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Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965
Drawing on a wealth of new evidence from all sides, Triumph Forsaken overturns most of the historical orthodoxy on the Vietnam War. Through the analysis of international perceptions and power, it shows that South Vietnam was a vital interest of the United States. The book provides many new insights into the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and demonstrates that the coup negated the South Vietnamese government's tremendous, and hitherto unappreciated, military and political gains between 1954 and 1963. After Diem's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson had at his disposal several aggressive policy options that could have enabled South Vietnam to continue the war without a massive US troop infusion, but he ruled out these options because of faulty assumptions and inadequate intelligence, making such an infusion the only means of saving the country.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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October 26, 2021
In his book, Mark Moyar breaks away from what he calls "the orthodox school," which generally sees America’s involvement in Vietnam as wrongheaded and unjust, and argues that the war was a noble but wrongly executed enterprise.
First, he examines the Vietnam War’s main characters and countries in the years leading up to 1954. According to the orthodox historians, Ho Chi Minh had followed the tradition of numerous Vietnamese nationalists who had defended the country against foreign aggression and who had despised the Chinese and other foreigners. However, Moyar asserts, Vietnam's past shows that all of the conflicts in Vietnamese history before the twentieth century had involved Vietnamese fighting against Vietnamese, not against external enemies. Furthermore, neither Ho Chi Minh nor Vietnamese nationalists of earlier times hated the Chinese, but rather worked amicably with Chinese allies. Ho served in the Chinese Communist Army in the Second World War, did whatever his Chinese communists recommended during his war with France, and asked the Chinese to send troops to help him in Vietnam. He respected them more than Diem respected his American allies. According to Moyar, Ho Chi Minh fervently believed in Marxism and Leninism and would not have sacrificed Communism for the interests of Vietnam or turned against his Communist allies had the United States allowed him to re-unify Vietnam under his control.
After reading several other books about Ho, I considered him first and foremost a nationalist. However, Moyar's argument provoked me to re-think, and I came to the conclusion that indeed, Ho's successes depended heavily upon large-scale material aid and advice from the Soviet Union and China. He also followed the advice of the Chinese with a submissiveness that Diem never expressed in his dealings with the American government. "Only Ho Chi Minh would fill towns and villages with propaganda lauding his foreign allies," adds the author.
Moyar also re-examines the reasons behind the South Vietnamese peasants' Viet Cong sympathies by pointing out that it was not the renowned land-distribution reform or the Communist ideology that attracted the rural population, but rather the the Viet Cong’s leadership capabilities and military strength. The villagers were easily infatuated by charismatic leaders and wanted to be on the winning side when the fighting ended. Concerned with local rather than national matters, they had no desire to fight for nationalist causes and no interest in Marxist theories or in the collectivization of agriculture that the Communists had in mind.
Another myth Moyar dispels is the portrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem as a tyrannical reactionary with no talent for politics, confirming my suspicions. In fact, Diem was a wise and effective leader, who defeated, with few resources at his disposal, rival politicians, pro-French dissidents in the South Vietnamese Army, two angry religious sects, and a brotherhood of organized criminals and brought order and prosperity to South Vietnam. He was not despotic. He just understood that a modern Vietnam that preserved Vietnamese traditions was closer to the hearts of most Vietnamese than Western democracy or Communism. Diem did not stifle religion or kill tens of thousands in the process of redistributing land as Ho Chi Minh did, and he was more tolerant of dissent than the Northern communists.
The Buddhist protest movement of 1963 did not arise from popular discontent with a government practicing religious intolerance. "It was, in truth, a power play by a few Buddhist leaders whose duplicity became clear over time as they showed themselves impervious to government attempts at reconciliation and as their charges of religious persecution were disproved," argues Moyar. These leaders had close ties to the Communists or were themselves covert Communists, and other Communist agents participated extensively in the Buddhist movement’s protests. Diem eventually had to suppress the Buddhists not to lose face. On August 21, 1963, he arrested its leaders and cleared the pagodas where the movement was headquartered. That action was actually planned by Diem’s generals, but the Prime Minister was blamed for cruelty towards the Buddhists. Most interestingly, the anti-Diem Americans would decide that Diem should be replaced with those generals exactly.
The sharp criticism of Diem by the American government and press eventually compelled some of those generals to remove him from power. Moyer accuses David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan in particular of turning influential Americans and South Vietnamese against Diem's regime. Their reporting on military events was inaccurate at times, and it regularly exaggerated Diem's government's shortcomings. Once the overthrow they had advocated led to a political chaos in Saigon, one ineffective government succeeding another, Halberstam, Sheehan, and their colleague Stanley Karnow disparaged Diem with lies to claim that South Vietnam had already been hopelessly weak before the overthrow.
Finally, Mark Moyar maintains that President John F. Kennedy never consented to the overthrow of Diem. Until the end, the President had serious reservations about the plotting against the South Vietnamese Prime Minister because many senior advisers opposed Diem’s removal. He tried to stop the conspiracy, but American ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, who was seriously influenced by the anti-Diem journalists, such as Halberstam and Sheehan, instigated the coup without notifying John Kennedy and in spite of Presidential orders. A few days before the overthrow, President John F. Kennedy found out that Lodge was encouraging a group of South Vietnamese generals to rebel and was not notifying Washington of his communication with the conspirators. The President vainly tried to rein in Lodge and the plotters by sending instructions to the Saigon embassy. As Moyar explains, John Kennedy did not take decisive action to stop Lodge mainly because Lodge was a leading candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964, and the Democratic President did not want campaign accusations that he had prevented the Republican ambassador from taking the required actions.
In general, supporting the overthrow of Diem in November 1963 was by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War, argues Moyar. The South Vietnamese war effort had not entered into a period of decline during the last months of Diem’s rule. Proof that the war was going well came from the 1963 articles of the same those journalists who would afterwards spread the myth of the pre-overthrow, Diem-caused collapse of South Vietnam. "The deterioration did not begin until the period immediately following Diem’s overthrow, when the new leaders failed to lead, feuded with each other, and arrested untold numbers of former Diem supporters," writes the author. In the next few months, the counterinsurgency effort was ruined in most parts of the countryside, and the regular armed forces entered the first stage of a long decline. Because of those changes, the Communist North began seeking a decisive victory through the destruction of South Vietnam’s armed forces, which in turn forced the American government to make the difficult choice between sending ground forces to South Vietnam or abandoning the Southeast Asian country.
TRIUMPH FORSAKEN has undoubtedly arisen many a controversy. Mark Moyar persuasively refutes most of the orthodox school views and introduces arguments that seem to me to be telling the story of what actually happened more accurately. Any Vietnam buff whose mind is open to revisionist perspectives will enjoy this one.
First, he examines the Vietnam War’s main characters and countries in the years leading up to 1954. According to the orthodox historians, Ho Chi Minh had followed the tradition of numerous Vietnamese nationalists who had defended the country against foreign aggression and who had despised the Chinese and other foreigners. However, Moyar asserts, Vietnam's past shows that all of the conflicts in Vietnamese history before the twentieth century had involved Vietnamese fighting against Vietnamese, not against external enemies. Furthermore, neither Ho Chi Minh nor Vietnamese nationalists of earlier times hated the Chinese, but rather worked amicably with Chinese allies. Ho served in the Chinese Communist Army in the Second World War, did whatever his Chinese communists recommended during his war with France, and asked the Chinese to send troops to help him in Vietnam. He respected them more than Diem respected his American allies. According to Moyar, Ho Chi Minh fervently believed in Marxism and Leninism and would not have sacrificed Communism for the interests of Vietnam or turned against his Communist allies had the United States allowed him to re-unify Vietnam under his control.
After reading several other books about Ho, I considered him first and foremost a nationalist. However, Moyar's argument provoked me to re-think, and I came to the conclusion that indeed, Ho's successes depended heavily upon large-scale material aid and advice from the Soviet Union and China. He also followed the advice of the Chinese with a submissiveness that Diem never expressed in his dealings with the American government. "Only Ho Chi Minh would fill towns and villages with propaganda lauding his foreign allies," adds the author.
Moyar also re-examines the reasons behind the South Vietnamese peasants' Viet Cong sympathies by pointing out that it was not the renowned land-distribution reform or the Communist ideology that attracted the rural population, but rather the the Viet Cong’s leadership capabilities and military strength. The villagers were easily infatuated by charismatic leaders and wanted to be on the winning side when the fighting ended. Concerned with local rather than national matters, they had no desire to fight for nationalist causes and no interest in Marxist theories or in the collectivization of agriculture that the Communists had in mind.
Another myth Moyar dispels is the portrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem as a tyrannical reactionary with no talent for politics, confirming my suspicions. In fact, Diem was a wise and effective leader, who defeated, with few resources at his disposal, rival politicians, pro-French dissidents in the South Vietnamese Army, two angry religious sects, and a brotherhood of organized criminals and brought order and prosperity to South Vietnam. He was not despotic. He just understood that a modern Vietnam that preserved Vietnamese traditions was closer to the hearts of most Vietnamese than Western democracy or Communism. Diem did not stifle religion or kill tens of thousands in the process of redistributing land as Ho Chi Minh did, and he was more tolerant of dissent than the Northern communists.
The Buddhist protest movement of 1963 did not arise from popular discontent with a government practicing religious intolerance. "It was, in truth, a power play by a few Buddhist leaders whose duplicity became clear over time as they showed themselves impervious to government attempts at reconciliation and as their charges of religious persecution were disproved," argues Moyar. These leaders had close ties to the Communists or were themselves covert Communists, and other Communist agents participated extensively in the Buddhist movement’s protests. Diem eventually had to suppress the Buddhists not to lose face. On August 21, 1963, he arrested its leaders and cleared the pagodas where the movement was headquartered. That action was actually planned by Diem’s generals, but the Prime Minister was blamed for cruelty towards the Buddhists. Most interestingly, the anti-Diem Americans would decide that Diem should be replaced with those generals exactly.
The sharp criticism of Diem by the American government and press eventually compelled some of those generals to remove him from power. Moyer accuses David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan in particular of turning influential Americans and South Vietnamese against Diem's regime. Their reporting on military events was inaccurate at times, and it regularly exaggerated Diem's government's shortcomings. Once the overthrow they had advocated led to a political chaos in Saigon, one ineffective government succeeding another, Halberstam, Sheehan, and their colleague Stanley Karnow disparaged Diem with lies to claim that South Vietnam had already been hopelessly weak before the overthrow.
Finally, Mark Moyar maintains that President John F. Kennedy never consented to the overthrow of Diem. Until the end, the President had serious reservations about the plotting against the South Vietnamese Prime Minister because many senior advisers opposed Diem’s removal. He tried to stop the conspiracy, but American ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, who was seriously influenced by the anti-Diem journalists, such as Halberstam and Sheehan, instigated the coup without notifying John Kennedy and in spite of Presidential orders. A few days before the overthrow, President John F. Kennedy found out that Lodge was encouraging a group of South Vietnamese generals to rebel and was not notifying Washington of his communication with the conspirators. The President vainly tried to rein in Lodge and the plotters by sending instructions to the Saigon embassy. As Moyar explains, John Kennedy did not take decisive action to stop Lodge mainly because Lodge was a leading candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964, and the Democratic President did not want campaign accusations that he had prevented the Republican ambassador from taking the required actions.
In general, supporting the overthrow of Diem in November 1963 was by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War, argues Moyar. The South Vietnamese war effort had not entered into a period of decline during the last months of Diem’s rule. Proof that the war was going well came from the 1963 articles of the same those journalists who would afterwards spread the myth of the pre-overthrow, Diem-caused collapse of South Vietnam. "The deterioration did not begin until the period immediately following Diem’s overthrow, when the new leaders failed to lead, feuded with each other, and arrested untold numbers of former Diem supporters," writes the author. In the next few months, the counterinsurgency effort was ruined in most parts of the countryside, and the regular armed forces entered the first stage of a long decline. Because of those changes, the Communist North began seeking a decisive victory through the destruction of South Vietnam’s armed forces, which in turn forced the American government to make the difficult choice between sending ground forces to South Vietnam or abandoning the Southeast Asian country.
TRIUMPH FORSAKEN has undoubtedly arisen many a controversy. Mark Moyar persuasively refutes most of the orthodox school views and introduces arguments that seem to me to be telling the story of what actually happened more accurately. Any Vietnam buff whose mind is open to revisionist perspectives will enjoy this one.
August 19, 2014
Setting himself against the great bastion of liberal academic orthodoxy, Mark Moyar endeavors to challenge a large number of historical claims in this the first volume of a projected two-volume history of the Vietnam War. Where historians have emphasized Ho Chi Minh’s nationalism and the failed opportunity for early negotiation and compromise, Moyar argues for the supremacy of Ho’s ideological communist beliefs, even to the compromise of national interests. Where others have deplored the corrupt and authoritarian nature of Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime, Moyar defends the regime as being wholly nationalist, moderate, effective and successful. Where some have criticized the US-South Vietnamese focus on conventional approaches to the insurgency in the early 60s, Moyar targets Ambassador Durbrow and US civilian advisors for fatally undermining US military strategy by not providing sufficient funding or appropriate weaponry. And where many historians have pilloried the domino theory as being a fatally misleading heuristic, Moyar contends that real evidence and allied fears underwrote the potency of belief in the potential domino effects of Vietnam and furthermore suggests that subsequent events bears those fears out.
Each one of these claims individually might prove a provocative and potentially fruitful basis for careful research and examination. Taken together they comprise a formidable research agenda that requires the utmost endeavor of a historian’s skills, marrying detailed primary research and the evaluation of sources with careful argumentation to establish the necessary evidentiary basis of fact upon which to build this complex argument. Such an effort ought to take seriously the challenge of overturning, in one go, the accumulated historical wisdom to date. Mark Moyar does indeed proceed from the basis of an extensive grasp of both primary and secondary materials. It is perhaps unfortunate then, that he neglects almost completely the analytical and evaluative obligations of his argument and instead uses his own controversial claims as the frame upon which he constructs a loose narrative account of the war.
Written with compelling if dramatic prose, liberally interspersed with asian folk analogies, the style and tone of Moyar’s work is often deeply at odds with the credibility of the argument he is trying to make. For example, we are told that one key to the rise of the Viet Minh was ‘their demonstration of brute strength... in part because theirs was a culture that revered authority, in part because the enemies of a Vietnamese victor so often suffered nasty punishments.” (17) Moyar also suggests that while the French Socialist government in power might otherwise have been sympathetic, the Viet Minh’s actions had convinced the French that they were “deceitful and malevolent.” Moyar then characterizes the strategic position of the Viet Minh, “As if suddenly grown from a cub into a bear, the Viet Minh’s armed forces for the first time posed a serious threat to the French military. For the remainder of the war and for some years afterwards, Ho and his adherents would follow the Chinese in all things, as an awestruck boy follows his older brother.” (22) Subsuming complex political processes in such radically simplified and almost child-like terms is in no way appropriate for a scholarly argument that hopes to be taken seriously. Worse, Moyar often throws out numbers and figures without identifying the source for his data or assessing its credibility. For example, the fairly specific claim that the Chinese land-redistribution experiment just prior and during WWII cost over a million lives, while plausible, ought to be linked to its evidentiary source in a footnote. Neither this figure nor many of the more vague quantitative assertions are in any way referenced. Such a lack of attention to detail makes it difficult to accept even some of Moyar’s less controversial claims, much less his allegations of militant Buddhist conspiracies in South Vietnam or the portrayal of two eminent US journalists as the naive dupes of communist espionage. Mark Moyar concludes this volume by noting that, “The war in Vietnam that America’s young men were about to fight, therefore, was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints.” (416) If there is any merit to this argument, in failing to seriously engage with the terms of existing scholarship Moyar has also failed to advance his own.
Each one of these claims individually might prove a provocative and potentially fruitful basis for careful research and examination. Taken together they comprise a formidable research agenda that requires the utmost endeavor of a historian’s skills, marrying detailed primary research and the evaluation of sources with careful argumentation to establish the necessary evidentiary basis of fact upon which to build this complex argument. Such an effort ought to take seriously the challenge of overturning, in one go, the accumulated historical wisdom to date. Mark Moyar does indeed proceed from the basis of an extensive grasp of both primary and secondary materials. It is perhaps unfortunate then, that he neglects almost completely the analytical and evaluative obligations of his argument and instead uses his own controversial claims as the frame upon which he constructs a loose narrative account of the war.
Written with compelling if dramatic prose, liberally interspersed with asian folk analogies, the style and tone of Moyar’s work is often deeply at odds with the credibility of the argument he is trying to make. For example, we are told that one key to the rise of the Viet Minh was ‘their demonstration of brute strength... in part because theirs was a culture that revered authority, in part because the enemies of a Vietnamese victor so often suffered nasty punishments.” (17) Moyar also suggests that while the French Socialist government in power might otherwise have been sympathetic, the Viet Minh’s actions had convinced the French that they were “deceitful and malevolent.” Moyar then characterizes the strategic position of the Viet Minh, “As if suddenly grown from a cub into a bear, the Viet Minh’s armed forces for the first time posed a serious threat to the French military. For the remainder of the war and for some years afterwards, Ho and his adherents would follow the Chinese in all things, as an awestruck boy follows his older brother.” (22) Subsuming complex political processes in such radically simplified and almost child-like terms is in no way appropriate for a scholarly argument that hopes to be taken seriously. Worse, Moyar often throws out numbers and figures without identifying the source for his data or assessing its credibility. For example, the fairly specific claim that the Chinese land-redistribution experiment just prior and during WWII cost over a million lives, while plausible, ought to be linked to its evidentiary source in a footnote. Neither this figure nor many of the more vague quantitative assertions are in any way referenced. Such a lack of attention to detail makes it difficult to accept even some of Moyar’s less controversial claims, much less his allegations of militant Buddhist conspiracies in South Vietnam or the portrayal of two eminent US journalists as the naive dupes of communist espionage. Mark Moyar concludes this volume by noting that, “The war in Vietnam that America’s young men were about to fight, therefore, was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints.” (416) If there is any merit to this argument, in failing to seriously engage with the terms of existing scholarship Moyar has also failed to advance his own.
April 14, 2013
Mark Moyar's history of the years between the French defeat in Indochina and the American combat presence in Vietnam has sparked controversy within the community of Vietnam historians. The divide is, as you'd expect, along the lines of those who feel we were right to become directly involved and those who see the war as a foolhardy, unnecessary enterprise. As I understand it, Triumph Forsaken has reignited the debate over which narrative of the war is the correct one.
Moyar's history is a revisionist one, one that supports our effort there and offers reasonable arguments in defense of America's deep involvement. He discusses at length the domino theory driving the Southeast Asia policy of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. And he carefully reconstructs the documented motives of North Vietnamese leadership which led to the introduction of North Vietnamese Army main force units into the South in late 1964, constituting the 3d and final phase of Mao Tse-tung's doctrine of guerilla warfare. This offensive was so successful and so threatened the survival of the South that the Johnson administration felt it necessary to insert America's own ground combat units to forestall the South's collapse.
The author makes a careful, detailed presentation of facts to substantiate this general narration of events. His historical analysis makes clear he considers that estimation by the government correct and that backing up South Vietnam was the proper course rather than allowing it to be written off. But he's not without sharp criticism of how the foreign policy and military interests were pursued. In fact, he says, if America had acted boldly enough, most of the savage warfare of the next 7 years could have been avoided. South Vietnam could have been preserved.
The low-intensity, sporadic bombing of the North is faulted by Moyar. The Chiefs of Staff were encouraging heavy blows to severely damage the North and send more forceful signals of U. S. intentions. Johnson and McNamara insisted on a slow, incremental ratcheting-up of pressure, partly to not upset the Chinese into actively supporting the North. Interestingly, Moyar states that the Soviets themselves were advising a strong, sharp, and bold military pressure against the North to counter NVA military moves. They were afraid, he writes, that a communist South Vietnam would give that much more strength to China, so they were undermining the North's military effort even while supplying that effort. He argues that Johnson and his aides failed to act on this just as they failed to correctly read the signals from China that they had no intention of intervening if the U. S. launched massive air and ground strikes against the North.
One of the more controversial elements of Moyar's history is his evaluation of the South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his conduct of the war. He maintains Diem was the most effective South Vietnamese leader of the 1954-65 period and that our promotion of the 1963 coup overthrowing him was one of America's most damaging missteps. It's during this period of the early '60s, too, that the author, not an admirer of journalism's role in the war, is most condemnatory of the Saigon press corps. Most visibly represented by David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, he charges them with inexperience, with misplaced idealism leading them to expect whatever information they asked for from the South Vietnamese and U. S. governments, and with negative reporting when they ran into reluctance by officials to be forthcoming. The charge is that the American Embassy largely believed the general negative view of Diem and encouraged the coup which overthrew him.
All these are large issues in a comprehensive history of the 1954-65 period full of large issues. It's a big story but Moyar tells it well, I think, in detail and with adequate depth to validate his revisionist position. The story of the Vietnam War has many facets so it's no wonder there's disagreement about how these events should be interpreted. Moyar tells his side and I think he's written good history. It's a fascinating, engaging read. It's a big read. This is the 1st volume of what is a proposed 2-volume history of the entire war. I predict the narration of the events of America's military involvement, 1965 to 1972, will require a much larger book than Triumph Forsaken.
Moyar's history is a revisionist one, one that supports our effort there and offers reasonable arguments in defense of America's deep involvement. He discusses at length the domino theory driving the Southeast Asia policy of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. And he carefully reconstructs the documented motives of North Vietnamese leadership which led to the introduction of North Vietnamese Army main force units into the South in late 1964, constituting the 3d and final phase of Mao Tse-tung's doctrine of guerilla warfare. This offensive was so successful and so threatened the survival of the South that the Johnson administration felt it necessary to insert America's own ground combat units to forestall the South's collapse.
The author makes a careful, detailed presentation of facts to substantiate this general narration of events. His historical analysis makes clear he considers that estimation by the government correct and that backing up South Vietnam was the proper course rather than allowing it to be written off. But he's not without sharp criticism of how the foreign policy and military interests were pursued. In fact, he says, if America had acted boldly enough, most of the savage warfare of the next 7 years could have been avoided. South Vietnam could have been preserved.
The low-intensity, sporadic bombing of the North is faulted by Moyar. The Chiefs of Staff were encouraging heavy blows to severely damage the North and send more forceful signals of U. S. intentions. Johnson and McNamara insisted on a slow, incremental ratcheting-up of pressure, partly to not upset the Chinese into actively supporting the North. Interestingly, Moyar states that the Soviets themselves were advising a strong, sharp, and bold military pressure against the North to counter NVA military moves. They were afraid, he writes, that a communist South Vietnam would give that much more strength to China, so they were undermining the North's military effort even while supplying that effort. He argues that Johnson and his aides failed to act on this just as they failed to correctly read the signals from China that they had no intention of intervening if the U. S. launched massive air and ground strikes against the North.
One of the more controversial elements of Moyar's history is his evaluation of the South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his conduct of the war. He maintains Diem was the most effective South Vietnamese leader of the 1954-65 period and that our promotion of the 1963 coup overthrowing him was one of America's most damaging missteps. It's during this period of the early '60s, too, that the author, not an admirer of journalism's role in the war, is most condemnatory of the Saigon press corps. Most visibly represented by David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, he charges them with inexperience, with misplaced idealism leading them to expect whatever information they asked for from the South Vietnamese and U. S. governments, and with negative reporting when they ran into reluctance by officials to be forthcoming. The charge is that the American Embassy largely believed the general negative view of Diem and encouraged the coup which overthrew him.
All these are large issues in a comprehensive history of the 1954-65 period full of large issues. It's a big story but Moyar tells it well, I think, in detail and with adequate depth to validate his revisionist position. The story of the Vietnam War has many facets so it's no wonder there's disagreement about how these events should be interpreted. Moyar tells his side and I think he's written good history. It's a fascinating, engaging read. It's a big read. This is the 1st volume of what is a proposed 2-volume history of the entire war. I predict the narration of the events of America's military involvement, 1965 to 1972, will require a much larger book than Triumph Forsaken.
June 15, 2018
We’re to believe that if America had given it’s all in Vietnam even the whole cold war could have been won 25 years sooner. In trying to revise the real Vietnam wars into a feel-good saga of American triumphalism and good intentions, Mark Moyar has succeeded in overturning reality into a dream scene of which only contemporary Tim O’Leary might conceive.
Moyar has tried hard – hence the two stars – but his desire to prove the war was winnable by trusting in the failed satellite regime of the Republic of Vietnam just doesn’t wash. Pushing aside all sentiment regarding the real people of Vietnam or how war might have been avoided, we’re “treated” to a Wildman tour of cold war posturing that – yes – involves the threat of nuclear WMDs. (The ghost of Douglas MacArthur to Moyar’s Hamlet.) Overall, it’s a reiteration of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 GoP platform: hard to disprove because the scenarios were never enacted, yet for that reason armchair suppositions based on willful thinking.
Anyone who’s delved into the war on the ground knows the Diem regime had no credibility beyond an elite minority and its US advisers. To call Ho a “puppet of international Communism” is to echo the charge that Diem was merely a stringed toy himself; neither was essentially true. Diem certainly considered himself a nationalist as much as his northern rival, and for this reason would not allow the US takeover of the war. Diem rightly feared this as warmed-over colonialism, and the devastation of his country through a massive influx of direct US force. Thus Diem had to go. This of course did not stop the unraveling, only prolonging it, though Moyar endeavors vainly to show any energy left within the GVN to counter the Viet Cong. (See David Hunt’s “Vietnam’s Southern Revolution,” where VC cadres recalled a “golden period” of liberation and safety in the countryside as ARVN forces had been thoroughly driven out.)
The idea that that inter-agency divisions brought down the war is nonsense. The military pretty much had a blank check to use anything short of nuclear weapons. Only in this way could the American war have been “winnable.” Moyar doesn’t condemn the press as treasonous sellouts, like a standard ranting rightist, but chides their “ignorance.” Yet the press was pretty much gung-ho for the first three years or so; it took a lot of hard reality – as well as proven lying by those in power - to make the corporate media staffers question what was going on, why it was happening, and evolve into adversaries. The Vietnam War caused the death – literal or political – of all three presidents who tried to lead it. Moyar’s vision couldn’t have saved them, but only overlooked their final throes, as he focuses on his distant horizon like a dedicated wonk ideologue.
Moyar also advises us that "persistent engagement" in Colombia is a winning track; and police collaborators in Afghanistan will make a successful occupation regime, as in WW II Russia. Well . . . It’s possible that in Moscow some old cold warrior is delving into the archives at home and in Washington to prove that Afghanistan was “winnable”, if only Soviet forces hadn’t cared so much for global opinion and just thrown in all it had. Afghanistan would have been “free,” and the USSR might even have won the cold war, if not for that damn Gorbachev and his “inter-agency squabbling.” To date I don’t know of any such work. The Russian reading public must not consist of clueless conservatives trying to justify feeling over fact.
Moyar has tried hard – hence the two stars – but his desire to prove the war was winnable by trusting in the failed satellite regime of the Republic of Vietnam just doesn’t wash. Pushing aside all sentiment regarding the real people of Vietnam or how war might have been avoided, we’re “treated” to a Wildman tour of cold war posturing that – yes – involves the threat of nuclear WMDs. (The ghost of Douglas MacArthur to Moyar’s Hamlet.) Overall, it’s a reiteration of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 GoP platform: hard to disprove because the scenarios were never enacted, yet for that reason armchair suppositions based on willful thinking.
Anyone who’s delved into the war on the ground knows the Diem regime had no credibility beyond an elite minority and its US advisers. To call Ho a “puppet of international Communism” is to echo the charge that Diem was merely a stringed toy himself; neither was essentially true. Diem certainly considered himself a nationalist as much as his northern rival, and for this reason would not allow the US takeover of the war. Diem rightly feared this as warmed-over colonialism, and the devastation of his country through a massive influx of direct US force. Thus Diem had to go. This of course did not stop the unraveling, only prolonging it, though Moyar endeavors vainly to show any energy left within the GVN to counter the Viet Cong. (See David Hunt’s “Vietnam’s Southern Revolution,” where VC cadres recalled a “golden period” of liberation and safety in the countryside as ARVN forces had been thoroughly driven out.)
The idea that that inter-agency divisions brought down the war is nonsense. The military pretty much had a blank check to use anything short of nuclear weapons. Only in this way could the American war have been “winnable.” Moyar doesn’t condemn the press as treasonous sellouts, like a standard ranting rightist, but chides their “ignorance.” Yet the press was pretty much gung-ho for the first three years or so; it took a lot of hard reality – as well as proven lying by those in power - to make the corporate media staffers question what was going on, why it was happening, and evolve into adversaries. The Vietnam War caused the death – literal or political – of all three presidents who tried to lead it. Moyar’s vision couldn’t have saved them, but only overlooked their final throes, as he focuses on his distant horizon like a dedicated wonk ideologue.
Moyar also advises us that "persistent engagement" in Colombia is a winning track; and police collaborators in Afghanistan will make a successful occupation regime, as in WW II Russia. Well . . . It’s possible that in Moscow some old cold warrior is delving into the archives at home and in Washington to prove that Afghanistan was “winnable”, if only Soviet forces hadn’t cared so much for global opinion and just thrown in all it had. Afghanistan would have been “free,” and the USSR might even have won the cold war, if not for that damn Gorbachev and his “inter-agency squabbling.” To date I don’t know of any such work. The Russian reading public must not consist of clueless conservatives trying to justify feeling over fact.
November 15, 2013
The difference between Mark Moyar’s enormously long and exquisitely detailed political-military history of Vietnam and Tolstoy’s War and Peace is that Moyar cites his sources. Unfortunately, his notes-—if one actually takes time to examine them—-often do not support his point. It might better have been cast as a novel.
Indeed, it appears to me Moyar’s obviously long and painstaking research does not even support one of his main theses: that the domino theory was, in fact, valid. His case for his second thesis is much stronger: the United States flubbed several opportunities to actually win something that might be called victory.
Harvard and Cambridge educated Mark Moyar is associate professor of military history at the U.S. Marine Corps University, which is itself something of a conundrum. When did the Marine Corps training facility at Quantico, Virginia, rise to the status of university? I digress, but the thought raises related questions about the bias that Moyar might bring to the debate.
And a debate it is. Big time. There is something of an academic insurgency growing around revisionist history of the Vietnam War, and Moyar, while not the point man on this patrol—-Cornell University professor Keith Taylor has that assignment-—is certainly one of its top intelligence officers.
Despite the failure of this book to connect facts to conclusions (maybe the conclusions were unnecessary?), a patient reader can learn a lot from it. Moyar takes us back to the twelfth century to see how political power and boundaries have shifted endlessly, how the influence of China, France, the Soviet Union, and Japan has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. He gives us a remarkable portrait of the activist as a young man: Ho Chi Minh. I had no idea that Ho was one of the founders of the Socialist Party in France, where he lived after WWII. I had no idea he was the communist agent-in-place who launched successively the communist movements in Laos, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Moyar informs us how Eisenhower kept troops uninvolved by consistently threatening to nuke adversaries, how newly elected President John F. Kennedy’s “dressing down” by Khrushchev in Vienna humiliated the young president into taking a stronger stand in Vietnam than he otherwise might have, and how then, like now, many highly regarded generals strongly advised involvement in Vietnam was a very bad idea.
Why do I trust Moyar’s assertions of these facts when I question others? It seems harmless to or irrelevant whether I take his word on these points. I am not prepared to do all the research to find out. Nevertheless, my scribbled dialogue with Moyar fills his pages: What is your evidence of this? How do you know that?
Case in point: Moyar writes, “The North Vietnamese published grossly inflated rice production statistics [late 1950s:] in order to hide both their failures and the enormous disparity in agricultural productivity between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.” He cites two authors—-one a North Vietnamese-—to support this statement. But Moyar then adds, after his citation number, almost as though he can’t resist, “The only people who enjoyed better living conditions under Communist management than before were a select number of industrial workers and the functionaries of the Communist Party.”
How does he know that? At 35, he is too young to have been there. If he got it from a source who was there or who has statistics, he should cite him. If not, it’s a gratuitous, unfounded quip.
Case in point: Moyar writes, “Reports of killings by the Diem government [late 1950s:] during the Denounce the Communists campaign, though, were much less plentiful than those on the North Vietnamese side during the same period, despite the West’s much greater access to the South and its people. In 1959, the Communists complained that from April 1955 to January 1959, the Denounce the Communists campaign took 4,971 lives. Even if the Communists were not exaggerating, the number of persons killed was much lower than the number killed by the Communists in 1945 and 1946 and in the later land reform campaign. (23)"
O.K., hike back to note 23 and what do we find? “The Communist complaint is in Thayer, War by Other Means, 117. The Canadian component of the International Control Commission observed that the violence was substantially worse in the North than in the South. Ross, In the Interest of Peace. 121-2.”
I’m not a historian, nor do I play one on TV. But if Moyar’s wants to persuade the reader that he’s not stretching the true meaning of his sources’ statements, citations like that—-and there are many—-fail completely to persuade me. He gives me no confidence at all that his cited sources actually support his assertion. Further, should I accept his premise that his guys are the good guys because their 4,971 killings were-—maybe-—dwarfed by those of the other side ten years earlier? It’s a silly premise.
But read on. You’ll see where he’s headed: He’s building a case that Ngo Dinh Diem was “a wise and talented leader” who was on his way to success in warding off the communist threat, if only the United States had stepped up to the plate when they should have, if only there weren’t such incompetent U.S. ambassadors, if only JFK hadn’t appointed Henry Cabot Lodge for reasons of U.S. domestic politics, if only Henry Cabot Lodge hadn’t engineered (or at least acquiesced to) the assassination of Diem.
And what of the domino theory? To his credit, and rare for historians, Moyar says his research changed his mind. He had already published a history of the latter half of the Vietnam War. In that book, Moyar says, “I also contended that U.S. politicians were wrong to view the preservation of the South Vietnamese government as a vital U.S. interest. In the course of writing Triumph Forsaken, analysis of hitherto unappreciated facts caused me to alter this and other conclusions …”
To his credit, yes, but I’ll be darned if I can find an exposition of those “unappreciated facts” or his altered logic in Triumph Forsaken. At most, I find a laying out of 1960s opinions by politicians that Malaya, Singapore, and Indonesia were really the prize worth fighting for because they “yielded much of the world’s natural rubber and tin” and that Ho had spent time there building communist cells before hunkering down in Hanoi.
Moyar’s final sentence: "The war in Vietnam that America’s young men were about to fight, therefore, was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints.”
It was a wise war only if one accepts the validity of the domino theory. Moyar’s case for this is weak, barely there at all, despite his enormously detailed descriptions of village fortifications, construction techniques of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and precisely how the bullets and knives were delivered to the body of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. All interesting stuff, but irrelevant to his argument.
Perhaps the most compelling rebuttal (and there are many on the Internet) of all came in the New York Times October 25th. Journalist Keith Bradsher’s story, “Vietnam’s Roaring Economy is Set for World Stage,” offers this: “Nearly four decades ago, South Vietnamese leaders mapped out their battle plans inside the presidential palace here [Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon:]. When they lost the war, the palace became the base for the People’s Committee, which worked to impose tight Communist control.
"But in September it was the scene of a very different gathering: a board meeting of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. In the three decades since Vietnam has gone from communism to a form of capitalism, it has begun surpassing many neighbors. It has Asia’s second-fastest-growing economy, with 8.4 percent growth last year, trailing only China’s, and the pace of exports to the United States is rising faster than even China’s.
“American companies like Intel and Nike, and investors across the region, are pouring billions of dollars into the country; overseas Vietnamese are returning to run the ventures.
“In the latest sign of Vietnam’s economic vitality, trade negotiators from around the world are preparing, after more than a decade of talks, to put the finishing touches on an agreement, possibly by Oct. 26, for Vietnam to join the World Trade Organization.”
In the games of international power politics, it seems Monopoly trumps dominoes.
Indeed, it appears to me Moyar’s obviously long and painstaking research does not even support one of his main theses: that the domino theory was, in fact, valid. His case for his second thesis is much stronger: the United States flubbed several opportunities to actually win something that might be called victory.
Harvard and Cambridge educated Mark Moyar is associate professor of military history at the U.S. Marine Corps University, which is itself something of a conundrum. When did the Marine Corps training facility at Quantico, Virginia, rise to the status of university? I digress, but the thought raises related questions about the bias that Moyar might bring to the debate.
And a debate it is. Big time. There is something of an academic insurgency growing around revisionist history of the Vietnam War, and Moyar, while not the point man on this patrol—-Cornell University professor Keith Taylor has that assignment-—is certainly one of its top intelligence officers.
Despite the failure of this book to connect facts to conclusions (maybe the conclusions were unnecessary?), a patient reader can learn a lot from it. Moyar takes us back to the twelfth century to see how political power and boundaries have shifted endlessly, how the influence of China, France, the Soviet Union, and Japan has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. He gives us a remarkable portrait of the activist as a young man: Ho Chi Minh. I had no idea that Ho was one of the founders of the Socialist Party in France, where he lived after WWII. I had no idea he was the communist agent-in-place who launched successively the communist movements in Laos, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Moyar informs us how Eisenhower kept troops uninvolved by consistently threatening to nuke adversaries, how newly elected President John F. Kennedy’s “dressing down” by Khrushchev in Vienna humiliated the young president into taking a stronger stand in Vietnam than he otherwise might have, and how then, like now, many highly regarded generals strongly advised involvement in Vietnam was a very bad idea.
Why do I trust Moyar’s assertions of these facts when I question others? It seems harmless to or irrelevant whether I take his word on these points. I am not prepared to do all the research to find out. Nevertheless, my scribbled dialogue with Moyar fills his pages: What is your evidence of this? How do you know that?
Case in point: Moyar writes, “The North Vietnamese published grossly inflated rice production statistics [late 1950s:] in order to hide both their failures and the enormous disparity in agricultural productivity between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.” He cites two authors—-one a North Vietnamese-—to support this statement. But Moyar then adds, after his citation number, almost as though he can’t resist, “The only people who enjoyed better living conditions under Communist management than before were a select number of industrial workers and the functionaries of the Communist Party.”
How does he know that? At 35, he is too young to have been there. If he got it from a source who was there or who has statistics, he should cite him. If not, it’s a gratuitous, unfounded quip.
Case in point: Moyar writes, “Reports of killings by the Diem government [late 1950s:] during the Denounce the Communists campaign, though, were much less plentiful than those on the North Vietnamese side during the same period, despite the West’s much greater access to the South and its people. In 1959, the Communists complained that from April 1955 to January 1959, the Denounce the Communists campaign took 4,971 lives. Even if the Communists were not exaggerating, the number of persons killed was much lower than the number killed by the Communists in 1945 and 1946 and in the later land reform campaign. (23)"
O.K., hike back to note 23 and what do we find? “The Communist complaint is in Thayer, War by Other Means, 117. The Canadian component of the International Control Commission observed that the violence was substantially worse in the North than in the South. Ross, In the Interest of Peace. 121-2.”
I’m not a historian, nor do I play one on TV. But if Moyar’s wants to persuade the reader that he’s not stretching the true meaning of his sources’ statements, citations like that—-and there are many—-fail completely to persuade me. He gives me no confidence at all that his cited sources actually support his assertion. Further, should I accept his premise that his guys are the good guys because their 4,971 killings were-—maybe-—dwarfed by those of the other side ten years earlier? It’s a silly premise.
But read on. You’ll see where he’s headed: He’s building a case that Ngo Dinh Diem was “a wise and talented leader” who was on his way to success in warding off the communist threat, if only the United States had stepped up to the plate when they should have, if only there weren’t such incompetent U.S. ambassadors, if only JFK hadn’t appointed Henry Cabot Lodge for reasons of U.S. domestic politics, if only Henry Cabot Lodge hadn’t engineered (or at least acquiesced to) the assassination of Diem.
And what of the domino theory? To his credit, and rare for historians, Moyar says his research changed his mind. He had already published a history of the latter half of the Vietnam War. In that book, Moyar says, “I also contended that U.S. politicians were wrong to view the preservation of the South Vietnamese government as a vital U.S. interest. In the course of writing Triumph Forsaken, analysis of hitherto unappreciated facts caused me to alter this and other conclusions …”
To his credit, yes, but I’ll be darned if I can find an exposition of those “unappreciated facts” or his altered logic in Triumph Forsaken. At most, I find a laying out of 1960s opinions by politicians that Malaya, Singapore, and Indonesia were really the prize worth fighting for because they “yielded much of the world’s natural rubber and tin” and that Ho had spent time there building communist cells before hunkering down in Hanoi.
Moyar’s final sentence: "The war in Vietnam that America’s young men were about to fight, therefore, was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints.”
It was a wise war only if one accepts the validity of the domino theory. Moyar’s case for this is weak, barely there at all, despite his enormously detailed descriptions of village fortifications, construction techniques of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and precisely how the bullets and knives were delivered to the body of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. All interesting stuff, but irrelevant to his argument.
Perhaps the most compelling rebuttal (and there are many on the Internet) of all came in the New York Times October 25th. Journalist Keith Bradsher’s story, “Vietnam’s Roaring Economy is Set for World Stage,” offers this: “Nearly four decades ago, South Vietnamese leaders mapped out their battle plans inside the presidential palace here [Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon:]. When they lost the war, the palace became the base for the People’s Committee, which worked to impose tight Communist control.
"But in September it was the scene of a very different gathering: a board meeting of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. In the three decades since Vietnam has gone from communism to a form of capitalism, it has begun surpassing many neighbors. It has Asia’s second-fastest-growing economy, with 8.4 percent growth last year, trailing only China’s, and the pace of exports to the United States is rising faster than even China’s.
“American companies like Intel and Nike, and investors across the region, are pouring billions of dollars into the country; overseas Vietnamese are returning to run the ventures.
“In the latest sign of Vietnam’s economic vitality, trade negotiators from around the world are preparing, after more than a decade of talks, to put the finishing touches on an agreement, possibly by Oct. 26, for Vietnam to join the World Trade Organization.”
In the games of international power politics, it seems Monopoly trumps dominoes.
March 4, 2009
Mark Moyar has written a ‘revisionist’ history of the beginning of U.S. direct involvement in Viet Nam. History is constantly being revised as new information comes out and people take the time to really think or rethink logically about the new facts. He notes that Diem and Nhu were intent on redistributing land. “They built schools, hospitals, and places of worship for the masses.” Moyar states they ‘employed many of the undemocratic methods used by other authoritarian leaders of the twentieth century, not only because they considered Western democracy incompatible with a Vietnamese culture imbued with authoritarianism and a Vietnamese populace largely ignorant of national politics, but also because democracy inhibited the implementation of drastic change and the suppression of subversion.” This is actually an important lesson provided by this work. In discussing proposals by a member of the Durbrow school of dealing with the Vietnamese Diem told a listener that the “Taylor mission had produced an outcome similar to that of General George Marshall’s mission to China during the Chinese civil war, for in both cases the Americans decided to force-feed liberal Western concepts that were ill-suited to the local circumstances and culture.” If doesn’t sound familiar, read the book and compare Durbrow’s, Averell Harriman’s and Henry Cabot Lodge’s actions to that of Bremmer and others.
Mark Moyar also points out how various, now famous reporters, used questionable information to help bring down the Diem regime because of personal spite. Halberstam and Sheehan were among them. It is also interesting to find out how U.S. domestic politics (JFK appointed Lodge, a Republican, to be Ambassador to Saigon in the summer of 1963) played a major role in the disastrous turning point of the Viet Nam War, the overthrow and assassination of Diem and Nhu. Though history does not repeat itself exactly, there are lessons to be learned and situations that can be avoided from the lessons of the past. I recommend this work to everyone, especially journalists and ‘patriots’; and to those with an interest in preventing unnecessary and illegal wars
Mark Moyar also points out how various, now famous reporters, used questionable information to help bring down the Diem regime because of personal spite. Halberstam and Sheehan were among them. It is also interesting to find out how U.S. domestic politics (JFK appointed Lodge, a Republican, to be Ambassador to Saigon in the summer of 1963) played a major role in the disastrous turning point of the Viet Nam War, the overthrow and assassination of Diem and Nhu. Though history does not repeat itself exactly, there are lessons to be learned and situations that can be avoided from the lessons of the past. I recommend this work to everyone, especially journalists and ‘patriots’; and to those with an interest in preventing unnecessary and illegal wars
November 15, 2014
Mark Moyar's book must be one of the most intriguing ones about the Vietnam War that I've read in a long time. His insistence on a major reassessment of the Vietnam War is compelling enough that it motivates you to collect all those assumptions you may have had about the war and reconsider them, one by one. The reverse spin Moyar puts on the received wisdom about the war, especially that which has been disseminated by a few prominent American journalists over the last 40 years, is formidable to say the least. From a pure foreign policy and military strategy perspective, the book is a valuable contribution to the field of Vietnam War research.
In the book's preface, Moyar sets out the main argument that Ngo Dinh Diem and his administration were unreservedly the correct fit for the fledgling Republic of Vietnam that had arisen from the 1954 Geneva Accords. He contends that no one else in South Vietnamese politics demanded the same respect and possessed the innate leadership qualities as Diem. Moyar attempts to demonstrate that three main forces colluded to have Diem deposed, which ended up with his assassination in November 1963: militant Buddhists, liberal-leaning American news media and then US Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.
According to Moyar's historical accounts based on select source documents, a strong militant Buddhist contingent, led by Tri Quang, effectively manipulated American public opinion against Diem and his government through the use of particularly opinionated American journalists living in Saigon. The book insinuates that either communist agents were infiltrating and manipulating the outspoken Buddhist movement or both groups colluded with each other in order to bring down Diem. Moyar holds a clear distaste for The New York Times, especially David Halberstam ("...he would do more harm to the interests of the United States than any other journalist in American history"), whom he accuses of reporting disinformation about the Diem regime that effectively planted the seed of distrust for Diem in American public opinion. On the diplomatic side, Moyar holds Henry Cabot Lodge personally responsible for allowing the assassination of Diem to occur presumably because Lodge disliked the man's antidemocratic, uniquely Vietnamese, approach to governance.
Diem's forced downfall inevitably led to the irreparable destabilization of South Vietnam, especially on the counterinsurgency front, for the rest of the war effort. In turn, a seemingly endless series of military juntas were to rule the country and they exhibited neither the talent nor the inclination to successfully run a nation, let alone defeat a voracious communist insurgency.
Interestingly, the book espouses the merits of the "domino" theory in helping to explain America's subsequent intervention in South Vietnam's political affairs and expansion of the war on the Indochinese peninsula. Moyar argues that due to China's vast influence over the Asian continent at the time when communist insurgencies were blooming like wildflowers all over region, even in such stalwart U.S. allies as India and Thailand, the U.S. was obligated to step in and contain the spread of Marxism-Leninism. Therefore, in the eyes of many domino theorists Vietnam became both the lynchpin of American military power and litmus test of U.S. influence upon the world.
To this end, Moyar supports the Joint Chiefs of Staff's contention that the war in Vietnam should have been prosecuted using overwhelming force instead of a "limited war", which Robert McNamara and his subordinates recommended to both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In their viewpoint, victory could have been had if enough ground troops had been sent to seal off South Vietnam from Laos and Cambodia, and at the 17th parallel between the two Vietnams, as well as conduct heavy aerial bombardment of the North.
Anatoliy Aleksandrovich Danilov, a Soviet official in London, confided to an American that the United States "should increase its force by five divisions in Vietnam, seal off the 17th Parallel, cut off the Viet Cong from their northern logistics, then ignore the North and wait for Viet Cong to come to terms because they are `starved' by lack of Northern support." (p. 360)
According to Moyar, the "limited war" strategy advocated by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations only emboldened the North Vietnamese communists to attack South Vietnam even harder, until the Johnson administration relented in deploying thousands of American troops to South Vietnam in 1965.
Taken as a whole, Triumph Forsaken is a detailed rumination on how the South Vietnamese could have won the war against the North with significant U.S. assistance. That is, if the American government had shown patience and understanding toward Diem and had not tried to rigidly enforce American democratic principles upon the Vietnamese.
Moyar's point of view is reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's unapologetic realpolitik. Kissinger was Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor and then Gerald Ford's Secretary of State toward the end of the Vietnam War. The main concern of realpolitik was the furtherance and protection of America's political and economic interests around the world. One could argue that its only concern was with being on the "right" side of history when it came to the epic struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. Let's imagine for a moment that U.S. foreign policy and military support were as decisive in either Vietnam or Cambodia as it had been in Latin America during the Cold War. Just as in countries like Nicaragua, Panama and Chile, American funds, military expertise and armaments could have propped up right wing, anticommunist dictatorships in Southeast Asia that only decades later would have been accused of atrocities, all in the name of stamping out communism.
Regardless of my moralistic aside, Triumph Forsaken is well worth reading in order to see the flipside of history and to broaden the discussion of the Vietnam War.
In the book's preface, Moyar sets out the main argument that Ngo Dinh Diem and his administration were unreservedly the correct fit for the fledgling Republic of Vietnam that had arisen from the 1954 Geneva Accords. He contends that no one else in South Vietnamese politics demanded the same respect and possessed the innate leadership qualities as Diem. Moyar attempts to demonstrate that three main forces colluded to have Diem deposed, which ended up with his assassination in November 1963: militant Buddhists, liberal-leaning American news media and then US Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.
According to Moyar's historical accounts based on select source documents, a strong militant Buddhist contingent, led by Tri Quang, effectively manipulated American public opinion against Diem and his government through the use of particularly opinionated American journalists living in Saigon. The book insinuates that either communist agents were infiltrating and manipulating the outspoken Buddhist movement or both groups colluded with each other in order to bring down Diem. Moyar holds a clear distaste for The New York Times, especially David Halberstam ("...he would do more harm to the interests of the United States than any other journalist in American history"), whom he accuses of reporting disinformation about the Diem regime that effectively planted the seed of distrust for Diem in American public opinion. On the diplomatic side, Moyar holds Henry Cabot Lodge personally responsible for allowing the assassination of Diem to occur presumably because Lodge disliked the man's antidemocratic, uniquely Vietnamese, approach to governance.
Diem's forced downfall inevitably led to the irreparable destabilization of South Vietnam, especially on the counterinsurgency front, for the rest of the war effort. In turn, a seemingly endless series of military juntas were to rule the country and they exhibited neither the talent nor the inclination to successfully run a nation, let alone defeat a voracious communist insurgency.
Interestingly, the book espouses the merits of the "domino" theory in helping to explain America's subsequent intervention in South Vietnam's political affairs and expansion of the war on the Indochinese peninsula. Moyar argues that due to China's vast influence over the Asian continent at the time when communist insurgencies were blooming like wildflowers all over region, even in such stalwart U.S. allies as India and Thailand, the U.S. was obligated to step in and contain the spread of Marxism-Leninism. Therefore, in the eyes of many domino theorists Vietnam became both the lynchpin of American military power and litmus test of U.S. influence upon the world.
To this end, Moyar supports the Joint Chiefs of Staff's contention that the war in Vietnam should have been prosecuted using overwhelming force instead of a "limited war", which Robert McNamara and his subordinates recommended to both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In their viewpoint, victory could have been had if enough ground troops had been sent to seal off South Vietnam from Laos and Cambodia, and at the 17th parallel between the two Vietnams, as well as conduct heavy aerial bombardment of the North.
Anatoliy Aleksandrovich Danilov, a Soviet official in London, confided to an American that the United States "should increase its force by five divisions in Vietnam, seal off the 17th Parallel, cut off the Viet Cong from their northern logistics, then ignore the North and wait for Viet Cong to come to terms because they are `starved' by lack of Northern support." (p. 360)
According to Moyar, the "limited war" strategy advocated by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations only emboldened the North Vietnamese communists to attack South Vietnam even harder, until the Johnson administration relented in deploying thousands of American troops to South Vietnam in 1965.
Taken as a whole, Triumph Forsaken is a detailed rumination on how the South Vietnamese could have won the war against the North with significant U.S. assistance. That is, if the American government had shown patience and understanding toward Diem and had not tried to rigidly enforce American democratic principles upon the Vietnamese.
Moyar's point of view is reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's unapologetic realpolitik. Kissinger was Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor and then Gerald Ford's Secretary of State toward the end of the Vietnam War. The main concern of realpolitik was the furtherance and protection of America's political and economic interests around the world. One could argue that its only concern was with being on the "right" side of history when it came to the epic struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. Let's imagine for a moment that U.S. foreign policy and military support were as decisive in either Vietnam or Cambodia as it had been in Latin America during the Cold War. Just as in countries like Nicaragua, Panama and Chile, American funds, military expertise and armaments could have propped up right wing, anticommunist dictatorships in Southeast Asia that only decades later would have been accused of atrocities, all in the name of stamping out communism.
Regardless of my moralistic aside, Triumph Forsaken is well worth reading in order to see the flipside of history and to broaden the discussion of the Vietnam War.
January 18, 2025
Triumph Forsaken is polemical yet still strongly convincing. Extremely informative on Vietnamese history as well. I suspect I will be re-reading this soon.
March 20, 2017
Whew! As I began to read this book I felt like I was reading about the Viet Nam War for the first time. This book is one of many that has been and will be written in the years coming ahead. There are are many avenues of this conflict that were not known prior to this book being written and after it was written. War as Sherman said is Hell...The epic falseness of governtment reporting on warmaking issues..the methodology of its occurring....the involvement of so many people that tried to present that they did not know about what was happening...Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon...Halbartstam/Sheehy et al...The French...The English/Colonialism///"localitis"/ "limited war" The casualties..both Viet and American...the sideshows..Henry Cabot Lodge involvement with the death Of Diem...A Civil War that the US become involved in...which Moyar uses the French involvement of the American Revolution as an example...using also the various examples of other countries who have removed the shackles of colonialism and the difficulties incurred...Using examples of Russian and Chinese Revolutions to portray what was happening...I believe Moyar unknowingly shows what was happening and why it happened...to the point of justifying what will occur in the future.If anything..after reading this. it stuns me to see the Nixon played right into the Sino View. When in the other book by Tom Weiner about Nixon shows that Nixon wanted to be known as a "madman" willing to use nuclear weapons..the Chinese were only to happy to see this as the Chinese didn't really care simple because China had more people and their people were more spread out in that large piece of land..where the govt infrastructure would not be as affected by the big event.. It is a disheartening book. One that needs to be read...I look forward to his second volume on this subject.There is another book about this book that has responses from at least 25 to 30 people who either agree or disagree with his precepts. The problem is that he is a equal opportunity lamblaster criticizing both pro-ponets and opponents of the War..Very even handed.I am stunned...Its such a damn good book....RJH
January 7, 2013
I've long understood that the United States lost the Vietnam War because it didn't set out to win, but I'd thought that stupidity and incompetence were the reasons for this failure. Reading this book, a scholarly history by a history Ph.D. who's taught at Cambridge, I find it hard not to add to these factors one of deliberation. It appears, from some of the actions that the United States took during the course of its involvement in Vietnam, that at least some people, in the media and government, earnestly sought defeat almost from the very beginning. Certainly this book makes it clear that there were many opportunities to thoroughly defeat North Vietnam, some of them very early in the long affair, and that the United States by its own actions and by what it compelled the South Vietnamese government to do squandered every single one. The only complaint I have about this book is that it's got a couple of glaring typographical errors, which startled me in a book that issued from the Cambridge University Press.
June 7, 2015
4.5 stars
The strength of Moyer's book is that unlike most American historians of the Vietnam War, he actually considers and understands a Vietnamese social, cultural and political perspective to the historical events. His reconsideration of Ngo Dinh Diem is quite radical, and though hardly a hagiography, his assessment comes across as fair. Moyer is at his most convincing when suggesting that the coup to oust Diem was pretty much the most crucial mistake that ultimately led to American and South Vietnamese self-immolation.
If you are a relative or believer in Henry Cabot Lodge, then stay away from this book - the man gets eviscerated (and if Moyer's conclusions are correct, rightly so).
The strength of Moyer's book is that unlike most American historians of the Vietnam War, he actually considers and understands a Vietnamese social, cultural and political perspective to the historical events. His reconsideration of Ngo Dinh Diem is quite radical, and though hardly a hagiography, his assessment comes across as fair. Moyer is at his most convincing when suggesting that the coup to oust Diem was pretty much the most crucial mistake that ultimately led to American and South Vietnamese self-immolation.
If you are a relative or believer in Henry Cabot Lodge, then stay away from this book - the man gets eviscerated (and if Moyer's conclusions are correct, rightly so).
October 22, 2012
I thought the author did a good job in making the case at the US involvement in Vietnam was the result of a series of logical decisions each one making sense at the time as the prudent thing to do but the cumulative effect being an undesireable result. This rings true. The authors implication that threatening China with nukes if they came into the war if we invaded the north would have worked is possible, but he dismisses the risk as negligible.
February 25, 2009
New look at the early days of American involvement in Vietnam. Revealing material gleened from recent sources that challenges some of the conventional opinions regarding Diem and the involvement of people other that Kennedy in his removal and death. Telling quote form archives in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh on learning of Diem's death. "The Americans just won the war for us."
January 3, 2008
Excellent book about the early stages of the Vietnam War. Must read if you are interested in the history of the war.
January 7, 2008
Causes you to reconsider what you thought you knew about the early years of the Vietnam conflict. The power of media/rogue reporters to influence/shape events is not a new phenomenon.
August 4, 2011
A different take on Vietnam and thought-provoking for that, but Moyar's obvious anger at the "traditional" historian colors his interpretation.
May 13, 2014
A neocon's view of key elements dictating America's early role in Vietnam from the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu to the post Saigon junta after America backed the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem.
January 15, 2019
One of the most important new books on the Vietnam War. Interpreting the latest sources, Mark Moyar challenges the traditional orthodox views of the war in this first of a planned two volume history of the war. In this first volume, the author’s main argument is that South Vietnamese President Diem was not the bumbling, out of touch leader portrayed by some of the earliest popular orthodox histories by Halberstam, Karnow and Sheehan. Rather Diem had contained, even turned back, the communist insurgency in the late fifties and early sixties, until the Kennedy Administration lost faith and favor in him and engineered his assassination. This act, moreover, enflamed and rejuvenated the communists in the south and the North, while creating havoc and defeat in the South Vietnamese government and military; all of which led to a US major military intervention in 1965. In sum, the removal of Diem led to a “Triumph Forsaken” in the overall war against a communist takeover of South Vietnam.
September 15, 2023
I was delighted to read this book. If I were teaching a class on the Vietnam War, I would require the students to read it. It is not the regular Vietnam theme that blames the loss on the Vietnamese, etc. If you read one you have read them all. Historians have a tendency to only write and quote anything that fulfills their objective. History is much more nuanced. I served in Vietnam as a combat advisor to the Vietnamese Army. I have always felt that the war portrayed by many authors (including Halberstam and Sheehan) focused on what went wrong instead of what went right. They had a preplanned agenda, and their writing reflects that agenda. I have read untold books on the war and have always felt that my story of living and fighting with the Vietnamese has never been adequately told. One can disagree with Moyar's book, but he does make some great points and it is refreshing to finally read a book that approaches the war from a different angle.
I read all the reviews on this book and literally had to laugh out loud. Do not upset the traditional viewpoint or you will be slammed. I loved Moyar's thesis, and it forced me to rethink my views on the war. He challenged me and that is not true of most of the books I have read. I plan to read the second book Triumph Regained as soon as Amazon gets it to me.
I read all the reviews on this book and literally had to laugh out loud. Do not upset the traditional viewpoint or you will be slammed. I loved Moyar's thesis, and it forced me to rethink my views on the war. He challenged me and that is not true of most of the books I have read. I plan to read the second book Triumph Regained as soon as Amazon gets it to me.
August 4, 2023
As a Marine who served in Vietnam this book documents what many of us who served always believed. The democrats never cared about the young men who were fighting the war. They never cared about winning the the war. The democrat
Politicians only cared about getting re-elected. So many died so many of us have suffered .
Politicians only cared about getting re-elected. So many died so many of us have suffered .
April 19, 2021
My Bible on the Vietnam war. This book is thoroughly researched, and examines the war from all sides- including from declassified North Vietnamese documents.
April 18, 2025
A gazillion pages to tell us the domino theory was valid.
He contends that the United States made significant strategic errors by not intervening more decisively during that period. Moyar criticizes the U.S. for not taking more aggressive actions, such as invading North Vietnam or Laos, to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which he believes would have been effective in preventing the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. I found this perspective unconvincing and, frankly, a rehashing of the same logic that led the U.S. into a deeply flawed conflict in the first place.
He contends that the United States made significant strategic errors by not intervening more decisively during that period. Moyar criticizes the U.S. for not taking more aggressive actions, such as invading North Vietnam or Laos, to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which he believes would have been effective in preventing the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. I found this perspective unconvincing and, frankly, a rehashing of the same logic that led the U.S. into a deeply flawed conflict in the first place.
August 5, 2011
The first of a two volume history - looking back from an objective, and exhaustively documented, perspective. Moyar effectively dispels many of the hallowed conventional wisdoms about the Vietnam War.
July 15, 2009
Brilliant revisionist history - meticulously researched.
Opened my eyes about President Diem of South Vietnam.
Opened my eyes about President Diem of South Vietnam.
May 19, 2016
aiiight
December 31, 2021
tough hang
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