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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....

How Journalistic Falsehoods Set In Motion the Eventual "Loss" of the Vietnam War An excerpt from Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-1965 by Mark Moyar (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006). "In 1963, the American journalists David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan played pivotal roles in turning influential Americans and South Vietnamese against the Diem regime. Their reporting on military events was inaccurate at times, and it regularly overemphasized the South Vietnamese government's shortcomings. Colonel John Paul Vann, a U.S. Army adviser and the central figure in Sheehan's book A Bright Shining Lie, was more dishonest in dealing with the press than Sheehan...