Why We Were in Vietnam
By By Alan Brinkley
Published: April 8, 2001
A GRAND DELUSION
America's Descent Into Vietnam.
By Robert Mann.
Illustrated. 821 pp. New York:
Basic Books. $35.
Almost as soon as the Vietnam War came to its dismal end in 1975, Americans seemed to develop a willful forgetfulness about the nation's longest military conflict, an amnesia that lasted for nearly a decade. Then came the showing of a celebrated PBS documentary about Vietnam, the release of a series of powerful Hollywood films on the war, the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and the publication of some important war novels. Suddenly Vietnam became as central to American popular and intellectual culture as it had once been marginalized. And so it remains.
Historical scholarship on the war has mushroomed along with all the other representations of it. Just in the last two years, there have been three large and important studies of the war -- by David Kaiser (who makes the most persuasive case yet that John F. Kennedy would have avoided the mistakes of Lyndon B. Johnson), Fredrik Logevall (who creates a powerful international context for what he considers epic and avoidable blunders by both Kennedy and Johnson) and A. J. Langguth (who provides a history of the war based as much in the experience of the Vietnamese as in that of the Americans). These books join what is more than a generation of contending explanations of this central event in recent American history and contribute significantly to the process of interpretation.
Now Robert Mann, a former legislative aide to Senators Russell Long and John Breaux and the author of a book on the civil rights movement, has published another very long study of America's route into the quagmire, one that seems to mark an additional step in the passage of the Vietnam War into the center of the American imagination. Mann does not advance any particular new thesis or take issue with previous analysts of the war. Rather, he appears to want to transform the story of American intervention into grand narrative, to do for the war what Taylor Branch, for example, did for the civil rights movement. Mann is not as gifted a writer as Branch, but he writes clearly and well. And like Branch, he turns complicated history into a vivid and engaging story. ''A Grand Delusion'' is the longest and most ambitious narrative of the policy-making process since David Halberstam's book of nearly 30 years ago, ''The Best and the Brightest.'' It is no less critical than Halberstam of the decisions that led America into the conflict, but it is a much more linear and much less interpretive narrative, with a more specific focus.
Mann organizes his book around a discrete group of people, all of them arguably central to the story of American intervention. Among them, naturally, are the four presidents who presided over the escalating American involvement: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. He portrays as well a group of prominent Democratic senators -- Frank Church, Mike Mansfield, J. William Fulbright and George McGovern -- who gradually turned against the war and helped much of the public to turn against it too. The principal strength of this book, and a considerable one, is Mann's acute description of how politicians act, how they judge their self-interest and how they balance those judgments against their principles. Not surprisingly, he is far more sympathetic to the Senate critics of the war than he is to the presidents they attacked. But he is also sensitive to the very different pressures facing decision makers on the one hand and legislators on the other. Mann does not approve of what the presidents did, but more than many commentators he seems to understand why they felt they had to do it. By skillfully displaying the interplay among these disparate personalities, he offers a dramatic narrative of at least one part of a great American tragedy.
On the major interpretive debates over American decision making, Mann is generally agnostic. He takes no definite stand on the question of whether Kennedy would have handled Vietnam differently from the way Johnson did. He does not make a choice among the various interpretations of why American leaders decided to intervene. Was it arrogance and overconfidence, as Halberstam argued? Was it fear of political reprisals, as Logevall and Larry Berman maintain? Was it a rational choice by rational actors correctly assessing the costs and benefits of different options at different times, as Leslie H. Gelb and Richard Betts once wrote? Mann borrows bits and pieces from all these (and other) arguments but sides clearly with none.
HE does not take a firm position on whether the war was militarily winnable, whether a different diplomatic strategy would have ended it sooner, whether the final peace agreement was a genuine effort to preserve an independent South or an excuse to create a ''decent interval'' for American withdrawal. Nor, despite the book's considerable length, has Mann found any room for serious consideration of events in Vietnam itself. Vietnamese leaders like Ho Chi Minh, Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu make cameo appearances at the expected places, but readers will learn very little about the real nature of the conflicts among the Vietnamese and hence little about why and how Americans so badly misinterpreted the country's character. And Mann largely ignores the antiwar movement, both its leaders and its rank and file and their much-disputed role in changing the political balance of power on Vietnam.
This is not, in other words, a book for scholars or even for the avid students of the war who have closely followed its changing fortunes in the historical literature. But there are now many Americans for whom the Vietnam War is a kind of folk legend memorialized in films and in fiction and in the efforts of veterans to legitimize their sacrifices. To them, Vietnam is mostly the story of an American ''Heart of Darkness'' -- a story of rice paddies, exotic cultures, social turmoil, generational tension and personal anguish, a symbol of the shattering of American innocence. Mann offers an alternative narrative. He describes an aspect of this history much less well understood by casual observers -- the unromantic and fundamentally political nature of the decisions that created the war. If this appealingly accessible book attracts the audience it is clearly designed to serve, it could provide a useful counterweight to the popular transformation of this military and political disaster into an evocative myth.