Top 5 Books On JFK & Vietnam

[Calvin Ye]

14 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

Based on what? You might want to read Moyar's book and all the evidence he presents before you reach a conclusion, if you are interested in making an informed judgment. A basic tenet of critical thinking is to consider both sides of an argument before drawing a conclusion about it.

For starters, Moyar's version is based on the new information from North Vietnamese sources. Chapman did not even try to address a single item of this historic evidence. Let me summarize some of the things the North Vietnamese sources document:

-- The Communist war effort was going badly in 1962 and 1963 but began to improve a few months after Diem's death.

-- The Communist war effort went very badly throughout 1967, and this development was the reason the Hanoi regime decided to launch the Tet Offensive in January 1968.

-- The Viet Cong were tightly controlled by Hanoi and relied on Hanoi for most of their arms and supplies.

-- South Vietnam's army, aka ARVN (ar-vin), was a formidable fighting force in the majority of cases. ARVN usually defeated the Viet Cong during 1962 and 1963 and performed well during the Tet Offensive.

-- The Hanoi regime was unpleasantly surprised by the performance of ARVN during the Tet Offensive. Most of the Communists' attacks were aimed at ARVN units, since Hanoi believed they could be easily defeated. Hanoi's leaders were surprised when this failed to occur.

-- Hanoi's leaders were stunned by the refusal of the South Vietnamese to rise up against the Saigon government at the start of the Tet Offensive. The Hanoi Politburo firmly believed that once their forces attacked, most South Vietnamese would welcome them as liberators. 

-- After the Tet Offensive, the Communists lost control of most of the areas they had held in South Vietnam before the offensive. They had lost control of a number of areas in 1967, but they lost control over even more areas after the offensive.

-- From 1967 through early 1972, the Saigon government and MACV steadily increased their control of the countryside.

-- The Viet Cong's ranks were so decimated during the Tet Offensive, and recruiting became so difficult after the offensive, that from that point onward, most of the Viet Cong's soldiers were North Vietnamese.

-- The 1967-1968 bombing of North Vietnam did even more damage than MACV and the Pentagon estimated it did at the time, even when the bombing did not include targets near and around Hanoi.  

-- The Operation Linebacker I and II bombing campaigns and the mining of Haiphong Harbor in 1972 brought North Vietnam to the verge of collapse. 

-- Hanoi's leaders had no intention of honoring the Paris Peace Accords.

-- The Hanoi regime launched a propaganda campaign to blame South Vietnam for violating the Accords in an attempt to draw attention away from Hanoi's egregious violations of the Accords. 

-- Even with American aid slashed, ARVN often put up stiff, sometimes "ferocious," resistance in 1974 and 1975. 

I have no interested in reading Moyer's book

[Michael Griffith]

12 minutes ago, Calvin Ye said:

I have no interested in reading Moyer's book

If you are unwilling to read anything that disagrees with what you want to believe on the subject, then there is no point in discussing it with you. Personally, I would never get on a public board and make sweeping, adamant statements on a controversial historical subject unless I had read at least two books and/or several articles on both sides of the issue. And I would certainly not dismiss a book published by a major publishing house and written by a qualified scholar unless I had read the book. But that's just me.

[Calvin Ye]

29 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

If you are unwilling to read anything that disagrees with what you want to believe on the subject, then there is no point in discussing it with you. Personally, I would never get on a public board and make sweeping, adamant statements on a controversial historical subject unless I had read at least two books and/or several articles on both sides of the issue. And I would certainly not dismiss a book published by a major publishing house and written by a qualified scholar unless I had read the book. But that's just me.

I only commented because the members failed to include an certain aspect

[Michael Griffith]

21 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

Mike, I think appeals to authority are bogus and arguments should be judged on merit. That’s kind of my whole point. Whenever anyone here, Jim D. in particular, challenges your view of any aspect the Vietnam war, you label their arguments as some variation of “fringe” or “far-left” and/or claim they are not qualified to even comment because you’ve read more books on Vietnam.

Unfortunately, it just so happens that Jim repeatedly expresses views that truly are fringe and far left when it comes to JFK and the Vietnam War. Even the vast majority of liberal historians reject the claim that JFK was determined to abandon South Vietnam after the election, not to mention moderate and conservative historians. Similarly, Jim repeatedly cites Nick Turse's awful book. Even Neil Sheehan sharply condemned Turse's shoddy research, and Turse and his publisher were forced to issue a formal retraction to settle a lawsuit over bogus claims made in Turse's book. And, Jim still peddles the old myth that ARVN was a feckless, incompetent fighting force, a myth that even liberals such as Daddis and Hastings have repudiated. 

Example A: me, just for posting articles and quotes from experts you disagree with, including the following article on the Vietnam revisionist movement from an award winning Vietnam historian and director of the LBJ library, which I think is worth posting again. 

https://commonreader.wustl.edu/c/revisionism-as-a-substitute-for-victory/

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/ut1markl

I’m sure this guy is just one of those kooky liberals though…

His article “Revisionism as a Substitute for Victory” is a gold mine of quotes, e.g. 

Revisionists might be gaining favor, as many of them contend, because they are finally setting the record straight by heroically challenging a left-leaning academic establishment congenitally hostile to the use of American military power. The problem with that view is that younger academics, relatively free from the antiwar sensibilities of the older generation and benefiting from unprecedented access to source material, are consistently reinforcing the old view in a remarkable body of new work about the war: No decision the United States could have made would have brought victory in Vietnam at a sensible cost. 

You say you think appeals to authority are bogus, yet you keep appealing to authority. You keep quoting condemnations of revisionism by orthodox historians on the Vietnam War, the vast majority of whom are liberals, yet those quotes are usually devoid of specifics and devoid of substantive responses to the evidence that revisionists have presented. As we see in Moyar's reply to the roundtable reviews, when orthodox historians have offered specific criticisms and responses, their arguments have been faulty and are frequently based on misrepresentations of the revisionist case.

Is it really reasonable to think that not one Vietnam academic has come to a different conclusion regarding these so-called “historic” North Vietnamese sources than people like Moyar? 

Huh??? As I have already noted in previous replies, Moyar is by no means the only Vietnam War scholar who has presented the historic information from the North Vietnamese sources that refutes the key components of the orthodox view. I refer to such as scholars as Dr. Lewis Sorley, Dr. George Veith, Dr. Robert Turner, Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen (who is not a revisionist), Dr. Max Hastings (who is not a revisionist and is center-left in his politics), Merle Pribbenow (widely regarded as the best Vietnamese linguists on the planet), Dr. Geoffrey Shaw, Dr. Tuong Vu, among several others.

Furthermore, liberal historians have not challenged the new information from North Vietnamese sources. As you saw in the roundtable reviews, not a single reviewer, not even Chapman, disputed the import and meaning of the statements quoted from the sources . Not once did any of them say, "Moyar says that the North Vietnamese sources show that the Communist war effort was going badly in 1962 and 1963, but this is wrong, and here is why." Not one word along that line. 

If the evidence is really so lacking in ambiguity that it “destroys” the prevailing academic wisdom on the war, would the head of the LBJ library still be making statements like the above and saying things like: The problem with surging revisionism is that just about every academic expert on the war disagrees.”?

Another whopping appeal to authority, as if to say, "Gee, the North Vietnamese sources cannot say what revisionist and even some non-revisionist scholars say they say because otherwise the head of the LBJ library would not be attacking revisionists!" And well might a WC apologist ask, "If the case for conspiracy in JFK's death is so clear and compelling, would not the vast majority of American historians who have written about JFK or that era reject the lone-gunman theory?"

Here is an idea: Why don't you read the information from the North Vietnamese sources yourself and make up your own mind? Moyar's two books present more of this historic information than any other book, but a sizable chunk of this information is also presented in the books by the scholars I named above. Go read it for yourself and make up your own mind.

Forgive me for being skeptical. If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t actually given an opinion on this whole debate. I just think it’s important to present both sides of an argument, and you’ve been vigorously promoting a position on Vietnam that is clearly ambiguous and highly disputed as if it is the pinnacle of enlightened historical thought.

The North Vietnamese sources say what they say. They cannot be wished away. Yes, absolutely, they destroy the key components of the liberal/orthodox view of the war. There is a reason that not a single liberal "academic historian" has even tried to refute or explain the historic information from the North Vietnamese sources. The sources are too clear to allow any wiggle room.

Similarly, anti-JFKA-conspiracy academic historians have not attempted to explain the historic new information from the ARRB-released materials because they cannot do so, so they dismiss them or ignore them. 

[Tom Gram]

I got curious and decided to pick up the book Triumph Revisited, which is a collection of scholarly reviews of Triumph Forsaken, and it’s a very interesting and entertaining read. A common criticism is that Moyar’s endnotes either do not support or flatly contradict the claims in his book. A review by Scott Laderman addresses this issue directly with concrete, indisputable examples of Moyar’s highly questionable use of source material. I don’t feel like transcribing several pages for a forum comment, but it’s pages 94-98 if anyone is interested. I can’t resist quoting Laderman’s conclusion though: 

“This example appears typical of Moyar’s style. Favorable evidence marshaled in framing the monograph’s arguments, while inconvenient evidence was ignored, downplayed, or dismissed. It is, of course, necessary for scholars in evaluating sources to make subjective decisions about which evidence seems credible and which evidence does not. But given how often Moyar used seemingly incriminating details from sources authored by leading specialists while concomitantly overlooking the many other details that lend these specialists’ work a nuance that Triumph Forsaken, for the most part, does not possess, readers would be well advised not to pick up the time in isolation. 

For reasons that are hardly surprising, Moyar’s book has found an enthusiastic audience among proponents of a militaristic foreign policy. They find in its pages an assertive revisionist account in which, it turns out, Ronald Reagan was right after all. It was a “noble cause” that the United States fought in Southeast Asia, just as it is a “noble purpose” being fought now in Iraq (and Afghanistan). If assessments of Triumph Forsaken from Vietnam and Vietnam War specialists have been decidedly cooler than those of the general public, it is largely because scholars have had the time and the inclination to closely examine the the evidentiary foundation on which the book rests. The results have, to say the least, been deeply troubling thus far, particularly for a study that purports to have been driven by the pressing need for historical accuracy.”

Sounds a lot like the Warren Report. I am admittedly actively looking for quotes like this, but they are not very hard to find, and the examples this guy gives would make Arlen Specter blush. 

The North Vietnamese sources regarding military progress in ‘62-63 are addressed directly by two of the reviews I’ve read so far. One reviewer states that Moyar is correct that the enemy conceded in internal reports that the military successes in that period were real, but that he goes too far in claiming that the South was actually winning the war. He says that the North Vietnamese’s own characterization of the progress of the war as a “see-saw situation” was most apt. (pp 134-135). 

Another reviewer commends Moyar for using North Vietnamese sources to show that the communists were not indestructible and “faced grave setbacks at various points and managed to avoid battlefield defeats by surprisingly thin margins”, but prefaces that comment by saying “To be sure, he stands on shaky ground in his attempt to demonstrate that the Saigon government was on its way to military success when the United States torpedoed it by overthrowing Ngo Ding Diem in November 1963.” (pp. 175-176)

So the consensus even among sympathetic reviewers seems to be that the North Vietnamese sources are significant in that they demonstrate the Communists were mortal, but they are far from being so “historic” as to “destroy the key components of the liberal/orthodox view of the war”

There’s more that I’ll probably get bored and post at some point but I need to catch a plane in the morning. 

 

[James DiEugenio]

OMG, Tom, it was that bad?

The old Nixon standby about Diem being an intrepid leader?

I would have thought that was as dead as a door nail.  Just count the attempts to overthrow Diem from 1959 onward.

The whole thing about the USA standing up for democracy in Vietnam was undermined by Diem and Nhu and Madame Nhu. They were autocrats who put protesters in the infamous tiger cages. If one reads the reports from that time period, the Viet Cong were moving from the rural areas into the cities by 1963.  

 

[Michael Griffith]

On 7/11/2023 at 5:12 PM, Tom Gram said:

Mike, I think appeals to authority are bogus and arguments should be judged on merit. That’s kind of my whole point. Whenever anyone here, Jim D. in particular, challenges your view of any aspect the Vietnam war, you label their arguments as some variation of “fringe” or “far-left” and/or claim they are not qualified to even comment because you’ve read more books on Vietnam. Example A: me, just for posting articles and quotes from experts you disagree with you.

Just to set the record completely straight, I raised the issue of the depth of your research compared to mine because you were making claims about Moyar that I knew were false. I knew you were bluffing when you said that some of Moyar's fellow revisionists regard him as "the most extreme pro-war revisionist on the planet" and that even some of the favorable reviews of his book Triumph Forsaken say that he "goes farther to push the revisionist perspective than just about anyone, often at the expense of his analysis." 

Many liberal historians have attempted to smear Moyar as an extremist to try to discredit him and to discourage people from reading his books. When you read his books or watch his lectures and panel discussions, you immediately see that he makes his case in a measured, careful, and methodical way, and that his books are thoroughly documented and reflect detailed and extensive research. 

Also, the only arguments that I have labeled as fringe and far left are arguments that are in fact fringe and far left. For example, I have never applied those labels to the argument that the war was unwinnable, because that is part of the majority view on the war. It is an argument that is flatly contradicted by the North Vietnamese sources and by plenty of other evidence, but it is not a fringe, far-left argument because mainstream liberal historians also make that argument.

When someone gets on a public board and argues that ARVN was a feckless, incompetent fighting force, that ARVN was "no match for the Viet Cong," that, gee, ARVN must have been pitiful because Saigon fell in "like three months," etc., you know that that person is not to be taken seriously, and that their research on the war has been meager and one sided. At the very latest, this false portrayal of ARVN became inexcusable when the History of the People's Army of Vietnam, compiled by Vietnam's Ministry of Defense, was translated by Merle Pribbenow in 2002 (Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975, University Press of Kansas). Even this obviously pro-Communist history of the war destroys the myth of a cowardly, inept ARVN, as I have documented in other replies in this forum, and as anyone can verify by reading the book.

You see, the myth of an unwilling, weak ARVN was one of the lies that the anti-war movement peddled to undermine support for the war. "Why should we fight for South Vietnam when South Vietnam's own army does not want to fight?", they dishonestly asked. It was one of the lies that the anti-war majority in Congress used as their excuse for slashing aid to South Vietnam in 1973 soon after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, and they used this same lie, among others, in 1974 and 1975 to justify their refusal to restore the promised aid levels to South Vietnam, even after it became impossible to deny that North Vietnam was resuming its aggression.

Edited July 13, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Tom Gram]

3 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Just to set the record completely straight, I raised the issue of the depth of your research compared to mine because you were making claims about Moyar that I knew were false. I knew you were bluffing when you said that some of Moyar's fellow revisionists regard him as "the most extreme pro-war revisionist on the planet" and that even some of the favorable reviews of his book Triumph Forsaken say that he "goes farther to push the revisionist perspective than just about anyone, often at the expense of his analysis." 

Many liberal historians have attempted to smear Moyar as an extremist to try to discredit him and to discourage people from reading his books. When you read his books or watch his lectures and panel discussions, you immediately see that he makes his case in a measured, careful, and methodical way, and that his books are thoroughly documented and reflect detailed and extensive research. 

Also, the only arguments that I have labeled as fringe and far left are arguments that are in fact fringe and far left. For example, I have never applied those labels to the argument that the war was unwinnable, because that is part of the majority view on the war. It is an argument that is flatly contradicted by the North Vietnamese sources and by plenty of other evidence, but it is not a fringe, far-left argument because mainstream liberal historians also make that argument.

When someone gets on a public board and argues that ARVN was a feckless, incompetent fighting force, that ARVN was "no match for the Viet Cong," that, gee, ARVN must have been pitiful because Saigon fell in "like three months," etc., you know that that person is not to be taken seriously, and that their research on the war has been meager and one sided. At the very latest, this false portrayal of ARVN became inexcusable when the History of the People's Army of Vietnam, compiled by Vietnam's Ministry of Defense, was translated by Merle Pribbenow in 2002 (Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975, University Press of Kansas). Even this obviously pro-Communist history of the war destroys the myth of a cowardly, inept ARVN, as I have documented in other replies in this forum, and as anyone can verify by reading the book.

You see, the myth of an unwilling, weak ARVN was one of the lies that the anti-war movement peddled to undermine support for the war. "Why should we fight for South Vietnam when South Vietnam's own army does not want to fight?", they dishonestly asked. It was one of the lies that the anti-war majority in Congress used as their excuse for slashing aid to South Vietnam in 1973 soon after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, and they used this same lie, among others, in 1974 and 1975 to justify their refusal to restore the promised aid levels to South Vietnam, even after it became impossible to deny that North Vietnam was resuming its aggression.

The word “extreme” might have been a bit of hyberbole, and a subjective interpretation, but that was hardly a “bluff”. Many reviewers with a positive overall take on Moyar’s book state that it is the most extensive and spirited defense of the revisionist position to date, but that Moyar stretches his evidence in certain areas to push his arguments, particularly regarding his ambitious attempt at rehabilitating Diem, which almost every single review I’ve read disagrees with in some form or another. 

This idea that there is some liberal conspiracy to discourage people from reading Triumph Forsaken is just ludicrous. I encourage you to read the review by Scott Laderman I quoted in my last comment. Laderman’s is the most compelling negative review I’ve read to date, since he gives concrete, indisputable examples of Moyar’s egregious misuse of source material to push his agenda. Laderman’s direct quotes from authors whose books Moyar cited as support for arguments are absolutely devastating, and should give anyone pause in taking Moyar’s endnotes at face value. 

One example is Moyar’s use of a book by Sean McHale to support his claim that “intra-Vietnamese killings, which the Communists perpetrated in greater numbers than everyone else combined, came to a total of as high as 50,000 in this period”. Laderman quotes directly from McHale’s book and demonstrates, conclusively, that Moyar’s endnote does not even remotely support his claim. I’ll let Laderman sum it up:

As is true of a number of damning statements in Moyar’s book, the claims noted above therefore lack a citation to evidentiary support - something especially important in a work that seeks to challenge nearly the entire corpus of Vietnam War scholarship. The point is not that Moyar is wrong; he may very well be correct. But in a book that consistently attempts to portray the Viet Minh in the most negative possible light, this lack of substantiation for his empirical claims only exacerbates the concerns raised by Moyar’s problematical use of evidence elsewhere. 

Another common criticism is that Moyar’s analysis lacks nuance, and the competency of the ARVN is a good example. Moyar demonstrates, using the so-called “historic” North Vietnamese sources, that the ARVN did have legitimate battlefield successes, and that  they could indeed be an effective fighting force at times. However, Moyar attempts to stretch communist reports that are somewhat critical of their own performance and respectful of the ARVN as a combat force into evidence that the ARVN was actually winning the war, and that the war overall was actually winnable, while the record as a whole doesn’t even come close to supporting that conclusion, and often suggests the exact opposite. 

[James DiEugenio]

If the ARVN could have won on their own what was Jean Paul Vann screaming about?

Why did LBJ's team say that their time table of entering the war in early 1965 was just before Saigon could be defeated?

Boy Mark M is a full scale propagandist.

Edited July 13, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Michael Griffith]

14 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

I got curious and decided to pick up the book Triumph Revisited, which is a collection of scholarly reviews of Triumph Forsaken, and it’s a very interesting and entertaining read. A common criticism is that Moyar’s endnotes either do not support or flatly contradict the claims in his book. A review by Scott Laderman addresses this issue directly with concrete, indisputable examples of Moyar’s highly questionable use of source material. I don’t feel like transcribing several pages for a forum comment, but it’s pages 94-98 if anyone is interested. I can’t resist quoting Laderman’s conclusion though: 

“This example appears typical of Moyar’s style. Favorable evidence marshaled in framing the monograph’s arguments, while inconvenient evidence was ignored, downplayed, or dismissed. It is, of course, necessary for scholars in evaluating sources to make subjective decisions about which evidence seems credible and which evidence does not. But given how often Moyar used seemingly incriminating details from sources authored by leading specialists while concomitantly overlooking the many other details that lend these specialists’ work a nuance that Triumph Forsaken, for the most part, does not possess, readers would be well advised not to pick up the time in isolation. 

For reasons that are hardly surprising, Moyar’s book has found an enthusiastic audience among proponents of a militaristic foreign policy. They find in its pages an assertive revisionist account in which, it turns out, Ronald Reagan was right after all. It was a “noble cause” that the United States fought in Southeast Asia, just as it is a “noble purpose” being fought now in Iraq (and Afghanistan). If assessments of Triumph Forsaken from Vietnam and Vietnam War specialists have been decidedly cooler than those of the general public, it is largely because scholars have had the time and the inclination to closely examine the the evidentiary foundation on which the book rests. The results have, to say the least, been deeply troubling thus far, particularly for a study that purports to have been driven by the pressing need for historical accuracy.”

Sounds a lot like the Warren Report. I am admittedly actively looking for quotes like this, but they are not very hard to find, and the examples this guy gives would make Arlen Specter blush. 

The North Vietnamese sources regarding military progress in ‘62-63 are addressed directly by two of the reviews I’ve read so far. One reviewer states that Moyar is correct that the enemy conceded in internal reports that the military successes in that period were real, but that he goes too far in claiming that the South was actually winning the war. He says that the North Vietnamese’s own characterization of the progress of the war as a “see-saw situation” was most apt. (pp 134-135). 

Another reviewer commends Moyar for using North Vietnamese sources to show that the communists were not indestructible and “faced grave setbacks at various points and managed to avoid battlefield defeats by surprisingly thin margins”, but prefaces that comment by saying “To be sure, he stands on shaky ground in his attempt to demonstrate that the Saigon government was on its way to military success when the United States torpedoed it by overthrowing Ngo Ding Diem in November 1963.” (pp. 175-176)

So the consensus even among sympathetic reviewers seems to be that the North Vietnamese sources are significant in that they demonstrate the Communists were mortal, but they are far from being so “historic” as to “destroy the key components of the liberal/orthodox view of the war”

There’s more that I’ll probably get bored and post at some point but I need to catch a plane in the morning. 

I had hoped you had learned not to reflexively rely on negative reviews before reading the other side after you uncritically ran with the roundtable reviews, only to find out that they were all flawed to varying degrees, the worst being Chapman's (your favorite).

Yet, here you are doing the same thing again, this time uncritically endorsing the attacks in Triumph Revisited.  And, needless to say, you do not appear to have read Moyar's responses in Triumph Revisited. His three responses in the book constitute over 60 pages of the book's text, but you do not seem to have read any of them. 

The North Vietnamese sources do in fact destroy the key elements of the orthodox view. But, you do not know this because you have not read them yet. It seems you are eager to read and accept any review that attacks Moyar's research, but you are unwilling to read Moyar's research, or any research that support's Moyar's writings. It seems you did not even bother to read any of Moyar's responses in the very book that you claim refutes Moyar's position. 

As for "the consensus even among sympathetic reviewers," those reviewers are hardly "sympathetic." They grudgingly make some limited concessions about the validity of Moyar's arguments, but then they seek to dismiss those arguments with sophistry, misrepresentation, and omission. Read Moyar's responses in the book and then see what you think of the "consensus" that you describe.

A paragraph from your latest reply deserves special attention:

Another common criticism is that Moyar’s analysis lacks nuance, and the competency of the ARVN is a good example. Moyar demonstrates, using the so-called “historic” North Vietnamese sources, that the ARVN did have legitimate battlefield successes, and that  they could indeed be an effective fighting force at times. However, Moyar attempts to stretch communist reports that are somewhat critical of their own performance and respectful of the ARVN as a combat force into evidence that the ARVN was actually winning the war, and that the war overall was actually winnable, while the record as a whole doesn’t even come close to supporting that conclusion, and often suggests the exact opposite. 

You would know how lame and misleading these arguments are about ARVN and the winnability of the war if you had read Moyar's Triumph Forsaken and his newest book Triumph Regained, and/or if you had read Dr. Lewis Sorley's A Better War and/or Dr. George Veith's Black April and/or Ira Hunt's Losing Vietnam, not to mention Dr. Andrew Wiest's study on ARVN's performance, Vietnam's Forgotten Army, to name a few scholarly sources--not to mention Moyar's responses on these issues in Triumph Revisited. 

Hunt's and Veith's books are particularly compelling answers to your portrayal of what the North Vietnamese sources and other evidence reveal about ARVN's performance. Moyar does a good job on this issue in one of his responses in Triumph Revisited, but Hunt and Veith make a more in-depth case because they were not limited by space in their books. FYI, Hunt is the former deputy commander of USAAG in Thailand (1973-1974), and his main job was to track and analyze the fighting in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, mainly in South Vietnam.

Just curious: Are you aware that British counterinsurgency expert and the head of the UK's military mission in South Vietnam, Sir Robert Thompson, said that the war was going well until Diem was killed? 

Edited July 13, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Tom Gram]

I found another devastating review that directly addresses Moyar’s misrepresentation of source material. After conclusively proving that Moyar’s portrayal of Tri Quang as a communist agent and the Buddhist crisis as a communist controlled movement lacks any credible evidentiary support whatsoever, the reviewer, Edward Miller, states: 

“As the above examples suggest, there are many points in Triumph Forsaken at which Moyar’s interpretation of particular documents is open to criticism. Yet these interpretive problems are not the most troubling aspect of Moyar’s use of sources. In a few cases, Moyar does not merely misinterpret sources; he actually misrepresents their textual content.”

Miller goes on to give an example of how Moyar: 

“…relates what purports to be a verbatim account of the dialog between Harkins and Diem, as indicated in his use of quotation marks to indicate what was said to the other. But the sole document that Moyar cites for this exchange is an American memorandum of the conversation, which does not contain anything that can be construed as a verbatim record of the meeting.”

Miller then puts Moyar’s imaginary conversation and the memorandum side-by-side, and continues by saying:

“One might argue that the text of the memorandum still supports his interpretive claim about Harkins’ ability to “coach” and advise Diem. But such an argument does not excuse the fact that Moyar has reconstructed a historical event in a way that dramatically embellishes the available record of that event. That Moyar repeats this practice elsewhere in the book - for example, in his account of a 1963 meeting between Diem and Robert McNamara on page 254 - raises worrisome questions about whether and how frequently he plays fast and loose with his sources.” (Triumph Revisited, pp. 204-206) 

Moyar is allowed a reply in each of the chapters, and he makes some valid points in response to certain criticisms, but his justifications for the behavior pointed out by Laderman and Miller do not reflect very well on his academic honesty, IMO. I’m sure Mike will try to spin it somehow, but the evidence that Moyar both distorted and deliberately misrepresented his sources to advance a particular narrative is conclusive, period. Jim is right, that’s what propagandists do. 

And Mike, I’m reading the whole book, including Moyar’s lackluster defense briefs. The negative reviews I’ve quoted are the most compelling since they provide concrete proof of Moyar’s highly questionable and deceptive use of source material. 
 

EDIT: Moyar’s reply to Miller on the Buddhist crisis basically amounts to conceding that there is no evidence to support his claims, then doubling down by saying that some guy at some point said that communists penetrations of the Buddhists organized some political activities, so they must have held leadership positions…right. 

His defense of the imaginary conversations is that some other guy did the same thing in some other book and he won Nonfiction Book of the Year… 

So convincing. 

Edited July 13, 2023 by Tom Gram

[Michael Griffith]

2 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

I found another devastating review that directly addresses Moyar’s misrepresentation of source material. After conclusively proving that Moyar’s portrayal of Tri Quang as a communist agent and the Buddhist crisis as a communist controlled movement lacks any credible evidentiary support whatsoever, the reviewer, Edward Miller, states: 

“As the above examples suggest, there are many points in Triumph Forsaken at which Moyar’s interpretation of particular documents is open to criticism. Yet these interpretive problems are not the most troubling aspect of Moyar’s use of sources. In a few cases, Moyar does not merely misinterpret sources; he actually misrepresents their textual content.”

Miller goes on to give an example of how Moyar: 

“…relates what purports to be a verbatim account of the dialog between Harkins and Diem, as indicated in his use of quotation marks to indicate what was said to the other. But the sole document that Moyar cites for this exchange is an American memorandum of the conversation, which does not contain anything that can be construed as a verbatim record of the meeting.”

Miller then puts Moyar’s imaginary conversation and the memorandum side-by-side, and continues by saying:

“One might argue that the text of the memorandum still supports his interpretive claim about Harkins’ ability to “coach” and advise Diem. But such an argument does not excuse the fact that Moyar has reconstructed a historical event in a way that dramatically embellishes the available record of that event. That Moyar repeats this practice elsewhere in the book - for example, in his account of a 1963 meeting between Diem and Robert McNamara on page 254 - raises worrisome questions about whether and how frequently he plays fast and loose with his sources.” (Triumph Revisited, pp. 204-206) 

Moyar is allowed a reply in each of the chapters, and he makes some valid points in response to certain criticisms, but his justifications for the behavior pointed out by Laderman and Miller do not reflect very well on his academic honesty, IMO. I’m sure Mike will try to spin it somehow, but the evidence that Moyar both distorted and deliberately misrepresented his sources to advance a particular narrative is conclusive, period. Jim is right, that’s what propagandists do. 

And Mike, I’m reading the whole book, including Moyar’s lackluster defense briefs. The negative reviews I’ve quoted are the most compelling since they provide concrete proof of Moyar’s highly questionable and deceptive use of source material. 

Uh-huh. Yeah, okay. There are two problems here: One, you have done very little reading on the Vietnam War, and thus, even if you were willing to be objective and open minded, you do not have the needed foundation to properly judge the negative reviews. Two, you are bound and determined to believe the negative reviews and to reject Moyar's responses, no matter what. Your surprising claim that Moyar's responses to Miller and Laderman "do not reflect very well on his academic honesty" is a good indication of this.

I invite interested readers to read Triumph Revisited and see for themselves whether Moyar effectively answers the criticisms contained therein.

Unfortunately for you, you picked a really bad example of an alleged error by Moyar, i.e., the issue of Communist influence on the Buddhist leader Tri Quang and in the Buddhist "crisis." Miller's claim that there is no evidence that Tri Quang was a Communist agent or that Communists played a role in the Buddhist crisis is a perfect example of bogus claims made by liberal scholars who have no excuse for not knowing better (assuming they really do not know better and are not deliberately making claims they know are false). 

Your reliance on Miller regarding Tri Quang and the Buddhist crisis shows what can happen when a novice who is determined to believe something uncritically accepts utterly bogus claims because they reinforce what he wants to believe and because they are made by a scholar with whom he agrees. 

Are you aware that Tri Quang was a member of the Viet Minh? That during his sermons he said that Buddhism and communism were compatible? That he openly urged collaboration with the Communists? Gee, I wonder why Miller mentions none of these things. Why do you suppose that is?

This being said (much more could be said), I should note that Moyar allows that Tri Quang may have not have been a Communist sympathizer but a political opportunist who was hedging his bets for his own reasons. Moyar believes the evidence indicates--not proves, but indicates--that Tri Quang was a Communist operative but allows that he may not have been. 

As for the Communist influence in the Buddhist crisis, Miller grossly understates what the primary sources say on this matter. Incredibly, Miller does not mention the fact that two Vietnamese Communists later admitted that they brought large numbers of Communists to the famous massive 8/18/63 demonstration at the Xa Loi pagoda in Saigon and that these Communist agitators posed as devout Buddhists during the demonstration.

Equally incredibly, Miller says nothing about the fact that when a limited number of Buddhist pagodas were raided in late August 1963, government forces found weapons and Viet Cong documents in seven of the pagodas. Shucks, why do you suppose Miller says nothing about this evidence? 

Miller cites the conclusion of CIA analysts that Tri Quang was not a Communist, but Miller is not giving his readers the whole story. For instance, a 10-page CIA memorandum on Tri Quang, though it found against the Communist-agent charge, did note that Quang was "prone to see Catholics as a greater immediate danger than the Communists," and that "there are grounds for considerable doubt about the compatibility of his ultimate aims and long-term U.S. interests." The memo further noted, "there is little doubt that he regards the Catholics as a more pressing immediate danger to his own concept of nationalism than the Communists." Sheesh, if Tri Quang was not a Communist agent, he was certainly Communist dupe to believe that the Catholics were more of a threat than the Communists.

FYI, Moyar is certainly not the only scholar who has presented evidence that Tri Quang was doing the bidding of the Communists and that the Communists played a key role in fomenting the Buddhist crisis. I would recommend you read the book The Lost Mandate of Heaven (Ignatius Press, 2022), by Dr. Geoffrey Shaw, a Canadian historian who specializes in Southeast Asian history. Shaw spends several chapters just on Tri Quang and the Buddhist crisis and presents considerable evidence that supports Moyar's position on the subject. Some of the scholars who have praised Shaw's book include Thomas Marks, Stephen Sherman, Nghia M. Vo, and William Stearman.

Another problem is that you desperately want to believe that the North Vietnamese sources do not destroy the key facets of the orthodox view. You have not read them yet. Nor have you have read a single scholarly book that presents statements from those sources that clearly, plainly, and undeniably contradict the orthodox portrayal of the war. Instead, you keep running to find any source that will tell you that Moyar and numerous other revisionist scholars are misrepresenting the North Vietnamese sources.

You say that you will read Moyar's responses, but, again, given the mindset you have displayed, I suspect you will come back and report that you find Moyar's arguments insufficient, yet I also suspect that you will not lay a finger on the statements he quotes from the North Vietnamese sources. 

[James DiEugenio]

This sounds like Nixon and his godawful book, No More Vietnams.

He tried to make the same arguments, like Diem was really a fine leader for Saigon, that the Buddhist uprising was both exaggerated in numbers and likely communist infiltrated, and that somehow the USA suffered a terrible defeat when Saigon fell.

Look, first of all, there are two good books about Diem and what a mistake it was to back him.  Seth Jacobs' biography Cold War Mandarin, and David Anderson's Trapped by Success, the latter is the best book you will ever read about the Eisenhower administration and Diem. Both authors conclude that picking Diem was a big mistake and that were other choices that would have been much better. Almost any member of the Caravelle Group. who protested Diem's autocratic rule--and who he arrested and dispelled--would have been better. (See Jacobs. pp. 115-16; Anderson pp. 183-85)

The idea that the Buddhists were not, by far, the overwhelming religious majority is a myth that Nixon tried to convey.   Every genuine historian places their numbers at about 60-70 per cent of the population.  And I have never seen any credible evidence that any of the immolations of 1963 were somehow Moscow inspired.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was not just one, but 8 of them, including a nun.  The KGB staged them all?  Please.

Nixon also lied about the measures  he advocated.  He said he never was going to use atomic weapons or bomb the dikes.  He actually suggested doing both at the same meeting.  That was too much even for Kissinger.  He said doing the latter would kill two hundred thousand people.  John Newman says it was much more, like a half million. Which would have made it worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I would have denied suggesting it too.

When Nixon wrote his book he actually tried to say that somehow Vietnam was a huge geopolitical defeat.  This was 1987, when Gorbachev was in power.  Just two years before the Berlin Wall fell.

But in addition to concealing their real agenda in Vietnam, which was the Decent Interval, know how bad Nixon and Kissinger were?  Neither one of them thought Gorby was the real deal! They thought he was just another apparatchik.  This is a man that Thatcher said we could deal with.  And do you know how we know this about Nixon and Kissinger?  Because even Reagan though Gorby was for real.  He called them in for their advice.  They both said no he was not.  Nixon even told Ron's advisors not to leave Reagan in the same room with Gorby.  This is what triple distilled Cold Warriors those two were. And this is how worthless they were as foreign policy thinkers.

Even Ambrose, a compromised historian, thought Nixon was nutty about Vietnam.  Which he was.  They were both war criminals. And they spent decades after trying to justify their crimes. And now Mark M tries to cover up for them..

Thanks Tom.  

Edited July 14, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Tom Gram]

2 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Uh-huh. Yeah, okay. There are two problems here: One, you have done very little reading on the Vietnam War, and thus, even if you were willing to be objective and open minded, you do not have the needed foundation to properly judge the negative reviews. Two, you are bound and determined to believe the negative reviews and to reject Moyar's responses, no matter what. Your surprising claim that Moyar's responses to Miller and Laderman "do not reflect very well on his academic honesty" is a good indication of this.

I invite interested readers to read Triumph Revisited and see for themselves whether Moyar effectively answers the criticisms contained therein.

Unfortunately for you, you picked a really bad example of an alleged error by Moyar, i.e., the issue of Communist influence on the Buddhist leader Tri Quang and in the Buddhist "crisis." Miller's claim that there is no evidence that Tri Quang was a Communist agent or that Communists played a role in the Buddhist crisis is a perfect example of bogus claims made by liberal scholars who have no excuse for not knowing better (assuming they really do not know better and are not deliberately making claims they know are false). 

Your reliance on Miller regarding Tri Quang and the Buddhist crisis shows what can happen when a novice who is determined to believe something uncritically accepts utterly bogus claims because they reinforce what he wants to believe and because they are made by a scholar with whom he agrees. 

Are you aware that Tri Quang was a member of the Viet Minh? That during his sermons he said that Buddhism and communism were compatible? That he openly urged collaboration with the Communists? Gee, I wonder why Miller mentions none of these things. Why do you suppose that is?

This being said (much more could be said), I should note that Moyar allows that Tri Quang may have not have been a Communist sympathizer but a political opportunist who was hedging his bets for his own reasons. Moyar believes the evidence indicates--not proves, but indicates--that Tri Quang was a Communist operative but allows that he may not have been. 

As for the Communist influence in the Buddhist crisis, Miller grossly understates what the primary sources say on this matter. Incredibly, Miller does not mention the fact that two Vietnamese Communists later admitted that they brought large numbers of Communists to the famous massive 8/18/63 demonstration at the Xa Loi pagoda in Saigon and that these Communist agitators posed as devout Buddhists during the demonstration.

Equally incredibly, Miller says nothing about the fact that when a limited number of Buddhist pagodas were raided in late August 1963, government forces found weapons and Viet Cong documents in seven of the pagodas. Shucks, why do you suppose Miller says nothing about this evidence? 

Miller cites the conclusion of CIA analysts that Tri Quang was not a Communist, but Miller is not giving his readers the whole story. For instance, a 10-page CIA memorandum on Tri Quang, though it found against the Communist-agent charge, did note that Quang was "prone to see Catholics as a greater immediate danger than the Communists," and that "there are grounds for considerable doubt about the compatibility of his ultimate aims and long-term U.S. interests." The memo further noted, "there is little doubt that he regards the Catholics as a more pressing immediate danger to his own concept of nationalism than the Communists." Sheesh, if Tri Quang was not a Communist agent, he was certainly Communist dupe to believe that the Catholics were more of a threat than the Communists.

FYI, Moyar is certainly not the only scholar who has presented evidence that Tri Quang was doing the bidding of the Communists and that the Communists played a key role in fomenting the Buddhist crisis. I would recommend you read the book The Lost Mandate of Heaven (Ignatius Press, 2022), by Dr. Geoffrey Shaw, a Canadian historian who specializes in Southeast Asian history. Shaw spends several chapters just on Tri Quang and the Buddhist crisis and presents considerable evidence that supports Moyar's position on the subject. Some of the scholars who have praised Shaw's book include Thomas Marks, Stephen Sherman, Nghia M. Vo, and William Stearman.

Another problem is that you desperately want to believe that the North Vietnamese sources do not destroy the key facets of the orthodox view. You have not read them yet. Nor have you have read a single scholarly book that presents statements from those sources that clearly, plainly, and undeniably contradict the orthodox portrayal of the war. Instead, you keep running to find any source that will tell you that Moyar and numerous other revisionist scholars are misrepresenting the North Vietnamese sources.

You say that you will read Moyar's responses, but, again, given the mindset you have displayed, I suspect you will come back and report that you find Moyar's arguments insufficient, yet I also suspect that you will not lay a finger on the statements he quotes from the North Vietnamese sources. 

Mike, did you even look at the evidence Miller and Laderman provided? They spell it all out. Both reviewers quote directly from Triumph Forsaken and compare the claims in the book to what the citations for those claims actually say. That Moyar deliberately misrepresented multiple sources to push his revisionist agenda is not a matter of interpretation. It’s a fact. Moyar’s replies are spirited and of course well written but read ultimately like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar, cause there’s really no way to wriggle out of this sort of thing. 

And you are misrepresenting what I’ve said. I addressed the North Vietnamese sources in a previous comment. The overall very positive review “Triumph Forsaken as Military History” quotes directly from several of those sources to actually support Moyar’s claims that the ARVN did make real progress and even regained the initiative in ‘62-63 in many ways. He even adds some additional communist sources of his own. However, the reviewer, and several other scholars that deal directly with this issue in Triumph Revisited argue that Moyar makes a massive and unwarranted leap from military progress to decisive progress in the entire war effort to push the idea that the war was actually winnable, and that such a leap is not supported by the sum of the evidence. I’ll try to quote a few more examples tomorrow. 

Another issue directly relevant to this idea of a winnable war is Moyar’s claim that the Chinese would not have entered the war if Johnson invaded North Vietnam in ‘64. Multiple reviewers criticize Moyar’s questionable citation on this one, but the Chinese expert in the first chapter, I forget his name, slams Moyar for relying on a single dubious source while ignoring a massive new body of evidence from Chinese sources that directly contradict his claims. The reviewer also flatly states that Moyar’s citation does not actually say what he claims it says. This one might be quote-worthy too at some point. 

And I’m only really doing this to add some balance to this thread, and the discussion of Vietnam on this forum in general. The contradictory evidence and counterarguments to Moyar’s book are notably absent from any of your previous comments, and I think interested readers should have the opportunity to get some perspective, do their own research, and make up their own minds. I have no agenda, other than to share a few arguments from the other side, and this lame attempt by you to shoot the messenger by calling me a “novice” or “unqualified” is frankly ridiculous. All I’ve been doing is posting verbatim quotes from top scholars in the field. This idea that Moyar and the revisionists are the sole truth tellers on a conflict as complex as Vietnam is absurd. You’d think that Moyar’s provable use of ambiguous and even contradictory source material to advance his arguments would be enough to warrant just a little bit of hesitation, but instead you are still uncritically and credulously defending every claim in Triumph Forsaken as if it is gospel. Who’s not being objective and open minded again? 

I’ll also try to post some more quotes on the Buddhist Crisis this weekend, along with Moyar’s almost comically weak reply to Miller, etc. 

[James DiEugenio]

China would not have entered the war in the face of a Johnson invasion of the North?

Whew.