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Triumph Forsaken The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 by Mark Moyar Cambridge, 542 pp., $32 In the late summer of 1963, President John Kennedy dispatched two observers to South Vietnam. Their mission was to provide the president an assessment of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam. The first, Major General Victor Krulak, USMC, the special assistant for counterinsurgency for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited some ten locations in all four Corps areas of Vietnam. Based on extensive interviews with U.S. advisers to the South Vietnamese army, Krulak concluded that the war was going well....

Success would be achieved when the offensive forced the North Vietnamese to meet at the negotiating table and stop supporting the Viet Cong. U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine airmen flying from bases in Thailand and South Vietnam and from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin were to apply that pressure in the North by disrupting supply routes and destroying resources that facilitated aggression in the South. Specific targets included electric power, war-supporting industry, transportation, military complexes, petroleum storage facilities, and air defenses. Unfortunately, the campaign was compromised and circumscribed by unprecedented micromanagement emanating from the White House and...

The GOP’s destructive Vietnam mythology: How the right’s self-glorifying delusions led to decades of avoidable war It only took about five years from the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, for the American right to succeed in burying the moment under mounds of revisionist horse shit. Ronald Reagan, speaking at a campaign appearance in the summer of 1980, said, It is time that we recognized that [the American War in Vietnam] was, in truth, a noble cause… We dishonor the memory of 50 thousand young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt...

A left-wing high school teacher is actually complaining about a text book’s treatment of the Vietnam War, because it is written for the JROTC. “The authors cite then-President Johnson’s 1964 statements that North Vietnam attacked a U. S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin as the impetus for the broader war, ignoring overwhelming evidence from declassified documents that there was no such attack,” Sylvia McGauley writes in the Fall 2014 issue of the Rethinking Schools periodical. McGauley teaches social studies at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon. As it happens, the official account of what happened at the Gulf in...