The Vietnam War : an intimate history by Geoffrey C. Ward; Ken BurnsFrom the award-winning historian and filmmakers of The Civil War, Baseball, The War, The Roosevelts, and others: a vivid, uniquely powerful history of the conflict that tore America apart--the companion volume to the major, multipart PBS film to be aired in September 2017. More than forty years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war: U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers and their families, high-level officials in America and Vietnam, antiwar protestors, POWs, and many more. The book plunges us into the chaos and intensity of combat, even as it explains the rationale that got us into Vietnam and kept us there for so many years. Rather than taking sides, the book seeks to understand why the war happened the way it did, and to clarify its complicated legacy. Beautifully written and richly illustrated, this is a tour de force that is certain to launch a new national conversation.
Call Number: DS557.7.W368 2017
ISBN: 9780307700254
The Columbia History of the Vietnam War by David Anderson (Editor)Rooted in recent scholarship, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War offers profound new perspectives on the political, historical, military, and social issues that defined the war and its effect on the United States and Vietnam. Laying the chronological and critical foundations for the volume, David L. Anderson opens with an essay on the Vietnam War's major moments and enduring relevance. Mark Philip Bradley follows with a reexamination of Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism and the Vietminh-led war against French colonialism. Richard H. Immerman revisits Eisenhower's and Kennedy's efforts at nation building in South Vietnam, and Gary R. Hess reviews America's military commitment under Kennedy and Johnson. Lloyd C. Gardner investigates the motivations behind Johnson's escalation of force, and Robert J. McMahon focuses on the pivotal period before and after the Tet Offensive. Jeffrey P. Kimball then makes sense of Nixon's paradoxical decision to end U.S. intervention while pursuing a destructive air war. John Prados and Eric Bergerud devote essays to America's military strategy, while Helen E. Anderson and Robert K. Brigham explore the war's impact on Vietnamese women and urban culture. Melvin Small recounts the domestic tensions created by America's involvement in Vietnam, and Kenton Clymer traces the spread of the war to Laos and Cambodia. Concluding essays by Robert D. Schulzinger and George C. Herring account for the legacy of the war within Vietnamese and American contexts and diagnose the symptoms of the "Vietnam syndrome" evident in later debates about U.S. foreign policy. America's experience in Vietnam continues to figure prominently in discussions about strategy and defense, not to mention within discourse on the identity of the United States as a nation. Anderson's expert collection is therefore essential to understanding America's entanglement in the Vietnam War and the conflict's influence on the nation's future interests abroad.
The War Within: America's battle over Vietnam by Tom WellsThe Vietnam war left a gash in the heart of America that can still be felt today. The War Within is the definitive history of America's internal battle over that war, and it chronicles, as no other book has done, the full story of how a powerful grassroots force--the antiwar movement--changed the course of American history. Tom Wells spent over ten years painstakingly researching government and antiwar-movement documents and interviewing virtually every key player from the Vietnam era--from Dean Rusk, William Westmoreland, and John Ehrlichman to Dave Dellinger, Philip Berrigan, and Daniel Ellsberg. Wells moves from protests at the White House gates to antiwar meeting halls, recreating the activities of the student factions, religious organizations, political splinter groups, and other organizations that waged campaigns of mass protest, draft resistance, civil disobedience, and sometimes political violence. Here, too, are the behind-the-scenes planning sessions of Democratic and Republican administrations as they sought to discredit and subvert the antiwar movement's efforts. Wells demonstrates that Washington took the antiwar movement seriously at every stage of the war and that the movement was instrumental in the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Southeast Asia. He also reveals how the movement's growing influence prompted the Watergate fiasco. And he graphically conveys the internecine conflicts that plagued the antiwar movement and its leaders. In these pages the human drama of the antiwar era unfolds through the words of its participants, both the famous and the forgotten. Wells not only captures the spirit of these tumultuous times but also shows how the events of twenty-five years ago shaped the America of today.
Speech delivered at New York City's Riverside Church on April 4th 1967.
Telltale Hearts : the origins and impact of the Vietnam antiwar movement by Adam GarfinkleMore than two decades after the end of the Vietnam War, America's wounds have yet to heal; the war's divisiveness continues. Yet today, even the most hard-line hawks and doves share the conviction that, for better or worse, the antiwar movement played an important role in turning American opinion against the war, thereby limiting and ultimately ending U.S. military activity in Southeast Asia. In Telltale Hearts, Adam Garfinkle convincingly demonstrates that this widely accepted view is wrong. Garfinkle argues that the movement, even at its radical height, had but a marginal impact on limiting and ending the war and in fact unwittingly helped to prolong it, thereby killing more people on both sides. The movement, in the end, was simply not as important as other factors, such as the contours of normal electoral politics, the ebb and flow of battle, and the devastating misjudgments made by a series of American civil and military leaders. However, by following the movement into the present, the author concludes that it has in fact had a powerful, and greatly underestimated, postwar influence.
"The May 2nd Movement was formed to fight against a politics of default, specifically by organizing student protest and revolt against our government's savage war on the people of Vietnam."
In an August 7, 2002 NPR broadcast, Cronkite recalls the gradual change in journalistic approach, and the public attitude, toward the Vietnam War in the 1960s.