Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam

In this second volume in a two-part reassessment of the American war in Vietnam, Daddis, a retired Army colonel who teaches at Chapman University, expands on the arguments he made in 2014’s Westmoreland’s War. He continues to recast the accepted view of the abject failure of Gen. William Westmoreland’s war-of-attrition strategy and to shatter the idea that his successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, implemented a more successful one—only to have Congress, the antiwar movement, and the media snatch defeat from the hands of victory. Daddis mines official records and solid secondary sources to suggest that Westmoreland took a more nuanced approach than that for which he is generally credited. Daddis also posits that Abrams made no significant changes in strategy after he took over in 1968 and that the war effort was doomed for reasons that had very little to do with politicians, the media, or antiwar demonstrators. He persuasively argues that few U.S. historians have factored in the most important determinant of the war’s outcome: the role of the Vietnamese. Daddis’s sound and convincing advice is to look at the Vietnam War “as many Vietnamese see it—the American War”—in other words, as one part of a long fight for self-determination. (Oct.)