Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties

Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations

by Heather Marie Stur

"It was a tense week in Saigon in October 1974, when a South Vietnamese university student slipped into the office of the city's archbishop to deliver a letter addressed to North Vietnamese youth. Archbishop Nguyen Van Binh was headed to the Vatican for an international meeting of Catholic leaders, and he promised the student he would hand the letter off to his Hanoi counterpart when he saw him at the conference. The letter implored North Vietnamese students to join southern youth in demanding an end to the fighting that the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement was supposed to have halted. Both the archbishop and the student risked arrest for circulating the letter. Authorities had raided the offices and shut down the operations of four newspapers that had published it. That the leader of South Vietnam's Catholics would be involved in clandestine communication between North and South Vietnamese students would have been surprising in the early 1960s, but by the mid-Seventies, many Vietnamese Catholics had grown weary enough of the war that they saw peace and reconciliation, even if under Hanoi's control, as the better alternative to endless violence."--

Genres: Nonfiction, History

299 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2020

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book drawing attention to an often-overlooked, but absolutely central, part of the Vietnam War. Without downplaying the ineptness of the South Vietnamese government, Stur demonstrates that part of its problem stemmed, ironically, from "too much, not too little democracy." That is, the public presence of many different perspectives in the South contrasted sharply with the North's ability to impose and enforce uniformity, which proved an advantage in international settings.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, well-researched study of Saigon's political scene during the 1960s and early '70s. Stur argues that not only did South Vietnam have the potential to develop into a mature democracy, it actually DID show early signs of that development happening during the war years. Unlike revisionist historians (Geoffrey Shaw, Mark Moyar, etc.) who focus on South Vietnamese leaders, Stur's adopts a bottom-up focus on noncommunist opposition groups in Saigon. By focusing on students, Catholics, and others, she rounds out the picture of RVN politics. However, her view is more nuanced than some revisionists who have desperately tried to salvage the image of RVN's leaders as corrupt and incompetent: she shows persuasively that by repressing opposition groups (even non- or anti-communist ones), the governments of Diem and Thieu undermined the RVN's image abroad. Stur also contextualizes the political happenings in Saigon within the "global sixties" framework, which I found super interesting.

I only have a couple of minor gripes about the book. One is the poor editing, which harms the readability but not the quality of the argument. I would also have liked a bit more social history of everyday life in Saigon - demographics, culture, daily life, etc. Finally, why are there no maps of the city??