The Irony Of Vietnam

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The Irony of Vietnam

Author : Leslie H. Gelb
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
ISBN 13 : 0815726805
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (157 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irony of Vietnam by : Leslie H. Gelb

Download or read book The Irony of Vietnam written by Leslie H. Gelb and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If a historian were allowed but one book on the American involvement in Vietnam, this would be it." — Foreign Affairs When first published in 1979, four years after the end of one of the most divisive conflicts in the United States, The Irony of Vietnam raised eyebrows. Most students of the war argued that the United States had "stumbled into a quagmire in Vietnam through hubris and miscalculation," as the New York Times's Fox Butterfield put it. But the perspective of time and the opening of documentary sources, including the Pentagon Papers, had allowed Gelb and Betts to probe deep into the decisionmaking leading to escalation of military action in Vietnam. The failure of Vietnam could be laid at the door of American foreign policy, they said, but the decisions that led to the failure were made by presidents aware of the risks, clear about their aims, knowledgeable about the weaknesses of their allies, and under no illusion about the outcome. The book offers a picture of a steely resolve in government circles that, while useful in creating consensus, did not allow for alternative perspectives. In the years since its publication, The Irony of Vietnam has come to be considered the seminal work on the Vietnam War.

The Irony of Vietnam

Author : Leslie H. Gelb
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
ISBN 13 : 0815726791
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (157 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irony of Vietnam by : Leslie H. Gelb

Download or read book The Irony of Vietnam written by Leslie H. Gelb and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If a historian were allowed but one book on the American involvement in Vietnam, this would be it." — Foreign Affairs When first published in 1979, four years after the end of one of the most divisive conflicts in the United States, The Irony of Vietnam raised eyebrows. Most students of the war argued that the United States had "stumbled into a quagmire in Vietnam through hubris and miscalculation," as the New York Times's Fox Butterfield put it. But the perspective of time and the opening of documentary sources, including the Pentagon Papers, had allowed Gelb and Betts to probe deep into the decisionmaking leading to escalation of military action in Vietnam. The failure of Vietnam could be laid at the door of American foreign policy, they said, but the decisions that led to the failure were made by presidents aware of the risks, clear about their aims, knowledgeable about the weaknesses of their allies, and under no illusion about the outcome. The book offers a picture of a steely resolve in government circles that, while useful in creating consensus, did not allow for alternative perspectives. In the years since its publication, The Irony of Vietnam has come to be considered the seminal work on the Vietnam War.

Vietnam: the System Worked

Author : Leslie H. Gelb
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 20 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Vietnam: the System Worked by : Leslie H. Gelb

Download or read book Vietnam: the System Worked written by Leslie H. Gelb and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Understanding Vietnam

Author : Neil L. Jamieson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520916581
Total Pages : 447 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Vietnam by : Neil L. Jamieson

Download or read book Understanding Vietnam written by Neil L. Jamieson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American experience in Vietnam divided us as a nation and eroded our confidence in both the morality and the effectiveness of our foreign policy. Yet our understanding of this tragic episode remains superficial because, then and now, we have never grasped the passionate commitment with which the Vietnamese clung to and fought over their own competing visions of what Vietnam was and what it might become. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese, their culture, and their ways of looking at the world. Neil L. Jamieson, after many years of living and working in Vietnam, has written the book that provides this understanding. Jamieson paints a portrait of twentieth-century Vietnam. Against the background of traditional Vietnamese culture, he takes us through the saga of modern Vietnamese history and Western involvement in the country, from the coming of the French in 1858 through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Throughout his analysis, he allows the Vietnamese—both our friends and foes, and those who wished to be neither—to speak for themselves through poetry, fiction, essays, newspaper editorials and reports of interviews and personal experiences. By putting our old and partial perceptions into this new and broader context, Jamieson provides positive insights that may perhaps ease the lingering pain and doubt resulting from our involvement in Vietnam. As the United States and Vietnam appear poised to embark on a new phase in their relationship, Jamieson's book is particularly timely.

Into the Quagmire

Author : Brian VanDeMark
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195357191
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (953 download)

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Book Synopsis Into the Quagmire by : Brian VanDeMark

Download or read book Into the Quagmire written by Brian VanDeMark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In November of 1964, as Lyndon Johnson celebrated his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, the government of South Vietnam lay in a shambles. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor described it as a country beset by "chronic factionalism, civilian-military suspicion and distrust, absence of national spirit and motivation, lack of cohesion in the social structure, lack of experience in the conduct of government." Virtually no one in the Johnson Administration believed that Saigon could defeat the communist insurgency--and yet by July of 1965, a mere nine months later, they would lock the United States on a path toward massive military intervention which would ultimately destroy Johnson's presidency and polarize the American people. Into the Quagmire presents a closely rendered, almost day-by-day account of America's deepening involvement in Vietnam during those crucial nine months. Mining a wealth of recently opened material at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and elsewhere, Brian VanDeMark vividly depicts the painful unfolding of a national tragedy. We meet an LBJ forever fearful of a conservative backlash, which he felt would doom his Great Society, an unsure and troubled leader grappling with the unwanted burden of Vietnam; George Ball, a maverick on Vietnam, whose carefully reasoned (and, in retrospect, strikingly prescient) stand against escalation was discounted by Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy; and Clark Clifford, whose last-minute effort at a pivotal meeting at Camp David failed to dissuade Johnson from doubling the number of ground troops in Vietnam. What comes across strongly throughout the book is the deep pessimism of all the major participants as things grew worse--neither LBJ, nor Bundy, nor McNamara, nor Rusk felt confident that things would improve in South Vietnam, that there was any reasonable chance for victory, or that the South had the will or the ability to prevail against the North. And yet deeper into the quagmire they went. Whether describing a tense confrontation between George Ball and Dean Acheson ("You goddamned old bastards," Ball said to Acheson, "you remind me of nothing so much as a bunch of buzzards sitting on a fence and letting the young men die") or corrupt politicians in Saigon, VanDeMark provides readers with the full flavor of national policy in the making. More important, he sheds greater light on why America became entangled in the morass of Vietnam.

Without Honor

Author : Arnold R. Isaacs
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476645841
Total Pages : 447 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (766 download)

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Book Synopsis Without Honor by : Arnold R. Isaacs

Download or read book Without Honor written by Arnold R. Isaacs and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-11-09 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a new and updated second edition, this book--first published in 1983--provides a detailed review of the end of the Vietnam War. Drawing on the author's eyewitness reporting and extensive research, the book relies on carefully reported facts, not partisan myths, to reconstruct the war's last years and harrowing final months. The catastrophic suffering those events brought to ordinary Vietnamese civilians and soldiers is vividly portrayed. The largely unremembered wars in Cambodia and Laos are examined as well, while new material in an updated final chapter points out troubling parallels between the Vietnam War and America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Ironies of Freedom

Author : Thu-huong Nguyen-vo
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295989211
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (959 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ironies of Freedom by : Thu-huong Nguyen-vo

Download or read book The Ironies of Freedom written by Thu-huong Nguyen-vo and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1980s, Vietnam joined the global economy after decades of war and relative isolation, demonstrating how a former socialist government can adapt to global market forces with their neoliberal emphasis on freedom of choice for entrepreneurs and consumers. The Ironies of Freedom examines an aspect of this new market: commercial sex. Nguyen-vo offers an ambitious analysis of gender and class conflicts surrounding commercial sex as a site of market freedom, governmental intervention, and depictions in popular culture to argue that these practices reveal the paradoxical nature of neoliberalism. What the case of Vietnam highlights is that governing with current neoliberal globalization may and does take paradoxical forms, sustained not by some vestige from times past but by contemporary conditions. Of mutual benefit to both the neoliberal global economy and the ruling party in Vietnam is the use of empirical knowledge and entrepreneurial and consumer's choice differentially among segments of the population to produce different kinds of laborers and consumers for the global market. But also of mutual benefit to both are the police, the prison, and notions of cultural authenticity enabled by a ruling party with well-developed means of coercion from its history. The freedom-unfreedom pair in governance creates a tension in modes of representation conducive to a new genre of sensational social realism in literature and popular films like the 2003 Bar Girls about two women in the sex trade, replete with nudity, booze, drugs, violence, and death. The movie opened in Vietnam with unprecedented box office receipts, blazing a trail for a commercially viable domestic film industry. Combining methods and theories from the social sciences and humanities, Nguyen-vo's analysis relies on fieldwork conducted in Ho Chi Minh City and its vicinity, in-depth interviews with informants, participant observation at selected sites of sexual commerce and governmental intervention, journalistic accounts, and literature and films. This book will appeal to historians and political scientists of Southeast Asia and to scholars of gender and sexuality, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and political theory dealing with neoliberalism.

Brothers in Arms

Author : William Broyles, Jr.
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292783396
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (927 download)

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Book Synopsis Brothers in Arms by : William Broyles, Jr.

Download or read book Brothers in Arms written by William Broyles, Jr. and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviews of the Knopf edition: "A wonderful book—fresh and intelligent. Broyles's eye for Vietnam, then and now, is unerring." —Peter Jennings "[A] superbly written, often moving story of Broyles' journey back to the killing ground in Vietnam where he once served as a Marine lieutenant. A cool, clear meditation that stings the heart." —Kirkus Reviews "A first-rate piece of work, infused with an ideal American common decency and common sense." —Kurt Vonnegut "Exceptional and memorable." —Gay Talese

The Irony of American History

Author : Reinhold Niebuhr
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226583996
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irony of American History by : Reinhold Niebuhr

Download or read book The Irony of American History written by Reinhold Niebuhr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace. “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times “Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society “Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft. . . . The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction

War Stories

Author : Gary Kulik
Publisher : Potomac Books, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 1597976377
Total Pages : 507 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (979 download)

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Book Synopsis War Stories by : Gary Kulik

Download or read book War Stories written by Gary Kulik and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2009-10-31 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War stories are mostly innocent fables and understood as such by both the teller and the hearer. However, they have long been used for political and national purposes, and those about the war in Vietnam were no exception, as painfully evidenced in the 2004 presidential campaign. John Kerry campaigned as a war hero. His opponents cast him as a liar and a traitor and their war story prevailed. ""War Stories"" delves into the myths associated with the Vietnam veteran s experience and looks at them through the war stories they told and continue to tell. Kulik conducts an extremely thorough review of the Vietnam literature and interviews participants wherever possible, poking holes in the war myths of people throughout the political spectrum. War Stories discusses how returning Vietnam vets were treated and delves into the myths that atrocities were commonplace, that all veterans of that war suffer from PTSD, and that all are guilt ridden. Kulik s research and analysis of such stories lies at the heart of this book s originality and provides a new perspective on the Vietnam War for scholars, students, and general readers. His purpose in exposing such stories is not to deny or minimize American war crimes in Vietnam but to cut through the cant of false stories so that we retain our outrage at those that are true. As we are faced with future war stories from Iraq and Afghanistan and their likely exploitation, the moral stance and the lessons learned in this book will be especially important."

Secrets

Author : Daniel Ellsberg
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101191317
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Secrets by : Daniel Ellsberg

Download or read book Secrets written by Daniel Ellsberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-09-30 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the event which inspired Steven Spielberg’s feature film The Post In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers - a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam - to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man's exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad. "[Ellsberg's] well-told memoir sticks in the mind and will be a powerful testament for future students of a war that the United States should never have fought." -The Washington Post "Ellsberg's deft critique of secrecy in government is an invaluable contribution to understanding one of our nation's darkest hours." -Theodore Roszak, San Francisco Chronicle

Choosing War

Author : Fredrik Logevall
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520927117
Total Pages : 558 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Choosing War by : Fredrik Logevall

Download or read book Choosing War written by Fredrik Logevall and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of the most detailed and powerfully argued books published on American intervention in Vietnam, Fredrik Logevall examines the last great unanswered question on the war: Could the tragedy have been averted? His answer: a resounding yes. Challenging the prevailing myth that the outbreak of large-scale fighting in 1965 was essentially unavoidable, Choosing War argues that the Vietnam War was unnecessary, not merely in hindsight but in the context of its time. Why, then, did major war break out? Logevall shows it was partly because of the timidity of the key opponents of U.S. involvement, and partly because of the staunch opposition of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to early negotiations. His superlative account shows that U.S. officials chose war over disengagement despite deep doubts about the war's prospects and about Vietnam's importance to U.S. security and over the opposition of important voices in the Congress, in the press, and in the world community. They did so because of concerns about credibility—not so much America's or the Democratic party's credibility, but their own personal credibility. Based on six years of painstaking research, this book is the first to place American policymaking on Vietnam in 1963-65 in its wider international context using multiarchival sources, many of them recently declassified. Here we see for the first time how the war played in the key world capitals—not merely in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi, but also in Paris and London, in Tokyo and Ottawa, in Moscow and Beijing. Choosing War is a powerful and devastating account of fear, favor, and hypocrisy at the highest echelons of American government, a book that will change forever our understanding of the tragedy that was the Vietnam War.

Dispatches

Author : Michael Herr
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307814165
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Dispatches by : Michael Herr

Download or read book Dispatches written by Michael Herr and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

No Shining Armor

Author : Otto J. Lehrack
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis No Shining Armor by : Otto J. Lehrack

Download or read book No Shining Armor written by Otto J. Lehrack and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the Vietnam War, as seen by the American PFCs, sergeants and platoon leaders in the rivers and jungles and trenches. Into their stories, Lehrack has woven a narrative that explains the events they describe and places them into both a historical and a political context.

A Terrible Irony

Author : Ross McGregor
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis A Terrible Irony by : Ross McGregor

Download or read book A Terrible Irony written by Ross McGregor and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The Sympathizer

Author : Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 080219169X
Total Pages : 387 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sympathizer by : Viet Thanh Nguyen

Download or read book The Sympathizer written by Viet Thanh Nguyen and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now an HBO Limited Series from Executive Producers Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr., Streaming Exclusively on Max Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction One of TIME’s 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time “[A] remarkable debut novel.” —Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review) Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, a startling debut novel from a powerful new voice featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent fiction: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

The Last Valley

Author : Martin Windrow
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 0786737492
Total Pages : 754 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (867 download)

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Book Synopsis The Last Valley by : Martin Windrow

Download or read book The Last Valley written by Martin Windrow and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-03-04 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 1953 the French army occupying Vietnam challenged the elusive Vietnamese army to engage in a decisive battle. When French paratroopers landed in the jungle on the border between Vietnam and Laos, the Vietnamese quickly isolated the French force and confronted them at their jungle base in a small place called Dien Bien Phu. The hunters-the French army-had become the hunted, desperately defending their out-gunned base. The siege in the jungle wore on as defeat loomed for the French. Eventually the French were depleted, demoralized, and destroyed. As they withdrew, the country was ominously divided at U.S. insistence, creating the short-lived Republic of South Vietnam for which 55,000 Americans would die in the next twenty years.