Top 5 Books On JFK & Vietnam

[Michael Griffith]

9 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

Mike, did you even look at the evidence Miller and Laderman provided? They spell it all out.

You are descending into comedy now. You have not even read Moyar's book yet, and you ran with the negative reviews in Triumph Revisited before you had read any of Moyar's responses in the book, and yet now you are asking me if I have read "the evidence" that Miller and Laderman provided. 

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.

That is total nonsense. This is as bogus as your bluffing falsehood that some other revisionists consider Moyar extreme.

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. 

Or so you wish. Objective people who read the book and Moyar's replies therein will wonder if you actually read the book or how you have reached those conclusions after reading it. 

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. . . .

Listen to yourself: "ARVN did make real progress and even regained the initiative in '62-63 in many ways" but, oh no, this was not "decisive progress in the entire war effort." Are you ever going to break down and read the North Vietnamese sources yourself, not to mention books that document the other evidence that "the entire war effort" was going well in '62 and '63?  

to push the idea that the war was actually winnable, and that such a leap is not supported by the sum of the evidence.

Your severe lack of research shows itself yet again. Entire books have been written on the evidence that the war was winnable, but of course you have not read them (and probably never heard of them until now). I suspect you will never read them, but for the sake of others, some of these books include the following:

Dr. Lewis Sorley's A Better War

Dr. C. Dale Walton's The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam

Ira Hunt's Losing Vietnam

Phillip Davidson's Vietnam at War

Bruce Palmer's The 25-Year War

Hunt was the deputy commander of USAAG for two of the three final years of the war. Davidson was the chief of U.S. intelligence in South Vietnam under both Westmoreland and Abrams. Palmer was the deputy commanding general of U.S. forces in South Vietnam and later the U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff.

This is the tip of the iceberg of what could be said on this issue. Sir Robert Thompson, famous British counterinsurgency expert and the head of the British military mission in South Vietnam, who was frequently critical of the early war effort, declared that by late 1972, the U.S. had "won the war."

For a quick introduction to the subject, here is a 2018 online article by Mackubin Owens, a professor emeritus at the Naval War College and a National Security Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin:

The Vietnam War Revisited: Whe the Conventional History Is Wrong

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. 

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, Keith Taylor and (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?

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.

I do not believe you. And, no, it is not ridiculous to observe that you are clearly a novice who is in way over your head. You are not "the messenger." From the outset, you have done nothing but run to liberal sources and have uncritically quoted their arguments. The "contradictory evidence and counterarguments are notably absent" line is the kind of silliness you would hear in a junior-high debate, especially coming from someone who has not read a single scholarly book that disagrees with what you want to believe about the war.

All I’ve been doing is posting verbatim quotes from top scholars in the field.

No, you have been posting "verbatim quotes" (is there another kind of quote?) from a few top liberal scholars in the field, while you have studiously ignored what top conservative scholars in the field have said about Moyar's research. You have also ignored Vietnamese scholars, such as Nghia M. Vo, a former ARVN doctor and author of several books on the war, including The ARVN and the Fight for South Vietnam (2021), which does an even better job than Wiest's book in debunking the myth of an unwilling, weak ARVN.

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? 

That would be you. The liberal reviews you have cited do not prove that Moyar uses "ambiguous and even contradictory source material." One would think you would have learned your lesson when you got burned by relying on Chapman's dishonest and erroneous "review" in the roundtable review.

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. 

"Comically weak reply to Miller"? Such a comment makes it very hard to take you seriously. If anything is comical, it is Miller's specious attack on Moyar regarding Communist influence in the Buddhist protests. I notice you simply ignored the evidence I cited on this point in my previous reply: the admission of two prominent Vietnamese Communists and the discovery of weapons and Viet Cong documents in seven Buddhist pagodas. Miller says nothing about this evidence, so I guess you are going to search far and wide on the Internet looking for some answer to it. I am guessing you have no intention of reading Dr. Geoffrey Shaw's research on this issue, right?

I also notice that you did not defend Miller's claim that there is no evidence whatsoever that Tri Quang was a Communist sympathizer. Why? Because that is a curious argument to make given that Tri Quang was in the Viet Minh, that he claimed that Buddhism and communism were compatible, and that he stated that the South Vietnamese should collaborate with the Communists. And, again, are you ever going to read Dr. Shaw's research on Tri Quang? (He devotes 18 pages to the Buddhist protests and Tri Quang--his full name was Thich Tri Quang.)

Is it not revealing that after the Communists conquered South Vietnam, they gave Tri Quang a job in Hue, whereas they imprisoned many other monks who had been politically active? Perhaps this was because Tri Quang had urged his fellow Buddhists to seek aid from the Viet Cong in their effort to topple Diem, among other actions.

Finally, for the sake of others, here are just a few worthwhile quotes from Moyar's replies in Triumph Revisited that discuss some of the false claims and dubious complaints in the reviews:

          William Stueck calls into question my assertion that the Viet Minh were in serious trouble at the time of Dien Bien Phu, and argues that unless the communist forces at Dien Bien Phu had been completely annihilated, the communists would have occupied a favorable military position across Indochina after the battle. He asserts that my argument is based primarily on Khrushchev’s memoirs and Janos Radvanyi’s book. But the two endnotes supporting my interpretation (426, notes 63 and 64) cite six different sources. One of the sources is a book by Ilya Gaiduk, for whom Stueck expresses respect elsewhere. Two of the other sources, written by North Vietnamese leader Le Duan and North Vietnamese witness Bui Tin, show that the Viet Minh had sent most of their mobile armed forces to Dien Bien Phu, refuting the view that the Viet Minh had great numbers of troops elsewhere that would have pressed on to victory had the Dien Bien Phu attack failed. (p. 63)

          Stueck also criticizes me for using multiple sources in a single endnote at the middle or end of a paragraph. Many other scholars of the Vietnam War, and many other historians, have done the same, which was why I cited sources in this manner. Examples of books on Vietnam include: Fredrik  Logevall’s Choosing War (University of California Press, 1999); Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam & America (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Howard Jones, Death of a Generation (Oxford University Press, 2003); Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2004). I do not recall seeing any reviewers assert that these or other historians undermined their credibility by citing sources in this way. (pp. 63-64)

          Qiang Zhai takes issue with my portrayal of Ho Chi Minh as a committed Leninist, contending that he was instead “half Gandhi and half Lenin.”  But he offers no evidence to suggest Gandhi-like characteristics, while there is much evidence that Ho was far closer to Lenin than Gandhi on key issues like pluralism, religion, and the use of violence. Nor does Zhai provide any support for his assertion that Ho was less constricted by communist ideology than other Asian communist leaders. (p. 67)

Comment: Zhai's claim that Ho Chi Minh was not a fanatical, dedicated Stalinist-Leninist Communist is astounding and inexcusable. Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen's book Hanoi's War, Dr. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life, and Dr. Christopher Goscha's recent book The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam prove that Moyar's description of Ho Chi Minh as a hardcore Communist is indisputably correct. It is amazing that any alleged "scholar" in the 21st century would deny this fact. Let us continue:

          Zhai and Stueck neglect to mention Mao’s stunning remark to Edgar Snow in January 1965 that China would not fight outside its borders (360–361). I cannot believe that Mao would have made this statement insincerely, for he could not have gained anything and could have lost much by lying on this score—luring American ground forces into North  Vietnam by promising to stay out would have frustrated his ambitions in Southeast Asia, endangered the survival of his North Vietnamese allies, and produced a military situation in which he could not make good use of  his relatively modest military resources.  

          Zhai asserts that I did not cite a source when asserting that the Chinese communist land reform campaign killed more than one million people. I am not sure why he raised this issue, since today’s most prominent scholars all put the death toll at between one and three or more million.  

          Zhai contends that I provided no source for my contention that the North Vietnamese and Chinese were considering an invasion of Thailand. But elsewhere in the book I do cite sources stating that they discussed the matter, on August 13, 1964, and again on May 16, 1965 (482, note 78; 489, note 61). (p. 70)

Edited July 14, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Tom Gram]

8 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Mike, did you even look at the evidence Miller and Laderman provided? They spell it all out.

You are descending into comedy now. You have not even read Moyar's book yet, and you ran with the negative reviews in Triumph Revisited before you had read any of Moyar's responses in the book, and yet now you are asking me if I have read "the evidence" that Miller and Laderman provided. 

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.

That is total nonsense. This is as bogus as your bluffing falsehood that some other revisionists consider Moyar extreme.

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. 

Or so you wish. Objective people who read the book and Moyar's replies therein will wonder if you actually read the book or how you have reached those conclusions after reading it. 

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. . . .

Listen to yourself: "ARVN did make real progress and even regained the initiative in '62-63 in many ways" but, oh no, this was not "decisive progress in the entire war effort." Are you ever going to break down and read the North Vietnamese sources yourself, not to mention books that document the other evidence that "the entire war effort" was going well in '62 and '63?  

to push the idea that the war was actually winnable, and that such a leap is not supported by the sum of the evidence.

Your severe lack of research shows itself yet again. Entire books have been written on the evidence that the war was winnable, but of course you have not read them (and probably never heard of them until now). I suspect you will never read them, but for the sake of others, some of these books include the following:

Dr. Lewis Sorley's A Better War

Dr. C. Dale Walton's The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam

Ira Hunt's Losing Vietnam

Phillip Davidson's Vietnam at War

Bruce Palmer's The 25-Year War

Hunt was the deputy commander of USAAG for two of the three final years of the war. Davidson was the chief of U.S. intelligence in South Vietnam under both Westmoreland and Abrams. Palmer was the deputy commanding general of U.S. forces in South Vietnam and later the U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff.

This is the tip of the iceberg of what could be said on this issue. Sir Robert Thompson, famous British counterinsurgency expert and the head of the British military mission in South Vietnam, who was frequently critical of the early war effort, declared that by late 1972, the U.S. had "won the war."

For a quick introduction to the subject, here is a 2018 online article by Mackubin Owens, a professor emeritus at the Naval War College and a National Security Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin:

The Vietnam War Revisited: Whe the Conventional History Is Wrong

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. 

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, Keith Taylor and (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?

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.

I do not believe you. And, no, it is not ridiculous to observe that you are clearly a novice who is in way over your head. You are not "the messenger." From the outset, you have done nothing but run to liberal sources and have uncritically quoted their arguments. The "contradictory evidence and counterarguments are notably absent" line is the kind of silliness you would hear in a junior-high debate, especially coming from someone who has not read a single scholarly book that disagrees with what you want to believe about the war.

All I’ve been doing is posting verbatim quotes from top scholars in the field.

No, you have been posting "verbatim quotes" (is there another kind of quote?) from a few top liberal scholars in the field, while you have studiously ignored what top conservative scholars in the field have said about Moyar's research. You have also ignored Vietnamese scholars, such as Nghia M. Vo, a former ARVN doctor and author of several books on the war, including The ARVN and the Fight for South Vietnam (2021), which does an even better job than Wiest's book in debunking the myth of an unwilling, weak ARVN.

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? 

That would be you. The liberal reviews you have cited do not prove that Moyar uses "ambiguous and even contradictory source material." One would think you would have learned your lesson when you got burned by relying on Chapman's dishonest and erroneous "review" in the roundtable review.

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. 

"Comically weak reply to Miller"? Such a comment makes it very hard to take you seriously. If anything is comical, it is Miller's specious attack on Moyar regarding Communist influence in the Buddhist protests. I notice you simply ignored the evidence I cited on this point in my previous reply: the admission of two prominent Vietnamese Communists and the discovery of weapons and Viet Cong documents in seven Buddhist pagodas. Miller says nothing about this evidence, so I guess you are going to search far and wide on the Internet looking for some answer to it. I am guessing you have no intention of reading Dr. Geoffrey Shaw's research on this issue, right?

I also notice that you did not defend Miller's claim that there is no evidence whatsoever that Tri Quang was a Communist sympathizer. Why? Because that is a curious argument to make given that Tri Quang was in the Viet Minh, that he claimed that Buddhism and communism were compatible, and that he stated that the South Vietnamese should collaborate with the Communists. And, again, are you ever going to read Dr. Shaw's research on Tri Quang? (He devotes 18 pages to the Buddhist protests and Tri Quang--his full name was Thich Tri Quang.)

Is it not revealing that after the Communists conquered South Vietnam, they gave Tri Quang a job in Hue, whereas they imprisoned many other monks who had been politically active? Perhaps this was because Tri Quang had urged his fellow Buddhists to seek aid from the Viet Cong in their effort to topple Diem, among other actions.

Finally, for the sake of others, here are just a few worthwhile quotes from Moyar's replies in Triumph Revisited that discuss some of the false claims and dubious complaints in the reviews:

          William Stueck calls into question my assertion that the Viet Minh were in serious trouble at the time of Dien Bien Phu, and argues that unless the communist forces at Dien Bien Phu had been completely annihilated, the communists would have occupied a favorable military position across Indochina after the battle. He asserts that my argument is based primarily on Khrushchev’s memoirs and Janos Radvanyi’s book. But the two endnotes supporting my interpretation (426, notes 63 and 64) cite six different sources. One of the sources is a book by Ilya Gaiduk, for whom Stueck expresses respect elsewhere. Two of the other sources, written by North Vietnamese leader Le Duan and North Vietnamese witness Bui Tin, show that the Viet Minh had sent most of their mobile armed forces to Dien Bien Phu, refuting the view that the Viet Minh had great numbers of troops elsewhere that would have pressed on to victory had the Dien Bien Phu attack failed. (p. 63)

          Stueck also criticizes me for using multiple sources in a single endnote at the middle or end of a paragraph. Many other scholars of the Vietnam War, and many other historians, have done the same, which was why I cited sources in this manner. Examples of books on Vietnam include: Fredrik  Logevall’s Choosing War (University of California Press, 1999); Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam & America (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Howard Jones, Death of a Generation (Oxford University Press, 2003); Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2004). I do not recall seeing any reviewers assert that these or other historians undermined their credibility by citing sources in this way. (pp. 63-64)

          Qiang Zhai takes issue with my portrayal of Ho Chi Minh as a committed Leninist, contending that he was instead “half Gandhi and half Lenin.”  But he offers no evidence to suggest Gandhi-like characteristics, while there is much evidence that Ho was far closer to Lenin than Gandhi on key issues like pluralism, religion, and the use of violence. Nor does Zhai provide any support for his assertion that Ho was less constricted by communist ideology than other Asian communist leaders. (p. 67)

Comment: Zhai's claim that Ho Chi Minh was not a fanatical, dedicated Stalinist-Leninist Communist is astounding and inexcusable. Dr. Lien-Hang Nguyen's book Hanoi's War, Dr. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life, and Dr. Christopher Goscha's recent book The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam prove that Moyar's description of Ho Chi Minh as a hardcore Communist is indisputably correct. It is amazing that any alleged "scholar" in the 21st century would deny this fact. Let us continue:

          Zhai and Stueck neglect to mention Mao’s stunning remark to Edgar Snow in January 1965 that China would not fight outside its borders (360–361). I cannot believe that Mao would have made this statement insincerely, for he could not have gained anything and could have lost much by lying on this score—luring American ground forces into North  Vietnam by promising to stay out would have frustrated his ambitions in Southeast Asia, endangered the survival of his North Vietnamese allies, and produced a military situation in which he could not make good use of  his relatively modest military resources.  

          Zhai asserts that I did not cite a source when asserting that the Chinese communist land reform campaign killed more than one million people. I am not sure why he raised this issue, since today’s most prominent scholars all put the death toll at between one and three or more million.  

          Zhai contends that I provided no source for my contention that the North Vietnamese and Chinese were considering an invasion of Thailand. But elsewhere in the book I do cite sources stating that they discussed the matter, on August 13, 1964, and again on May 16, 1965 (482, note 78; 489, note 61). (p. 70)

So essentially what you are saying is if someone is reading a critique of the Warren Report e.g. Accessories After the Fact, and Meagher quotes directly from the Warren Report, then puts the citation for that claim from the Hearings and Exhibits right next to it, demonstrating conclusively that that the citation does not support the claim in the report, the reader is not qualified to comment unless they have read the entire Report itself along with Case Closed and Reclaiming History and already believes with religious fervor that Oswald did it. And if the reader posts Meagher’s work verbatim for others to make up their own minds that is somehow nonsense and a “bluff” just because you said so. Got it. 

And by the way, there is such a thing as non verbatim quote apparently: Moyar’s imaginary conversations he invented from non-verbatim memos. 

Regarding the progress of the war effort, you are again trying to shoot the messenger. I’m just reporting what is said in Triumph Revisited, including the very positive military history review of Moyar’s book. I will post some more quotes when I have the time. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that that guy is pretty far removed from the “liberal historian” caricature label you’re assigning to anyone who isn’t already a full blown revisionist zealot. I could be wrong though. 

Why don’t you post the comments from Miller, Stueck, Zhai, etc. that Moyar is replying to so readers can make up their own minds on the validity of Moyar’s replies? I’ll get around to it eventually but I’m at an event all weekend so don’t have a lot of time to be online. 

[Michael Griffith]

19 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

So essentially what you are saying is if someone is reading a critique of the Warren Report e.g. Accessories After the Fact, and Meagher quotes directly from the Warren Report, then puts the citation for that claim from the Hearings and Exhibits right next to it, demonstrating conclusively that that the citation does not support the claim in the report, the reader is not qualified to comment unless they have read the entire Report itself along with Case Closed and Reclaiming History and already believes with religious fervor that Oswald did it. And if the reader posts Meagher’s work verbatim for others to make up their own minds that is somehow nonsense and a “bluff” just because you said so. Got it. 

This is a curious argument for a conspiracy theorist to be making, since your view--our view--is considered to be fringe, baseless, wildly speculative, and unscholarly by the vast majority of academic historians who have written anything about JFK or the late 20th century. 

Anyway, what do you say about Moyar's response to the charge that some of his references do not support the claims for which they are cited? How do you specifically answer his points on this issue? Remember that Chapman accused Moyar of not presenting evidence for key points, and Moyar proved that he did, which is why I openly wondered if Chapman actually read Moyar's book or just skimmed through it. 

And by the way, there is such a thing as non verbatim quote apparently: Moyar’s imaginary conversations he invented from non-verbatim memos. 

One, a quote is by definition verbatim; otherwise, it is not a quote but a paraphrase. Two, see above. Have you read Moyar's responses yet?

Regarding the progress of the war effort, you are again trying to shoot the messenger. I’m just reporting what is said in Triumph Revisited, including the very positive military history review of Moyar’s book. I will post some more quotes when I have the time. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that that guy is pretty far removed from the “liberal historian” caricature label you’re assigning to anyone who isn’t already a full blown revisionist zealot. I could be wrong though.

Instead of posting more quotes from the negative reviews, you should take the time to read at least two of the books that I recommended on the progress of the war effort and the winnability of the war, not to mention Moyar's Triumph Forsaken (and his new book Triumph Regained). I would be embarrassed to be seen so stridently attacking a book that I had not read.

I am careful about my use of labels. I only call someone a liberal if they are a liberal. For example, I have not called Max Hastings a liberal or a defender of the orthodox view, because he is more of a centrist and because his book departs from the orthodox line on a number of issues (which is why it has received negative reviews from some anti-war liberals). Similarly, I have not described Lien-Hang Nguyen as a liberal nor categorized her as an apologist for the orthodox view, because she is, as far as I can tell, a centrist of some type, and because her book presents a wealth of information that contradicts the orthodox position.

Why don’t you post the comments from Miller, Stueck, Zhai, etc. that Moyar is replying to so readers can make up their own minds on the validity of Moyar’s replies? 

Uh, gee, why have you only posted comments from Miller, Zhai, and other negative reviewers from Triumph Revisited?! Why did you only post comments from Chapman's review when you quoted from the roundtable review? Why did you not post any of Moyar's comments from his roundtable reply? Why did you not post any of Moyar's comments from his responses in Triumph Revisited? Etc., etc. Every single comment you have quoted has come from negative reviews of Moyar's book or from attacks on revisionist scholars.  

For other readers, some might be wondering why virtually all liberal scholars deny that Communists played a key role in the Buddhist crisis in 1963, and why they deny that the leader of the militant Buddhists was in league or sympathetic with the Communists, in spite of the considerable evidence that contradicts their denials? Because certain influential journalists and key liberals in the Kennedy administration greatly exaggerated the Buddhist crisis and used it as an excuse to push for a coup against South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem, and because the coup proved to be a disaster.

The murder of Diem erased much of the progress that had been made since 1960, caused the Hanoi regime to decide to vastly escalate their war effort, and led to crippling political instability in the Saigon government for nearly two years. Liberal scholars do not want to admit that liberals used false information to push for Diem's removal.

Similarly, why do so many liberal historians persist in denying that Ho Chi Minh was a hardcore Communist, despite the overwhelming and indisputable evidence that he was? This, too, was another one of the lies that the anti-war movement peddled to undermine the war effort. "Ho is mainly a nationalist, not a Communist, and he is not in league with the Soviets and the Chinese," the John Kerrys and Jane Fondas falsely claimed. 

And, why do so many so many liberal scholars continue to doggedly argue that ARVN was a feckless and unwilling army, in spite of the wealth of evidence we now have that refutes this view? Because the myth of a weak, reluctant ARVN was one of the big lies that the anti-war movement peddled in their effort to undermine support for the war, and one of the lies that the anti-war majority in Congress used as their excuse to slash aid to South Vietnam soon after the Paris Peace Accords were signed.

Edited July 15, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

Here are more segments from Moyar’s responses in Triumph Revisited. I have changed their order because I want to start with part—not all, but part—of Moyar’s response to McAllister regarding the militant Buddhist monk Tri Quang and the Communist role in the Buddhist protests. The other segments deal with Diem, the Viet Minh, and the amount of progress in the war effort:

          McAllister disputes my assertion that Tri Quang was likely to have been a communist agent. The evidence of Tri Quang’s communist affiliation presented in Triumph Forsaken, he contends, is no more convincing than what Marguerite Higgins presented in her 1965 book Our Vietnam Nightmare. First, it must be said that Higgins presented some important, and wrongfully neglected, evidence. My research shows that Higgins’ work was more accurate than that of David Halberstam or Neil Sheehan; the fact that she has largely been forgotten, while Halberstam and Sheehan have become iconic figures, reflects the biases of many who have written about Vietnam and the unfortunate fact that Higgins died in 1966. Higgins revealed, among other things, that Tri Quang’s brother was a senior North Vietnamese official, and that Tri Quang had at one time belonged to the Viet Minh State Department, and C.I.A. documents from 1963 and 1964 confirm that Tri Quang acknowledged both of these facts to be true (458, note 59). I also incorporated some evidence not used by Higgins.

          During the 1963 crisis, Tri Quang advocated collaboration with the communists, and in 1964 some of Tri Quang’s followers turned against him and declared him to be a communist (218). In 1964 and 1965, Tri Quang frequently used false charges of wrongdoing to demand that the Saigon government remove some of the best anti-communist officers (317, 319, 364, 394). Tri Quang had ties to the People’s Revolutionary Committees established in Annam in 1964, which were viewed by many as tools of the communists (317). Tran Van Huong, like Diem, believed Tri Quang to be an accomplice of the communists, and both Huong and Diem knew more about Vietnamese politics than any Americans (334). Furthermore, Triumph Forsaken is the first history to provide evidence from North Vietnamese sources of extensive communist participation in the Buddhist movement in 1963, evidence that none of the reviewers has disputed (217, 231).

          McAllister states, “The communists, both during and after the war, certainly saw [Tri Quang] as an irreconcilable enemy rather than as a partner,” and backs this view with a communist document from late 1966 that denounced Tri Quang. This document is interesting and significant, but it does not prove that Tri Quang was not a communist. If Tri Quang had been working secretly for North Vietnam, most North Vietnamese officials, including the author of this document, would not have been informed of it. Extraordinarily tight security procedures would have been maintained with such a profoundly important agent. In addition, the date of the document in question comes well after the events I describe in Triumph Forsaken, and after the showdown between the Buddhists and the government in the spring of 1966, and it is possible that the communists parted ways with Tri Quang sometime between the end of Triumph Forsaken and late 1966. (pp. 216-218, emphasis added)

          Lawrence contends that I overturn simplistic caricatures of the Vietnamese only to replace them with new ones, which, he says, “often seem inspired by a deeply conservative agenda rather than a deep reading of the available evidence.” He appears to be saying, as Edward Miller appears to say later, that I first decided that American support for Diem and Vietnam was good and then I looked for ways of portraying the Vietnamese and Diem to prove that point. But if one looks at my first book [Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam], I portrayed the Vietnamese in much the same way but did not come out in favor of Diem—at that time, I had studied peasant culture extensively but had not discovered the gross fallacies in the conventional depictions of Diem. As stated in the previous chapter, I changed my views on central questions of the war while researching Triumph Forsaken in accordance with the discovery of new facts. (pp. 209-210)

          My treatment of the Franco-Viet Minh War comes under attack from Lawrence for “saying nothing of the fluidity of Viet Minh ideology as the movement struggled desperately to find foreign support.” Yet I do mention that the Viet Minh professed to be a conglomeration of diverse nationalists, rather than a hierarchy led by doctrinaire communists. I also argue this portrayal was a deceitful attempt to gain support from the United States and other foreign powers; the Viet Minh organization was always controlled by people dedicated to communist ideology. Ho’s ideology and that of his Communist Party did not change; he was merely resorting to the old communist trick of gaining the temporary assistance of one enemy to destroy another as a stepping stone towards destroying all of his enemies (1–25). (p. 210)

Comment: Dr. Christopher Goscha documents these facts in exhaustive detail in his recent book The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2022). Goscha shows that Ho and other Communist leaders pretended to be willing to rule with non-communist nationalists and concealed their Marxist agenda from the people as a war expediency to defeat the French. When Ho, Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, etc., felt it was safe to do so, they ruthlessly purged non-Communists from all levels of power, murdering thousands of people and jailing thousands of others in the process. Let us continue:

          According to Lawrence, David Elliott’s study shows that the Denounce the Communists campaigns undermined “the government’s legitimacy in the eyes of its people,” contrary to what I argued in Triumph Forsaken. Elliott argues that the repression following Decree 10/59 of May 1959 “pushed tensions in the countryside to the breaking point,” creating grassroots resentment that sparked the communist assassination campaign of 1960. . . . Other sections of Elliott’s book, in fact, contradict the claim that the government’s actions produced mass unrest.

          Elliott himself acknowledges that the peasants looked back fondly on the period up to 1960 as a time of peace and tranquility, not a time of seething discontent with the government. He also states that the Diem government’s arrests during the campaigns of the late 1950s mainly created popular fear of aiding the Viet Cong, rather than popular anger against the government.

          Communist histories make clear that the reason the assassination campaign began in 1960 was that higher headquarters ordered it to begin at that time, not that popular opposition to the government surged at that time. (pp. 211-212)

          Lind contends that the United States lost the Vietnam War because its pacification efforts failed to defeat the insurgents. But, as is shown in my first book and also in Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, pacification ultimately succeeded. South Vietnamese and American forces wiped out the Viet Cong insurgents by the early 1970s. South Vietnam fell in 1975 because over half a million well-equipped North Vietnamese regulars attacked South Vietnamese forces that had been deprived of fuel, weapons, ammunition, and spare parts by American aid cuts. (p. 215)

          Miller takes me to task for not mentioning that the South Vietnamese government ceded large amounts of territory to the communists in 1963 in Binh Duong province—the province from which Philip Catton extrapolated in his book—and other provinces. But the Saigon government’s abandonment of some territory in Binh Duong, which resulted from unusually intense enemy military activity and difficult terrain, ran contrary to trends in most provinces. Nationwide, the South Vietnamese government was increasing its control of both population and territory in the summer and fall of 1963 (248, 283–285).

          Within Binh Duong, withdrawal from certain areas did not prevent the Diem government from using the Strategic Hamlet program to expand its control over the province’s population, which mattered more than territory. Although the Strategic Hamlet program encountered more difficulties in Binh Duong than in the other III Corps provinces, it was not in the same category as the worst Delta provinces (247–248, 284–285).

          A September 1963 U.S.O.M. report stated that, in Binh Duong, the South Vietnamese were succeeding militarily, and “substantial gains are being made in the strategic hamlet program.” It noted that of 205 strategic hamlets planned for Binh Duong, 108 had been completed and fifty were under construction. The strategic hamlets contained 209,944 people of the province’s total population of 302,655. A Viet Cong report on Binh Duong in the late summer of 1963 confirms that the South Vietnamese government was militarily and politically aggressive and was able to recruit most of the province’s youths into its service, while the Viet Cong were enduring heavy losses and could not obtain any popular support in the strategic hamlets. (pp. 219-220)

Edited July 17, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

Here are my final segments from Moyar’s responses in Triumph Revisited. One of the segments deals with the bogus claim that Moyar misrepresented the content of his sources and embellished the record:

          In Miller’s estimation, Diem’s land reform was “desultory.” Before the start of Diem’s land reform in 1956, nearly 80 percent of the peasants in the highly populous Mekong Delta owned no land. By 1960, only 44 percent of Delta peasants remained landless.23 How Miller considers this achievement unimpressive is difficult to fathom. Would we consider it unimpressive if the number of Americans below the poverty line in a large and populous area went from 80 percent to 44 percent in four years? (p. 221).

          Miller then claims that I overlooked Diem’s relocation of peasants to the highlands, but in fact I discuss how and why Diem relocated these peasants, as well as their subsequent influence on the war in the highlands (72, 392). (p. 221)

Comment: One wonders if Miller actually read Moyar’s book or deliberately misrepresented it. 

          Miller then asserts that I “misrepresented” the “textual content” of sources, which “dramatically embellishes the available record” and “raises worrisome questions about whether and how frequently he plays fast and loose with his sources.” Miller seems to be asserting that I seriously misrepresented the meaning of sources, but when he gets down to specifics, it turns out that he is discussing something of much less significance, which begs the question of why he used such ominous and inflammatory language. What he is discussing is merely the use of meeting notes as verbatim transcripts—a matter of style rather than content, upon which reasonable people sometimes disagree. Other historians have employed this same method without incurring invective. Richard Reeves, for example, used it extensively in his highly acclaimed President Kennedy, which won best non-fiction book of the year accolades from Time Magazine and P.E.N.

          In Miller’s opinion, I invoke “an outdated and condescending understanding of the peasants.” He offers no explanation to back up this accusation, although presumably he takes exception to some of the same interpretations as previous contributors. His next bold denunciation, that I possess a “superficial understanding of Vietnamese political history and political culture,” also goes unsubstantiated. (p. 222)

          William Stueck calls into question my assertion that the Viet Minh were in serious trouble at the time of Dien Bien Phu, and argues that unless the communist forces at Dien Bien Phu had been completely annihilated, the communists would have occupied a favorable military position across Indochina after the battle. He asserts that my argument is based primarily on Khrushchev’s memoirs and Janos Radvanyi’s book. But the two endnotes supporting my interpretation (426, notes 63 and 64) cite six different sources. One of the sources is a book by Ilya Gaiduk, for whom Stueck expresses respect elsewhere. Two of the other sources, written by North Vietnamese leader Le Duan and North Vietnamese witness Bui Tin, show that the Viet Minh had sent most of their mobile armed forces to Dien Bien Phu, refuting the view that the Viet Minh had great numbers of troops elsewhere that would have pressed on to victory had the Dien Bien Phu attack failed. Just after the completion of Triumph Forsaken, additional communist sources emerged that showed deep trouble on the communist side in early 1954.

          The early stages of Dien Bien Phu, contends Stueck, were very favorable for the Viet Minh, which he says casts doubt on Khrushchev’s claim that the Viet Minh were in dire straits during the battle. Owing to space constraints, I did not get into the details of this battle in my book, but communist sources, as well as some Western accounts, show that the Viet Minh did suffer major reverses in March 1954. A decade ago, Pierre Asselin revealed that the Viet Minh suffered a whopping 9,000 casualties in the first four days at Dien Bien Phu. Asselin reported that the staggering losses compelled the Viet Minh to turn away from the use of human wave tactics. (p. 63)

Comment: In his recent book The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2022), Dr. Christopher Goscha presents evidence that supports Moyar’s portrayal of the state of the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. For example, Goscha notes that the French recapture of the position named Eliane on April 11 caused a drop in Viet Minh morale, and in a few weeks the situation among the Viet Minh was so bad that Giap ceased operations for three days to conduct mandatory propaganda sessions among the troops:

          Apparently, the French (re)capture of the position they called Eliane on 11 April sapped confidence along parts of the front line. On 29 April, as the third attack got underway, Giap sent strict orders to his political officers in which he criticized widespread manifestations of “rightist, negative thinking” among the troops, cadres, and officer corps. . . .

          In sharp language designed to pull his cadre and officers together and take the fortress in one last attack, Giap singled out for severe criticism and punishment manifestations of this “rightist deviationism.” This was communist doublespeak for troubling cases of insubordination, cowardice, fear of death and injury, exhaustion, and lack of morale:

          “Upon encountering the enemy, they refused to shoot. They had weapons but did not want to use them to destroy the enemy.” This, he told his divisional commanders on 29 April, had happened in “our army.” To fix these problems, the party center organized three days of intensive study sessions, propaganda drives, and rectification campaigns to raise morale, assert party control, and, in so doing, return as many men to their combat positions as possible. Criticism, emulation, and rectification sessions were mandatory for soldiers and cadres.

          Looking through their field binoculars, French officers could see commissars unleashing this on their own troops in the distance—literally, on the battlefield. . . .

          It is hard to convey how desperate the situation truly was on the food front. The People’s Army had already depleted rice reserves in the northwest during its operations in the highlands in 1952–3, triggering famine in large parts of the Tai country where Dien Bien Phu was nestled. Many areas in the northwest were still experiencing famine. . . .

          Despite attempts to hammer them into line through emulation campaigns and heavy doses of propaganda, the communists had to accept the desertion of several civilian teams. Even an official history had to admit that these people were simply terrified of dying in a hail of fire. (The Road to Dien Bien Phu, pp. 562-563, 567-569)

Goscha’s observations about Viet Minh losses and the aftermath of the battle are also worth quoting:

          Glorious though the victory was, Dien Bien Phu came at a great cost for the Vietnamese. The official number of Vietnamese military casualties for the battle is 13,930, with 4,020 of that number listed as killed or missing in action. But French military intelligence estimated that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam lost around 20,000 combatants. The latter number is closer to the truth, in my view. On related fronts where fighting occurred, the casualties on the Vietnamese side totaled 15,004, including 5,833 dead. None of these statistics count the several thousand porters killed or missing in action. During the Dien Bien Phu campaign (November 1953–May 1954), one can safely assume that the DRV lost 25,000 souls in all, men and women, civilians and combatants, in the area stretching from the Chinese border to Zone V [where Dien Bien Phu was located].

          Meanwhile, on another, connected battlefront, Ho Chi Minh had already marched his cadres into villages to launch class warfare on their fellow Vietnamese. Several thousand would die at the party’s own hands by the time this horrifying extension of the war on the civilian front finally ended. This, once again, was Vietnamese War Communism writ large. This was its human cost. This, too, was Dien Bien Phu. (The Road to Dien Bien Phu, pp. 569-570).

[James DiEugenio]

Keep it coming Tom, its excellent.

Evidently Mike was so eager to swallow this that he did no cross checking.

[Michael Griffith]

6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Keep it coming Tom, its excellent.

Evidently Mike was so eager to swallow this that he did no cross checking.

Just SMH. Uh, did you not read my responses to Tom's replies? Tom is the one who failed to do any cross checking. Tom obviously did not read any of Moyar's responses in Triumph Revisited before he posted the quotes from Miller, Stueck, Zhai, Laderman, etc.  As he did with the roundtable review, Tom ran with his favorite negative reviews in Triumph Revisited without bothering to read Moyar's responses to them. What is it that you and he cannot seem to understand about the basic need to read both sides before commenting?

The reviews by Miller, Zhai, Chapman, and Stueck are the worst in the book, with Laderman's not far behind. Miller's and Zhai's reviews, in particular, are loaded with embarrassingly erroneous claims and misrepresentations. 

You see, one advantage that I had over Tom is that I had already read Triumph Revisited. Thus, I knew Tom was jumping to conclusions and had not read Moyar's responses when he called Miller's and Laderman's false and misleading arguments "devastating," and especially when he claimed that Miller and Laderman proved that Moyar has misrepresented the North Vietnamese sources. 

Edited July 18, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Tom Gram]

1 hour ago, Michael Griffith said:

Just SMH. Uh, did you not read my responses to Tom's replies? Tom is the one who failed to do any cross checking. Tom obviously did not read any of Moyar's responses in Triumph Revisited before he posted the quotes from Miller, Stueck, Zhai, Laderman, etc.  As he did with the roundtable review, Tom ran with his favorite negative reviews in Triumph Revisited without bothering to read Moyar's responses to them. What is it that you and he cannot seem to understand about the basic need to read both sides before commenting?

The reviews by Miller, Zhai, Chapman, and Stueck are the worst in the book, with Laderman's not far behind. Miller's and Zhai's reviews, in particular, are loaded with embarrassingly erroneous claims and misrepresentations. 

You see, one advantage that I had over Tom is that I had already read Triumph Revisited. Thus, I knew Tom was jumping to conclusions and had not read Moyar's responses when he called Miller's and Laderman's false and misleading arguments "devastating," and especially when he claimed that Miller and Laderman proved that Moyar has misrepresented the North Vietnamese sources. 

No Mike, I did read Moyar’s replies. Those reviews are indeed devastating, and I think any objective reader not already wedded to Moyar’s position would agree. 

Also, you are once again misrepresenting what I said about the North Vietnamese sources. I never once said that Laderman and Miller’s reviews proved that Moyar had misrepresented North Vietnamese sources.
The conclusive examples of Moyar egregiously misrepresenting his citations in those reviews are from other types of source material. Laderman even used quotes from the authors of books Moyar cited that describe how Moyar misrepresented and cherry-picked their work to push his arguments. 

What I said about the North Vietnamese sources is that not one scholarly reviewer in Triumph Revisited agreed with Moyar’s massive and unwarranted leap from military progress in ‘62-63 over previous years to decisive progress that could have won the entire war, including the military history review which was otherwise very positive. 

I’ve been out of the country since Friday but heading back today. I’ll try to post some more stuff in this thread this week. 

[Michael Griffith]

4 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

 

No Mike, I did read Moyar’s replies. Those reviews are indeed devastating, and I think any objective reader not already wedded to Moyar’s position would agree. 

If you think those reviews are "devastating," then I am left to wonder if you really did read Moyar's responses to them, because he proves that they make one erroneous claim and straw-man assumption after another. Miller's and Zhai's reviews are especially pathetic. Are you going to address the evidence I have presented regarding some of the errors in their reviews? 

Also, you are once again misrepresenting what I said about the North Vietnamese sources. I never once said that Laderman and Miller’s reviews proved that Moyar had misrepresented North Vietnamese sources.

Humm, you are drawing a very fine-line distinction between misrepresenting and exaggerating/misusing. How ever you want to spin your attack now, anyone who reads your previous replies will see that, at the very least, you clearly implied that the North Vietnamese sources do not say everything that Moyar says they say. 

I will not harp on the fact that in this thread you have made a number of demonstrably false claims about Moyar's scholarship and about how he is viewed by other scholars. 

The conclusive examples of Moyar egregiously misrepresenting his citations in those reviews are from other types of source material. Laderman even used quotes from the authors of books Moyar cited that describe how Moyar misrepresented and cherry-picked their work to push his arguments. 

But if you would bother to actually read those authors' books, you would see that Moyar does not misrepresent them to push his arguments. 

What I said about the North Vietnamese sources is that not one scholarly reviewer in Triumph Revisited agreed with Moyar’s massive and unwarranted leap from military progress in ‘62-63 over previous years to decisive progress that could have won the entire war, including the military history review which was otherwise very positive.

And you are telling me that you read Moyar's responses to the negative reviews??? Did you only read every third line or something??? Just the evidence presented in the segments that I have quoted from Moyar's responses shows that Moyar is not making a "massive and unwarranted leap." 

And, needless to say, you obviously still have not read any of the books written by other scholars who make the same argument that Moyar makes about the winnability of the war. I listed several such books in a previous reply, several of which were written by senior military officers who actually served in Vietnam (as opposed to liberal historians who have never spent a day in the military and have no formal training in military tactics, intelligence, logistics, and strategy).

"Decisive progress that could have won the entire war"? FYI, Moyar never says that we nearly had the war won in 1963. No one has ever said that. Moyar does, however, say that the war was going well in 1963, contrary to the false portrayal that liberals have been pushing for decades, and the North Vietnamese sources indisputably verify that the war was going well for us before Diem was murdered.

But, rather than admit this, Moyar's critics pretend that Moyar claims the war was nearly won in 1963 and then accuse him of going beyond what the North Vietnamese sources say.

It is telling that some liberal scholars, faced with the evidence in Moyar's book, now admit that we were making substantial progress until Diem was killed, which is the exact opposite of what liberals had been saying until Moyar's Triumph Forsaken was published. It is also the exact opposite of what JFK was being told by Hilsman, Forrestal, Mendenhall, Ball, and Harriman.

Liberal scholars dread any evidence that we made steady progress in our war effort and that the war was entirely winnable. This is one reason that the North Vietnamese sources sent such shockwaves through liberal academia. It is also the reason that liberal scholars have yet to provide a comprehensive response to all the evidence on this point contained in the North Vietnamese sources. 

Triumph Revisited only deals with the war through mid-1965, since it is reviewing Triumph Forsaken. But the North Vietnamese sources also have plenty to say about progress in the American war effort in the years following 1965, and Moyar's new book, Triumph Regained, presents that evidence, as do the books authored by a number of other scholars (Veith, Sorley, Turner, Kort, Hunt, Tuong Vu, L.H.T. Nguyen, N. Nguyen, N.M. Vo, etc., etc.).

Edited July 18, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Tom Gram]

10 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

But if you would bother to actually read those authors' books, you would see that Moyar does not misrepresent them to push his arguments. 

Wow Mike. So you’re now trying to say that these authors don’t understand their own books? If a scholarly reviewer says that Moyar misrepresented a book to push his agenda, and puts Moyar’s claim right next to the cited passage from the book to prove it, plus the actual author of that book says the same thing and is quoted in the review, you’ll still side with Moyar because you can’t fathom that the pro-war revisionist messiah might have twisted his sources to support a bogus narrative? Cause that’s literally what you’re doing. 

There’s a word for that. I think it starts with a D and ends with “enial”. 

Edited July 19, 2023 by Tom Gram

[Michael Griffith]

20 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

Wow Mike. So you’re now trying to say that these authors don’t understand their own books? If a scholarly reviewer says that Moyar misrepresented a book to push his agenda, and puts Moyar’s claim right next to the cited passage from the book to prove it, plus the actual author of that book says the same thing and is quoted in the review, you’ll still side with Moyar because you can’t fathom that the pro-war revisionist messiah might have twisted his sources to support a bogus narrative? Cause that’s literally what you’re doing. 

There’s a word for that. I think it starts with a D and ends with “enial”. 

"Wow" is right. So this is your response to all the evidence and points presented in my previous three replies? Has it occurred to you that you should read Moyar's book and read the books in question that he is citing, and then compare what he says with what the cited pages say? No, obviously not. You still have not learned your lesson from when you got burned by running with Chapman's vacuous review in the roundtable review. "Denial" indeed.

Let us back up and remember that you started off by making the false claim that even some other revisionists view Moyar as "extreme" and that they say that he sometimes misrepresents his sources. I knew that was hogwash. Thus, when I called your bluff and asked you to name one such revisionist scholar, you could not. Then, you found a scholar who had never written anything about the Vietnam War before but who labeled Moyar's views as "extreme." You failed to mention that she only labeled him "extreme" in reference to two of the areas she was analyzing; you also failed to mention that she said that Moyar is highly qualified. 

You uncritically ran with Chapman's review from the roundtable review, obviously without bothering to read Moyar's response, and then fell silent when I showed that Moyar proved that Chapman's review is not only flawed but petty and unserious, that her errors and false characterizations are so bad that one is led one to wonder if she actually read the book or if she deliberately misrepresented Moyar's arguments. 

Next, you announced that you had found "devastating" reviews of Moyar's book in Triumph Revisited, and you specifically cited Miller's and Zhai's error-riddled reviews as two of those "devastating" reviews (although you could not remember Zhai's name). You did not realize that Miller's and Zhai's reviews are two of the worst, error-packed reviews in the book.

It is apparent that you still have not read the North Vietnamese sources themselves, and that you also have not read any of the scholarly books that support Moyar's position. Nor have you read L.H.T. Nguyen's and Max Hastings' books, which, though not revisionist, support many of Moyar's key arguments. 

Finally, just to give other readers some idea of how Moyar's book has been received among scholars who are not stridently anti-Vietnam War, consider these assessments of Triumph Forsaken:

“a stunning performance”
-– James M. Murphy, The Times Literary Supplement

“one of the most important books ever written on the Vietnam War”
-– Mackubin Thomas Owens, former professor at the Naval War College and the University of Rhode Island, author of Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain.

“groundbreaking”
-– Evan Thomas and John Barry, Newsweek

“a brilliant analysis”
-– Lewis Sorley, military historian and author of A Better War

“akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances”
-– Victor Davis Hanson, professor of history at Hillsdale College

“a bold, courageous, and brilliant book”
-– Christina Goulter, Asian Affairs

“a landmark contribution”
-– Robert F. Turner, military historian and former professor of history at the University of Virginia, author of Vietnamese Communism: Its Origin and Development and Myths of the Vietnam War: The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered

“Moyar makes so many striking contrarian arguments that one hardly knows where to begin…. This is an important book, a history that serves as a mirror on the present.”
-– Robert H. Scales, Wall Street Journal

“thought provoking, exhaustively researched, highly organized, and above all, outstanding.”
-– Rick Baillergeon, History

“Moyar, who has strong credentials, has an engaging writing style and supports his arguments with dispassionate research, unlike many earlier revisionists’ works… Highly recommended.”
-– Michael O’Donnell, Choice

“Thoroughly researched and richly informative.”
-– George Cohen, Booklist

“The author is an immensely talented academic and writer… Moyar marshals the fruits of his research into a devastating attack on the conventional wisdom about the Vietnam War.”
-– James C. Roberts, founder of the American Veterans Center and an award-winning journalist and author

“[a] definitive examination… It is essential reading for anyone wanting a fresh understanding of one of America’s longest and most misunderstood conflicts.”
–- Charles Melson, chief historian at the Marine Corps Historical Division

“Impressive and scrupulously researched… elevates the arguments of Vietnam War revisionists to a higher, more respected, level.”
-– Karl Helicher, ForeWord Magazine

“the sheer scholarship behind Moyar’s book demands that we take his views seriously.”
-– Ian Horwood, Reviews in History

“Moyar is a fine writer and switches from broad strategic and geopolitical issues to heart-gripping accounts of key military actions…. Triumph Forsaken will go a long way toward vindicating and restoring respect for Vietnam vets and those who supported the war, often at great personal cost.”
-– Robert A. Hall, military historian, Vietnam veteran, and contributing author for the journal Leatherneck

“will prove to be the indispensable history of the Vietnam War.”
-– Scott W. Johnson, Claremont Institute Fellow

“throws down a mighty challenge to orthodox historians”
-– Paul Beston, The American Spectator

“The book is meticulously documented; it draws on the substantial U.S. documentary record of the war, bringing fresh perspectives to familiar evidence. Moyar augments and supports his analysis with extensive use of North Vietnamese archival material, most of which was unavailable to the orthodox historians of the 1970s and ’80s. In sum, Triumph Forsaken is an important book.”
-– James S. Robbins, historian, author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive

“Extensively researched from communist as well as Western sources. . . . gripping.”
-– John M. Taylor, historian, author of Garfield of Ohio: The Available Man

“This is revisionist history at its best.”
-– Christian Nelson, VietNow

“Moyar is refreshingly frank in his appraisals.”
-– Curtis Hooper O’Sullivan, Air Power History

“I know of no scholar more dedicated to bringing a thorough and accurate portrayal of America’s involvement in Vietnam than Mark Moyar. Everyone who is interested in a full picture of that of-tmisunderstood war should be grateful for his effort.”
-– Senator James Webb, Marine combat veteran, author of Fields of Fire and Born Fighting

“Mark Moyar tells how and why the United States did not win its first war in Vietnam, 1954–1965. Triumph Forsaken replaces its predecessors because it shows how the counterinsurgency campaign might have been won at acceptable cost, thus avoiding ‘the big war’ that followed.”
-– Allan R. Millett, Director, Eisenhower Center for American Studies, University of New Orleans

“Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true communist, and that his victory was inevitable. That Ngo Dinh Diem was an unpopular and repressive reactionary. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘domino theory’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. Mark Moyar, a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. It is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.”
-– Max Boot, author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

“Mark Moyar provides detailed accounts of Saigon politics and of actual battles that are unmatched in any other study. He gives particular emphasis to southern Vietnamese views and experiences, and he encourages us to think about the war in fresh ways.”
-– K.W. Taylor, professor of history at Cornell University

“Triumph Forsaken is a remarkable book. Moyar’s work is the most powerful challenge to the orthodox interpretation of the origins of America’s war in Vietnam. In taking a fresh look at the primary sources, as well as exploiting new materials from the American and communist archives, Moyar has constructed an alternative explanation for the roots of the American commitment. Moyar’s book compels historians to reopen the debate about the meaning of the Vietnam War.”
-– Thomas Alan Schwartz, professor of history at Vanderbilt University

“Such is the quality of this book and the rewriting of history it effects that you will not only see the Vietnam War in a different light but understand current events in Iraq more clearly. That’s quite an accomplishment and makes this the best book you’re likely to read for some time. Grade: A+”
-– BrothersJudd.com

“One of the most important books of the last several years. This book is a must for anyone interested in either the Vietnam War, or in American security policy in general.”
-– George Mellinger, Old War Dogs

“Mark Moyar has joined the company of a select group of serious war scholars, including Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, Colonel Harry Summers, and Colonel H. R. McMaster, who have provided fact- and logic-based analyses of the Vietnam War.”
-– Thomas Snodgrass, The Conservative Voice

“[Moyar] goes to great lengths to stress Uncle Ho’s communist ties and ideals, and he turns the father of his country idea on its ear, making a case that South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, not Ho, was the George Washington of Vietnam…. His fiercely argued book covering the early years of American involvement in the war is a salvo against what he calls the ‘orthodox school’ of Vietnam war historians…. Moyar marshals a good deal of evidence to make his points.”
–- Marc Leepson, historian and Vietnam War veteran, author of four books on military history

Edited July 19, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Tom Gram]

4 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

"Wow" is right. So this is your response to all the evidence and points presented in my previous three replies? Has it occurred to you that you should read Moyar's book and read the books in question that he is citing, and then compare what he says with what the cited pages say? No, obviously not. You still have not learned your lesson from when you got burned by running with Chapman's vacuous review in the roundtable review. "Denial" indeed.

Let us back up and remember that you started off by making the false claim that even some other revisionists view Moyar as "extreme" and that they say that he sometimes misrepresents his sources. I knew that was hogwash. Thus, when I called your bluff and asked you to name one such revisionist scholar, you could not. Then, you found a scholar who had never written anything about the Vietnam War before but who labeled Moyar's views as "extreme." You failed to mention that she only labeled him "extreme" in reference to two of the areas she was analyzing; you also failed to mention that she said that Moyar is highly qualified. 

You uncritically ran with Chapman's review from the roundtable review, obviously without bothering to read Moyar's response, and then fell silent when I showed that Moyar proved that Chapman's review is not only flawed but petty and unserious, that her errors and false characterizations are so bad that one is led one to wonder if she actually read the book or if she is deliberately misrepresents Moyar's arguments. 

Next, you announced that you had found "devastating" reviews of Moyar's book in Triumph Revisited, and you specifically cited Miller's and Zhai's error-riddled review as two of those "devastating" reviews (although you could not remember Zhai's name). You did not realize that Miller's and Zhai's reviews are two of the worst, error-packed reviews in the book.

It is apparent that you still have not read the North Vietnamese sources themselves, and that you also have not read any of the scholarly books that support Moyar's position. Nor have you read L.H.T. Nguyen's and Max Hastings' books, which, though not revisionist, support many of Moyar's key arguments. 

Finally, just to give other readers some idea of how Moyar's book has been received among scholars who are not stridently anti-Vietnam War, consider these assessments of Triumph Forsaken:

“a stunning performance”
– James M. Murphy, The Times Literary Supplement

“one of the most important books ever written on the Vietnam War”
– Mackubin Thomas Owens, former professor at the Naval War College and the University of Rhode Island, author of Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain.

“groundbreaking”
– Evan Thomas and John Barry, Newsweek

“a brilliant analysis”
– Lewis Sorley, military historian and author of A Better War

“akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances”
– Victor Davis Hanson, professor of history at Hillsdale College

“a bold, courageous, and brilliant book”
– Christina Goulter, Asian Affairs

“a landmark contribution”
– Robert F. Turner, military historian and former professor of history at the University of Virginia, author of Vietnamese Communism: Its Origin and Development and Myths of the Vietnam War: The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered

“Moyar makes so many striking contrarian arguments that one hardly knows where to begin…. This is an important book, a history that serves as a mirror on the present.”
– Robert H. Scales, Wall Street Journal

“thought provoking, exhaustively researched, highly organized, and above all, outstanding.”
– Rick Baillergeon, History

“Moyar, who has strong credentials, has an engaging writing style and supports his arguments with dispassionate research, unlike many earlier revisionists’ works… Highly recommended.”
– Michael O’Donnell, Choice

“Thoroughly researched and richly informative.”
– George Cohen, Booklist

“The author is an immensely talented academic and writer… Moyar marshals the fruits of his research into a devastating attack on the conventional wisdom about the Vietnam War.”
– James C. Roberts, founder of the American Veterans Center and an award-winning journalist and author

“[a] definitive examination… It is essential reading for anyone wanting a fresh understanding of one of America’s longest and most misunderstood conflicts.”
– Charles Melson, Marine Corps Gazette

“Impressive and scrupulously researched… elevates the arguments of Vietnam War revisionists to a higher, more respected, level.”
– Karl Helicher, ForeWord Magazine

“the sheer scholarship behind Moyar’s book demands that we take his views seriously.”
– Ian Horwood, Reviews in History

“Moyar is a fine writer and switches from broad strategic and geopolitical issues to heart-gripping accounts of key military actions…. Triumph Forsaken will go a long way toward vindicating and restoring respect for Vietnam vets and those who supported the war, often at great personal cost.”
– Robert A. Hall, military historian, Vietnam veteran, and contributing author for the journal Leatherneck

“will prove to be the indispensable history of the Vietnam War.”
– Scott W. Johnson, Claremont Institute Fellow

“throws down a mighty challenge to orthodox historians”
– Paul Beston, The American Spectator

“The book is meticulously documented; it draws on the substantial U.S. documentary record of the war, bringing fresh perspectives to familiar evidence. Moyar augments and supports his analysis with extensive use of North Vietnamese archival material, most of which was unavailable to the orthodox historians of the 1970s and ’80s. In sum, Triumph Forsaken is an important book.”
– James S. Robbins, historian, author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive

“Extensively researched from communist as well as Western sources. . . . gripping.”
– John M. Taylor, historian, author of Garfield of Ohio: The Available Man

“This is revisionist history at its best.”
– Christian Nelson, VietNow

“Moyar is refreshingly frank in his appraisals.”
– Curtis Hooper O’Sullivan, Air Power History

“I know of no scholar more dedicated to bringing a thorough and accurate portrayal of America’s involvement in Vietnam than Mark Moyar. Everyone who is interested in a full picture of that of-tmisunderstood war should be grateful for his effort.”
– Senator James Webb, Marine combat veteran, author of Fields of Fire and Born Fighting

“Mark Moyar tells how and why the United States did not win its first war in Vietnam, 1954–1965. Triumph Forsaken replaces its predecessors because it shows how the counterinsurgency campaign might have been won at acceptable cost, thus avoiding ‘the big war’ that followed.”
– Allan R. Millett, Director, Eisenhower Center for American Studies, University of New Orleans

“Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true communist, and that his victory was inevitable. That Ngo Dinh Diem was an unpopular and repressive reactionary. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘domino theory’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. Mark Moyar, a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. It is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.”
– Max Boot, author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

“Mark Moyar provides detailed accounts of Saigon politics and of actual battles that are unmatched in any other study. He gives particular emphasis to southern Vietnamese views and experiences, and he encourages us to think about the war in fresh ways.”
– K.W. Taylor, Cornell University

“Triumph Forsaken is a remarkable book. Moyar’s work is the most powerful challenge to the orthodox interpretation of the origins of America’s war in Vietnam. In taking a fresh look at the primary sources, as well as exploiting new materials from the American and communist archives, Moyar has constructed an alternative explanation for the roots of the American commitment. Moyar’s book compels historians to reopen the debate about the meaning of the Vietnam War.”
– Thomas Alan Schwartz, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

“Such is the quality of this book and the rewriting of history it effects that you will not only see the Vietnam War in a different light but understand current events in Iraq more clearly. That’s quite an accomplishment and makes this the best book you’re likely to read for some time. Grade: A+”
– BrothersJudd.com

“One of the most important books of the last several years. This book is a must for anyone interested in either the Vietnam War, or in American security policy in general.”
– George Mellinger, Old War Dogs

“Mark Moyar has joined the company of a select group of serious war scholars, including Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, Colonel Harry Summers, and Colonel H. R. McMaster, who have provided fact- and logic-based analyses of the Vietnam War.”
– Thomas Snodgrass, The Conservative Voice

“[Moyar] goes to great lengths to stress Uncle Ho’s communist ties and ideals, and he turns the father of his country idea on its ear, making a case that South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, not Ho, was the George Washington of Vietnam…. His fiercely argued book covering the early years of American involvement in the war is a salvo against what he calls the ‘orthodox school’ of Vietnam war historians…. Moyar marshals a good deal of evidence to make his points.”
– Marc Leepson, Vietnam War scholar and VVA Veteran

 

Did I ever deny that some people gave Moyar’s book positive reviews? Why would I bother posting that stuff when we can all rely on you to champion Triumph Forsaken as the greatest book ever written? That is not the issue here, the issue is that the criticisms in Triumph Revisited, especially the several devastating direct comparisons of Moyar’s claims to his cited sources, are valid, and there’s no getting around it. 

How many authors of those glowing blurbs you posted do you think took the time to check Moyar’s citations? The reviewers in Triumph Revisited did, and what they found does not inspire confidence, to put it mildly. 

Also, I have a day job, and a life, and don’t have time to type out 3000 words a day arguing with you. Your approach is “if Moyar said it, it must be true”, and you swallow his every word in his books, review responses, etc. as if they are the word of God and also actively try to convert people to his revisionist approach to the Vietnam War. I on the other hand could honestly care less about this guy. Like I said I have no agenda here, and believe it or not that’s actually true.

I just think that people interested in Vietnam on this forum deserve to get the full story on Moyar and know that his claims, and his research methods apparently, are highly disputed by top experts in the field, and that a majority of professional historians basically think he’s a politically motivated neocon and completely full of crap. Since you’ve got the uncritical praise side covered, I started posting some critical reviews to add some balance. It’s really as simple as that. 

[James DiEugenio]

"a majority of professional historians basically think he’s a politically motivated neocon and completely full of crap."

Nice one.

God, the idea that the ARVN could have won the war against the Viet Cong and the PAVN is so far out its sci fi.

I mean really.  I knew a guy who was there and he said it was simply not going to happen with the ARVN and everyone knew it.

Edited July 19, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Tom Gram]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

"a majority of professional historians basically think he’s a politically motivated neocon and completely full of crap."

Nice one.

God, the idea that the ARVN could have won the war against the Viet Cong and the PAVN is so far out its sci fi.

I mean really.  I knew a guy who was there and he said it was simply not going to happen with the ARVN and everyone knew it.

Here’s a good op-ed on this issue from a military historian who worked in the Pentagon in the early 2000’s

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/opinion/vietnam-was-unwinnable.html

There is a broad consensus among professional historians that the Vietnam War was effectively unwinnable. Even the revisionists admit their minority status, though some claim that it’s because of a deep-seated liberal bias within the academic history profession. But doubts about the war’s winnability are hardly limited to the halls of academe. One can readily find them in the published works of official Army historians like Dr. Jeffrey J. Clarke, whose book “Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965-1973” highlights the irrevocable problems that frustrated American policy and strategy in South Vietnam. Pessimism also pervades “Vietnam Declassified: The C.I.A. and Counterinsurgency,” a declassified volume of the agency’s secret official history penned by Thomas L. Ahern Jr., a career C.I.A. operations officer who served extensively in Indochina during the war.

I’ll save Mike the trouble on this one. The author of this op-ed says that one issue was the ARVN’s “will to fight”. Mike will jump on this and soon comment that newly released North Vietnamese sources somehow disprove this idea because Viet Cong and PAVN leaders were critical of their own progress, effectiveness and morale in ‘62-63 and respectful of the ARVN as a worthy adversary. I’ll go ahead and post quotes from several experts who vehemently disagree with Moyar’s interpretation of those sources, then maybe throw in some evidence from Newman’s book that in many cases the ARVN actively avoided combat, and that even though the North Vietnamese expressed some frustration with the strategic hamlets, the real situation on the ground was that many of the hamlets were so poorly managed and defended that the Viet Cong would basically use them as “supply points”. 

Hell even Moyar himself has said that the best case scenario was that Diem could have held off the North indefinitely:

Had Diem remained in power, the Viet Cong could have kept the war going as long as they continued to receive new manpower from North Vietnam and maintained sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos, but it is highly doubtful that the war would have reached the point where the United States needed to introduce several hundred thousand of its own troops to avert defeat, as it did under Diem’s successors. South Vietnam might well have survived under Diem without the help of any U.S. ground forces. 

“Highly doubtful”, “might well have”, etc., but the Viet Cong could have “kept the war going”. One of the main criticisms of revisionism is its heavy dependence on counterfactuals, and this is why. 

[James DiEugenio]

Counterfactual?

It might be even worse than that.

Diem, Nhu and Madame Nhu were just the wrong leaders for South Vietnam.

Who can forget her saying: Go ahead and have another barbecue, we will bring the gasoline.