Historians disagree
Historians Disagree: Vietnam War
What diverse approaches and assumptions have historians brought to studying the Vietnam War?
by David Parsons, California State University, Channel Islands
Apart from the Civil War and Reconstruction, few events have divided historians more deeply than the Vietnam War. The divisions created by the war, part of a global political and cultural upheaval often referred to as “the Sixties,” are reflected throughout the vast historical literature produced in the decades since the war’s official end in 1975. The first major historical works were written at the height of the war’s multipronged crisis and began with the assumption that American involvement in Vietnam was a grievous mistake, doomed to failure from the beginning. The scholars who wrote these works examined U.S. Cold War policymaking in the early years of the conflict, telling the story of how successive presidential administrations, from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson, gradually deepened American commitment to an anti-communist nation-building project in South Vietnam. In addition to documenting the thoughts and actions of U.S. administration officials, these early histories also often focused on the leadership of South Vietnam by Ngo Dinh Diem, characterizing him as a puppet of the United States whose corruption, incompetence, and cruelty played a critical role in worsening the crisis. This historical perspective, known as the “orthodox” perspective because of its wide acceptance in academia, places a poorly planned and executed American foreign policy at the center of its analysis.
A challenge to the orthodox view emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s, as scholars often referred to as “revisionists” offered a counternarrative to the dominant view of U.S. policy failure. Revisionists argued that South Vietnam, and Diem himself, were not mere puppets of the United States, but independent actors fighting for a non-Communist Vietnam. These histories rejected the idea that the American project was illegitimate and doomed, instead seeing the United States, for various reasons, as sabotaging its own efforts by failing to act decisively to win a military victory. Insisting that the South Vietnamese government was a sovereign state fighting for its survival against an insurgency funded and controlled by Soviet and Chinese Communist superpowers, revisionist historians portrayed American withdrawal from Vietnam as an abandonment of both its strategic interests and its commitment to South Vietnamese democracy.
With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, newly available archival material from China, the Soviet Union, and North Vietnam helped a new generation of historians shed light on decision-making by Communist governments, complicating the landscape of historical perspectives on the war. Vietnamese scholars, working with documentary evidence and oral histories unavailable outside Vietnam, have produced significant work on the war, demonstrating in particular the deep, nuanced political and cultural divisions within Vietnamese society stemming from the war, which have often eluded the analysis of Western historians.
In addition to works of political, economic, and diplomatic history that focus on foreign policy decisions and military strategy, the 1990s saw the rise of an extensive and growing body of historical literature that investigated the war using the methodologies of social and cultural history, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and other fields. These interdisciplinary works seek to understand how ideas like race, gender, class, and imperialism shaped historical experience on both the individual and national level. American political culture has been a particular focus of historians interested in explaining how the war both emerged from and ultimately shaped the direction of Cold War U.S. society. From the antiwar movement and counterculture to the civil rights movement, feminism, environmentalism, and related social developments, these histories connect the Vietnam War to a widening ecology of significant transformations in the 1960s and 1970s.
Finally, events of the twenty-first century have made an impact on how historians view the Vietnam War. United States-launched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11 renewed historical interest in the Vietnam era and produced a number of works that took a fresh look at the war, as terms like “counterinsurgency” and “state-building” returned to public discourse. The rise and dominance of conservatism in the post-Vietnam era has also caused many historians to trace the beginnings of conservative politics to the 1960s, when figures like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon capitalized on public divisions over controversial issues like the war, racial inequality, cultural values, and patriotism. Scholars studying police brutality and white supremacy in American life are returning to the Vietnam War era to gain perspective on the origins of modern drug policy, police militarization, and mass incarceration. Historians in the field of environmental history are drawing connections between American chemical defoliation of Vietnam and modern issues of climate change and ecocide. Around the world, a rising generation of younger scholars is expanding on all these connections, drawing upon previous scholarship while building a new body of historical literature that, despite its many points of division, continues to reveal the centrality of the Vietnam War to our understanding of the past, present, and future.
Additional Reading
Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking, 2003).
David L. Parsons, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).