America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975; 3rd Edition [Paperback]

George C. Herring (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0070283931 | ISBN-13: 978-0070283930 | Publication Date: October 1, 1995 | Edition: 3rd

Widely recognized as a major contribution to the study of American involvement in Vietnam, this comprehensive and balanced account analyzes the ultimate failure of the war, and the impact of the war on US foreign policy. The book seeks to place American involvement in Vietnam in historical perspective and to offer answers to vital questions. This new edition has been necessitated not only by the development in the field, but also by dramatic change in the world in the time since the last edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

George C. Herring is Alumni Professor of history at the University of Kentucky. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia and taught at Ohio University before moving to the University of Kentucky. He is the author of numerous books, articles, and essays, including The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers (1983) and LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (1994). He served as editor of the scholarly journal Diplomatic History from 1982 to 1986 and was President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1990. In 1991, he served as Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and from 1993 to 1994, he was Visiting Professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 354 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies; 3rd edition (October 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070283931
• ISBN-13: 978-0070283930
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #403,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

George C. Herring is Alumni Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. His book in the Oxford History of the United States series, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 won the Robert Ferrell Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A leading authority on U.S. foreign relations, he is the former editor of Diplomatic History and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, among other books. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Herring focuses on diplomacy, January 26, 2001

By 

Pete Agren (Twin Cities, MN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975; 3rd Edition (Paperback)

Unlike most Vitenam books, America's Longest War chooses to examine the diplomacy element of the war instead of the typical military aspects of the conflict. I was assigned this as a textbook in my Vietnam War class in college and was surprised by the lack of military coverage in it. About two chapters into ALW, I realized that Herring was concentrating on what happened behind closed doors during the war and then it became more easy to understand. Herring also introduces the reader to the movers and shakers of the war and their reasoning behind their decisions. He also starts back with Truman's administration in dealing with French Indo-China and you get the story from the very beginning. Other books typically gloss over Truman and Ike and like to start in LBJ's administration.

Herring also informs the reader that contrary to the current popular opinion, JFK was NOT going to get out of Vietnam because he chose to let the aggressive Henry Cabot Lodge make key decisions in escalating the United States' involvement in South Vietnam. The reader begins to understand that the US lost the war in the diplomatic and political theaters and not on the battlefield. After all, the US military's job was to keep communists from taking over South Vietnam and while US troops were deployed in the country, that objective never happened.

I highly recommend this book to anybody interested in the Vietnam conflict. Although there is no coverage on military engagements, troop life, or popular battles like Khe Sanh and Dienbienphu, this book will give the reader answers on why we were there and who was making the decisions on what we did in Southeast Asia.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Read the First Edition. Good, but needed North POV, July 30, 2000

By 

L. Troy Beals (Las Vegas, NV USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975; 3rd Edition (Paperback)

I read the first edition of this book (published 1979). This is an excellent introduction into the Vietnam War. The book does focus on the politics and policies of the United States rather than more palatable topics such as the human stories of the war. The book gives a firm background into the years preceding American involvment in Vietnam. The first edition needed the perspective of communist sources to make it a more well rounded work, but of course at the time that was near impossible. A good book for anyone interested in a general history of the Vietnam war.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Account of American Grand Strategy in Vietnam, February 3, 2007

By 

Andrei Bolkonski - See all my reviews

This review is from: America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 with Poster (4th Edition) (Paperback)

Like many people here, I read this book for a college class concerned with providing an explanation of the numerous questions that arise whenever one ponders America in Vietnam, like why it was there, and why it lost. Any student or curious reader should find this work a great tool for this task.

The book is fairly short, numbering less than 400 pages. By that restraint alone, no reader should expect a thorough, voluminous exposition on every aspect of the war akin to Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, or a textbook for that matter. It's a piece on political history with a general thesis, numerous recurring themes, and plenty of information to back everything up.

The thesis is that the containment strategy America adopted around the Korean War, and its perceiving Vietnam as a strategic door to all of Southeast Asia, prevented each successive president from leaving Vietnam to the wolves and forced each one to progressively raise American stakes n the region. Numerous other variables--some consistent to all presidencies, like fear of facing the same political bloodletting as Truman got over "losing" China in 1949; some specific to the president, like JFK's need to take a stand somewhere after negotiating on Laos, and after the Berlin wall was erected--accompanied this grand one, but the central theme of this book draws a vivid picture of proud Cold Warriors refusing to back down and unwilling to commit entirely, hoping to bluff out an enemy who had already gone all in.

Of course, because it is a work with a point to prove rather than a huge collection of unfiltered facts, the reader must be wary of buying into Herring's perspective without private review of his logic. That's true for every book of this sort, however, and for what it's worth, Herring makes a very convincing case.

On the technical side of things, this book could have done more to centralize its presentation of thematic events. Since the author shifts between historical narrative and analysis, the latter could have summaries and reminders of recurring concepts on the margins. As it is, the reader has to discover themes like "US arrogance" or "governmental deception" by himself and note their recurrence without any assistance from Herring. Doing this isn't the standard for most books, though (the only one I can think off that does this is Landmark Thucydides), I can't criticize the book for not following up on these suggestions.