Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Vietnam War may already be the most written about war in US history. All of this writing and rewriting – and refighting – of the war flows in large measure from the daunting reality that the United States lost the war. Victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan. World War II was the “good war” because Americans celebrated its outcome as evidence of their nation's power and moral virtue. The Korean War has been the “forgotten war” because its stalemated conclusion prompted neither congratulations nor recrimination. The Vietnam War is the “endless war,” a subject locked into a protracted debate over the responsibility for and the significance of the outcome. The absence of consensus on key questions about the origins, conduct, and results of the American war in Vietnam does not arise from an absence of information. On some aspects of US involvement there are vast amounts of documentation in presidential libraries, other government archives, media accounts, memoirs, and oral histories. Although secrecy of government records has plagued the work of historians of the Cold War era, many of the once-classified papers have been released in the years since the war ended in 1975. There are some significant exceptions to this pattern, such as Central Intelligence Agency materials and other records of covert operations, but thousands of pages of military, diplomatic, political, and ... log in or subscribe to read full text