Sense on Vietnam
Wick, Joseph E.
Sense on Vietnam Peace in Vietnam: A New Approach in Southeast Asia, a report prepared for the american friends service committee. Hill and Wang. 112 pp. Cloth, $3. Paper, 95 cents. Vietnam:...
...The insanity is made graphically clear in two instances...
...Yet while antidotes and means of interpretation are needed, they must be used with care...
...From here on the American leaders believed that all the blows received from a certain and elusive enemy (the Vietcong) should be returned to a doubtful but clearly visible enemy (North Vietnam...
...But Peace in Vietnam is not anecdotal history...
...Random House...
...You are making beggars of our children, prostitutes of our women, and Communists of our men...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick...
...With regard to the last, it is noted that "a careful reading of The New York Times shows that the United States has rejected no fewer than seven efforts to negotiate an end to the war...
...he has visited Vietnam frequently since 1945 and has written two other books and numerous articles on the subject...
...As Joseph Kraft pointed out in his review of the 1965 French edition (which serves as an introduction to this English translation), the book "deals with the elements and forces of the conflict, not as if they were apocalyptic and milennial events but as political phenomena...
...Paper, $1.95...
...But in Premier Ky, the United States has found a worthy agent: An air force man and a refugee from the North, he agrees wholeheartedly with the policy of bombing Hanoi and misunderstands completely the nature of the N.L.F...
...The irony is tragic...
...The creation of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (labeled the Vietcong by Diem) in 1960 was indigenous, and Lacouture believes it has remained so...
...Peace in Vietnam can serve two useful purposes...
...To the outsider, who is shown that personal antagonisms, religious animosities, and regional diversity must assume places of importance beside generalizations about nationalism and social change, Vietnam: Between Two Truces may seem more confusing than complex...
...The results: "The Ngo family's 'witch-hunting' policy no longer left open to the growing number of its opponents any alternatives other than prison, exile, or the guerrilla forces...
...295 pp...
...government has overlooked the local origins of the conflict and the animosities which perpetuate it—even when, as presently, these animosities erupt in "safe" areas (anyone who has read La-couture would not have been surprised at the Buddhist demands or the turbulence in Danang...
...One involves a Vietnamese school teacher who admonishes a GI for lavishing candy on a group of youngsters: "You Americans don't understand...
...Lacouture is an insider...
...This report prepared for the American Friends Service Committee is a concise, lucid, and restrained treatment of nationalism and the drive for social and economic change in Southeast Asia, the role of China in that region, the history of the United States involvement in Vietnam, and the possibilities for peace negotiations...
...And it simultaneously provides a framework of understanding for the interested but confused citizen who wants to interpret newspaper and television coverage of the war...
...Vietnam: Between Two Truces, by Jean Lacouture...
...It was only after "pathetic appeals for help . . . and the economic pressure on them, resulting from the blockade of the undernourished North" that they were led "after 1959 and five years of honest application of the Geneva Agreements, to intervene progressively in the South in order to press by force for reunification that could not be obtained by other means...
...It is the proper antidote to the official pronouncements of the Johnson Administration and the Luce magazine empire...
...The other quotes an AID official (via the Wall Street Journal, December 16, 1965) : "The Pentagon is spending more for just its air strip and docks at Cam Ranh Bay than we've been allocated for the nation's entire reconstruction...
...The organization of the book accentuates this problem: Lacouture separately describes the succession of coups in Saigon, military operations, and protests against the South Vietnam government, leaving the reader to ponder what causal relationships are involved...
...a completely different movement from the opposition to Diem...
...authors of Peace in Vietnam label the report "an eleventh-hour appeal for sanity...
...In the face of Vietnamese pluralism, Diem enforced a policy of absolutism...
...Jean Lacouture's Vietnam: Between Two Truces, by way of contrast, is complex in treatment and internal in approach...
...While the authors of Peace in Vietnam and Jean Lacouture do not agree on every point, both put forward convincing arguments that the conflict in South Vietnam is not the product of external Communist pressures, and both conclude that the United States must recognize this basic fact before peace negotiations can hope to succeed...
...The United States, long committed to Diem's regime, pulled South Vietnam into SEATO, contrary to the stipulations of the Geneva Agreements, in February, 1962...
...His story begins in 1954, the year of the Geneva Agreements, the formation of SEATO, and the accession of Ngo Dinh Diem to power...
...The contrast between Lacouture's interpretation and that of the Johnson Administration is evident from a May 13, 1965 statement by William P. Bundy: "The leaders of the National Front are faceless men installed by Hanoi...
...Cloth, $5.95...
...But it is well worth the effort to understand Lacouture...
...Ho Chi Minh had little choice but to react or lose his influence in the South...
...Peace in Vietnam is a handbook for the peace movement...
...Diem created the conditions...
...Lacouture sees this as the choice for direct intervention, though the conflict was not to become "Americanized" for another two and a half years—with the bombing raids of August 4 and 5, 1964...
...Fastening responsibility for the war in Vietnam on Hanoi or even Peking, the U.S...
...The men in Hanoi, meanwhile, had their own problems with resettlement, reconstruction, and food shortages...
...it is deceptively simple (perhaps it would be fairer to say "determinedly simple") and its approach, though it deals with nationalism and social revolution, is external...
...It is a good starting point but by no means the whole picture...
Vol. 36 • June 1966 • No. 6
