Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam

by Gregory A. Daddis

Overview

A "better war." Over the last two decades, this term has become synonymous with US strategy during the Vietnam War's final years. The narrative is enticingly simple, appealing to many audiences. After the disastrous results of the 1968 Tet offensive, in which Hanoi's forces demonstrated the failures of American strategy, popular history tells of a new American military commander who emerged in South Vietnam and with inspired leadership and a new approach turned around a long stalemated conflict. In fact, so successful was General Creighton Abrams in commanding US forces that, according to the "better war" myth, the United States had actually achieved victory by mid-1970. A new general with a new strategy had delivered, only to see his victory abandoned by weak-kneed politicians in Washington, DC who turned their backs on the US armed forces and their South Vietnamese allies.

In a bold new interpretation of America's final years in Vietnam, acclaimed historian Gregory A. Daddis disproves these longstanding myths. Withdrawal is a groundbreaking reassessment that tells a far different story of the Vietnam War. Daddis convincingly argues that the entire US effort in South Vietnam was incapable of reversing the downward trends of a complicated Vietnamese conflict that by 1968 had turned into a political-military stalemate. Despite a new articulation of strategy, Abrams's approach could not materially alter a war no longer vital to US national security or global dominance. Once the Nixon White House made the political decision to withdraw from Southeast Asia, Abrams's military strategy was unable to change either the course or outcome of a decades' long Vietnamese civil war.

In a riveting sequel to his celebrated Westmoreland's War, Daddis demonstrates he is one of the nation's leading scholars on the Vietnam War. Withdrawal will be a standard work for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190691080
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/02/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Gregory Daddis is Associate Professor of history and director of Chapman University's MA Program in War and Society. A retired US Army colonel, he has served in both Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. Daddis specializes in the history of the Vietnam Wars and the Cold War era.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Lists of Abbreviations

Introduction - The Limits of Strategy in a Stalemated War

Chapter 1 Abe's "One War" - Continuity in Change

Chapter 2 Vietnamization - Policy of Withdrawal or Strategy for Victory?

Chapter 3 Pacification without Peace - The Travails of Nation Building

Chapter 4 Balancing a War - Strategy, Diplomacy, and Withdrawal

Chapter 5 A New Army for an Old War?

Chapter 6 From Victory to Defeat? - Abrams's Final Years

Conclusion - Limited Wars, Societies, and the Problem of "Victory"

Editorial Reviews

07/31/2017
In this second volume in a two-part reassessment of the American war in Vietnam, Daddis, a retired Army colonel who teaches at Chapman University, expands on the arguments he made in 2014’s Westmoreland’s War. He continues to recast the accepted view of the abject failure of Gen. William Westmoreland’s war-of-attrition strategy and to shatter the idea that his successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, implemented a more successful one—only to have Congress, the antiwar movement, and the media snatch defeat from the hands of victory. Daddis mines official records and solid secondary sources to suggest that Westmoreland took a more nuanced approach than that for which he is generally credited. Daddis also posits that Abrams made no significant changes in strategy after he took over in 1968 and that the war effort was doomed for reasons that had very little to do with politicians, the media, or antiwar demonstrators. He persuasively argues that few U.S. historians have factored in the most important determinant of the war’s outcome: the role of the Vietnamese. Daddis’s sound and convincing advice is to look at the Vietnam War “as many Vietnamese see it—the American War”—in other words, as one part of a long fight for self-determination. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"... the author convincingly suggests that the war was much more than a military endeavour, essentially a political conflict that must be studied as part of the 'changing global context of the larger Cold War'." — Marcel Berni, Journal of Contemporary History

"The author methodically takes apart the myths surrounding the latter years of the war....Highly recommended."—CHOICE

"Solid scholarly history that should arouse spirited arguments among historians and will also appeal to a wider audience."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Daddis's sound and convincing advice is to look at the Vietnam War 'as many Vietnamese see it-the American War'—in other words, as one part of a long fight for self-determination."—Publishers Weekly

"Greg Daddis revisits an overlooked and contested period in the Vietnam War with clarity and scholarly insight. His deep dive into the last years of America's war in Vietnam opens the door for today's reader to better understand our past and our own century. Like his two previous books on Vietnam, Withdrawal is an essential addition to the conversation and should not be missed."—Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, directors of the PBS documentary film series, The Vietnam War

"In this revelatory book, Gregory Daddis demolishes the myth that the United States 'won' the Vietnam War militarily only to have thrown away that victory on the home front. The evidence he presents on that score is definitive and irrefutable. Yet perhaps more importantly, Daddis shows that the war was never America's to win or to lose in the first place. Vietnam's fate was a matter for the Vietnamese to decide. Apart from sowing death and destruction on a vast scale, U.S. military efforts had no bearing whatsoever on the outcome."—Andrew J. Bacevich, professor Emeritus of International Relations and History, author of America's War for the Greater Middle East

"A major accomplishment. Far and away the best study of the military and the last years of the Vietnam War we are likely to have for some time."—Robert. K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, Vassar College

"Withdrawal brilliantly dismantles old and pervasive myths about the final phases of America's lost war in Vietnam. The book affirms Greg Daddis' stature as one today's most original and insightful historians of the war and deserves a broad readership among not just students of history but also policymakers and military officers."—Mark Lawrence, Associate Professor of History, The University of Texas at Austin

From the Publisher

★ 2017-06-14
A historical revision of the last few years of the Vietnam War.In this fine, thoroughly argued book, Daddis, the director of Chapman University's MA Program in War and Society and the author of two well-regarded books on the war (Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam, 2014, etc.), tackles the relatively understudied final years. He engages with a revisionist theory that emerged a few years after America's withdrawal from the war, an argument that took a handful of different forms. For these revisionists, who tended to be defenders of the war and its legacy, the U.S. did not lose the war but rather lost the peace—or if it did lose the war, it was not a military defeat but a political one caused by weak-willed politicians who refused to carry through on the military's pending victory. At the heart of this "better war" narrative is the changing of the military leadership in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive as Gen. Creighton Abrams led the U.S. forces away from the failed policies of Gen. William Westmoreland. In reasoned prose, Daddis, a retired Army colonel who served in both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, eviscerates this revisionist argument. He takes readers methodically through the realities of Vietnam from spring 1968, showing how the change in strategy was not that profound in terms of its impact on the ground, that the separation of military from political policies represents a false dichotomy, and, perhaps most importantly, that the argument that the military could have won the war had the politicians only unshackled the military utterly ignores, among other elements, the agency of the Vietnamese people. Furthermore, the author reveals how the "better war" argument has real, modern-day ramifications, manifesting in equally flawed arguments about Gen. David Petraeus' so-called "surge" in Iraq in 2007. Solid scholarly history that should arouse spirited arguments among historians and will also appeal to a wider audience.

Kirkus Reviews