman theory, and would then stridently reject the conspiracy view. When conspiracy theorists would start pointing out the plethora of errors in the writings of those academic historians, the JFK newcomer (if he were not inclined to reconsider and do more research) would use appeals to authority to dismiss or ignore the facts being pointed out to him by conspiracy theorists.

Lastly, would it be less offensive to say something like “the vast majority of experts vehemently disagree with every single core argument”? I think “think it is total nonsense” covers it just fine. 

You seem to have a very hard time admitting error. You said that the vast majority of Vietnam War experts regard Moyar's books and the revisionist view as "total nonsense." Now you are trying to weasel-word your way out of defending that ridiculous statement. 

Even your weasel-worded revised verbiage is inaccurate, as anyone can see just by reading the negative reviews in Triumph Revisited. Indeed, non-revisionist scholars have written books that present evidence that strongly supports a number of Moyar's core arguments, e.g., Max Hastings, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Nguyen Van Canh, Christopher Goscha, and Tuong Vu. 

You keep misrepresenting things I’ve said. I can’t say I’m surprised. I did read Moyar’s review replies, and have said so multiple times in this thread. Even though you uncritically embrace everything Moyar writes as gospel, and have tried valiantly to pass off his lawyerly excuses to valid, incisive criticisms from top experts as some sort of proof the reviewers were wrong, not one thing Moyar said in those replies invalidates the hard evidence provided by the reviewers in Triumph Revisited that Moyar deliberately cherry-picked and misrepresented source material to support his thesis. It doesn’t get any clearer than putting a claim and a citation right next to each other and demonstrating conclusively that they don’t match up. 

You’re still dodging the point made by Laderman et al. that accuracy and verifiability are of the utmost importance in such a controversial book. As Laderman (I think?) pointed out, the choice of using block citations, which requires the reader to search through several different sources at a time to verify specific cited claims, is suspect when paired with the fact that Moyar provably twisted, misrepresented, and cherry-picked his sources to support his arguments. Complaining that other authors do it too without invoking the same level of criticism is not a valid excuse. Is it really “juvenile” for Laderman to suspect that a deliberate obfuscation of the peer review process in a book that makes such extraordinary claims might be more than just stylistic preference, especially after discovering that many of Moyar’s claims were not even remotely supported by his citations? Yeah, I don’t think so, and I think anyone who reads Triumph Revisited - except you, of course - would at least want to check Moyar’s sources in detail before believing anything he says. 

[James DiEugenio]

All of this to try and show that Diem was an effective ruler who could have held out indefinitely?

Oh man.  General Collins who spent months there in 1954-55 did not think so.

[Gene Kelly]

Jim 

I've been following this extended debate and discussion about JFK, Diem and Vietnam.  I am also now reading Monika Wiesak's fine book, "America's Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy".  My question is, in your estimation, why did Foster Dulles and company originally back/support Diem?  Was it because they felt he was a controllable puppet?  Or perhaps a Catholic leader they thought could unite the north and south? 

Surely, they must've known how flawed and weak he was. But they had Edward Lansdale continue to prop him up as a leader.  What was their end game here? 

Thanks,

Gene

[Tom Gram]

50 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

All of this to try and show that Diem was an effective ruler who could have held out indefinitely?

Oh man.  General Collins who spent months there in 1954-55 did not think so.

Right? Another key element of Moyar’s thesis is that the US would have been in a “better strategic scenario” had they initiated a full-scale invasion of the North in ‘64:

“The United States would not have won the war quickly had it invaded the North, but it would have faced a far better strategic scenario than the one it ultimately accepted by not invading.” - Moyar from QA session on Triumph Forsaken 

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/30490.html

Of course, for Moyar to be able say this, he has to argue that China would not have intervened. As shown in Triumph Revisited, Moyar’s evidence for this claim is highly dubious, since he relies heavily on a single comment made to (a reporter?) while ignoring several other statements and Chinese sources that indicate that China would have indeed entered the war in response to an American invasion in ‘64. 

I don’t have the dates in front of me, but even Moyar acknowledges that by 1965, China was committed to entering the war if the US invaded North Vietnam. One of the reviewers points out that this limits Moyar’s effective invasion theory to a six-month window…

[Michael Griffith]

5 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

You keep misrepresenting things I’ve said.

No, I do not. You keep writing gaffes and then falsely claim I've misrepresented you when I call you on them. 

I am still waiting for you to post what you regard as the three most "devastating" criticisms in Laderman's review. I suspect you have not done so because you fear I will refute them.

I did read Moyar’s review replies, and have said so multiple times in this thread.

Then you must have read them with dark sunglasses on and must have only read every third word. You have repeated a number of attacks that Moyar soundly refutes in his responses.

Even though you uncritically embrace everything Moyar writes as gospel, and have tried valiantly to pass off his lawyerly excuses to valid, incisive criticisms from top experts as some sort of proof the reviewers were wrong,

One, you have not read enough to be able to credibly judge the negative reviews and Moyar's responses. Two, you have not pointed out a single error in Moyar's responses or in my critiques of the negative reviews. Three, all you keep doing is using appeals to authority, as if to say, "Gee, I cannot explain the errors you have documented in the negative reviews, and I have no answers for the points Moyar makes in his responses, but you and Moyar must be wrong because 'top experts' wrote those negative reviews." 

not one thing Moyar said in those replies invalidates the hard evidence provided by the reviewers in Triumph Revisited

"Not one thing"??? Really??? What utter hogwash. You must know this is false. I guess you are hoping that nobody who is reading this thread will ever read Moyar's books and Triumph Revisited.

that Moyar deliberately cherry-picked and misrepresented source material to support his thesis.

You can repeat this falsehood a hundred times, but that will not make it come true. You still have not explained the evidence I have presented that Laderman falsely accused Moyar of misusing McHale as a source and that Laderman surely knew this when he made the claim. I keep asking you if you are going to explain Laderman's false claim, and you keep ducking the question. 

Part of your "cherry-picked" claim is based on the uneducated repetition of the complaint that Moyar cited/quoted some sources to support arguments even though the sources reject those arguments. Uh, yeah, scholars do this all the time. All the time. We conspiracy theorists do it all the time, such as when we cite or quote Warren Commission materials to support arguments that the Commission rejected, or when we cite HSCA studies to support arguments that those studies rejected. 

You see, there are innumerable times when Author A includes information that does not support Position A, even though he presents it as evidence for Position A because he misinterprets it or fails to realize its actual implications, and then other authors will cite or quote that same information from Author A's book to support Position B even though Author A rejects Position B and argues for Position A. If you do not know that this is done all the time, then I must wonder about your level of education. 

It doesn’t get any clearer than putting a claim and a citation right next to each other and demonstrating conclusively that they don’t match up. 

Again, repeating a falsehood over and over will not make it come true. I already addressed your bogus examples that supposedly prove Moyar did this, and I showed they prove no such thing. 

You are still dodging the point made by Laderman et al. that accuracy and verifiability are of the utmost importance in such a controversial book.

This is the kind of unserious strawman claim that a frustrated teenager would make when he knew he was losing an argument. Nobody denies that accuracy and verifiability are important in any book, controversial or otherwise. 

As Laderman (I think?) pointed out, the choice of using block citations, which requires the reader to search through several different sources at a time to verify specific cited claims is suspect, when paired with the fact that Moyar provably twisted, misrepresented, and cherry-picked his sources to support his arguments.

LOL! This is clown material. Using block citations is never suspect under any circumstances. It is a common practice used in hundreds of thousands of books.  And, again, you have not proved that Moyar misrepresented or "cherry-picked" his sources to support his arguments. On the contrary, I proved that Laderman's prime example of alleged misuse of sources is bogus, and that Laderman must have known it was bogus when he wrote it. 

Complaining that other authors do it too without invoking the same level of criticism is not a valid excuse.

No??? This is more clown material. The fact that some of the negative reviewers fault Moyar for using block citations and for treating meeting notes as verbatim transcripts only proves that they are so desperate to attack Moyar that they will stoop to using juvenile methods to do so.

Is it really “juvenile” for Laderman to suspect that a deliberate obfuscation of the peer review process in a book that makes such extraordinary claims might be more than just stylistic preference,

Yup, it is juvenile. It is also dishonest and ridiculous.

And let us keep in mind that Laderman, whom you keep holding up as a top expert, endorses Zhai's ludicrous claim that Ho and his fellow Communist leaders were mainly nationalists, a myth that even many non-revisionist scholars have debunked. Laderman also makes the long-debunked assumption that Diem's government was just as oppressive as Ho's government, a fable that was destroyed many years ago. A few sources that prove these claims are inexcusably outdated are Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen's Hanoi's War, Dr. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life, Max Hastings' Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, Nguyen Van Cahn's Vietnam Under Communism, Bui Tin's Following Ho Chi Minh (do you know who Bui Tin was?), and Pierre Brocheux's Ho Chi Minh: a Biography.

especially after discovering that many of Moyar’s claims were not even remotely supported by his citations?

How many times are you going to repeat this falsehood, while still refusing to address the relevant points in my previous replies and while still peddling the juvenile nonsense about block citations, the treatment of meeting notes as verbatim transcripts, and the use of sources for arguments that the sources reject? 

Yeah, I don’t think so, and I think anyone who reads Triumph Revisited - except you, of course - would at least want to check Moyar’s sources in detail before believing anything he says. 

Ouch. Yowzah. Well, that is a mighty bold and petty comment to be made by someone like you, given that you have not read Moyar's Triumph Forsaken, i.e., the very book that Triumph Revisited reviews, and given that you have not read any of Moyar's other books or any other scholarly books that support the revisionist position. 

Edited July 21, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

On 7/21/2023 at 10:25 AM, Gene Kelly said:

Jim 

I've been following this extended debate and discussion about JFK, Diem and Vietnam.  I am also now reading Monika Wiesak's fine book, "America's Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy".  My question is, in your estimation, why did Foster Dulles and company originally back/support Diem?  Was it because they felt he was a controllable puppet?  Or perhaps a Catholic leader they thought could unite the north and south? 

Surely, they must've known how flawed and weak he was. But they had Edward Lansdale continue to prop him up as a leader.  What was their end game here? 

Thanks,

Gene

That is a good question.  

Because even Bao Dai thought that Phan Huy Quat was a better choice.  (Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, pp. 18-19) And Quat was both anti French and anti communist.

But Diem had been in the USA for awhile. His big backer was Wesley Fishel at Michigan State who had ties to the CIA, as did the university president John Hannah. But there was also Spellman and he was important since he knew a lot of people in NYC and Washington. And he  likely got him an audience with Pope Pius in Rome.

The next year, 1951, he got an interview with the State Department chief of Indochina. He attacked Bao Dai and said that he would give the country over to the commies.  That got him an interview with Acheson. From then, Spellman set him up at Maryknoll Seminary. He was in the USA for about three years.  One commentator said that his catholicism was his greatest asset.  This had an appeal in America.  And Diem then began to speak at eastern and midwestern universities.  This got him some good newspaper and magazine coverage.

When that happened Spellman connected him with Justice William O. Douglass at the Yale Club in NYC. Douglass then introduced him to John McCormack, a higher up in the House.  He then told  Robert Amory of the CIA. about him.  Once Dien Bien Phu fell, then this was the choice Bao Dai made. Knowing full well that Diem had backers in DC.

The French officials did not like it since they thought Diem would fail.  But once Bao Dai picked him, the CIA and Foster Dulles sent Lansdale over to usher him in.

Edited July 23, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

17 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

Right? Another key element of Moyar’s thesis is that the US would have been in a “better strategic scenario” had they initiated a full-scale invasion of the North in ‘64:

“The United States would not have won the war quickly had it invaded the North, but it would have faced a far better strategic scenario than the one it ultimately accepted by not invading.” - Moyar from QA session on Triumph Forsaken 

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/30490.html

I suspect you do not care and that this will go in one ear and out the other, but, just FYI, virtually every senior military officer who served in Vietnam and who wrote about the war likewise argued that, at the very least, we would have been in a stronger position if we had invaded North Vietnam in 1964. If you want to read about this, you could start with Admiral Sharp's book Strategy for Defeat and General Davidson's book Vietnam at War. Admiral Sharp was the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), and commanded the air war in Vietnam through mid-1968. Davidson was MACV's chief of intelligence under both Westmoreland and Abrams.

Of course, for Moyar to be able say this, he has to argue that China would not have intervened.

I called you out on this blundering argument in my July 13 reply (LINK). You never responded to the points and facts I presented in that reply. And now, here you are again repeating the debunked claim that China would have intervened if we had invaded North Vietnam in 1964. Let me quote what I said about this argument in my July 13 reply:

Yikes. You obviously do not realize how badly you are blundering here. Where to start? For starters, as a boatload of scholars have pointed out, China was in no condition to intervene against a U.S. invasion of North Vietnam in 1964.

Guess who said this regarding China's intentions:

          Mao signaled to Washington that Beijing would only enter the war if Chinese territory were attacked. The chairman was only willing to fight the Americans down to the last Vietnamese. 

What "extreme revisionist" made this statement? Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen, a professor of history at Columbia University, in her widely acclaimed 2012 seminal study Hanoi's War (p. 75). She is not really a revisionist, by the way, although her book contains a large amount of material that contradicts the orthodox view.

Are you aware of the fact that the North Vietnamese and the Chinese explicitly agreed on October 5, 1964, that if the U.S. invaded North Vietnam, the Chinese would not intervene, and the North Vietnamese would not even try to keep the Americans out of North Vietnam but would retreat from the coast and engage primarily in guerrilla warfare? Why do you suppose that the two scholars who assail Moyar on this issue, mostly Qiang Zhai (the Chinese scholar whose name you could not recall), say nothing about this fact, not to mention the other facts mentioned above? Why?

Does this refresh your memory? Reasonable people are going to wonder about the candor behind your repetition of your attack on Moyar on this point while you have ignored the above-quoted points and facts that were presented to you over a week ago.

As shown in Triumph Revisited, Moyar’s evidence for this claim is highly dubious, since he relies heavily on a single comment made to (a reporter?) while ignoring several other statements and Chinese sources that indicate that China would have indeed entered the war in response to an American invasion in ‘64. 

One, see above. Two, Moyar's evidence on this issue is only "highly dubious" to left-wing idealogues who can never admit error and who still have not come to grips with the North Vietnamese sources. 

Why did you not tell our readers who made that "single comment to a reporter" and who the reporter was? The reporter was Edgar Snow, a proud communist sympathizer and an adoring fan of Red China's mass-murdering dictator Mao Tse Tung. And the person who made that "single comment" was none other than Mao Tse Tung. So, uh, yeah, any rational person would place great importance on the fact that Mao expressly told Snow, for the record, that "China's armies will not go beyond her borders to fight" and that "only if the United States attacked China would we fight."  

By the way, not one of the negative reviews mentions this fact. But you just do not care, do you?

If you had read Moyar's Triumph Forsaken before stridently attacking it, you would know that he spends three pages examining this issue (pp. 360-362).

I don’t have the dates in front of me, but even Moyar acknowledges that by 1965, China was committed to entering the war if the US invaded North Vietnam. One of the reviewers points out that this limits Moyar’s effective invasion theory to a six-month window….

Say what??? You have no clue what you are talking about. For starters, Mao made his no-intervention declaration in January 1965. 

Your gaffe here is another indication to me that you have not actually read Moyar's responses to the negative reviews, because he spends two pages dealing with the issue of potential Chinese intervention in his first response (pp. 69-70). 

Despite months of pleading from Hanoi, Mao did not even dare to send support troops into the northern part of North Vietnam (just to help with logistics) until May 1965, and this was only after LBJ had foolishly declared to the world that he would not invade North Vietnam. And what did Mao do in 1972 when Nixon unleashed the devastating Linebacker I and II bombing raids on North Vietnam, which included bombing bridges next to China's border, attacks on Chinese ships near North Vietnam's coast, and the mining of Haiphong Harbor? Huh? 

All the doves and anti-war activists who had screamed for years that large-scale bombing of Hanoi and mining Haiphong Harbor would provoke China to enter the war fell silent when China failed to enter the war in 1972 when Nixon not only bombed Hanoi and mined Haiphong Harbor but attacked Chinese ships and destroyed bridges right next to the Chinese border with North Vietnam. 

You know, you would not keep blundering and embarrassing yourself if you would take a few weeks off and read Moyar's Triumph Forsaken and Nguyen's Hanoi's War, and also actually read Moyar's responses in Triumph Revisited.

Edited July 22, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

OMG, the USA should have launched a full scale invasion of the north in 1964?

 

With what?  All we had were advisors there.

Was the ARVN supposed to invade?  That would have been a debacle.

In 1964, Johnson was reversing Kennedy's withdrawal and forming his escalation plan while spreading propaganda that he was not going to send American boys to do what Asian boys should.  To launch a full scale invasion of the north, under those conditions, would have been  both militarily and politically not possible.  Because it would have been such a stark break with what JFK was doing.

The more you talk about him Tom, Moyar sounds like a clown.

Edited July 22, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

I have been waiting to present Moyar’s response to Laderman’s review because I have been waiting for Tom to post more quotes from Laderman’s review, but I think I have waited long enough. You will notice that Moyar uses sharper language in his response to Laderman than he does in other responses, at one point calling one of Laderman’s attacks “poor and irresponsible.” Here is Moyar’s entire response to Laderman:

          The ranks of those on the Left concerned about Western erosion of foreign cultures do not include Scott Laderman, because he does not acknowledge the presence of great cultural differences between Vietnam and the West. Laderman states that I present no evidence of an authoritarian political culture in Vietnam. He overlooked a great deal. For instance, in the elections held in both North Vietnam and South Vietnam, almost everyone voted as the government told them to vote, and very few became upset when the government’s preferred candidates won by overwhelming margins or when nonpreferred candidates were allowed to win but relegated to meaningless offices (17, 54–55, 75–76). The Communists and Diem’s nationalists both mobilized the peasantry effectively without holding democratic elections in the villages (71, 158). No one would claim that these same behaviors were prevalent in the United States during the mid-twentieth century.

          The book also shows that most Vietnamese differed from Westerners by choosing their political allegiance on the basis of the armed strength, prestige, and charisma of a political leader or group, rather than political ideology or political programs (16–18, 43–44, 52–55, 62–63, 80–81, 93–94, 136, 152–153, 160, 169, 209, 216, 232–233, 316). In Laderman’s view, American support for the bombing of North Vietnam shows that Americans have the same respect for power as the Vietnamese. Using force against a foreign country is, however, quite different from using force within one’s own. Americans, unlike the Vietnamese, have long abhorred the use of force against political oppositionists within their own country. Laderman adds that Vietnamese concerns about prestige and face were similar to U.S. concerns about credibility. There are some important similarities, but also important differences. Certain events that caused a devastating loss of face in Vietnam, such as public protests against the government, would not have had the same impact in the United States (46, 62–63, 216, 230–232).

          In denouncing my portrayal of an authoritarian culture, Laderman brings up Diem’s discussion of democracy in the October 1955 referendum. As I explain in the book, Diem paid lip service to democracy and took some superficially democratic actions merely to please the United States and the small South Vietnamese intellectual class (75).

          Laderman goes on to claim that my assessment of Vietnamese mass culture “echoes much too closely the racist suppositions of American policymakers in earlier decades.” Laderman’s unsubstantiated insinuation of racism is a poor and irresponsible substitute for dispassionate analysis. I never raise the issue of race in discussing Vietnamese political culture, nor do I say that authoritarian cultures have historically been peculiar to Asia or other non-Western regions—most Western countries have had authoritarian cultures at some point in their past. Most Vietnamese agree with my interpretation of Vietnamese political culture, which is one reason why my books are very popular among Vietnamese-Americans.

          Laderman approvingly cites Gareth Porter’s dispute of my claim that the Malayan communist insurgency never stopped. But numerous accounts show that Commonwealth forces continued counterinsurgency operations against Malayan communist guerrillas after the “Emergency” was officially declared over in July 1960.1 Porter was also wrong when he alleged that one of my sources, Chin Peng’s memoirs, stated that the Malayan insurgency ended in 1960. In actuality, Chin Peng stated that although the Malayan Communist Party had demobilized many guerrillas after July 1960, its guerrilla strength did not fall below 300 prior to the 1961 decision to accelerate the armed struggle.2

          The claims of Edwin Moïse concerning the Tonkin Gulf that Laderman cites largely concern minute details of no significance to the big picture, such as Moïse’s criticism that I referred to some North Vietnamese naval bases as torpedo boat bases—Moïse acknowledged that torpedo boats were present at the bases at the time in question, but claimed that they should not have been called torpedo boat bases because the torpedo boats were only there temporarily and had a permanent base elsewhere. Here, I will include only the segments of serious historical import.

          Moïse wrote: “On August 4, on a dark night in poor weather, the Maddox and another US destroyer, Turner Joy, believed themselves to be under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Moyar acknowledges that in retrospect the evidence does not support the reality of this attack, but he gives a misleading impression that the men on the destroyers had better reason to believe themselves under attack, at the time, than they actually had.”

My response:

          Moïse fails to explain how my description produces a misleading impression. The facts I cite—such as the reports from the Turner Joy’s crew of enemy gunfire and an enemy searchlight—are mentioned in Moïse’s book. I mention these facts simply in explaining why the destroyer commanders, Admiral Sharp, and the Joint Chiefs became convinced that an attack had occurred. Moïse acknowledges in his book that, in the first two days following the August 4 incident, “There was considerable information coming from the Turner Joy that suggested a real attack.” (Edwin Moïse, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, p. 144) He further states, “Captain Herrick and Commander Ogier both state at the time they wrote their replies to the JCS on August 7, the review they had made of the sighting reports had left them convinced that the attack had been real.” (Ibid.)3

          Laderman disputes my assertions that the Vietnamese communists killed tens of thousands of people by the end of 1946, and killed more in 1945 and 1946 than all other Vietnamese groups combined. In his description of Shawn McHale’s writings, Laderman neglects a key phrase of McHale’s upon which I base my assertions: “tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed.”4 The available sources on this subject, which I summarized on pages 17 to 19, make it clear that the communists were the principal killers during 1945 and 1946. According to David Marr, the communists killed several thousand “alleged enemies of the revolution” in late August and September 1945 alone.5 François Guillemot notes that “revolutionary purification” took between 4,000 and 8,000 lives in Quang Ngai and that the communists massacred significant numbers of Hoa Hao and Cao Dai believers.6  And in 1946, the communists killed large numbers of people in overrunning several provinces held by the Vietnam Nationalist Party (19).

          Next on Laderman’s list is my citation of a former communist land reform cadre who said that the communist land reform campaigns killed 32,000 people. According to Laderman, I do not give any explanation as to why this person should be trusted, but the fact that this person had been a land reform cadre, which I stated in the text, is a very good reason.

           Laderman goes on to complain that I did not mention the fact that this individual was questioned by someone who was not an experienced interrogator, or that the questioner thought that only “most” of the rallier’s answers were truthful, or that the rallier did not explain who compiled the figures in question, or that David Hunt had doubts about the testimony of ralliers, or that ralliers were frequently tortured, etc.

          If Laderman really believes that such considerations should be spelled out for every source in a book, he has no understanding of the limitations inherent in a publisher’s word count. Had this document been challenged in the years after Arthur Dommen first cited it in his 2001 book, then perhaps its validity would have been worthy of elaboration in a footnote, but between 2001 and now, no one has challenged the document, or Dommen’s manner of citation, which is very similar to mine.7

          Some of the issues Laderman raises about this document do not merit significant attention from historians. David Hunt’s objections, for example, do not carry much weight given that he wrote an entire article in Radical America that was based on the statements of ralliers.8

          Other issues Laderman cited, however, do deserve the scrutiny of historians, and I did scrutinize them before I chose to include this source in the book. The historians should consider what topics the rallier might have been inclined to lie about. Having read hundreds of similar rallier debriefings, I have a good feel for the likely topics. For reasons of self-protection, the individual might have been inclined to lie about his personal involvement in atrocities against South Vietnamese personnel, or about the participation of his family members in insurgent activities. He might have spoken more positively about the South Vietnamese government or the Americans than he really felt, in order to ingratiate himself with them. Many other defectors displayed such tendencies.

          But there was no compelling reason for him to fabricate a story about the number of land reform deaths. Ralliers rarely commented on such large issues, and I have seen no evidence that the South Vietnamese or Americans tried to pressure them into making false statements on such subjects. In addition, a variety of elements of his testimony support his claim to have been a land reform cadre, and the figure of 32,000 seems reasonable based upon what else is known on the land reform program.

          Laderman proceeds to state that he is not persuaded by my dismissal of Edwin Moïse’s estimate of deaths in the communist land reform campaigns. Rather than address the substance of my critique, Laderman merely contends that Moïse is more reliable because he spent seven pages making his case while I rebutted it in a single sentence. I remain convinced that one sentence suffices to call Moïse’s calculations into doubt, for it takes but one sentence to state that his data came from a perennially untrustworthy and partisan source, the Hanoi government.

          Laderman invokes William Turley and Alexander Kendrick to argue that the South Vietnamese government killed “as many as 75,000 persons” in the 1950s. He neglects to mention that Kendrick’s book The Wound Within was Turley’s only source, and that The Wound Within itself does not state its source for the 75,000 figure.

          I would be suspicious of anything contained in The Wound Within, considering that it contains no footnotes and it espouses some of the most egregious fictions concocted by the anti-war movement, such as that the Hue Massacre was a myth and that My Lai was “a typical incident in the war.”9 In Triumph Forsaken, by contrast, I cite a communist complaint that the anti-communist campaigns took 4,971 lives through January 1959, which may well be an overstatement given the communists’ track record on such matters (65).

          Laderman alleges that I wrote Triumph Forsaken to promote a “militaristic foreign policy.” It would have helped if he had clarified what precisely he meant. In the academic world, “militarism” is often used carelessly to mean something along the lines of “the glorification of warfare and the wanton use of force to impose a country’s will on others,” as exemplified by the militarists of Germany and Japan during World War II. I do not know of any influential Americans today who advocate that type of militarism.

          The term militarism does have other meanings: according to my American Heritage dictionary, it can mean “The glorification of the ideals of a professional military class”; “predominance of the military in the administration or policy of the state”; or “A policy in which military preparedness is of primary importance to the state.” All three of those definitions have their virtues and vices. Most societies glorify at least some of the ideals of the professional military class, such as persistence and self-sacrifice.

          The American military has played a predominant role in administering Iraq and Afghanistan, even under the Obama administration. And military preparedness often deters aggressors or leaves countries in a better position when war breaks out, as Franklin Roosevelt’s preparations for war before Pearl Harbor demonstrate. A country can cause great harm if it goes too far in these directions; as with most things political, moderation is preferable to extremism.

          With his references to “militarism,” Laderman may be accusing me, as others have already done, of supporting a foreign policy that involves frequent recourse to military force in service of the interests of the nation and/or large corporations and/or conservative white males.

          Let me first point out that Triumph Forsaken was written as a history, not as a vehicle towards promoting a specific present-day foreign policy agenda. The words “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” and “George W. Bush” do not appear in the book, which cannot be said of some recent orthodox histories like that of John Prados.

          As far as foreign policy is concerned, the idea that American conservatives simply wish to use force at every possible moment is a fantasy that could be believed by intelligent people like Professor Laderman only if they had no real exposure to American conservatives. It is true that the Right tends to be more skeptical than the Left about the utility of nonviolent means of coercion and persuasion, and to attach more value to military preparedness and threats to use force. But most American conservatives of recent memory have not sought war eagerly, viewing it instead as a perilous last resort. (Triumph Revisited, pp. 144-149)

[James DiEugenio]

BTW, one of the things McNamara told John Newman is precisely that his critics always excluded the idea that China would intervene.

Newman agreed with McNamara on that, and his specialty was east Asia history.

 

 

[Michael Griffith]

23 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

 

OMG, the USA should have launched a full scale invasion of the north in 1964? With what?  All we had were advisors there. Was the ARVN supposed to invade?  That would have been a debacle.

Are you so unread on military matters and military history that you do not understand that we could have had a large force in Vietnam in a matter of weeks? You see, we had these things called Navy ships and Air Force transport planes, and they could transport enormous amounts of equipment and personnel in matter of weeks or days. You can Google it, if you do not believe me.

You ignored all the points I made about a '64/'65 invasion and Chinese intervention and responded with this stuff. How can you be so unread and uninformed on these matters and then pretend to be any kind of an authority on the war, much less pretend to be qualified to review books on the subject?

And I see you are still inexcusably running with the long-debunked myth that ARVN was usually an unwilling, ineffective fighting force. You still have not read a single one of the sources I have recommended on ARVN's performance, have you? Have you? No. Just as I suspect you have not read any of the sources I have recommended on the Winter Soldier garbage, on Nick Turse's historically pornographic book, and on the winnability of the war, right? Right? 

In 1964, Johnson was reversing Kennedy's withdrawal and forming his escalation plan while spreading propaganda that he was not going to send American boys to do what Asian boys should. 

As I have pointed out to you before, it is misleading and irresponsible to make this claim because JFK was never faced with the vastly escalated situation that LBJ faced in 1964 and 1965. You keep ignoring this crucial fact while also repeating the Stone-Newman-Prouty myth that JFK was determined to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election. As I have also noted, even most liberal historians reject your unconditional-withdrawal-after-the-election myth.

To launch a full scale invasion of the north, under those conditions, would have been both militarily and politically not possible.  Because it would have been such a stark break with what JFK was doing.

Actually, the exact opposite is true. At the time, polls showed overwhelming public support for the war effort, and invading North Vietnam was not only entirely militarily feasible but would have been a wise tactical move that would have put us in a stronger position, if not caused the murderous Hanoi regime to collapse. Are you aware of what some North Vietnamese sources say would have happened if we had invaded North Vietnam in 1964 or 1965? Do you care? 

The more you talk about him Tom, Moyar sounds like a clown.

You and Tom sound like two D-grade high-school students who are getting your clocks cleaned in a debate with a professor and who are trying to comfort each other with juvenile comments.

I think it is worth recalling that in your amateurish smearing of Dr. Selverstone's widely acclaimed book The Kennedy Withdrawal, you were unable to cite a single legitimate scholar who agrees with your attack on the book, whereas I was able to cite numerous recognized scholars who have praised the book. You cited far-left author Michael Swanson, whose obscure book on the Vietnam War is not only loaded with embarrassing errors but repeatedly displays a poor command of English (e.g., Swanson twice misidentifies McNamara as the Secretary of State and commits numerous grammatical errors). 

Edited July 23, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Gene Kelly]

On 7/22/2023 at 4:27 AM, James DiEugenio said:

That is a good question.  

Because even Bao Dai thought that Phan Huy Quat was a better choice.  (Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, pp. 18-19) And Quat was both anti French and anti communist.

But Diem had been in the USA for awhile. His big backer was Wesley Fishel at Michigan State who had ties to the CIA, as did the university president John Hannah. But there was also Spellman and he was important since he knew a lot of people in NYC and Washington. And he  likely got him an audience with Pope Pius in Rome.

The next year, 1951, he got an interview with the State Department chief of Indochina. He attacked Bao Dai and said that he would give the country over to the commies.  That got him an interview with Acheson. From then, Spellman set him up at Maryknoll Seminary. He was in the USA for about three years.  One commentator said that his catholicism was his greatest asset.  This had an appeal in America.  And Diem then began to speak at eastern and midwestern universities.  This got him some good newspaper and magazine coverage.

When that happened Spellman connected him with Justice William O. Douglass at the Yale Club in NYC. Douglass then introduced him to John McCormack, a higher up in the House.  He then told  Robert Amory of the CIA. about him.  Once Dien Bien Phu fell, then this was the choice Boa Dai made. Knowing full well that Diem had backers in DC.

The French officials did not like it since they thought Diem would fail.  But once Bao Dai picked him, the CIA and Foster Dulles sent Lansdale over to usher him in.

Thanks for the feedback, Jim. 

I did some research into this topic of Diem, specifically the work of Seth Jacobs who is an Associate Professor in History at Boston College and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American military and diplomatic history, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and America in the 1950s.  He authored "Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam" among other works.  In a 2004 paper by Jacobs entitled, “America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S.” he makes the following comment:

Americans had a number of “ideas, notions, and images … in their heads” about Asia, and these made up the universe within which U.S. government officials weighed options and fashioned strategies. American ideas, notions, and images— specifically racist and religious ones—led policymakers to conclude that Diem was the perfect viceroy to prevent South Vietnam’s absorption by the red empire. These long-implanted biases enabled Washington officials to ignore or reject the accumulating evidence that their policy was not working.

Jacobs wrote that, following the removable of the emperor Bao Dai, the nation was led by a Confucianist authoritarian Ngo Dinh Diem, who gave preference to a Catholic minority (of which he was a part). He describes Diem as a Vietnamese who, while he had worked as a civil servant in French Indochina, had strong credentials both as a nationalist and anti-communist. He left Vietnam between 1950 and 1954, in part, due to credible Communist threats on his life. He also distrusted the Bao Dai proto-state relationship with France.

Jacobs describes the "Diem Experiment" which began on July 7, 1954, when Ngo Dinh Diem, the Prime Minister of South Vietnam, took control of the South Vietnamese government. During the initial stages, Diem inspired little confidence in the South Vietnamese, Americans, and French, but the Eisenhower administration welcomed Diem's rise to power. Jacobs gives Diem credit for being an effective networker ... like most politicians, he cultivated the support of influential patrons by seeking out their company and telling them what they wanted to hear. Jacobs described a pivotal May 1953 luncheon where Diem made the acquaintance of Senator Mike Mansfield, who was instrumental in keeping Diem in office during the subsequent Battle for Saigon (along with Cardinal Spellman), characterizing that meeting as “one of the most fateful encounters of the postwar era”.  But Jacobs does not portray Diem as a puppet.  He wrote the following:

Diem was shrewd enough to understand that American cold warriors came in different stripes and responded to different overtures; thus, he emphasized his devoutness when lobbying conservative Catholics like Spellman and played the “third force” card to great effect with liberals like Kennedy, Mansfield, and Buttinger. More important, Diem had the perspicacity to build a power base in the United States. While other anticommunist Vietnamese like Phan Huy Quat, Tran Van Huu, and Nguyen Van Tam conducted their campaigns for the premiership either in their native land or with Bao Dai on the French Riviera, Diem concentrated for the most part on winning over American government officials and influential private citizens. He recognized that Washington, not Paris or Saigon, would have the final say in determining who occupied the Norodom Palace.  

Gene

 

[James DiEugenio]

Nice one Gene.

That is true that Diem knew that once France fell, the USA would fill the vacuum. And unlike his rivals, he waged a campaign here.  And again, he knew how to adjust his message depending who he was talking to. A very clever lobbyist.

[Gene Kelly]

Thanks Jim ... Seth Jacobs work is an interesting read.  I also plan to get John Newman's "JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power".  The book summary describes "an intense power struggle that plagued the Kennedy Administration before the Vietnam War" ... Newman contends that the president's advisors conspired to deceive Kennedy and push the United States into combat (similar to what occurred with Cuba and Bay of Pigs). There is also Howard Jones 2004 book "Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War".  In a concluding chapter entitled "The Tragedy of JFK" he states:

Just as the withdrawal plan moved closer to implementation, President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, bringing the process to a close. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, assured Americans that he would continue his predecessor's domestic and foreign policies. Indeed, Newsweek observed that the White House intended to fulfill its October 2 decision to withdraw 1,000 troops by the end of the year. In a bitter irony, however, Johnson's pledge to continuity helped to undermine the rest of the withdrawal plan because the Kennedy administration had so carefully kept its existence from public view that any further troop reduction would appear to repudiate previous policy. The United States still intended to withdraw the first thousand troops in Vietnam by the end of the year; but the Johnson administration escalated the nation's military involvement, and the heart of the plan soon died.

While interesting to consider, Marc Silverstone's thesis doesn't convince me.  It's simply not credible that JFK would've escalated similar to LBJ in the ensuing years. A New York Journal of Books review states that "Silverstone speculates about JFK’s real intentions in Vietnam, suggesting that Kennedy and his national security team would probably have acted on the basis of the military situation on the ground as it evolved over the next several years". But the reviewer also points out that most of the people advising Johnson on Vietnam after Kennedy’s death were Kennedy’s people.

Gene

[James DiEugenio]

If you get Newman's book, buy the second edition.  Not the first.

Jones' book is pretty good, and he was a conservative guy.

I reviewed Selverstone.  Really not worth reading.  He actually  said in an interview that it is hard to say what Kennedy would have done.

Bundy, McNamara, and Taylor have all said that Kennedy was never going into Vietnam.  Those were his three major defense advisors. So why is it hard to tell?  Taylor even said that Kennedy was the one guy who stopped American intervention.