| Vietnam: A History |  | Author: Stanley Karnow
Publisher: Naval Inst Pr
Category: Book
Buy New: $69.60
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Avg. Customer Rating:  60 reviews
Sales Rank: 2244878
Media: Hardcover
ISBN: 9998527287
EAN: 9789998527287
ASIN: 9998527287
Publication Date: June 1983
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Condition: THE HARDCOVER BOOK! VIKING, 1991. THE UNABRIGED 1ST EDITION, REVISED AND UPDATED IN 1991. WITH GREAT PHOTOGRAPHS! HARDCOVER BOOK W/GILT LETTERING, DUST JACKET AND PAGES ARE NEW! Rapid shipping w/FREE tracking. GREAT PACKAGING . Air Mail.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 55 more reviews...
 Good but lacking and lopsided July 11, 2008
For a so-called "complete" history of Vietnam, this book was decidedly lopsided in some areas. For example, he spends hundreds of pages with useful and interesting pre-1965 historical background, but then skims over the post-1969 events, which were some of the most crucial. He does the same with the political leaders involved, describing Generals Ky and Khan, even though each of them only ruled for a short period of time, while devoting little time to exploring Thieu's biography, even though he played the dominant role for much of our involvement there. For the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, Karnow provides rich details of the internal debates, politics, and considerations. One gets the sense that the author's contacts ran out after Nixon won the election, so he doesn't really discuss this period in nearly as much depth.
Overall, I would preferred if the author had given us a bit more of a sense of South Vietnam, why it did not fight and was riddled with corruption, the personalities involved, etc. The best parts of the book are undoubtedly when he recalls interviews from vietnamese, North and South, who played key roles, providing fresh information.
This book was a useful overview of the Vietnam War and its roots, but doesn't really provide any new insights or in-depth understanding of Vietnam the country.
 Vietnam: A Long History Thus A Long Book April 7, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
It was a long book - for good reason - so stick with me. I also took some time aside to view the items outlined above to give me a visual and cinematic sense of what happened in Vietnam and how the whole business is perceived - before, during, and after. Vietnam: A History, as previously mentioned, is an extensive and detailed account of the goings on in Vietnam. Karnow begins as early as 208 B.C. (Karnow 55 - 127) and culminates with the departure from Saigon in 1975 (Karnow 631). In a sense, because Karnow covered the Vietnam War, this could be considered a primary document - at least the last decade covering '64 to `75. Karnow provides what I see as an attempt to give a balanced perspective of the war - in an effort to give both the Vietnamese and the Americans a sense of what was going on.
Connected and intelligent, Karnow weaves his way between the common people and to the highest offices and we live vicariously through him. One could almost argue that these are musings of an intelligence officer as it provides stark cultural insight the likes of which have been followed up by someone like a John Dower when he writes a book like War without Mercy . I bring up Dower for a very specific reason, although this is not a new argument we, in the U.S. (and this is not unique to the U.S., mind you) seem to get caught in quagmires because we fail to see who and what we are up against with clear 20/20 vision. Many lessons learned about cultural, military, and our policy of intervention seem to be lost on the current administration - even the language is the same. I will focus on the issue of cultural misunderstanding.
One of the reasons we failed so badly in Vietnam, Karnow argues, is because we failed to know our enemy (Karnow 98 - 99). All throughout the book, Karnow was screaming for us to get an objective sense of what was going on in Vietnam. In short, we were looking at Vietnam as a civil war when in reality it was a product of centuries of struggle for self-rule. Karnow weaves a narrative of nationalistic consciousness from as early as their engagement with Chinese. China, Karnow pens invaded Vietnam (at least the northern section) as early as 208 B.C. (Karnow 99). In what was the nascent Vietnam, the Champa invasion from India also has a powerful impact on this nationalistic consciousness (Karnow 98, 103). Looking to free themselves from the clutches of the Chinese, the Annamese - as their Chinese invaders called then, the proud descendants of Le Loi and Le Than Tong sought solace in the dry Analects of Confucius (Karnow 105 - 106).
As early as the mid 1800s the French brought their conquering ways and mission civilsatrice (Karnow 60-65). With the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia from the middle to mid 1940s, France has lost its hold of Vietnam but sought, with the help of the U.S. to regain control of its territories of Laos, Cambodia, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina - the latter three making up what we now know to be Vietnam (Karnow 111). From this wish to regain control will we see the rise of Ho Chi Minh - who, despite arguments to the contrary was a nationalist first and communist second (Karnow 135 - 136).
American strategists would be obsessed with pegging Ho Chi Minh as communist - one would argue to ensure consistency with the domino theory (Karnow 43, 169, 250, 252, 326, and 378). Karnow writes, "The American crusade, propelled as it was by the "domino theory," and the naive assumption that the entire region would collapse to the Communists if they won in Vietnam, disregarded the complex nationalistic diversity in Southeast Asia. Two "dominoes" - Laos and Cambodia - have toppled since the war in Vietnam. Much of Laos, however, had been virtual Vietnamese provinces for years, and Cambodia suffered unimaginable horrors - more because of the insane cruelty of its own Communist regime than as a consequence of Vietnamese ambitions" (Karnow 43 - 44). In effect, our ignorance of these issues led to a shallow understanding of the deep seated nationalistic struggle and long term Vietnamese struggle for self-determination that Ho Chi Minh tapped into. From a military perspective, the same can apply in terms of not reading or misunderstanding the past.
For the French, the lessons of underestimating the Vietnamese came in Dienbienphu IN 1953 (Karnow 191) - when the Vietnamese surrounded the French and no one seemed ready (Karnow 189 - 191, 194 - 198). The legacy of Dienbienphu would rear its ugly head when the U.S. underestimating the drive and resourcefulness of the North Vietnamese were not able to plan an orderly escape from Saigon in 1974 and with Westmoreland's attempt to save Khesanh (Karnow 540 - 541). Again, not understanding the Vietnamese resolve, "General Westmoreland had conceived a long range-strategy even before Lyndon Johnson fulfilled his request for more American battalions" (Karnow 435). Westmoreland either ignored or failed to hear Ton That Tung declare "There was extraordinary fervor then. The Americans thought that the more bombs they dropped, the quicker we would fall to our knees and surrender. But the bombs heightened rather than dampened our spirit" (Karnow 435).
McNamara, in The Fog of War is keen to explain the cost/benefit ratios and models he used to analyze the bombing efficiencies to be gained and his recommendations used to alter the flight plans to fire bomb Tokyo. I wonder how he sleeps at night... but it seems like the same sort of reasoning was put into effect in Vietnam with disastrous results and great loss of human life and no movement forward towards peace. Folks like Ton That Tung argue that the opposite actually happened - it increased their resolve.
In A Bright Shining Lie, the argument foisted through the character of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann was that the way to win the `hearts and minds' was through rice. By wining the people, you don't give the enemy a place to hide - in the end, even Vann fell prey to the notion that we need to destroy them (Karnow 260 - 262).
While watching Heart of Darkness: The Vietnam War Chronicles 1945 - 1975, one is introduced to how extensive the Intelligence gathering had become during the Vietnam War. Still, this was not a conventional war. It was not fought in the front lines - it was fought everywhere. In effect, Vietnam: A History really gives us a sense of perspective and shows us our lack of objectivity vis-a-vis the Vietnam War. The current engagement in Iraq is starting to challenge the Vietnam War in terms of longevity. The resilience and tactics as well as cultural misunderstanding is starting to sound like an echo from the past. As the body count begins to climb in Iraq - as it was starting to do in Vietnam - the parallels are almost creepy.
Karnow, I would argue, writes because of a strong sense of the importance of history. He draws from an extensive archive and is archive himself. Karnow's method is almost ethnographic as he uses interviews extensively. Karnow brings up controversial topics but has the sources to prove them - this and his extensive book on the Philippines In Our Image should be required reading in any engagement of the U.S. in Southeast Asia.
If Karnow's history of Vietnam shows us our lack of objectivity and shows us how these misunderstandings shaped the way the actors dealt with the war - should we not be hearkening back to those days not in nostalgia but with a sense of caution? Sometimes moving into the future means taking a long heard look at our modern day `heart of darkness' instead of trying to winning over anyone's `hearts and minds' when in the end, it is us we are thinking about and not them.
Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History.
Supporting media: Bright Shining Lie, Deer Hunter, Heart of Darkness: The Vietnam War Chronicles 1945 - 1975, Hearts and Minds, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, and The Fog of War
Miguel Llora
 poorly researched and providing little insight into the war March 23, 2008
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book has given an authority that its contents and research in no way deserves. A more appopriate title would be "Vietnam: An American mythology" because facts be damned, Karnow is dedicated to telling the story he wants to tell.
The first thing to understand is that the majority of this book does not concern itself with America's "vietnam war" in terms of the large conventional conflict between 1965 and 1975. Karnow spends the first 426 pages leading up to 1965. What should be background in some sense consumes the book. And in terms of the book, the historical subjects are where Karnow's knowledge is worst. As an example, Karnow describes Chinese, Roman and 19th century french methods of rule as essentially the same system. He fails to grasp that Vietnam was under chinese rule for the majority of its history and that "nationalism" was the exception rather than the rule.
His coverage of Ho Chi Minh essentially is the propoganda view of the man himself. Karnow is incapable of looking beyond it or doing original research on his subject. He gets the facts of what happened in 1945 completely wrong. He buy's into Ho's propoganda that the Ho led a popular "revolution" against the Japanese. In reality, the surrendering Japanese in 1945 handed over power to a variety of local groups with the goal of causing the allies trouble. Contrary to Karnow's poor research, there was no revolution in 1945 and there was no Viet Minh "government" except on paper. The Viet Minh were so weak that they were pushed aside by the local french within a few weeks without even support from the outside.
Karnow disposes of the French war in Vietnam in around 30 pages. Following the mythology script, he focuses most of his attention on Dien Bien Phu and ignores the complexity and details of the French phase. Its a superficial account at best.
The Eisenhower and Kennedy chapters on Diem show off Karnow's basic ignorance of the situation in Vietnam at that time. Rather than being about Vietnam, its more like Vietnam as seen by Washington in those years. There is no attempt at understanding the actual politics of the Diem era. The information on North Vietnam (or as Karnow strangely refers to them "the communists") is completely lacking. The internal politics of North Vietnam are ignored as much as possible.
As an example of Karnow's strange views: "In May 1959, the North Vietnamese leadership created a unit called Group 559, its task to begin enlarging the tradtional communist infiltration route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, into the south." Group 559 in reality launched an invasion of Laos putting a large part of the territory of that counry under Vietnamese rule which continues on even now. Karnow's notion of a "traditional infiltration route" is completely false. North Vietnam invaded Laos to flank the border of south vietnam and to use occupied Laos as a base for attacking Vietnam.
As the book goes on, Karnow presents the traditional mythology about peaceful neutral cambodia. What he fails to say is that Sihanouk was a dictator who murdered his opponents and kept power by alternately allying himself with the left and the right. He also fails to mention the well-known fact that rather than being neutral, Sihanouk (and cambodia) had signed a deal with China were their rice crop would be bought at an inflated price in exchange for opening cambodian ports to arms shipments and allowing Vietnamese bases on cambodian soil. The so-called "neutrality" story that Karnow repeats is nonsense.
The last couple of hundred pages that cover the war itself give a mixed up account that does a disservice to both the military and political history of the war. He doesn't understand how the war was fought in Vietnam, he doesn't understand the politics of any of the players and he is deeply attached to the mythology that vietnam was a "gureilla war" fought against a local insurgency. He doesn't pick up on the fact that Vietnam was largely a conventional war fought between large units with no front lines. Entire divisions of north vietnam came south to fight american divisions in the field. The counterinsurgency mythology of vietnam on the part of Karnow and many others is in no small part due to the fact that reporters were stationed in Saigon and did day-trips out to counterinsurgency operations in the Saigon area.
And Karnow gets how the war ended completely wrong. The war ended because the entire North Vietnamese army launched a conventional military invasion with tanks over the border. In the end, the "invincible" insurgency in the countryside couldn't win anything.
Karnow is also useless in terms of the legacy of the war. The book ends with the North Vietnamese celebrating their victory in Saigon. He doesn't cover the disaster of the postwar era. He doesn't cover the irony of "Imperial" Vietnam turning Laos and Cambodia into colonies within a few years of the war except to note it as minimally as he can. While we get hundreds of pages of history on the front end of the war, North Vietnam marching into Saigon is the end of history.
In summary this is a bad book. It spends way too many pages on the wrong subjects, suffers from a lack of research, depends too much on anicdotal views of history and presents an utterly misleading version of the war.
For those who want a complete (but very dry) accurate military history of the conflict, I suggest "The Rise and Fall of an American Army by Shelby Stanton." For those interested in the complete story of Cambodia, I would suggest the first half of Pol Pot Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short.
Stanley Karnow is an appaulingly bad historian and I keep hoping for a more accurate generalist history of the war to eclipse this book. But there still is nothing out there.
Vietnam: A History February 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The late Stanley Karnow, while writing for American audiences, provides an authoritative history of one of the most divided periods of our times. A must for any student or participant of the the period.
The Best Research Book on Vietnam December 23, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was required reading for a class on the Vietnam War at the University of Nebraska. Excellent research vehicle to understand the backround of Vietnam and its trials and tribulations. Starts from the begining and takes you thru the American Vietnam War with an even keel look with a middle of the road written word.
I still use it as a reference while writing my book about the Vietnam War during 1968-69. This book should be read first, before any other Vietnam book, to lay the ground work for all the other Vietnam books that follow.
LB 68-69
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