Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era

How many Americans know that the most revered leaders of our modern military (among them Ridgway, Eisenhower and Marshall) advised against intervening in Vietnam?How many know that in 1949 the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a policy paper stating that military involvement in Indochina would be "an anti-historical act likely in the long run to create more problems than it solves and cause more damage than benefit"?How many know that in 1967 the Joint Chiefs of Staff threatened to walk out on the president if he didn't call off military involvement?My guess is that most Americans still believe that the majority of military leaders favored intervention and "were not allowed to win."As Buzzanco makes clear, if that belief prevails in spite of the facts, Americans will have learned nothing from the tragedy that we call the Vietnam War. And given the current political and military situation, what we have, or haven't, learned has never mattered more. In a masterfully concise and thorough way, Buzzanco assembles the most important but previously scattered findings about America's involvement in Vietnam. He is among the rarest of authors -- a readable scholar, one who can write for the masses. And the fact that he's a scholar is important. Journalists, who usually write the readable stuff, have lost too much credibility with the American public. Upon finishing this relatively short but remarkably full account, all I could say was, "Finally!" The research and documentation to support Buzzanco's findings have been accumulating for years. As someone with a history degree who has tried to keep up, I applaud his ability to exhume, organize and present the essential and long buried information. For those who demand more, there are reams of source material. For those who have been looking for a clear and credible synopsis based on what we now know, this is it.I continue to hope that the publisher and the attending media will place it where the masses can find it.

"Although two decades have passed since US combat soldiers left Indochina, Americans are still telling lies about Vietnam." So begins Robert Buzzanco's invaluable book on the military opposition to the Vietnam war. As Buzzanco points out in his introductory chapter, it is not necessarily true that the military is more hawkish and militarist than its civilian leaders. In fact they were often more open to compromise and negotiation in the early days of the cold war than many American diplomats, and actually suggested non-involvement in the opening days of the Korean war. Some of the officers Buzzanco discusses, such as General Ridgway and Shoup rejected intervention in Vietnam altogether. Most often however a large number of officers realized that plans were flawed and that victory was unlikely, but by playing bureaucratic politics they could foist the blame on the civilians and on their service rivals in the army.The result was that over and over again officers raised the same unalterable points. You cannot bomb the North into submission, and you cannot defeat the NLF in the South with the corrupt and incompetent Southern regime we possess. Of course, much of this was the army, the navy and the air forces criticizing the other services plans. But as it turned out they were right and Buzzanco shows that the army was not stabbed in the back. A review of America's long involvement should help demonstrate this. In 1947, General George Marshall said that the French "have no prospect" of success in Vietnam. Five years later the Joint Chief of Staff were unanimously opposed to committing any American troops into Vietnam. General Matthew Ridgeway's opposition to assisting the French after Dien Bien Phu was crucial to the Geneva Accords.Flash forward ten years and Johnson's decision to expand the war. 1964 is a year filled with concerns over the collapse of the South Vietnamese authority, concerns about NLF strength, and strategic dithering. It is important to point out that Westmoreland, along with other officers like Wheeler, Johnson, and MacDonald opposed an all-out air war because they believed the Southern regime was too fragile to survive VC counterattacks. Pacification was dying and in only about 20% of the villages were the residents willing to provide RVN officials with information about the Viet Cong. In 1965 the war escalates. The army Chief of Staff suggests US military involvement will last at least five years, and could go as long as 20. "In I Corps, where the Marines were deployed, `the communist guerrillas enjoyed essentially uncontested dominance over most of the rural population,' they [the Corps] admitted." Conservative critics have blamed LBJ for not supporting an all-out air war. But at the time army leaders were divided about the effectiveness of such a strategy. Westmoreland thought that an air war would be ineffective as long as the situation of the South was on the verge of collapse. Westmoreland and Taylor we

Buzzanco's carefully researched and seamlessly written examination of military dissent in pre-Tet Vietnam rocks the boat tactfully--but thoroughly. Buzzanco conclusively lays to rest a great many myths about civil-military relations in the Vietnam era, and about the nature of the military conflict itself. This is not a book about guerilla tactics, comaraderie, or the horrors of war. Buzzanco tacitly accepts the profound emotional impact of Vietnam. His focus is on the high politics of waging a costly and highly unpopular "proxy" war. Many senior officers in Vietnam, including Matthew Ridgeway, John Paul Vann, and others, were tenaciously and vociferously critical of the war. Others were "true believers." Still others cynically hedged their bets in an effort to promote service and personal ambitions. Following the 1968 Tet offensive, Buzzanco reveals, most civilian and military leaders recognized the futility of the conflict and wanted to get out of Vietnam. Unable to do so, however, they participated in mutual recrimination and propagandizing. The result was a web of myth that pervades U.S. civil-military relations even after Desert Storm; which was, perhaps, reinforced by Desert Storm. Buzzanco's brilliant scholarship is a compact, unsettling, enlightening exploration of the defining Cold War conflict, and its enduring legacies.