The American Military's Rationale Against the Vietnam War

Abstract

Notable revisionist work on includes, from the military, William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976) and Vietnam in Perspective, Military Review (January 1979): 34-43; Harry Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982); William R. Peers, Introduction of American Combat Forces: 1965-1969, in Harrison Salisbury, ed., Reconsidered: Lessons From A War (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 44-7; Winant Sidle, Role of Journalists in Vietnam: An Army General's Perspective, in Reconsidered, 110-2, and Tet Offensive: Another Press Controversy: I, in Reconsidered, 164-6; Dave Richard Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet: US. -Vietnam in Perspective (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1978); William E. DePuy, We Might Have Done and Why We Didn't Do It, Army 36 (February 1986): 23-40; from the academic and conservative intellectual community, Guenter Lewy, America in (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K.Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979); Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982); Peter Berger, Indochina & the American Conscience, Commentary (February 1980): 29-39; David Fromkin and James Chace, What Are the Lessons of Vietnam? Foreign Affairs 63 (Spring 1985): 722-46; John Wheeler, Coming to Grips with Vietnam, Foreign Affairs 63 (Spring 1985): 747-58; the most important political figures to write extensively about the war are Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979) and Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982); and Richard M. Nixon, RN. The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) and No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985). For an early, yet thorough and excellent assessment of the new revi-