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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Alternative history reads well, in spite of clumsy prose,
By Jack Maybrick (Shuttling between the streets of Whitechapel and the shadow of Coogan's Bluff) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Victory in Vietnam: A Novel (Paperback)
Alternative history - that is, the "what if" perspective - is an interesting subject, and the premise of this one is as interesting as any that has been conceived: "What if Sam Ervin had worked as tirelessly to expose Lyndon Johnson's dirty linen as he did to expose Richard Nixon's role in Watergate?"In real life, Ervin put party loyalty ahead of principle and voted to kill the Bobby Baker probe in 1964; in this book, his conscience won't let him be a party to, as he puts it, allowing Lyndon Johnson to convert George Washington's America into Julius Caesar's Rome. An honest politician? A Democrat yet? Even in 1964, this must have seemed far-fetched, and from a 2002 perspective, it's sheer lunacy. But for alternative history purposes, that doesn't matter. The premise IS plausible enough for an excursion into the world of "what if". Or should I say the world of "never could be"? Anyway, in this excursion, Senator Sam follows the straight and narrow bi-partisan path to exposing corruption wherever he finds it. As a result, the 1964 election which was shaping up as a landslide victory for Johnson over Barry Goldwater begins to tighten, and well...the Vietnam War also follows an alternative history path as a result. This isn't a particularly well-written book. The language is somewhat stilted. There are clumsy sub-plots involving fictitious characters which could very easily have been eliminated. I don't imagine that the author, William Fox Eckbert, worried greatly about the quality of his writing. I think that his goal was to display his knowledge of military and political history in order to qualify himself as a prognosticator of how history would have changed. And he does this pretty well, I think. His historical characters are also somewhat flat, but these personalities are varied enough that their foibles still hold our interest. These historical characters not only include the usual round of suspects such as the Kennedy brothers, LBJ, Goldwater and Senator Sam but also lesser lights such as Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania. And interestingly enough, we also see life from the standpoint of the four members of the North Vietnamese ruling clique, including Uncle Ho. Eckbert is able to make them, as individuals, surprisingly human without whitewashing the brutality of the Communist system that they have imposed. Eckbert is also able to use this alternative view of history to nod in the direction of real life. The decision that the President has to make of whether to commit enough military manpower and firepower to capture Hanoi is reminiscent of the debate over a similar decision that was made about Iraq in 1991. Since this book was published in 1994, I suspect that this similarity was not a coincidence. However, the CLOSENESS of the Johnson-Goldwater election in this alternative history timeline does bear some coincidental resemblance to the story of the 2000 election, though it is not Florida that is the battleground here. Once upon a time, I would have said that the coverage of Election Day 1964 was a very dramatic event in this book. But after the real-life fiasco that was Election Day 2000, it's an unfair task to expect any author to create acceptable fictitious Election Day drama. And the fact that the loser in this story went down quietly without initiating a series of lawsuits seems absolutely preposterous from a contemporary perspective, but Eckbert can't be blamed for this, of course. It's also fairly apparent that Eckbert had no idea how to end this story after resolving the Vietnam War. But again, if you look at this book as a means of light and informative historical instruction, rather than as pure entertainment, that's one more flaw that can be judged leniently. Recommended reading to all with an interest in this genre and/or in this historical time period.
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