Early in his Marine Corps career, which he concluded as a four-star general, Walt Boomer was decorated for valor in Vietnam. He distilled into three words the lesson of that debacle: “Tell the truth.” Max Hastings, an eminent British journalist and historian, has done that in a book that is a painful but perhaps inoculating re-immersion in what Americans would prefer to forget.
“Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” is a product of Hastings’ prodigious research and his aptitude for pungent judgments. It is an unsparing look, by a warm friend of America, at the mountain of mendacities, political and military, that accumulated as the nation learned the truth of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s axiom: “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.”
Vietnam remains an American sorrow of squandered valor, but it was vastly more a tragedy for the Vietnamese, 2 million to 3 million of whom died during the 30 years war — around 40 for every American who died during the 10 years of intense U.S. futility. U.S. statesmen and commanders, Hastings writes, lied too much to the nation and the world but most calamitously to themselves.
In 1955, Hastings writes, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sent a cable to Saigon authorizing the removal of South Vietnam’s Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, “much as he might have ordered the sacking of an unsatisfactory parlor maid.” Six hours later, Dulles changed his mind, so Diem lived until he was murdered in the 1963 coup. Hastings’ tangy writing tells us that as the coup approached, a U.S. operative arrived at the South Vietnamese army’s headquarters “carrying a .357 revolver and $40,000 in cash, which he deemed the appropriate fashion accessories for an afternoon’s work overthrowing a government.”