Customer Reviews

The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War

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This is the fourth and largest volume of a mammoth five-volume study (volume five is not yet complete). This review applies to both this volume and to the study in general.

The Gibbons Study is the largest, most balanced, and most complete study of US Government Vietnam policy currently available. Its goal is much like that of the Pentagon Papers, and in size it is just as big as the analysis section of that study. However, it is much more comprehensive, using resources (like the LBJ library) which were unavailable in the late 60s. It is all original analysis, and contains only a few pieces of contemporary primary documents (unlike the Pentagon Papers, which contains a million words of documents).

The study was commissioned by the Senate Foreign Relations committee in the late 1970s, and the work was done by Gibbons, a researcher in the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. True to his mission, Gibbons keeps his work as apolitical as possible.

Every page is very detailed and impeccably-referenced. The references themselves are worthy of note, as they use the rarely-used form of footnotes, as opposed to endnotes. Such a format puts the references right on the page with the main text, so it is far easier for the reader to make use of them. And, in the Gibbons study, the footnotes are often huge and detailed.

This work is frequently cited as a principal reference by many recent Vietnam writers, including Karnow, Hendrickson, Gardner, and Herring, exceeded in such references only by Foreigh Relations of the United States. It is a big, serious study, appropriate for only the most dedicated student of the war.

This volume is by far the largest in the series, amounting to approximately 645,000 words. In comparison, Stanley Karnow's great general history, "Vietnam: A History," is considered a large book, yet it measures 330,000 words. But don't be intimidated -- the size and detail of Gibbons' work only adds to its usefulness.

From this book:

Congressman Tim Lee Carter (R-KY), 1966:

"No, Mr. President, you are not winning the war."

On August 28, 1967, Carter stated

"Let us now, while we are yet strong, bring our men home, every man jack of them. The Vietcong fight fiercely and tenaciously because it is their land and we are foreigners intervening in their civil war. If we must fight, let us fight in defense of our homeland and our own hemisphere."

Colleague of Senator Sherman Cooper (R-KY), who later drafted the Cooper-Church amendment to end that mess.

Pearls like those above make this author's work extremely valuable.