Vietnam War Collection: books plus

[tequila]

Another problem I have with Pearlstein's piece is his seeming dumbfoundedness at Moyar taking communist internal communications at face value, like all communitsts lie right? A more careful reading of Moyar reveals a much more studied treatment of communist propagandizing--for instance Pearlstiens quote of how Moyar treats the communist reaction to the deposment of Diem. Yes the communists were excited about this because they felt it would help thier effort in the long run, Moyar puts this in his book because the facts bear this out when looking back at history--in other words Moyar takes the communist reaction at face value because what they predict is actually what happened! Why would a professional historian ignore such an important piece of forbearance?

Or perhaps the Communists were simply putting a good face on their reaction to events --- that Diem's death would automatically be good or bad for their cause was up in the air and, I would argue, still not definitively proven to be a positive good. I was not convinced by Moyar's thesis that Diem was popular amongst the South Vietnamese peasantry, that GVN was on its way to unstoppable victory against the VCI under Diem, that ARVN would have won the battle of Ap Bac if not for the bungling Americans, nor did I buy his spin on the joys of the Strategic Hamlet program. I did, however, like his passage on how Madam Nhu, that exemplar of moral probity, brought the whorehouses of Saigon to a stop, with American servicemen reduced to playing tic-tac-toe with virtuous barmaids, and how this was a reason why the Western press turned against Diem. With this sort of clear-eyed history, how could Moyar have failed to gain tenure?

[stanleywinthrop]

that GVN was on its way to unstoppable victory against the VCI under Diem,

where in the world did you draw that conclusion? Moyar tells us that South Vietnam was winning , not on its way to an "unstoppable victory".

that ARVN would have won the battle of Ap Bac if not for the bungling Americans,

No, moyar's take was not that the ARVN would have won if not for the americans, his take was that it was not a dehibilitating defeat that Vann and his media friends portrayed it as.

I did, however, like his passage on how Madam Nhu, that exemplar of moral probity, brought the whorehouses of Saigon to a stop, with American servicemen reduced to playing tic-tac-toe with virtuous barmaids, and how this was a reason why the Western press turned against Diem.

Now you are bordering on comedy. Did you even read the book? Please provide a page number in which Moyar derives that conclusion.

With this sort of clear-eyed history, how could Moyar have failed to gain tenure?

This sort of ad-hom attack is not helpful in critiqueing Moyar's work, but it is helpful in understanding your true motivations for posting here.

[Steve Blair]

I'd say any reasonable assessment of the GVN's progress under Diem was that it was losing ground, not gaining it. The Strategic Hamlets Diem set up that were composed of Catholic refugees from the North were indeed fairly successful...but the others were not. Also, Diem continued the tradition of bungling relations with the hill tribes (Montagnards)...a group that could have really helped the GVN secure many border areas.

Diem's poor governance did the GVN few favors. What the VCI saw when he was assassinated was not the demise of a feared and effective opponent, but rather a chance to take advantage of the chaos that would certainly (and did) follow it.

And stanley, you might want to take a moment to introduce yourself.

[stanleywinthrop]

I'd say any reasonable assessment of the GVN's progress under Diem was that it was losing ground, not gaining it. The Strategic Hamlets Diem set up that were composed of Catholic refugees from the North were indeed fairly successful...but the others were not. Also, Diem continued the tradition of bungling relations with the hill tribes (Montagnards)...a group that could have really helped the GVN secure many border areas.

Diem's poor governance did the GVN few favors. What the VCI saw when he was assassinated was not the demise of a feared and effective opponent, but rather a chance to take advantage of the chaos that would certainly (and did) follow it.

And stanley, you might want to take a moment to introduce yourself.

One might make the comparison between "Strategic Hamlets" and Killcullen's "oilspot" concept. The idea, albiet imperfectly implemented in Vietnam (especially in the delta region), is a sound prinicple in COIN. One can obviously take issue with Moyar's assesment of the war's status just prior too the coup, but Moyar's assesment that whatever the status prior, the war took a decided turn for the worse after the coup and GVN became even more incapable of dealing with the insurgency, which led to the direct intervention of U.S. forces.

I certainly agree that if Diem had engaged the Montagnards it could have helped the war effort, but expecting him to do so would have required him to cross a cultural and racial divide, an indealistic naiveness that we Americans are famous for.

What is not helpful is gross mischaractizatons of Moyar like tequila above.

[John Grenier]

Has taken a lot of heat from the community of professional historians. It is a fine revision in that no one can rightly say that the US won the VN War (58K KIA, God only knows how many WIA, 1M+ VN dead, our economy thrown in the toilet, and our ability to contain communism--the stated aim of the war) so Moyar decided to write that we should have won the war. Well, I should have done a lot of things in life, but I didn't. Very few historians are taking this book seriously and have identified Moyar as a player in the Culture Wars. I recommend Andy Wiest's excellent book if you wanted to understanding the thinking of historians about the VN War. BTW, how do you write a book on how we should have won the VN War without reading a single Vietnamese source? We should have won the war, perhaps. But didn't the Vietnamese (NVA, ARVN, NLF, VC, etc) also get a vote?

[Sigaba]

Very few historians are taking this book seriously and have identified Moyar as a player in the Culture Wars.

FWIW, on the other side of the coin, John Prados's Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009) has drawn criticism for its presentism and political biases.

As the saying goes, the comprehensive, definitive history of the Vietnam War remains to be written.

[Ken White]

...

... What the VCI saw when he was assassinated was not the demise of a feared and effective opponent, but rather a chance to take advantage of the chaos that would certainly (and did) follow it.
. . .

by folks with more idealism and arrogance than good sense who approved that coup and the almost guaranteed assassination that followed.

Diem was not particularly popular with the hoi polloi (and particularly the Buddhists) -- but he was theirs and the US hand in the assassination was well known. It did not do us any favors and the South Viet Namese would not trust us after that. Probably smart. I talked to a number of SVN Officers who expressed some anger over elements of the Coup...

Moyars and Sorley wrote essentially decent if slightly biased (ALL historians have bias) history IMO. Pearlstein uses them in an attempt to produce a preemptive political strike. Not very well but I guess he deserves credit for trying...

[tequila]

Now you are bordering on comedy. Did you even read the book? Please provide a page number in which Moyar derives that conclusion.

The tic-tac-toe passage is from pg. 160 and relates to the truly remarkable effects of the Social Purification Law, propounded by Madam Nhu. According to Moyar, Diem's RVN was not only defeating Communism but also prostitution.

This sort of ad-hom attack is not helpful in critiqueing Moyar's work, but it is helpful in understanding your true motivations for posting here.

Yes, I want to destroy Mark Moyar. And perhaps America, as well.

No, I simply find many of his conclusions incredible and unhelpful. I am also slightly bitter at having spent much time reading transcripts of Diem declaiming on various subjects, presented as examples of Diem's clear-eyed leadership, as well as Moyar's justifications for the butchery in Indonesia --- when something similar happened in Rwanda in 1997, it was called genocide.

Moyar is far too credulous in taking the assessments of certain officials as genuine reality rather than as points of view, while discrediting others as inherently compromised. For instance, Pham Xuan An, the Communist military intel agent and Reuters stringer, is automatically presented as providing a distorting view and propaganda stories to the Western press. The view of Merle Pribbenow, former CIA officer and Moyar's translator of Vietnamese documents, is that Pham's main value was as conduit of intelligence to VCI given his many links to South Vietnam's CIO and the CIA, as well as analyst of South Vietnamese and American intentions and motivations. Pribbenow's view that Pham would not have been wasted by presenting VCI propaganda to Western newspaper reporters, and indeed that Pham acted "more Catholic than the Pope" to avoid suspicion, is much more plausible than Moyar's take. Yet Moyar does not even pause to consider this in his rush to assault the Western press in Saigon.

Moyar also does not convince when attempting to persuade us that the Chinese would have abandoned North Vietnam to its fate upon an American invasion, that Tri Quang was a Communist agent, or that Indonesia would have been doomed to Communism in 1965 if not for American intervention in Vietnam. Perhaps most misleading is his picture of the Vietnamese peasantry as an unpoliticized, undifferentiated lumpen mass which responded only to strength - David Elliott's Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930-1975 illustrates just how wrong this theory is.

[stanleywinthrop]

The tic-tac-toe passage is from pg. 160 and relates to the truly remarkable effects of the Social Purification Law, propounded by Madam Nhu. According to Moyar, Diem's RVN was not only defeating Communism but also prostitution.

Yet your claim that this 'tic-tac-toe' phenomena is the reason Moyar believes western press decided to dislike Diem is fallicious. My reading of Moyar leads me to the conclusion that Moyar believed the western press disliked Diem because most of the prominant journalists spent entirely too much time with and placed entirly too much weight on the opinions thereof with one small portion of the Vietnam poplulation--the social and acedemic elites of Saigon, not because "the troops had to play tic tac toe". I do not have my copy of the book available but when I do I will post pages for your reference.

No, I simply find many of his conclusions incredible and unhelpful. I am also slightly bitter at having spent much time reading transcripts of Diem declaiming on various subjects, presented as examples of Diem's clear-eyed leadership, as well as Moyar's justifications for the butchery in Indonesia ---

I am not familiar with this event and Moyar's analysis of it, but I shall study.

Moyar is far too credulous in taking the assessments of certain officials as genuine reality rather than as points of view, while discrediting others as inherently compromised. For instance, Pham Xuan An, the Communist military intel agent and Reuters stringer, is automatically presented as providing a distorting view and propaganda stories to the Western press.

I'm confused here (that happens often ) are you saying that Pham was reliable source or not?

The view of Merle Pribbenow, former CIA officer and Moyar's translator of Vietnamese documents, is that Pham's main value was as conduit of intelligence to VCI given his many links to South Vietnam's CIO and the CIA, as well as analyst of South Vietnamese and American intentions and motivations. Pribbenow's view that Pham would not have been wasted by presenting VCI propaganda to Western newspaper reporters, and indeed that Pham acted "more Catholic than the Pope" to avoid suspicion, is much more plausible than Moyar's take. Yet Moyar does not even pause to consider this in his rush to assault the Western press in Saigon.

Again your line of reasoning is confusing to me. Are you saying that while Pham was a communist agent he acted "more Catholic than the Pope" to avoid suspicion, and this necessarily included not spreading communist propaganda and disinformation to the press? What was his purpose as a communist agent, to back up Diem's claims that he was winning the war?

Perhaps most misleading is his picture of the Vietnamese peasantry as an unpoliticized, undifferentiated lumpen mass which responded only to strength - David Elliott's Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930-1975 illustrates just how wrong this theory is.

It's interesting that you choose to use an anthropolgy of the Mekong delta as evidence of the social leanings of the Vietnamese people--preciscly the place where Diem's COIN effort was least successful--even in Moyar's account.

[tequila]

Yet your claim that this 'tic-tac-toe' phenomena is the reason Moyar believes western press decided to dislike Diem is fallicious. My reading of Moyar leads me to the conclusion that Moyar believed the western press disliked Diem because most of the prominant journalists spent entirely too much time with and placed entirly too much weight on the opinions thereof with one small portion of the Vietnam poplulation--the social and acedemic elites of Saigon, not because "the troops had to play tic tac toe". I do not have my copy of the book available but when I do I will post pages for your reference.

Stanley, pg. 160 is not my main beef with Moyar - just a laughable example of his valorization of the Diem regime and its, shall we say, unironic estimation of its effectiveness. I just pulled it out because I have Moyar's book on my desk - randomly flipped and found that hilarious passage. Moyar also hints that the Social Purification Law hurt Diem with journalists because their entertainment was curtailed, with no evidence cited - par for the course for Moyar.

I'm confused here (that happens often ) are you saying that Pham was reliable source or not?

Again your line of reasoning is confusing to me. Are you saying that while Pham was a communist agent he acted "more Catholic than the Pope" to avoid suspicion, and this necessarily included not spreading communist propaganda and disinformation to the press? What was his purpose as a communist agent, to support the Diem regime?

His cover was as a journalist, but his mission was not to be a propaganda officer, it was to gain intelligence and provide analysis on Western and South Vietnamese intentions and motivation, as noted before. For instance, Pham deduced late in 1964 that the U.S. would escalate its troop presence drastically in 1965-66 essentially through analysis work, from his contacts in American and RVN intel offices (he maintained excellent contacts with CIO, which sought to use him as an agent, as well as with Lou Conein and Ed Lansdale besides Western journalists). He also provided much of the planning data for the VCI's Saigon offensive during Tet in 1968, assisting greatly in the remarkable infiltration of VCI troops into the city. Those missions would have been impossible if RVN intelligence believed he was a Communist agent provocateur. See Larry Berman's Perfect Spy for the best rundown on Pham's career, as well as a more detailed rebuttal of the idea of Pham as propagandist to the Western press.

It's interesting that you choose to use an anthropolgy of the Mekong delta as evidence of the social leanings of the Vietnamese people--preciscly the place where Diem's COIN effort was least successful--even in Moyar's account.

The Mekong was critical to RVN in terms of strategic access to Saigon, as well as forming a rather large part of the agricultural productivity and population of the country. If Diem wasn't going to win in the Mekong, it wouldn't have been much of a victory. More importantly, Elliott's account helps undercut Moyar's characterization of South Vietnamese village politics as essentially authoritarian, as responsive only to terror or propaganda, and the villagers themselves as incapable of forming political opinions or possessing social aspirations.

[stanleywinthrop]

Stanley, pg. 160 is not my main beef with Moyar - just a laughable example of his valorization of the Diem regime and its, shall we say, unironic estimation of its effectiveness. I just pulled it out because I have Moyar's book on my desk - randomly flipped and found that hilarious passage. Moyar also hints that the Social Purification Law hurt Diem with journalists because their entertainment was curtailed, with no evidence cited - par for the course for Moyar.

My main beef is that you initally played this passage as Moyar's main belief about why western media did not like Diem. He clearly states in other places (which I will reference when I get my book back,if you desire) the reasons he thinks they disliked Diem (which I explained above), which have nothing to do with the Social Purification Law.

His cover was as a journalist, but his mission was not to be a propaganda officer, it was to gain intelligence and provide analysis on Western and South Vietnamese intentions and motivation, as noted before...Those missions would have been impossible if RVN intelligence believed he was a Communist agent provocateur.

Because his main mission was not as a propoganda officer, you think Moyar should take his communications at face value? Where does Moyar say that Pham behaved stupidly enough that SVN intelligence should have suspected him?

[tequila]

My main beef is that you initally played this passage as Moyar's main belief about why western media did not like Diem. He clearly states in other places (which I will reference when I get my book back,if you desire) the reasons he thinks they disliked Diem (which I explained above), which have nothing to do with the Social Purification Law.

Apologies if my snarky tone led you to interpret it in that fashion. My main intent was to mock Moyar's unironic belief in the effectiveness of Madam Nhu's Social Purification Law, of a piece with his generally unskeptical attitude toward many of Diem's policies.

Because his main mission was not as a propoganda officer, you think Moyar should take his communications at face value? Where does Moyar say that Pham behaved stupidly enough that SVN intelligence should have suspected him?

Moyar says that Pham influenced journalists like Karnow, Halberstam, and Sheehan, whom he largely blames for Diem's downfall, in an anti-Diem direction without providing any evidence except that Pham was a Communist agent. That Pham might have acted in the opposite direction to preserve his more important mission as intel operative and analyst is not credited or discussed. See pg. 215 of Moyar.

Skimming over a bit more of pg. 215, I also see that Moyar apparently believes that Confucianism is a religion, that being a member of the Confucian "religion" means one cannot be a Buddhist or harbor Buddhist beliefs, and that Vietnamese peasants approved of governments that crushed public demonstrations with force.

[Steve Blair]

Again your line of reasoning is confusing to me. Are you saying that while Pham was a communist agent he acted "more Catholic than the Pope" to avoid suspicion, and this necessarily included not spreading communist propaganda and disinformation to the press? What was his purpose as a communist agent, to back up Diem's claims that he was winning the war?

If you stop to think about it from a classic subversion standpoint, it would make perfect sense for Pham to back the claims of the Diem regime. Why? Because then fewer people would look at what was really going on in the countryside and VCI activity could continue unchecked.

It's also worth noting that the majority of the ethnic Vietnamese population of SVN was in the Mekong Delta region (generally speaking...although both III and IV CTZs were densely populated compared to the rest of the country) so an examination of Diem's popularity in that region is perfectly justified. The relevance of the central government at the village level in Vietnam during this period is still the subject of some debate, but one thing that isn't debated is that Diem was not especially popular at that level (this shows up both in recent research and contemporary studies...some of which came out before the coup). Still, as Ken points out (and I'll paraphrase) "he may have been a bastard, but he was their bastard." Diem had precious little in common with the common folk of SVN, but they at least understood his brand of corruption. Could we have "won" with him? Doubtful.

[stanleywinthrop]

Could we have "won" with him? Doubtful.

But we clearly did not "win" without him, which is one of Moyar's main themes, and one of the main reasons for history, to ponder such questions.

[Steve Blair]

But we clearly did not "win" without him, which is one of Moyar's main themes, and one of the main reasons for history, to ponder such questions.

Sure, but I don't think there's as much to ponder as Moyar seems to think. Diem was a part of the equation, but the GVN was also sinking quickly with him. There is no reason to suspect, based on both his performance and that of the people around him, that he could have "pulled the rabbit out of the hat" and salvaged SVN.

[Sigaba]

With this sort of clear-eyed history, how could Moyar have failed to gain tenure?

IMO, what has failed Moyar thus far is his approach to historiography and his professionalism in general.

Above all else, he wants to be right and everyone who disagrees with him to know that they are wrong. One is not going to succeed with that type of approach in a profession dominated by academics who came of age protesting that war. (Especially when one is reliant upon another person's foreign language skills.)

[PeterJensen]

Has anybody heard of the new book "A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq" by Mark Moyar? And does anyone know which approaches Moyar uses in his new book? And how he regards counterinsurgency through the period?

Thanks in advance.

[Sigaba]

Has anybody heard of the new book "A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq" by Mark Moyar? And does anyone know which approaches Moyar uses in his new book? And how he regards counterinsurgency through the period?

Thanks in advance.

Peter--

FWIW, Yale University Press has a page for the book available here. From the blurbs, one may gain a sense of Moyar's trajectory of inquiry. YMMV.

[PeterJensen]

Thanks Sigaba
I have read the blurbs and know from other references, that he focuses on leaderhip and character, but does anyone know more about Moyar's approaches in his new book?

[MattC86]

My boss has an advance copy, I've been bugging him about it for days, but he despises Moyar, and hasn't really looked at it.

Will offer some insights ASAP.

Matt