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Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America's Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam

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William Colby--who served as the CIA Station Chief in Siagon (1959-62), Chief of CIA's Far East Division (1963-68), Deputy to the U.S. Military Commander in Vietnam with Ambassadorial rank (1968-71), and Director of the CIA (1973-75)--wrote this gripping memoir of his sixteen years of professional involvement with South Vietnam. No right-wing ideologue, Colby was a graduate of both Princeton and Columbia Law School whose liberal ideals once led him to work for the National Labor Relations Board in Washington D.C.

While gracious and understanding towards the Presidents (Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford) whom he served and directly advised, Colby is clear in his judgment about America's mistakes in Vietnam. The first major mistake was American encouragement--especially by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Asst. Secretary of State Averell Harriman--of the South Vietnamese Generals' coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem, and the assassination of both Diem and his brother Nhu. Despite their shortcomings, the Ngo brothers held South Vietnam together for 9 years and made significant progress towards defeating the Communist insurgency in the villages and rural countryside. The political chaos following their assassinations led to directly to an increase in Communist attacks and to the introduction of large numbers of U.S. ground forces to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam in 1965.

The second major mistake, according to Colby, was the way that the U.S. military fought the war in 1965-67, with General Westmoreland and Secretary of Defense McNamara settling on a strategy of attritition and military engagement on the ground in the hopes that the enemy would give up in the face of their enormous casualties. This ignored the essentially political nature of the Maoist "People's War" being conducted by the Communists in the countryside. Unfortunately, by the the time an appropriate change in strategy was made in 1967-68 in favor of village-level and rural security and pacification, U.S. public opinion had begun to shift against the war.

Colby points out that a turning point of the war in favor of South Vietnam came in 1967-68 with: (1) the election of President Nguyen Van Thieu and return of governmental stability; (2) President Johnson's appointment of Robert Komer as the civilian deputy to U.S. Military Commander for Vietnam with Ambassadorial rank to coordinate U.S. government civilian efforts with those of the military and to actively promote the pacification program; (3)the replacement of General Westmoreland with General Creighton Abrams, who helped unified the various American military and civilian government efforts in South Vietnam into a "One War" effort; and (4) the appointment of U.S. Ambassador Elsworth Bunker to replace Henry Cabot Lodge. Colby convincingly argues that, by 1972, South Vietnam had won the "People's War" with its pacification efforts in the countryside. He points out that the South Vietnamese Army--with major U.S. logistical and air support--had been able to defeat the large-scale conventional military attack by the North Vietnamese Army in the 1972 Easter Offensive without the help of U.S. ground forces. In short, a stable Korean-style settlement of the Vietnam conflict was possible, as long as the U.S. continued to provide substantial military aid to South Vietnam and remained willing to provide all-important logistical and air support in the event of a future attack by the North Vietnamese Army.

According to Colby, the third (and most egregious) of America's major mistakes was the abandonment of South Vietnam by the U.S. Government--in particular, the U.S. Congress--after the January 1973 "peace" agreement. The decision by the U.S. Congress to cut military aid to South Vietnam after 1973 denied the necessary U.S. logistical and air support that the South Vietnamese Army needed to defeat the next invasion by the North Vietnamese Army in 1975.

Colby acknowledges that his account leaves out those aspects of the Vietnam War in which he did actively participate--namely, the military decisions, actual battles, and the post-Tet 1968 diplomacy which eventually led to the 1973 peace agreement. Despite being more of a personal memoir--rather than a comprehensive overview--Colby's story serves as a counterpoint to those who argue that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and that America's involvement in Vietnam was, therefore, a tragically misguided policy. Unlike the works of David Halberstam, Stanley Karnow and Neil Sheehan, Colby's book does not give short shrift to the successes achieved in South Vietnam after Tet 1968.

This book is Colby's effort to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War. One wonders, reading this book, if Colby was on acid during the entire conflict, because his version bears little resemblance to the real one. In Colby's version, for example, the CIA did not support the military coup against Diem, in fact it opposed it. It did not get the war wrong from the first day to the last, it did a great job. And (and this is the favorite parallel universe chestnut of all the right-wingnuts in the field of Vietnam revisionism) the war was actually won by 1972 but we walked away from victory. Anyone interested in the history of the real Vietnam war would do well to steer clear of this half-baked melange of self-serving historical revisionism, polemics, and outright lies.