The Vietnam War

‘The Vietnam War’ is the companion volume to the 10-part, 18-hour Ken Burns PBS documentary series of that name but like other books co-authored by him and Geoffrey C. Ward, including ‘Jazz’, ‘The War’ and, most recently, ‘The Roosevelts’, it stands in its own right as a richly illustrated work which utilises evocative primary sources to the full within a strong narrative framework.

There are ten chapters and an Epilogue, punctuated by five essays by other authors. The most controversial of these is undoubtedly Frederk Logevall’s ‘Kennedy and what might have been’ pondering whether had he survived Dallas and won a second term, Kennedy’s scepticism regarding the wisdom of military action in Vietnam would have triumphed over the felt need to be seen to be tough on communism and prevent toppling dominoes. 

After judiciously reviewing the contradictory evidence Logevall comes down against the Oliver Stone school of thought that JFK had already sanctioned ‘incipient withdrawal’ before his death, arguing that the President was sensibly keeping his options open but that on balance “JFK most likely would not have have Americanized the war, but instead would have opted for some form of disengagement, presumably by way of a face-saving negotiated settlement.”

In the event, of course, Johnson allowed himself to get progressively drawn into the war (although it is rightly pointed out that he enjoyed very limited room for manoeuvre) and it was left to Nixon to find a superficially honourable way out. 

America’s formal exit from south-east Asia was humiliating and Vietnam casts a very long shadow so that it is still capable of exciting extreme emotions (note, for example, Trump’s disgraceful characterization of former POW McCain as a “loser”).

Personally I would have liked more on the war’s legacy but one cannot have everything and what one does have here is a superb one-volume history of the war which is much more substantial than the coffee-table book which it appears to be at first sight.

If the miniseries is as good as this book, we'll have another Ken Burns classic to enjoy soon. This book has a lot of excellent first-person narratives from both sides of the conflict combined with solid historical scholarship. It is well done and a nice companion piece.

Like Ken Burns' documentaries, this companion book to his upcoming documentary on the Vietnam War is riveting. No one who wasn't there cannot begin to imagine the horror that went on during that long war, but this book does as much as possible to make the public understand. Starting with the French occupation and war & ending in the present, Mr. Burns presents this complex portion of world history. One point he made, near the end of the book, is that Americans thought of this war as an American war, and tended to forget that it was a Vietnam war.