Suggested Readings
What follows is not a bibliography but rather a list of revisionist books and articles on the Vietnam War. This list includes many of the most influential revisionist works on the war as well as other revisionist works that are less well known but were valuable sources in the writing of The Vietnam War Reexamined. That said, it is highly selective – less than seventy entries – and can only serve as an introduction to the enormous and expanding corpus of revisionist works on the Vietnam War. The revisionist perspective includes a variety of conflicting viewpoints, depending on the specific topic under discussion. What places the works listed here inside the commodious revisionist tent is that each in one way or another supports the premise that the United States had options it did not employ that might have enabled South Vietnam to survive as an independent, non-Communist state, and at a cost far less than was suffered with the strategy that ended with South Vietnam’s destruction. Each work listed here therefore, in its own way, supports a reexamination of the Vietnam War.
Andrade, Dale. “Westmoreland Was Right: Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Vietnam War.” Small Wars and Insurgencies 19, no. 2 (June 1968): 145–181.
Andrade, Dale. and Lt. Colonel Willbanks, James H.. “CORDS/Phoenix: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future.” Military Review 86 (March–April 2006): 9–23.
Birtle, Andrew J. “PROVN, Westmoreland, and the Historians: A Reappraisal.” The Journal of Military History 72 (October 2008): 1213–1247.
Tín, Bùi. Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel. Translated by Stowe, Judy and Van, Do. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.
Tín, Bùi. From Enemy to Friend; A North Vietnamese Perspective on the War. Translated by Bich, Nguyen Ngoc. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002.
Tín, Bùi. “How the North Won the War.” Interview with Stephen Young. Wall Street Journal, August 3, 1995. Available online: www.viet-myths.netbuitin.htm Van Vien, Cao. The Final Collapse. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1985.
Colby, William. Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam. Chicago and New York: Contemporary Books, 1989.
Correll, John T. “Rolling Thunder,” AIR FORCE Magazine, March 2005, 58–65.
Davidson, Phillip B. Vietnam at War: The History, 1946–1975. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Dommen, Arthur A. The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Dror, Olga and Taylor, K. W., editors and annotators. Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam: Christoforo Borri on Chochinchina & Samual Baron on Tonkin. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2006.
Major Dunham, George R. and Colonel Quinlan, David A.. U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Bitter End, 1973–1975. Washington, DC: History and Museums Division, U.S. Marine Corps, 1990.
Colonel Ellsworth, John K. Operation Rolling Thunder: Strategic Implications of Airpower Doctrine. Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2003.
Gacek, Christopher M. The Logic of Force: The Dilemma of Limited War in American Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Hammer, Ellen. A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987.
Higgins, Marguerite. Our Vietnam Nightmare. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
Van Chi, Hoang. From Colonialism to Communism: A Case History of North Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1964.
Kamps, Charles Tustin. “The JCS 94-Target List: A Vietnam Myth That Distorts Military Thought,” Aerospace Power Journal, Spring 2001: 67–80.
Kissinger, Henry A. “The Viet Nam Negotiations.” Foreign Affairs 47, no. 2 (January 1969): 211–234.
Kissinger, Henry A. Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Krepinevich, Andrew F. Jr. The Army in Vietnam. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Krulak, Victor H. First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984.
Colonel Le Gro, William E. Vietnam from Ceasefire to Capitulation. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1981.
Lewy, Guenter. America in Vietnam. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Tana, Li. Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1998.
Tana, Li. “An Alternative Vietnam? The Nguyen Kingdom of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29, no.1 (March 1998): 111–121.
Lind, Michael. Vietnam, The Necessary War. New York: Free Press, 1999.
Lomperis, Timothy J. The War Everyone Lost – and Won: America’s Intervention in Vietnam’s Twin Struggles, rev. ed. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1993.
Margolin, Jean-Lewis. “Vietnam and Laos,” in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, eds. Courtois, Stéphane et al. Translated by Murphy, Jonathan and Kramer, Mark. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press 1999, 568–570.
McMaster, H. R. Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Momyer, William M. Air Power in Three Wars (WWII, Korea, Vietnam). Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1985.
Moore, John Horton, and Turner, Robert F., eds. The Real Lessons of the Vietnam War: Reflections Twenty-Five Years After the Fall of Saigon. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2002.
This volume, which contains contributions from participants at a conference that took place in 2000 at the University of Virginia School of Law, includes articles by both revisionist and non-revisionist authors. Among others, it includes contributions by Morris, Stephen J., Sorley, Lewis, Morris, Robert E., Pike, Douglas, Moyar, Mark, and Turner, Robert F..
Moyar, Mark. Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Troung, Ngo Quang. The Easter Offensive of 1972. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980.
Owens, Mackubin Thomas. “Vietnam as Military History.” Joint Force Quarterly, Winter 1993–94: 112–118.
Palmer, Bruce Jr.. The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.
Palmer, Dave Richard. Summons of the Trumpet: A History of the Vietnam War from a Military Man’s Viewpoint. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978.
Palmer, Gregory. The McNamara Strategy and the Vietnam War: Program Budgeting in the Pentagon, 1960–1968. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1978.
Podhoretz, Norman. Why We Were in Vietnam. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Robbins, James S. This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive. New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010.
Sharpe, U. S. Grant. Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect. San Rafael and London: Presidio Press, 1978.
Shaw, John W. The Cambodian Campaign: The 1970 Offensive and America’s Vietnam War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005.
Smith, R. B. An International History of the Vietnam War, vol. 1: Revolution Versus Containment, 1955–1961. Blasingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1983.
Smith, R. B. An International History of the Vietnam War, vol. 2: The Kennedy Strategy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.
Sorley, Lewis. A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. San Diego: Harcourt, 1999.
Staaveren, Jacob. Gradual Failure: The Air War Over North Vietnam, 1965–1966. Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museum Program, 2002.
Summers, Harry G. Jr. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. New York: Dell Publishing, 1984.
Taylor, Keith Weller. A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Taylor, Keith Weller. The Birth of Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Thomson, W. Scott and Frizzell, Donaldson D., eds. The Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1977.
This volume includes papers and comments by more than thirty analysts, both revisionist and non-revisionist, who participated in a colloquium and a conference held at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University during 1973–74.
Thompson, Wayne. To Hanoi and Back: The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam. Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
Turner, Robert F. “Myths and Realities of the Vietnam Debate.” Available online: www.viet-myths.net/turner.htm. This article originally was published in the Campbell Law Review 9, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 473–496. Turner, Robert F. Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1975.
Veith, George J. Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975. New York and London: Encounter Books, 2012.
Walton, C. Dale. The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002.
Lieutenant Colonel Ward, James R. “Vietnam: Insurgency or War,” Military Review 69 (January 1989): 14–23.
Westmoreland, William D. A Soldier Reports. New York: Dell, 1980.
Wiest, Andrew. Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Wiest, Andrew. ed. Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land: The Vietnam War Revisited. London and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2006.
This volume includes articles by both revisionist and non-revisionist authors. Among the contributors are Wiest, Andrew, Sorley, Lewis, and Tin, Bui.
Wiest, Andrew. and Doidge, Michael, eds. Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
This volume features both revisionist and non-revisionist authors, with Mark Moyar responding to comments on his book Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. Aside from Moyar, revisionist authors who contributed to this volume include Wiest, Andrew, Taylor, Keith W., Turner, Robert F., Birtle, Andrew J., and Lind, Michael.
Willbanks, James H. Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
Willbanks, James H. The Tet Offensive: A Concise History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Woodside, Alexander. “Central Viet Nam’s Trading World in the Eighteenth Century as Seen in Le Quy Don’s ‘Frontier Chronicles.’” In Taylor, K.W. and Whitmore, John K., eds., Essays into the Vietnamese Pasts. Ithaca: Studies in Southeast Asia, 1995, 157–172.
