Lost Victory

Vietnam Chronicles

The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972

edited by Lewis Sorley

Texas Tech University Press, 917 pp., $50

IT IS SURELY THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom that the United States was predestined to lose the Vietnam war. According to the orthodox view, the Vietnamese Communists were too determined, the South Vietnamese too corrupt, and the Americans incapable of fighting the kind of war that would have been necessary to prevail.

Despite its origins as a staple of left-wing political opinion, the claim that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was inevitable now transcends ideology. Today, when conservatives deny the claim that Iraq is like Vietnam, many do so because they, too, believe the conventional wisdom about Vietnam.

Several years ago, Lewis Sorley provided an antidote to the conventional wisdom, a remarkable book entitled A Better War. Building on his excellent biographies of Army generals Creighton Abrams and Harold Johnson, Sorley examined the largely neglected later years of the conflict and concluded that the war in Vietnam "was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the U.S. Congress."

Sorley's argument is controversial, but I find it persuasive. The fact is that most studies of the Vietnam war focus on the years up until 1968. Those studies that examine the period after the Tet offensive emphasize the diplomatic attempts to extricate the United States from the conflict, treating the military effort as nothing more than a holding action. But as William Colby observed in a review of Robert McNamara's memoir, In Retrospect, by limiting serious consideration of the military situation in Vietnam to the period before mid-1968, historians leave Americans with a record "similar to what we would know if histories of World War II stopped before Stalingrad, Operation Torch in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Pacific."