January 2011

For nineteen years I have, as much as possible, avoided movies, books, discussions, anything at all to do with Vietnam. I went and it wasn’t pleasant. When the May/June issue arrived, I picked it up and put it down for two weeks before deciding to read your article “What Should We Tell Our Children about Vietnam?” Maybe nineteen years is long enough.

The article has explained many things to me, and for that I thank Bill McCloud and American Heritage. It also brought back many memories. For that, well, maybe it’s time. Since you have started to help me understand, I ask your help for one more thing.

I can understand why our government must sometimes keep the truth from the public. I also understand our government’s making mistakes and using bad judgment. I cannot understand why it took ten years and thousands of lives to rectify these errors. Help me understand this.

Perhaps it goes without saying that a long war that demands great sacrifice from the populace, particularly one without spectacular victories to buoy the public spirit, will eventually lose support. But the Vietnam conflict did not demand half the sacrifice of World War II, for which support continued strong for the duration. In the case of Vietnam, public support, though strong in the beginning, declined rapidly later on. Why?

Congratulations for publishing Bill McCloud’s excellent article. I agree with the editors that the letters contained in McCloud’s article can serve as beacon lights for an understanding of the Vietnam experience.

Edward Hoagland recommends the 1985 Library of America edition of Thoreau’s works, which includes all four of his books. Dover Publications published The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau in two volumes. As for biographies, Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry David Thoreau (Princeton and Dover) and Robert D. Richardson, Jr.’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (California) are good.

Edward Luttwak is the author of nine books on the art of war, and he pronounces with startling confidence on a great array of events, as the titles of his works suggest. One is The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, another The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union. His most recent book is last year’s Strategy.

I was saddened by the responses of so many eminent Americans when asked “What should we tell our children about Vietnam?” Myths about the nature of U.S. involvement predominate and cloud the real lessons that must be learned if we are to avoid another such tragedy. The truth is:

1. From the very beginning, U.S. intentions were immoral and dishonorable. We sided with the French against a colonial independence movement that had vast popular support. Arrogantly dismissing Ho Chi Minh’s overtures to become a U.S. ally and establish an independent, democratic state, we set up a phony government in the south and twisted the conflict into one of freedom versus communism.

2. We did not lose because our military effort was fettered in any significant way. Indeed, we unleashed on a country about the size of New Mexico the most terrible war any people in history have ever known. More than one million Vietnamese were killed and one and one-half million wounded.

Retired professor of history, Yale University; author of The American Future

Most overrated:

Benjamin Franklin. He overrated himself, to begin with, and historians ever since have believed him. Without a printing press and a larcenous view of other people’s ideas, he would have ended up as a second-rate shopkeeper and third-rate politician. If he were alive today, with access to movies and television, he would be a third-rate former actor in the White House.

Most underrated:

Anyone who has not been a public figure. Think about it.

Book critic and historian; author of American Reformers

Most overrated:

John F. Kennedy. The glitz and dazzle of his Camelot conceal the false dawn of his New Frontier. It is easily forgotten that his Presidency enmeshed us irretrievably in Southeast Asia and set us on a destructive course of anti-Russian arms buildup. Moreover, the Camelot court at the White House was far more show than substance, and has in my opinion contributed to many of the delusions we now harbor about domestic peace and tranquillity.

Most underrated:

Professor of history, Northwestern University

Most overrated:

Harry S. Truman. The dropper of the bombs, the founder of the CIA, the father of the Attorney General’s list: he deserves worse than he has gotten.

Most underrated:

James Wilson. A signer of the Declaration, the author of Pennsylvania’s improved constitution of 1790, a principal drafter of the federal Constitution, the principal ratifier of it, and the profoundest theorist of it, Wilson is the least known of the great founders.

Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History, Yale University

Most overrated:

Nearly any of the Presidents (a group by whom we tend to organize our textbooks, as though their four years somehow defined time for us) who actually did virtually nothing. Even to discuss Chester Arthur or Millard Fillmore is to overrate them.

Most underrated:

The inventors of machines that truly change the way we live, inventors who nonetheless often are missing from any standard text: people like Howard Aiken and team, inventors of the computer, or William Shockley and others, responsible for the transistor.