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Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict Paperback – July 16, 2002
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In this groundgreaking reinterpretation of America's most disatrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes enduring myths and put the Vietnam War in its proper context—as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Lind reveals the deep cultural divisions within the United States that made the Cold War consensus so fragile and explains how and why American public support for the war in Indochina declined. Even more stunning is his provacative argument that the United States failed in Vietnam because the military establishment did not adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war.
In an era when the United States so often finds itself embroiled in prolonged and difficult conflicts, Lind offers a sobering cautionary tale to Ameicans of all political viewpoints.
- Print length314 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJuly 16, 2002
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100684870274
- ISBN-13978-0684870274
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Fareed Zakaria managing editor, "Foreign Affairs" A quarter century after its bitter end, Vietnam remains America's most controversial war and Michael Lind's book is sure to set off new sparks about it. Looking at the war from the heights of grand strategy and the inner reaches of domestic politics, Lind makes a fresh, highly intelligent, and passionate case for rethinking the conventional wisdom. Agree with it or not, it is compelling reading.
John Patrick Diggins Distinguished Professor of History, City University of New York Graduate Center Most Americans prefer to forget the Vietnam War. Lind compels us to remember it in all its complexity and tragedy and to consider military and diplomatic possibilities that almost no other author or statesman has though of raising. Moving through the pages of this richly provocative book is an agitated originality.
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Free Press; Reprint edition (July 16, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 314 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0684870274
- ISBN-13 : 978-0684870274
- Item Weight : 12.5 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,057,212 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #829 in Southeast Asia History
- #1,953 in Vietnam War History (Books)
- #2,058 in Military Strategy History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Michael Lind is the author of more than a dozen books about U.S. political and economic history, politics and foreign policy. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in The Next American Nation (1995), Hamilton's Republic (1997), What Lincoln Believed (2005), The American Way of Strategy (2006), and Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (2012). His most recent book is The New Class War: How to Save Democracy from The Managerial Elite (2020).
Lind's works of fiction and poetry include The Alamo (1997), named by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of hte best books of the year, and Bluebonnet Girl (2003), illustrated by Kate Kiesler, an Oppenheimer Toy Portfolio Gold Book Award winner.
Educated at the University of Texas and Yale University, Lind is a columnist for Tablet and a contributor to American Affairs, American Compass and Project Syndicate. He has been an editor or staff writer at Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, The New Republic, the National Interest, co-founder of New America, and Assistant to the Director of the U.S. State Department's Center for Foreign Affairs. He has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas.
A fifth generation Texan, Michael Lind lives in his home town of Austin, Texas, where he is Professor of Practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin.
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At times the book reads like it was designed for domestic political consumption and winning points on one of the cable talk shows that are broadcast from various parts of the Washington, D.C. area. It is far more sophisticated than what anyone will find on those shows, though.
Lind basically calls it like he sees it and manages to rankle almost anyone who has a stake in American public life: Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, the religious, the military, the antiwar movement and pacifists, the American intellectual community, and the civil rights movement to name just a few. Those few groups that do not get offended in some form from this book are probably not all that important in the first place. In the process, he punctures many myths. Chapter three on the failure of the U.S. military in Vietnam--rejecting the idea popular among veterans that the politicians kept them from winning the war--alone is worth the price of the book. He also goes after the antiwar movement and argues in convincing fashion that it became the witting pawn of the North Vietnamese and that many of the leaders crossed the line between dissent and disloyalty. The chapter on American politics and culture is interesting, but he makes the United States far more historical conscious than is actually the case. It is also difficult to take serious an argument that claims Wisconsin and Oregon are part of New England. Few people will buy all his arguments, but he will make you stop and think a bit.
Some mistakes were distracting, such as noting John McCain as an Air Force pilot (he was Navy) and discussion of 1991 Persian Gulf War with false assumptions.
The review of the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Communist takeover of China and other conflicts within the context of Cold War and global hegemony was refreshing in a new perspective on a painful conflict.








