Withdrawal

Starred review from August 1, 2017
A historical revision of the last few years of the Vietnam War.In this fine, thoroughly argued book, Daddis, the director of Chapman University's MA Program in War and Society and the author of two well-regarded books on the war (Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam, 2014, etc.), tackles the relatively understudied final years. He engages with a revisionist theory that emerged a few years after America's withdrawal from the war, an argument that took a handful of different forms. For these revisionists, who tended to be defenders of the war and its legacy, the U.S. did not lose the war but rather lost the peace--or if it did lose the war, it was not a military defeat but a political one caused by weak-willed politicians who refused to carry through on the military's pending victory. At the heart of this "better war" narrative is the changing of the military leadership in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive as Gen. Creighton Abrams led the U.S. forces away from the failed policies of Gen. William Westmoreland. In reasoned prose, Daddis, a retired Army colonel who served in both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, eviscerates this revisionist argument. He takes readers methodically through the realities of Vietnam from spring 1968, showing how the change in strategy was not that profound in terms of its impact on the ground, that the separation of military from political policies represents a false dichotomy, and, perhaps most importantly, that the argument that the military could have won the war had the politicians only unshackled the military utterly ignores, among other elements, the agency of the Vietnamese people. Furthermore, the author reveals how the "better war" argument has real, modern-day ramifications, manifesting in equally flawed arguments about Gen. David Petraeus' so-called "surge" in Iraq in 2007. Solid scholarly history that should arouse spirited arguments among historians and will also appeal to a wider audience.

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July 31, 2017
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.