Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Vietnam: A History
Book Review: Vietnam: I Was Right (and no Democrats are to blame!)
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm frankly stunned that this book has such a high rating. I found reading it such an exasperating - and ultimately unrewarding - experience that I can't imagine recommending it to anyone.
Yes, Karnow has won a Pulitzer Prize (as he points out in the book, just about every reporter who consistently wrote critically about the war did). But if the publisher did not proudly announce that fact on the cover, the reader would probably never guess. Karnow's writing is simply too scatter shot, too opinionated, too biased, and even at times childish.
The book is called 'Vietnam: A History', which gives the impression that it's intended to primarily be about the country, not the war. But very little is told about the early history of Vietnam. We are very quickly taken to French control of the country, then a little time is spent on the French/Vietnamese War, with the bulk taken up by the American/Vietnamese war. The little bit of pre-war Vietnam history is interesting. But the rest of the book suffers from major problems, which I noticed and noted as I read through the book, and which form a consistent narrative:
1. Karnow lionizes General Giap, calling him a 'genius'. Yet Giap lost almost every single direct action against French and American forces, including Tet, which was an embarrassment for the NV. Giap's victories, as they were, came in the form of guerrilla action and terrorism, war methods which do not require a tactical or strategical mastermind. Yet Karnow speaks almost adoringly of Giap, whom he sympathetically interviews later in life.
2. Karnow is unwilling to squarely place blame for the mismanagement of the Vietnam War on Kennedy and Johnson. Kennedy is simply let off the hook, his desire to fight communism around the world simply dismissed as "desire to appease red-baiting Republicans". Johnson's numerous errors are listed, but always softened, both with the same criticism (his hawkishness was always because he feared Republicans making fun of him) and with the excuse that Johnson cared more about his "New New Deal", the "Great Society", than his war. Karnow actually argues that Johnson just pushed the Vietnam war because he was afraid if he didn't, Republicans would stop his "Great Society". This becomes increasingly difficult as Johnson becomes more hawkish on the war, but Karnow gives it the college try. Of course, the fact that the "Great Society" was a failure escapes Karnow, who routinely praises it as some grand and just project. Many historians have suggested that the Vietnam war was actually an extension of Johnson's "Great Society": both were fundamentally attempts to transform the lives of a people via management by a group of elites using social programs and vast injections of cash. Both were abysmal failures.
3. Karnow routinely plays up American mistakes and individual atrocities (like My Lai, which is mentioned several times, along with unsourced allegations that My Lai meant there were other atrocities that went unreported) and the execution of an NV operative by Nguyen Ngoc Loan. He plays up every imprisonment by the SV government, and even painstakingly recounts every detail of a torture scenario he claims to have witnessed, although he admits he had no idea what it was about. Yet he routinely dismisses or downplays communist atrocities, such as the capture and torturing of South Vietnamese by the VC, their regular rape and murder of civilians or the murderous 'land reforms' enacted by Ho, or the bombing of the Brinks hotel by NV operatives. This last one is particularly infuriating: Karnow calls the operation 'daring' and 'crafted with painstaking care' (the entire plan involved the terrorists stealing SV uniforms and parking a car with a bomb in it at the hotel, then walking away).
4. Karnow repeatedly and forcefully rejects the notion that the media helped turn public opinion against the war, claiming the media only reflected public opinion. Then he tells us that while the media was very negative about the war, the public were generally positive ... until Tet, which was a decisive victory for American and SV forces, but was sold as a loss by the media, which changed public opinion virtually overnight. This is a bizarre one because Karnow is quite vainglorious and wants to play up his role, and the role of others who helped him undermine the war effort, but doesn't want to shoulder the burden for helping lose the war.
5. Karnow spends very little time actually discussing military action, rather focusing for torturous lengths on back room arguments between officials. Around 1968/1969 the book totally bogs down as Karnow goes into every memo and argument sent to and from the White House. Most battles, even major set pieces, are completely passed over ... although Karnow painstakingly describes some communist victories, like the taking of Bienhoa, and repeatedly reminds us whenever a battle for a city that was won by Americans caused damage to that city.
6. Any official who was against the war from the beginning, or who was initially for the war but later turned against it (such as McNamara) is lauded as a hero. Any official who was against the war but later became hawkish is described as 'selling out their impeccable liberal credentials'. Any official who was for the war is described as a fool, or blinded by 'fear of communism', or a war-monger. Karnow is particularly offensive when he describes the military, dismissing them as 'little boys with big toys' who just wanted to blow stuff up. He puts endless faith in treaties and negotiations, although as he is forced to report the NV were never interested in anything except total victory. Yet every treaty and peace negotiation that fails, he blames on the US.
7. Karnow dismisses the 'domino theory' as errant nonsense and paranoid fantasy ... after China helped try to take Korea, and planned to take Japan via Korea (and, later, via Vietnam); and even though several other Asian leaders such as Prince Sihanouk were quite convinced that the communists would continue to spread throughout Asia if they won in Vietnam. One wonders if Karnow was even aware of the Korean War.
8. Karnow uses his book to settle some petty personal disputes, such as calling some other reporters names for having different opinions about the war. And for a few pages in the middle he begins to engage in a very childish type of alliteration. Perhaps he was bored by his own subject matter.
9. The wheels really come off at the end. When the US finally pulls out of the war, millions of people tried to escape the brutal slaughter coming at the hands of Karnow's beloved communists. Karnow describes the flight of the people, but rather than deal with the actual murderous rampage of the NV regulars, Khmer Rouge, and their ilk, he notes idiotic errata, such as SK soldiers shooting people to get limited space on planes, or management disagreements and slow chain-of-command problems in American response to the coming slaughter. In Karnow's mind, America couldn't even leave Vietnam correctly.
These issues sum up the basic problem with the book: Karnow is a Vietnam War defeatist. He, like so many others, saw a battle between communism and American ideology and sided with the communists. The entire book reflects that viewpoint. Karnow would probably argue that he sided with the Vietnamese, but that's patently false. When crimes and horrors need to be suppressed to help the North Vietnamese cause, Karnow willingly does so. When problems need to be played up to help vilify the South Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans, Karnow willingly does so. The Vietnamese themselves are simply pawns in his narrative. If you buy the narrative, you'll like the book. But if you want real, objective analysis of the Vietnam War, look elsewhere.
Book Review: WORTH THE EXPENSE
Summary: 5 Stars
I have read many books on the Vietnam war, and that culture. This is the best one. It is a great view of the American position, of the Cold War, and of how the Vietnamese prevailed. It is well worth the money.Book Review: Why not tell about the communists?
Summary: 2 Stars
Why we not hear story of the Communists atrocities as much?
Why we not care about 3000 killings of innocent peoples by NVA with VC help at Hue?
Why speak more on communist killings in Laotian highlands.
Pol Pot in Cambodia?
God bless America for what try to do in Vietnam.
Book Review: impressive
Summary: 5 Stars
It took me several tries to get through this densely packed history of Vietnam up to 1975, but I'm glad I made it the third time around. I was most impressed with Karnow's knowledge of all the major players in the 1954 to 1975 period, and how he was able to interweave these individuals' stories into a comprehensive history of the conflicts in Vietnam after World War II.
I have to agree with another review that I read that critiqued Karnow's book as being more focused on the political rather than the military aspects of US involvement; however, that leads to one of the central messages that I got out of this history - the US and the South Vietnam were ultimately unsuccessful because of the failure of the South to be an effective government to their people. The corruption and lack of focus on the average citizen's needs by the Diem and the Thieu governments led these regimes to failure in the end.
Book Review: poorly researched and providing little insight into the war
Summary: 1 Stars
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.