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Learning From Failure
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13556 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
2,785 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
DEMOCRACY, STRATEGY, AND VIETNAM
Implications for American Policymaking
Edited by George K. Osborn, Asa A. Clark IV,
Daniel J. Kaufman, and Douglas E. Lute
Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath, 1987
373 pp., $35.00 (hardcover), $16.95 (paperback)
Within a couple years after the last American units were dispatched from Vietnam in 1975, the war had ceased being a matter of passionate concern to the public. Despite the predictions of some prowar advocates during the 1960s, an American failure in Vietnam did not set off a backlash of recrimination similar to what had taken place in Germany after World War I or in France after the French retreat from North Africa and Indochina. Rather, the country was enveloped in a temporary mass amnesia in which the need to forget triumphed over any desire to learn from the Vietnamese debacle. For most Americans, "letting Saigons be bygones" seemed to be the only sensible policy for a seemingly unwinnable war, a conflict in which the United States had done all that could be expected only to witness her erstwhile South Vietnamese allies' sudden collapse in 1975.
In the "dream factory" of Hollywood, the war was viewed as a total disaster. In numerous films such as Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now, the typical Vietnam veteran was permanently scarred, emotionally and physically, by the war. Only in the latter half of the 1980s have films such as Hamburger Hill and Gardens of Stone appeared with a more complex view of America's role in the war. The world
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