It's a shame that the author seemed so bitter about a new wave of revisionism reacting against the "reliable" products that came out in the 1960s...

Seriously, I always find it interesting when one side of the political spectrum comes out guns-blazing against the opposite side when it comes to historical writing. One could almost smell the torches being kindled to burn two "witches" at the stake for going against conventional liberal wisdom regarding Vietnam. Not that I agree with Sorley and Moyar and their positions on Vietnam...I tend after many years of study to come closer to the view that all we were doing was postponing the inevitable...and the question was more a matter of how much time we were buying our client state in the process. Hard-core liberals have the same cut and paste function when it comes to history...witness the efforts on the part of some of them to claim that Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam...ignoring his own personal ties to Diem and general lack of foreign policy success. He was too afraid of "losing" Vietnam...a fear he passed on to Johnson who had even less foreign policy experience and knowledge.

Like most historical events, the "truth" of Vietnam lies somewhere in the middle. It's very much a mix of misperceptions, colored by Cold War thinking and worldviews that need to be considered when writing about the subject. We might have bought the South more breathing room had we gone with an Abrams strategy in the early 1960s as opposed to the big war/Korea theory, but at the end of the day it would have been just that...buying time.