Unraveling Myths

Mark Moyar, who's book Triumph Forsaken was reviewed in the Weekly Standard a short while ago, has an article in the Christian Science Monitor today. In it he explains how so much of the "history" of the Vietnam war became mired in myth. It is not at all a pretty picture and shows just how dangerous bad journalism can be for the nation and the world. Moyar's extensive research into communist archives proves that the "conventional wisdom" about Vietnam has been very badly twisted by three journalists and their distortions and subsequent coverup of their actions.

Three journalists handed down the standard version of the Vietnam War in three bestselling tomes. The first two, David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" (1972) and Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History," (1983) each sold more than 1 million copies, while the third, Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" (1988), received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

These books have profoundly influenced almost everything else that has been written about the Vietnam War. Because of the iconic status of these journalists and the political inclinations of the intelligentsia, the three books received few serious challenges – prior to the publication last summer of my "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965."

Historians such as Guenter Lewy, Lewis Sorley, and Michael Lind have also effectively contested some of the journalists' basic interpretations, and antiwar historians have produced more modest modifications, but the Halberstam-Sheehan-Karnow rendition of the war has remained dominant.

One reason for the durability of their version is that the endless repetition by other commentators produced the impression that it had to be right. Earlier, when writing a book on counterinsurgency in the latter years of the war entitled "Phoenix and the Birds of Prey," I, too, presumed that the first half of the war had been covered exhaustively. Only after many subsequent forays into archives and Vietnamese-language sources did I discover that the standard narrative of the critical early years was terribly wrong.

The books of Messrs. Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow can be fully understood only in the light of the authors' actions in Vietnam during 1962 and 1963. Their writings were key elements in the drama, particularly in the summer and fall of 1963 when the US Embassy instigated a coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

It is an extremely interesting read. I still have not read Moyar's book, but intend to. Even more so now, I think. Moyar is a historian, not a journalist. And he has gone to great lengths to research this book using original sources. His evidence appears to be pretty compelling that the conventional wisdom is incorrect.