Since the late 1970s, we have learned a great deal about what really happened in the course of the Second Indochina War--the struggle Americans characteristically refer to by a misnomer, "the Vietnam War." A genuine scholarly literature has emerged, one calmer, more objective, and more successful than could have been reasonably expected ten or fifteen years ago. One of the first and best of these books, Guenter Lewy's Americans in Vietnam, has supplied an objective overview of the war that compares favorably with anything written about the World Wars or Korea. High-ranking American military officers, and a few South Vietnamese leaders, have also contributed their memoirs; and although these works have their faults, they have generally been more honest and objective than might have been expected in dealing with painful memories of a lost and violently unpopular war.
We have also gained insights into the other side of the war, and the behavior of the victors since 1975, from such former communist sympathizers as Doan Van Tai, Truong Nhu Tang, and Jean Lacoutoure. As a result, much of what was popularly believed about the war in the late 1960s and the 1970s--the antiwar movement's mythology, to be blunt--has been discredited, regardless of whether or not one thinks we should have become involved in Indochina. To be sure, many people are not interested in the truth; there are undoubtedly many people who believe, or pretend to believe, that the Indochina war was an instance of American aggression, that the My Lai massacre was an incident typical of American conduct in the war, and that the "Christmas bombing" of 1972 (which did not in fact take place on Christmas) was one of the great atrocities of world history. But these notions can no longer claim to have a rational foundation, if indeed they ever could.
Over the last decade, however, some new myths about the war have developed among conservatives and others who believe that the war might have been won, and that this or that error, or some individuals or groups, were responsible for the ultimate failure of the American effort in Indochina. Most of these myths are not as patently false or dishonest as many of the now discredited antiwar myths were; some are simply exaggerated rather than incorrect. Nor does refuting them necessarily disprove the general idea that with wiser policies the war could indeed have been won. But they are impediments to clear thinking about the war. This article will attempt to analyze some of the conservative myths about the Indochina struggle.
Diem's Overthrow
This idea--most recently popularized in the Accuracy in Media documentary produced as a counter to Stanley Karnow's PBS series on Vietnam--is not of recent origin. When the U.S. government decided to encourage the overthrow of the Diem regime in the fall of 1963, a substantial faction within the government, and not a few critics outside it, thought it was a mistake. When Ngo Dinh Diem's fall was followed not by an improvement in the situation but by a succession of military coups and weak regimes, and a worsening military situation, the adherents of this view understandably felt vindicated. Many observers, looking backward, have suggested that Diem's fall was a disastrous turning point. The able Australian expert Geoffrey Fairbairn, an exponent of this view, has pointed to the communists' own statements, reported by the late Wilfred Burchett, as evidence that the enemy was delighted with Diem's departure, jeering that the Americans "will search in vain for a more efficient
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