Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965–1968

Hillsdale College historian Moyar follows up Triumph Forsaken with another unabashed defense of America’s “honorable” and “worthy” intentions in the Vietnam War. Refuting prevailing wisdom, Moyar praises Gen. William Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy missions for “inflict[ing] massive losses on the North Vietnamese” while sparing South Vietnamese civilians from “the ravages of war,” and blames America’s defeat on President Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to listen to his generals; “biased and ill-informed” reporting by American journalists, who were “eager” to make the U.S. military and the South Vietnamese government look bad, but disregarded atrocities committed by the North Vietnamese; and the undue influence of “liberal elites” and the antiwar movement. Mixing detailed depictions of large and small combat engagements with extended analyses of war planning in the U.S. and North Vietnam, Moyar steadfastly highlights the “leadership, discipline, and professionalism” of the American military and downplays evidence to the contrary. (The My Lai massacre and its cover-up gets only five paragraphs, including a begrudging admission that some officers “worried that acknowledgment of what had happened could undermine the broader American war effort or could destroy their careers or those of officers at higher levels of authority.”) Though Moyar excavates some intriguing information from North Vietnamese sources, this revisionist history is more provocative than persuasive. (Jan.)