PAUL BESTON: Strong People Afraid to Act Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965
Moyar, Mark
BOOKS IN REVIEW Faces essay on journalistic hit men, Ferguson described H.L. Mencken’s humor as “delighting in the rapture that seizes a man when he is saying something that no one else dares...
...We were never going to win that war,” he insisted, knowing that I still didn’t buy it...
...People magazine waltz between artillery barrages...
...But the United States instead threw its support to South Vietnam, propping up a corrupt and often brutal dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, whose repressive tactics brought discredit to the anti-Communist cause...
...But because he was such a staunch nationalist, Diem sponsor—the U.S.—even though he knew that he could not prevail without American assistance...
...Ferguson is nowhere near as caustic as Mencken—and every bureaucrat and too-smart-by-half cultural elite whom Ferguson does give a minor tweaking should thank their lucky stars he isn’t—yet there is nevertheless rapturous writing on display in Land of Lincoln, and humor, and truth in spades as well...
...To avoid partisan charges from Lodge about his conduct of the war, Kennedy gave the ambassador a wide berth—and Lodge made it wider through his brazen freelancing and misapplication of presidential directives...
...Working with South Vietnamese generals, Lodge helped engineer the coup that ousted Diem from power, and killed him, in November 1963, just weeks before Kennedy’s assassination...
...President Kennedy appointed Lodge ambassador in part to get him out of the country, as he was widely viewed as a potential rival in 1964...
...And all that for a country that wasn’t vital to the United States’ policy goals...
...After six years of living with Abraham Lincoln, I can give him to you any way you want, cold or hot, jazz or classical,” Bob Rogers brags...
...corrupt near-great man, a leader of forcourage...
...combat troops—a point at which, in Moyar’s view, the best chances for American success had already passed, though victory was still within reach...
...He was lauded in the New York Times, the paper for which he had reported from Saigon, “as a gifted storyteller who was determined to tell his readers the truth...
...Please call 800.524.3469, visit www.spectator.org/DejaReviews, or mail a check to: The American Spectator, 1611 N. Kent Street, Ste...
...Triumph Forsaken is the first of an expected two-volume study...
...The new marketeers are only all too happy to exploit the opening such academics have provided...
...In other words, what can Lincoln do...
...Misreading the importance of Vietnam, foolishly buying into the domino theory, myopic about the distinctions in the Communist world between the Soviets and Chinese, and unable to understand that it faced a nationalist foe that would not surrender, the United States escalated its involvement...
...For just $24.95 (includes S&H) take a trip down memory lane, or begin the journey voluminous collection of essays from 1991-2002...
...took strong action...
...In the 19th century the French arrived and became the country’s rulers...
...The North Vietnamese and their allies were susceptible to discouragement when the U.S...
...The lady knows nothing of mediocrity...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Chi Minh, a was a unified, independwas ideology was only a means to an end...
...The protests’ leader, Tri Quang, was likely a Communist operative, though North Vietnam has never conceded this...
...The main source of discord between Diem and the U.S...
...failed in no small part because we viewed the Vietnamese through Western eyes—not a surprising fault, but terribly damaging nonetheless...
...ambassador to South Vietnam, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge...
...Any attempt at transition between the blasts would be ludicrous, like playing a – Paul Greenberg, Introduction to 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2007...
...Vietnam was not “a foolish war fought under wise constraints,” writes Moyar, “but a wise war fought under foolish constraints...
...He cannot return to explain himself, as in the 1989 film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which portrayed Father Abraham improbably laying out his life philosophy as, “Be excellent to each other...
...The self-immolation of monk Quang Doc—the iconic photos of which so shocked the West—may have been coerced by the Communists, Moyar suggests...
...Ferguson also relates the story of a Czech who had a vision of Lincoln while imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II and spent decades saving money to make a pilgrimage to the man’s tomb in the twilight of his life...
...suffered the nation’s first defeat in warfare, providing a cautionary lesson for the uses of military force...
...Marine Corps University in Quantico, is not the first to argue from what has become known as the revisionist position, but he has the advantage of much newly available source material from both sides of the conflict...
...When Ferguson returns to the Chicago Historical Society museum he had loved as a child, the new inclusive approach—you can call it “social history,” if the words don’t trigger your gag reflex—has excluded much of what stoked his passion for Lincoln and history, most notably guns and… well, Lincoln...
...Military raids on the pagodas restored order and put down the unrest, but key figures in the Kennedy administration, as well as American journalists like the young David Halberstam, were disgusted by Diem’s tactics...
...Party on, dudes...
...The main plotters against Diem in Washington were Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman at the State Department and Michael Forrestal of the U.S...
...Ferguson retorts: The logic may have been superficially sound, but it was also condescending...
...What if a woman who’s white and lesbian and northwestern and alive comes to the museum...
...The U.S...
...As Lincoln the Bold collapses under the dual weight of Lincoln the Demonized and Lincoln the Homogenized, we are inevitably left to wonder, like Bill Henrickson, what would Lincoln do...
...After insisting he sought nothing more than to be “truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem,” he concluded on a somewhat defiantly dour note—he was bipolar, right?—“But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined...
...Whether we can get the Lincoln Lincoln from Bob Rogers or anybody else is not quite as clear...
...Buying it is easy, though, when the orthodox Vietnam narrative is so embedded in our culture...
...understood early on that Communism was not a monolith, and that the potential for a split existed between the Soviets and Chinese...
...By the cura70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2007 torial logic of new history, such people should have no interest in Lincoln, not sharing with him the proper income level, melanin count, genital profile, sexual proclivity, or ontological status...
...It ends at July 1965, when Lyndon Johnson announced the first large-scale increase of U.S...
...If the sparking a social and political upheaval at home and war in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...He does, however, write lovingly of the ordinary buffs, buffs of the essence, introducing us, for instance, to Oscar Esche, the immigrant owner of Thai Little Home Café in Chicago who shows respect for his adopted country by placing a full meal before a statue of Lincoln daily, like an offering to a golden Buddha...
...was a and also received considerable The dictator that America supported, Diem, was a midable intellect and political was always clashing with his The American war planners concern borne out by the intentions of the Chinese SEPTEMBER 2007 71 (CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY P, 542 , $32) Reviewed by Paul Beston bombs...
...I can give you scandalous Lincoln, conservative Lincoln, liberal Lincoln, racist Lincoln, Lincoln over easy or Lincoln scrambled...
...A good exhibit makes people see themselves,” the director tells Ferguson...
...Vietnam was the wrong You had better sit down, because Mark Moyar says you’ve got it all wrong...
...Which may be why any collection of her writings goes off like a fireworks display...
...Even with enormous commitment of troops and resources, the U.S...
...That struggle was led by HoVietnamese nationalist whose goal ent Vietnam...
...Here goes: Vietnam was indeed dominated by China, but the Chinese allowed a fair amount of autonomy in exchange for tribute, and the two countries fought only three wars in the nearly thousand years before the troubled 20th century...
...Whatever his legacy’s ultimate fate, however, it is difficult to imagine he’d be “very much chagrined” by Andrew Ferguson’s tracing of the exotic tributaries flowing out far beyond the reverberations of his corporeal life in Land of Lincoln...
...abandonment of South Vietnam...
...It presumed that ordinary people suffer from an extraordinary lack of imagination—that no ordinary person will respond to information unless it concerns people just like him...
...Deja Reviews New York Times This is a limited time offer...
...Hoalso a Communist, but Americans had embraced Ho, he might have become an Asian Tito, a Communist leader working independent of Soviet or Chinese influence...
...Ho Chi Minh was never going to become an Asian Tito, because HoCommunist above all, dedicated to the goal of international revolution...
...The man himself may have answered this question in a statement run by a local Illinois paper when he ran for the state legislature at age 23...
...901, Arlington, VA 22209 Florence King All Over Again anew with these delightful selections of Miss King’s “To say that Florence King doesn’t suffer fools gladly is an understatement akin to suggesting that Fred Astaire could maneuver quite nicely on the dance floor...
...He adhered closely to Chinese directives, support from the Soviet Union...
...Ho’s reaction was telling: “I can scarcely believe that the Americans would be so stupid...
...Only after World War II did the Vietnamese throw off the colonial yoke, winning a long war against the French in 1954...
...David Halberstam, whose The Best and the Brightest is a cornerstone of orthodox history of the war, died this past April...
...In the end, Land of Lincoln is not only a paean to such buffs, but a stark warning that the Lincoln who could so inspire is in danger of being lost...
...In fact, despite his own pro-Lincoln proclivities, Ferguson is not partial to all buffs...
...The intricacy of the tunnels reinforced for him the image of the Viet Cong as an implacable foe that would fight America forever if necessary, no matter what the cost...
...Halberstam’s National Security Council, who collaborated with the relentless undermining of Diem in the Deja Reviews: – Selections from National Review and The American Spectator Get the very best of Miss Florence King from both National Review and The American Spectator in our new book, Deja Reviews...
...Maybe the president put too much faith in us, his affluence-addled descendants...
...Mencken’s humor as “delighting in the rapture that seizes a man when he is saying something that no one else dares say and that, upon reflection, is almost certainly true,” a line that probably fits its author better than its subject...
...The Americans felt that Diem’s authoritarianism cost him political support, but Moyar points out that the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 By Mark Moyar RESSPAGES BOOKS IN REVIEW Vietnamese tended to side with the strongest ruler, one who had “moral prestige” and brought order...
...was Diem’s refusal to be as democratic as the Americans wished, even though Diem presided over a traditional culture that revered authority and did not have democratic traditions...
...This would certainly narrow the appeal of someone like Lincoln, who, in addition to being extraordinary, as even his revilers agree, was white, Midwestern, heterosexual, male, poor for most of his life, and, at the end of it, dead...
...You may find that South Vietnam is not quite America,” Diem protested to a reporter, with typical understatement...
...They focused on the danger of falling Asian dominoes, a and North Vietnamese, as well as the political fragility of many countries in the region and their leaders’ fears of a U.S...
...Both, in their own ways, worked to make a coup inevitable...
...People come to places where they see themselves...
...Moyar, an associate professor at the U.S...
...For Moyar, Halberstam’s devotion to truth was slipshod at best, though he certainly was good at telling stories, many based on information from corrupt sources, including Communist agents...
...Strong People Afraid to Act A GOOD FRIEND visited Vietnam some years back, and returned telling me about his tour of the underground tunnel systems that the Viet Cong had built for protection against American Paul Beston is associate editor of City Journal...
...T HIS CULTURAL DIVIDE was best demonstrated by the Buddhist uprising of 1963, which played such an important role in destroying American support for Diem...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Faces essay on journalistic hit men, Ferguson described H.L...
...Or a live black rich guy from the Southwest, or a breathing Hispanic homosexual from Alaska...
...It goes something like this: Vietnam, an ancient Southeast Asian civilization, had fought against outside intruders, primarily the Chinese, for most of its history...
...New information from the North Vietnamese indicates that the protest movement was significantly infiltrated and spurred on by the Communists...
Vol. 40 • September 2007 • No. 7
