Keith Taylor Controversy
Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 18:05:11 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] Keith Taylor controversy
I recently was passed a copy of the Vietnamese translation of Keith Taylor's Michigan Quarterly Review article from Talawas. I have not looked at the posting itself on the site yet, but Talawas is always a place of lively debate.
I did look at a lengthy attack on Keith's person and his argument in the MQR article by an author I once published, Bob Buzzanco. Bob heard Keith give a related presentation at the last Lubbock conference, and before that one at the Society of Historians of Foreign Affairs.
In the course of talking back to these presentations, and to the MQR article, Bob also belittles Vietnamese Studies generally (apparently we don't study the country after 1945), patronizes the good people at Texas Tech, and sneers at Cornell.
It is a piece of work. Bob's approach to Keith lends some weight to Peter Zinoman's objection to the version of the talk that Keith gave at Asian Studies in Chicago in March. Peter told Keith he agreed with him but questioned the wisdom of using personal anecdotes to make his case.
Indeed, Bob dwells on Keith's use of emotion. That would be more convincing if Bob's own article wasn't in high dudgeon, another kind of emotion. I like Keith's use of emotion, because it is from the heart, and dislike Bob's because it wears the guise of dispassionate analysis.
As it happens, I agree with the substantive arguments Bob makes about the war, as I agree with the detailed assertions that Keith actually makes in the presentation and essay I have seen of his new project on Saigon and Viet Nam. It is all unexceptionable, if you happen to read Americanist history and also read the history of Viet Nam.
On Sunday when I get a minute I am going to explain why I disagree with Bob and Keith about the rest of their articles, the parts that aren't based on what they know about, but disagree most with Bob. So here's a heads up on Bob's article, so you will know what I am getting testicular about.
You can read his piece at http://www.counterpunch.org/buzzanco04162005.html And of course I
can't keep anyone else from jumping in first.
Dan
Dan Duffy
Viet Nam Literature Project
5600 Buck Quarter Road
Hillsborough, NC 27278
tel 919-383-7274, 11 AM - 3 PM Eastern
email dduffy@email.unc.edu
www.vietnamlit.org
Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 16:31:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: Stephen Denney <sdenney@ocf.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Keith Taylor controversy
Here is one passage from the Counterpunch article that stood out to me:
"Just in the past half-decade or so, scholars like Michael Lind, Lewis Sorley, Ed Miller, Mark Moyar, Ron Frankum, BG Burkett and Glenna Whitley, and of course Keith Taylor, among others, have written and delivered papers arguing, on many points, that the war was indeed a noble cause, that Vietnam below the seventeenth parallel was a viable and stable state, that the war was not fought disproportionately by the poor, that the U.S. military won in the field but was undermined at home, and that poor decisions and leadership in the United States-not the skills and appeal of the Vietnamese communists-were the main reason for American failure. "I am not sure about the others, but don't think BG Burkett would claim to be a scholar. He is a Vietnam veteran who wrote a book a few years ago exposing some fake veterans and disputing some perceptions of the war.
Regarding the Texas Tech Vietnam conferences, I believe anyone here who wanted to could submit a paper and speak at the conference (which I believe is held every three years). It does not seem intended to be solely an academic conference, but more a meeting ground where people with all kinds of backgrounds and views related to Vietnam can attend and participate, including academics, journalists, govt. officials, veterans from all sides, refugees and others with an interest.
- Steve Denney
Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 10:54:33 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] Keith Taylor controversy
On the road to talk about the Viet Nam Literature Project last month, I went for pho with a colleague I had somehow never got to know. We both read Americanist scholarship on the war, and also study Vietnamese language and have travelled to Viet Nam. There aren't that many persons and institutions at that intersection.
We spoke about Bob Brigham, the student of George Herring who was in my Vietnamese class at SEASSI at Cornell in 1991. He is chair of history at Vassar now, where his big project for some time has been a history of the armed forces of the Republic of Viet Nam.
Texas Tech came up, the university at Lubbock which winkled Douglas Pike's collection of Vietnamese and American stuff about Viet Nam away from the University of California at Berkeley. Pike was a social scientist who worked for the extermination of Communists as a class of people from the southern Vietnamese countryside.
The book jacket of his classic study of the Viet Cong mimics one of the face books the publications arm of the allied center for captured documents, CDEC, put together for that police effort. Those people were tracked down and killed. A handsome book, with that modern, airy and solid, Bauhaus look that MIT Press carries off so well, it is something I don't like to keep in the house.
Berkeley treated Pike's collection like most universities here treated the proposed presidential library for Richard Nixon, like it had cooties. Faculty at every institution would formally rail against the Nixon library. That scholars wouldn't want a federally-subsidized research facility on the Nixon administration near campus is obviously not a research decision.
It has to do with public memory, with making gestures about the past. But the Nixon papers were going to end up somewhere, while it was never certain that Pike's collection wouldn't quietly pass into a dumpster. When you look for repression in a personality, you look at what someone pushes away from his face, but you also look at what they truly deny, what they don't talk about much or at all.
Berkeley fended off the collection of Douglas Pike, that gruff, amiable, sharp and idealistic man who courteously helped to educate the generation of graduate students, now young professors, who came to his archive, more in the second manner. Kicking around Dick Nixon is easy; either choking down or spewing out Doug Pike and his papers is hard.
What the United States knows about communists in southern Viet Nam we know because our scholars and soldiers largely succeeded in killing them all. Admitting that candidly, living with it, proceeding as a public insitution with that knowledge, was beyond the University of California.
I don't know the story, but another university spotted the undervalued asset and took it home to Lubbock. Texas is in the South, part of the old Confederacy, where we kill prisoners and practice a friendly and polite candor about how the world works. Texas in particular is also an apparent colony, like West Virginia, where everything worth owning belongs to people somewhere else. People who live there are very proud of what they do have, cultural stuff like football and now apparently the Viet Nam War.
That is some broad cultural context for a story which will be better told circumstantially, by people who really know the Berkeley and the Lubbock ends. The upshot was that Texas Tech acquired the Pike papers and has made the collection the heart of a lively and purposeful academic enterprise.
They hold conferences. They fund graduate students. They bring over Vietnamese to give talks and they do educational development in Viet Nam. They offer the riches of the Doug Pike collection to the world through a website. They are dealing with the Viet Nam War.
One of their most enthusiastic visitors has been Keith Taylor, an American historian of Viet Nam. When I met in him, in 1991, before Texas Tech opened its Center or not long after, he had for some time refused to teach the Viet Nam War. Maybe he had just started. He enjoys their conferences, and spoke at their last one about his views on the war, which he does teach now.
Over pho, at dinner, my friend said that the Center and one of Keith's talks there are the target of a critical article by Robert Buzzanco, usually called Bob. Bob is just a little younger than me, I think. I was born in 1960.When I was working in the 1980s with a circle of intellectuals at the Popular Culture Association, publishing through the journal Viet Nam Generation, Inc. about the American consequences of the war in Viet Nam, Bob Buzzanco was one of the graduate students, like Bob Brigham, who were struggling towards similar ends in organizations of Americanist historians, such as the Society for History of Foreign Relations.
Buzzanco was working then on a subject of persistent interest to me, the dissent of the US military to the war in Viet Nam. Viet Nam Generation, Inc. in general was devoted to arguing against the rehabilitation of the public memory of the US military in Viet Nam. We lost that one, but Bob has stuck with it and published what sounds like a terrific book on the actual, contemporary officers' views of the war which is widely used.
I was surprised to find last Thursday that both copies in the University of North Carolina were available, but when I got to campus I found that was only because the semester is over. The research and undergraduate libraries were closed and I won't get a copy until I can get back there week after next.
I had already read Bob's essay on Keith and Lubbock. I had not found it on Google, but dunned my dinner friend for the URL. Bob's essay is at the website of Counterpunch, a magazine of dissent to US government policy, associated with such dissidents and critics of foreign policy as Noam Chomsky.
I didn't like it at all. Bob's essay put down Keith and the rest of us in Vietnamese Studies as narrow Viet Nam specialists, confined in expertise to the pre-modern past. A post-colonialist would point out that Bob's rhetoric treats us as natives.
Well, Keith Taylor was studying contemporary Vietnamese society professionally during the war itself, doing fieldwork and analysis. He then acquired the use of a set of Asian languages and scripts and worked around Asia as well as in the United States. He knows as much about the war in Viet Nam as a Vietnamese, Asian, international and American event as anyone.
Bob also high-hatted the professionals at Lubbock, granting that they are professional archivists doing a swell job but not historians. That is to say, they are not really generative intellectuals in the fields of military and diplomatic history. Well, there aren't any trained archivists at the Texas Tech Center. We had a controversy on vsg about one of the beginners' mistakes they have made.
They are learning on the job as they fly toward their intellectual goals. The Texas Tech Center's founder James Reckner is a military historian, and he and his staff are visionaries. Dismissing them as mere clerks isn't any more credible than it is for an Americanist who doesn't use Vietnamese, Chinese or French let alone Thai or Russian or Japanese sources or secondary work to figure Keith as an interloper in scholarship on the Viet Nam war.
I wrote to my dinner friend about this, and I also told her that I agree with the version of the war in Viet Nam that Bob presents in his attack on Keith and Lubbock. He or she asked why then I care about the insults, and the tone.
I told her that Keith and Bob both are not writing original history, it is all stuff that anybody alive at the time who read the papers and read the books as they come out would know. There is not any real
disagreement in their actual assertions about the past. The difference between them is a matter of class position and class trajectory, a difference in their vocation as authors. That is what tone is all about.
I got up late this morning, after a graduation party last night, and now I have to go do something else. I don't have Bob's book on hand. Sunday after next, after another business trip and some fieldwork here, I will get back to this and write up Bob and Keith's historical arguments, how they fit together, and what they really disagree about as men.
Dan
Dan Duffy
Viet Nam Literature Project
5600 Buck Quarter Road
Hillsborough, NC 27278
tel 919-383-7274, 11 AM - 3 PM Eastern
email dduffy@email.unc.edu
www.vietnamlit.org
Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 19:16:50 -0100
From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] Buzzanco/ Taylor controversy
Dear VSG list,
Here are some abridged reflections of mine on the Buzzanco-Taylor controversy -- abridged from a longer version that I am not sure I want to share in its entirety because I am unsure of the interpretation. Anyhow, read on.
Shawn McHale
*****************
Dear list,
The Bob Buzzanco attack on Keith Taylor is a doozy. For the original piece which Keith Taylor wrote ("How I Began To Teach the Vietnam War," go here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1284084/posts
(I found this, after searching, on Free Republic -- originally was from Michigan Quarterly Review)
For Buzzanco's riposte, go to here: http://www.counterpunch.org/buzzanco04162005.html
For those of you only dimly aware of the controversy, Buzzanco is apoplectic about Vietnam revisionism in general and Keith Taylor's recent writings on the war in particular: Taylor calls the American intervention in Vietnam a "noble cause," and states that American intervention was justified.
What can we say about this debate? Plenty, I am sure. I am torn in two ways on this one. Keith was my dissertation advisor. He was exemplary in that role. So, for reasons of loyalty and friendship, I naturally incline towards respecting his views. On the other hand, some - but not all -- of the views that Buzzanco holds also are mine. So for intellectual reasons, I might lean in Buzzanco's direction.
But this is not just an intellectual debate. What is notable about both Keith Taylor's and Bob Buzzanco's pieces is their emotional inflection. Keith Taylor's essay is -- in part -- about coming to terms with his personal experience of war. Buzzanco (who gets rather passionate himself) characterizes Taylor's essay as "emotions without evidence." No -- Taylor's emotions ARE evidence, evidence of a desire to wrestle with an unsettled past. But however one thinks about the role of emotions in academic debate, in the final analysis, the academic argument comes down to intellectual issues.
I disagree with Keith on some (not all!) of his analysis of the war and its justification. That is a historiographical issue where we can fight out our differences. Was democracy, for example, really a long-term interest of the US in Vietnam? I'm dubious. Was US intervẹntion justified? Well, one million died in the Second Indochina War -- was the scale of suffering worth it? Given the results, I say no. But I see no reason to call into question the fact that Keith Taylor is trying to make sense, at a very personal level, his experience in Vietnam.
In Counterpunch, Buzzanco hectors, postures, lectures. He takes the High road (analysis of history in a dispassionate tone), he takes the low road (many snide asides, too many to count). I think I can imagine the person behind this kind of performance. I imagine he relishes a good intellectual brawl. But you know what? Why go down that road -- my image of Buzzanco the man could be just as distorted as Buzzanco's picture of Taylor.
In the end, I agree with much of Buzzanco's argument. But I am turned off by his snide style, and I think that he writes as if the key questions on Vietnam have all been asked already (and mostly by American historians of diplomatic history!!). I happen to think that Buzzanco is naive about Vietnamese nationalism, the actual character of the NLF, Vietnamese nationalism, and the like. His attack on the viability of Diem's state strikes me as odd -- he seems to take for granted that the DRV was a viable AND legitimate state instantly, but that Diem's state could not possibly be. Why? (I am not claiming that Diem was sweet -- but the tactics he used against communists, noted by all critics of Diem, were identical to ones used by the DRV against its opponents).
The Second Indochina War was part of the Cold War and was a civil war. It was brutal. It was preceded by many earlier brutalities. The Viet Minh's extensive use of terror, intimidation, and assassination should disabuse us of the notion that it rose to power simply by tapping into the popular will. No -- it killed off its opponents quite effectively. But we can't reduce the Viet Minh, or the NLF, just to thugs. Some people joined these organization because they truly thought that they could advance Vietnamese freedom through them. We have to remember, then, this dual legacy of thuggery and idealism.
We are now developing a more complex view of the DRV in wartime. (See especially Christopher Goscha and Benoit de Treglode's volume on the birth of the party-state on this). We are also developing a more complicated view of the south in these years, a view that has not, much of the time, made it into print.Buzzanco does not seem adequately aware of some of these changes in the scholarship. He does not seem adequately aware that his fundamentally America-centric scholarship will become increasingly outmoded. He does not seem cognizant that one cannot fit much of this so-called "revisionist" scholarship into --as he does -- the tidy academic catagory of "revisionism" or "right wing scholarship." . In the end, while he makes many good arguments, I come away from his piece believing that he wasted an oppotunity for a real academic debate over the meaning of the Second Indochina War.
Shawn McHale
Associate Professor of History and International Affairs
Associate Director, Sigur Center for Asian Studies
George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 08:18:43 -0700
From: Lien-Hang T. Nguyen <ltnguyen@stanford.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Vsg] Buzzanco/ Taylor controversy
Dear VSG list,
I guess one of my first duties as VSG representative to the Vietnam Center initiative is to join in on the discussion regarding Bob Buzzanco’s piece in Counterpunch. In short, I want to agree with Steve Denney who points out that the Texas Tech symposia (which takes place every 3 years but the Center does hold smaller conferences in the intervening years) are open to anyone who wants to participate. Jim Reckner’s philosophy is that no one gets turned away – a philosophy that I find laudable. Although Buzzanco does concede in his article that there have been “well-established and respected scholars like George Herring, Randall Woods, and David Anderson,” he claims that the vast majority of voices is from the right. I don’t agree with Buzzanco’s assertion. Looking through the list of former participants, I stumbled across a few more names that Buzzanco would be happy with: Charles Neu, H.W. Brands, Don Oberdorfer, David Marr, Chris Goscha, John Prados, Mark Gilbert, Sandra Taylor, Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Peter Braestrup, Larry Berman….The list goes on.
In addition, for a center that supposedly resembles a “right wing think tank,” its conferences on Vietnamese Culture, History and Language, the Overseas Experience, Teaching Vietnam and other topics do not seem to support this assertion. Lastly, the Vietnam Center does much more than host conferences and collect historical documents and artifacts – it has a number of outreach programs that includes providing scholarships for Vietnamese and Khmer students and the medical projects with the Health Sciences Center at TT which tries to raise the current level of medical education, health sciences technical development, and healthcare in Vietnam.
Although Buzzanco raises interesting and valid points in his piece, they are almost lost on his readers due in no small part to his highly emotional attacks on Keith Taylor and unfair characterization of the Vietnam Center. Nonetheless, he has done a major service to Second Indochina War/Vietnam War studies by addressing the state of the field today.
Yours,
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen
Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University
Predoctoral Fellow, Center for International Security and Cooperation
(CISAC), Stanford University
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 14:49:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: Wynn William Wilcox <wilcoxww@potsdam.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Buzzanco/ Taylor controversy
Dear List:
I agree with the position of Dan Duffy and Lien-Hang Nguyen that the difference between Keith Taylor’s position and Buzzanco’s is that Keith’s position is written as a personal reflection, without the veil of objectivity that pervades Buzzanco’s analysis. Still, I think it would be worthwhile for someone to consider some of the interpretive ideas in Keith’s argument in more detail, even if that wasn’t his purpose in writing his recent articles and presentations to give a kind of rigorous and empirically-based interpretation of the South Vietnamese regime. Here are some thoughts that I’ve had about Keith's Michigan Quarterly Review article that might be of some interest to the list.Keith's article intends to debunk three “axioms” about the Vietnam War.
THE FIRST AXIOM: There was never a legitimate South Vietnam.
The logical way to debunk this argument, it seems to me, would be to defend a particular interpretation or definition of legitimacy (by elections? by civilian rule? by freedom of the press? by human rights? By the maintenance of order/suppression of rebellions and illegal activity?) and then demonstrate that some regime in South Vietnam fit those definitions.
Keith’s definition of legitimacy seems to be related to the maintenance of order: “For one thing, Ngo Dinh Diem effectively defeated rural insurrections twice, in 1956 and again in 1958.” Conceding that by this definition Diem is legitimate for most of the 1956-1963 period, Keith’s argument then runs into two potential problems, it seems to me:
1) By this standard the Diem regime after July 1963, the Duong Van Minh regime (both in 1963-64 and in 1975), the Nguyen Khanh regime, and the Thieu regime at least by late 1974 were decidedly not legitimate Insofar as they failed to maintain, in various ways substantial or continuous order.
2) By this definition, North Vietnam seems legitimate for most of the 1958-1975 period, (for who can argue that they were not reasonably effective in perpetuating their regime, and they certainly maintained order in a more effective way than some of the South Vietnamese regimes).
In addition, Keith puts forward the following argument as part of his debunking of axiom one: “To accept the axiom that the governments in Saigon from 1954 to 1975 were illegitimate or not viable is the same as to say that since 1945 the only legitimate or viable Vietnamese government was the one proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh.”This strikes me as a false dilemma, a “you’re either with us or against us” argument. Even if we concede that the number of groups (the Caravelle Group, for example, or Thich Tri Quang, or the 18 percent or however many of Vietnamese who voted for Truong Dinh Du in the 1967 election) that existed that fundamentally rejected the principles of the South Vietnamese government and demanded national reconciliation while still rejecting at least some of the North’s claims to authority were not viable alternatives to Diem or later to Nguyen Cao Ky/ Nguyen Van Thieu, it strikes me as still illogical to suggest that any rejection of Saigon governments is an embrace of the North, since these groups prove that it is logically possible to reject a Saigon regime without embracing the North.
AXIOM TWO: That the US had no justification for being involved in Vietnamese affairs Again, here the logical approach to debunking this axiom would be to define the conditions under which the United States has a justification to intervene, and to demonstrate that such conditions existed in this case. Here’s what Keith has to say on this issue:
“The liberties that we enjoy in this country did not just happen without human effort, and there is no guarantee of their continued existence. The excellent features of our political system that we tend to take for granted are the result of sacrifices made generation by generation, sacrifices often unappreciated by those who benefit from them. And this is why I cannot accept the axiom that the United States had no legitimate reason to be involved in Vietnamese affairs. I believe that global power in the hands of the United States should be taken as a responsibility, not something about which we need to be apologetic. If the United States fails to use this power for the general good of the people in this world, then it will lose not only its power but also the good that it has accumulated; the liberties that have thrived in the shade of American power will then be endangered.”
From this, I gather that Keith thinks the US use of power was justified because: a) the United States has a responsibility to intervene to prevent suffering and chaos; and b) not intervening in such cases is not only a betrayal of the ideals of the United States but it will eventually threaten the liberty of Americans themselves.
It seems to me that Keith’s criteria are insufficient to decide whether the United States had a legitimate interest in intervening in Vietnam. Obviously, there are an unlimited number of opportunities for the United States to invade for the purposes of decreasing suffering and chaos, and, equally obviously, the United States has limited resources and must decide to pass on some opportunities to decrease suffering and chaos, as it did in East Timor, Cambodia, Rwanda, etc., and seize others (Vietnam, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq). But on what basis do we put the situation in South Vietnam in one category or the other? Here it would be useful for someone to make a clearer case.
The question is: on what basis should the United States make such choices? One reasonable, if somewhat utilitarian, criteria, it seems to me, would be to ensure that the United States intervenes if and only if a reasoned evaluation of the situation would conclude that there is as near a certainty as possible that the United States actually will succeed in decreasing the suffering and chaos in that region. With that in mind, let’s turn to the third axiom:
Axiom Three: The US was bound to lose the Vietnam War
While I agree with Keith that one could imagine strategies that might have led to the establishment of an enduring South Vietnam, that does not mean that these strategies would necessarily have succeeded, or that other mistakes would not have been made instead of the mistakes that were made. Even if these strategies did succeed, that does not necessarily mean that the suffering and chaos experienced by the South Vietnamese would have been lessened, even in a situation in which the fall of Saigon did not occur. Not all non-communist nations with US military presences of one kind or another always had it easy after 1975. Do we have a clear enough basis to assume that without the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam would have thrived? Perhaps, but one still has to consider the influence of the military even in purportedly civilian South Vietnamese government and the continued political and social divisions among the South Vietnamese population.
Additionally, as Shawn McHale has pointed out, the suffering and chaos caused by US intervention followed by catastrophic and poorly planned US withdrawal perhaps ended up being greater than if the US had not directly intervened in the first place. If this is the case, then isn’t it irrelevant that the US loss was not in fact inevitable, since on balance the goal of decreasing suffering and chaos in South Vietnam in the long run was at best a possibility, while it was perhaps equally likely that the United States would not in fact succeed in decreasing suffering and chaos?
I really like Keith’s recent articles on the war, and of course like Shawn I share a debt of friendship and gratitude to Keith given that he was my dissertation advisor as well. I think in addition to opening up space to allow for new interpretations of the Vietnam War, as Keith is doing, considering the hairier interpretive questions would be useful as well.
All the best,
Wynn
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Sun May 29 09:04:26 2005
Date: Sun, 29 May 2005 12:03:53 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] Buzzanco/Taylor
I see that nearly everyone who knows a great deal more than me about Douglas Pike, Keith Taylor, Robert Buzzanco, Lubbock and Berkeley, SHAFR, Cornell, the Republic of Viet Nam and the Viet Nam War has posted about this topic. I'll make my own statement about the controversy now, the Sunday before Memorial Day, then read your postings and make my reply to those next Sunday.
If you're on the internet, you have the documents before you. Keith's Michigan Quarterly Review essay is at talawas, at http://www.talawas.org/talaDB/talaDBFront.php?rb=0304, translated by Bui Van Phu. If that doesn't work, go to www.talawas.org and look under the heading <Tu* t*o*`ng>, the fourth heading in red background on the right hand side, and click on <Cac nha nghien cuu nuoc ngoai viet ve Viet Nam>.
I am disappointed not to find some reaction to Keith's essay on the site, and to see the essay placed in the foreign researchers' ghetto. Pham Thi Hoai and her friends aren't kidding about the "ta"in "talawas". Although dictionaries say that "ta" is the inclusive first person plural, at "talawas" it is the "ta" Vietnamese people use when they mean us, and not the rest of you.
I was hoping that responses on Talawas would help me say what I think about Bob Buzzanco's criticism of Keith Taylor's new project. I will have to do it on my own.
Keith is a reflective man. In his essay in MQR he speaks of honor as an inner sense, and describes his process of deciding whether to go to Viet Nam as something entirely inside himself. He speaks of coming to terms with nausea provoked by subscribing to consensus views of the war.
His Birth of Viet Nam is distinguished by the intensity and stamina of the analyst's ability to think for himself, to look at each document that others have looked at and have his own opinion, even in the determined pace of a thousand-year narrative. If you go watch him present at a conference you can see this process happening, watch his face fold inside and come back out.
Bob instead engages with others. His criticism of Keith, available at Counterpunch at http://www.counterpunch.org/buzzanco04162005.html directly addresses Keith's argument about the Viet Nam War. Bob engages with others by presenting the authority of professional opinion, like a priest dropping a catechism on a doubter, with total confidence.
Bob's own book, Masters of War, uses a broad spectrum of archival and newspaper evidence in service to his argument, with no piece of evidence yielding any ambiguity. Bob engages with Keith by mounting the arguments of a broad consensus of historians, which all fits together on Bob's side.
So we've got a Protestant and a Catholic. In Keith's case, he is really Protestant: he has a whole rhetoric of reflection that is hard-core Calvinist, Cotton Mather stuff. I think it shows good sense on his part that he is not openly a millenarian evangelist democrat, someone who thinks George Bush is on a mission from God in the Middle East.
Another difference between Bob and Keith is class. Bob is of organized working class background and has made his journey into the professional middle class, all under the strict hierarchical discipline that characterizes those two strata.
Keith is not far from the farm. I don't know his exact circumstances and hope that he will write a book which will spell them out. Farmers make interior, individual decisions about what and when to plant, that must engage with the broadest currents of the outside world: the weather and the world market.
Hope College, where Keith did his BA, is one of our most intense liberal arts institutions. It serves the local Dutch farm and town people and the sons and daughters of the professionals it has graduated. It is a place to learn to think for yourself. After Hope he was in plain clothes overseas for Army Intelligence, where you can't trust anybody, certainly not your supervisors.
Then he entered a research university career. Between training at Michigan and tenure at Cornell he got kicked around the block, and really had to take care of himself. Keith is the only enlisted Viet
Nam veteran I know of with tenure in the social sciences or humanities at a Research I university in the United States, and his career shows why.
I have no idea how he hung in there and got over, in contrast with the equally brilliant Viet Nam veterans Eric Henry, Jack Jaeger, Jim Hevia and David Marr, and countless others we haven't heard of. These are the success stories. Jack's at a smaller university, Eric and Jim have secure but non-tenure jobs at Chapel Hill and Chicago. David Marr, with his good sense, fled to Australia.
Keith was unemployed for a while, then teaching hither and yon around the globe. He had to camp out in Ha Noi for two years before his age-peers at Cornell, who had not taken time to serve their country, promoted him. Men like Keith coming back from World War II founded area studies, with lifetime employment from the day they joined the Army, company men, but Keith has been out in the big world.
So, Keith is inward and flares out on his own, while Bob is engaging and brings his field with him. Bob has had a smooth career, while Keith has had bumps.
I go into all of this because reading Bob's attack on Keith I get the idea that Bob has no idea who he is talking about. For instance, Bob keeps bringing up Cornell as an elite institution, as if Keith is up there in the snow molding little conservatives.
Cornell was the Southeast Asianist think tank of the anti-war movement and the violent birthplace of ethnic studies. It is both a public land-grant and private, robber-baron university, yielding wonderful fusions like radical rural agronomists. Ithaca is moreover the origin and focus of one of the great back-to-the-land old hippy movements.
I can go on and on. Once on my way up to the Asian American Studies office at Cornell, while on campus for a Viet Nam colloquium, I passed the office of a physics lab instructor who, to judge by the posters and bumper stickers on his door, is the lone embattled USMC Viet Nam veteran militarist on campus.
Of course it is an elite institution, but if Bob is going to be a social critic he should observe how we here in the elite actually do things. Cornell is a liberal arts college, and Keith is the model of a liberal arts instructor. I've seen him imparting his inwardness to a student by listening to her talk without giving any cue of assent or critique. He spent my first course with him showing us in what ways his first book, the Birth of Viet Nam, is a pack of lies.
As for me, the person telling you all this: I find reflection difficult. It is murky and slow in there. I argue to hear myself think and to learn something from the other guy, rather than to win. Win what? I find it hard to believe that either Keith or Bob believes it is important what any of us thinks about the Viet Nam War, although I recognize that they do believe that, and I have ideas about why.
As to discipline, I am virtually unemployable, the very picture of a day-laborer or of a business owner, in particular an author and publisher. It is in my nature and position to size up people like Bob and Keith, and listen to them to learn something.
So what are they saying? We've got Bob's article, and Keith's essay. We don't have in front of us the talks Keith has been giving. I saw one at Asian Studies. Bob saw one at Lubbock, and watched Keith chair a panel on Ngo Dinh Diem at the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations conference.
Keith has been doing this for a long time, publishing essays in journals that are not peer-reviewed, giving expressive talks and letting go in his courses. All the while he writes his heavily professional historical articles on a completely different plane.
I wish he would put it all together and publish a book to tell us in one place what he thinks and why he thinks it, with reference both to professional literature and his life. The novelist Wayne Karlin has just done that in his brilliant new Journeys to Vietnam, with reference both to his life and to the professional work of his peer writers.
The MQR essay is the bare bones of such a thing for Keith. It takes my breath away because I have spent my life listening to veterans and reading their manuscripts and books. One thing you can say about them in general I wrote in 1976 in my very first essay on this subject, and it remains true. They are engaged in fantasy.
As time has gone by it has long since become clear that the fantasy isn't going anywhere, that it reflects an arrested state. Even the most accomplished and hard-driving of the war writers, Bill Ehrhart, David Willson, Joe Haldeman, all stay in the same place. Emblematically, Tim O'Brian's character Cacciato retreated into fantasy, and the author himself since then just keeps writing the same thing.
Keith's MQR essay moves me because it reflects spiritual movement. It is something different. That is what has always been wonderful about the man, he is always going to tell you what he thinks and you never know what it is going to be. He is a very alive person, in contrast to that tome he wrote about people long dead. The essay makes me feel like he is going to come out with something new.
It is going to be something about Saigon. The AAS talk was about the historical integrity and movement of Saigon since Nguyen Anh marched north two hundred years ago. Keith related that history to the sense he had in Saigon in 1971, what anyone who was in town then or has read the books and newspapers from the time knew, that Saigon under the Republic of Viet Nam was a lively civil society and active democracy.
The SHAFR panel which Bob saw was on a related topic, the seriousness of Ngo Dinh Diem as a political leader. Keith presents this as a new development in the historiography, which surprised me, and Bob jumps on it as heresy, which it is in his field of study.
But it is also the plain truth, something anyone who was there could tell you. It is a commonplace among the war generation in Ha Noi that the South lost when they lost Ngo Dinh Diem, a real mandarin. A whole class of southern Vietnamese intellectuals living overseas threw out their TVs, stopped reading the papers, and retreated into the arts after his murder in 1963.
The dissidents against Diem, the plotters against Diem, all were struggling against a real leader and they knew it. Bob calls Saigon corrupt and kleptocratic, like Boston and New York weren't? Bob trots out the most tired caricature of Diem, that he had lived in exile, that he had foreign sponsors. Look, Ho Chi Minh was out of the country a lot longer and he had many more foreign sponsors.
When Diem's enemies caricatured him, when Ho's supporters canonized him, they knew they were writing piffle. Nguyen Khac Vien was no robot. But as Keith says, the people throwing together teach-ins for the anti-war movement bought his arguments hook, line and sinker and now somebody has to point out that all that stuff was deliberate propaganda.
Oh, to heck with it. I can't help getting ahead of myself. Bob's essay rankles me deeply. Learn damned Vietnamese if you are going to write about Vietnamese history. If you aren't going to do that, read historians who do read Vietnamese. Bob's range of reference in his reply to Keith is limited strictly to Americanists. I include Marilyn Young and Georg Kahin and William Duiker.
Marilyn is a China historian; George was an Indonesianist and the man who argued for funding for Southeast Asia Studies and, to his great credit, against the war. The great value of their books on the Vietnam War is that they are studies of the American state by scholars formed in study of other countries, for once.
But they aren't about the nation of Viet Nam. William Duiker is a trickier case, a US diplomat mesmerized by the Vietnamese Communists to the exclusion of their historical context, finally writing one huge study about the one revolutionary who had all his rivals killed and his dissidents suppressed.
There is by contrast a much longer list of really good English-language authors who do treat the Viet Nam War as a Vietnamese political event and none of them are in Bob's footnotes. You can read William Turley in two hours, for heaven's sake. Ralph Smith's four volumes take longer but will re-thread any American's head.
Huynh Kim Khanh gives a realistic portrait of the VCP, and Ngo Vinh Long, a stalwart of the anti-war movement, provides a library of Vietnamese documents, as does Truong Buu Lam. Our contemporary Chris Goscha has placed the revolution and the war in its regional contexts. Not a one of these is in Bob's references.
Moreover, the man doesn't listen to Vietnamese people any more than he reads Viet Nam studies scholars. His article does engage with Keith's clearly stated three-point argument in the MQR essay and draws up his Americanist authorities to dispute the points. I don't do this kind of thing and I am grateful that Bob did.
But I would have liked to see him engage more seriously with the room he walked out of in Lubbock, when he heard Keith give his talk. I am sympathetic to walking out on Lubbock. I went there once and haven't gone back.
It's a room full of the public, rather than the professionals Bob builds his arguments on. In a footnote he states frankly that he doesn't like the role of the crank. I know exactly what he means, although I feel that way at SHAFR too.
The beautiful thing James Reckner has done at Lubbock is to engage a public audience for discussing Viet Nam. As it happens, he is working in Texas, one place where retired officers go to live cheap, not far from free medical care at the Veterans' Administration hospitals and discounted food and goods at the base PXs.
So that is who you have to talk to at Lubbock, retired civil servants living on the government tit who think that they are embattled conservatives, retired officers who think they speak for the active duty enlisted men and women. I can't handle it.
But a lot of people can. You can't keep Marc Gilbert away from the place. Two of the people at Lubbock when Keith gave his talk and Bob lost it could have lent Bob some perspective on Keith's point that the Republic of Viet Nam was a real place.
One was Bao Ninh, the great novelist of the Viet Nam War, who entered Saigon in April, 1975 with the People's Army. The overwhelming reaction of the entering soldiers was, my god, what are we liberating these people from anyways? They were bowled over by the material wealth, of course, but what made a lasting impression on Bao Ninh, and his contemporaries Duong Thu Huong and Nguyen Huy Thiep when they visited later were the books.
Bao Ninh tells every researcher who asks him that his Sorrow of War was inspired by the freedom of certain Saigon war novels. All of the the doi moi writers cite the inspiration they found in the books and newspapers left over from the thriving civil society of downtown Saigon.
The Republic of Viet Nam was real to them. Another person at the Lubbock conference who could have told Bob something about the Republic of Viet Nam was the new author Quang X. Pham, whose new memoir centers on his father. The elder Pham, a military officer, abandoned his family out of indecision in April, 1975. He could not choose a moment when it was right to abandon his nation. It was real to him.
That is the kind of thing Bob would hear if he listened to Vietnamese people. It is all there in the novelist Nguyen Ngoc Ngan's English-language memoir, the Will of Heaven. If you even try to learn just to read Vietnamese, using a ten-dollar copy of Nguyen Dinh Hoa's Read Vietnamese, you get a lively sense of the civil society of RVN in his selection from the daily press of the 1950s.
So, I agree with Keith rather than Bob on two of the Keith's three points. The Republic of Viet Nam was a real place. I agree with Bob, and William Turley and the rest of the world, that they didn't control their territory, but I agree with Keith that it was a real government and civil society. I agree with his assessment of the subjective experience of many of its citizens, and his historical argument about the force of Saigon in Vietnamese history.
I don't think that Bob could disagree with us using Vietnamese sources. I also agree with Keith that the present consensus academic understanding of the war outside of Vietnamese studies comes from determinist Ha Noi propaganda adopted uncritically by the anti-war movement. I think that Bob's own range of sources makes that point handily. I would add that George Kahin's student Frances Fitzgerald greatly influenced educated opinion outside the universities with her exoticist, determinist best-seller Fire in the Lake.
I disagree with Keith on whether the US properly had a role in Vietnamese affairs. He thinks the struggle against Communism was a good thing. I think that the Cold War was an elaborate charade to shore up the hegemony of elites in Washington and Moscow. This opinion doesn't do much, if you want to write history or make policy, but I don't do those things and it is what I think.
I agree with Bob that the Viet Nam War was a complete disaster. Keith seems to think so, too. Although Bob and I are alike in so many ways personally that my revulsion from his arguments is likely just a narcissism of small differences, my assessment of the war as a debacle is more like Keith's than like Bob's.
Keith I think would recognize the damage the United States did to Viet Nam. It's just a fact. But I don't think that Bob would accept what Keith and I both think, that a great shame from the war was that we abandoned an ally and its people. If Bob would pay attention to Vietnamese people he would know that.
I don't know what else there was to do but abandon them. If the United States Air Force had bombed the People's Army as they advanced on Saigon, serious people would have taken serious action here at home. We were sick of the war.
A top national security man, Daniel Ellsberg, had publicly committed treason against the war, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. The Republic of Viet Nam was doomed, as far as US help was concerned. We had to save our our own nation.
I agree with Keith's historical arguments, but I would like to spell out what he is saying about violence and about honor. Keith is a rough guy. The job he had in Viet Nam, plainclothes for Army Intelligence, involves autonomous thinking about violence. It is not just standing on a firing line holding a rifle over a sandbag and pulling a trigger while a gunnery sergeant kicks your ass.
One man I know who had Keith's job in Korea at the same time recruited young citizens of our ally to run with him over the DMZ to kidnap Communist officers for order of battle intelligence. That is, you would pull a man into the woods and beat him to death with a shovel while finding out his rank and so on.
After my friend, a family man with a business and property now whom I have known all my adult life, not some drunk in a VFW bar, had used his agent a few times he would either beat him up and drop him in a strange place or kill him. I don't know what Keith did for a living over there, but that is the world he worked in.
A profound acceptance of violence runs through his MQR article. For instance, he refers, in his exposition of the legitimacy of Ngo Dinh Diem and RVN, to the suppression of peasant revolts in 1956 and 1958.
Ngo Dinh Diem suppressed revolts by sending men out to kill not only everyone who disagreed with him but everyone who might one day in the future disagree with him. So Keith thinks that's all right, and he also thinks that all the bozo things we did for forty years to "fight Communism", chiefly sending men a great deal like him out to kill people for disagreeing with us were all right.
This is where I stand with Bob, and say that the Viet Nam War was a disaster because we carried it out on the population of our ally, with knives and small arms and fifty caliber machine guns and artillery and napalm and arclight strikes and defoliants, with reckless driving and C-ration cans thrown at the heads of hungry children. Army Intelligence, Keith's outfit, put parachutes on our ally's soldiers and dropped them into the North, never to be heard from again, month after month, for years and years.
I nonetheless know what Keith meant when he said at AAS the Viet Nam War was honorable, because he had explained it in his essay. He meant that he navigated his way through circumstances in accord with his inner sense of right and wrong.
That is not what the retired military officers at Lubbock mean by "honor." They are not talking about what Quang Pham's father did either, the quiet, desperate, anonymous, doomed task of being decent. They are talking about professional solidarity.
General Creighton Abrams, for instance, after commending Colonel David Hackworth as the best combat commander ever seen anywhere, denounced David's dissidence against the conduct of the war as "dishonorable." What Creighton was referring to, why it made sense to him to criticize the best combat commander in the Army as dishonorable, was that David had cleaned dirty laundry in public, taxing his brother officers with their cowardice and incompetence.
For me, in my civilian, individualist, business, artist's way, when I hear the word "honor", like "trust", or "leadership", spoken out loud, I know that the quality is not present. It is an aspirational utterance, what Keith in his Protestant lexicon calls an "exuberance", a performative gesture that does not perform. The more Keith talks about "honor", the more I know that the Viet Nam War was shameful.
Keith ends his essay with an exchange with a former ARVN official. It is a lovely moment, with Keith finding out what he thinks by relating to someone. The man asks him if he thinks the war was a noble cause. Keith finds himself replying that yes, he does.
I would have told the man that here in the United States the phrase "noble cause" refers specifically to the rehabiliation of the memory of the Confederacy in support of the institution of Jim Crow. The Americans who talk about the "noble cause" would just as soon kill a Vietnamese as look at him. The RVN offical should learn the history of his adopted country and find a better phrase.
Leaving the Civil War aside, calling RVN a "noble cause" does two things, and one is worth doing and the other just alienates me. The one that alienates me is rehabilitating the US Army without candidly accepting what it actually did in Viet Nam. All those retired officers in Lubbock clap for Keith and the obvious implication is that we should go do the same thing in Iraq.
Well we are doing the same thing in Iraq and I am sick about that. But we are Viet Nam scholars, with jack zip influence over the foreign policy of the government of the United States, no matter what Keith in his area studies milieu and Bob with his SHAFR pretensions may think.
What we do have influence over is how people view Viet Nam. The war against the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam was a noble cause, I will grant, if we can ignore the history of that phrase for the moment, with disregard for everything that happened on the ground, because it was a war against expansion by a bunch of robots, people who stand four-square against creativity and critical thought, what we do for a living.
Those of us who have found positive things to do in Viet Nam that require travel visas cannot come out and say this, but we all think it, because it is obvious, because it is true. Bob Buzzanco is an example of the consequences of our not saying it our loud. He is a professional, and knows only what he reads, like the rest of us. He hasn't any idea what Keith means.
Not enough of us have laid it out for people like Bob that, as Keith puts it, Viet Nam now "suffers from a corrupt, tyrannical and impoverishing form of government." That for me is the positive part of Keith's essay, of his trying to write history of Saigon in the personal terms that his profession makes difficult.
He is speaking up, at a time when the robot anti-communists have moved on to praise Viet Nam's openness to the global market, at a time when my government is making it embarassing to talk about human rights, to the fact that Viet Nam remains a police state.
Somebody really should have done something realistic about keeping the VCP from running Viet Nam, but no one did. One thing specialists can do now is to mock and scorn their old lies, still kicking around our universities.
Dan
Dan Duffy
Viet Nam Literature Project
5600 Buck Quarter Road
Hillsborough, NC 27278
tel 919-383-7274, 11 AM - 3 PM Eastern
email dduffy@email.unc.edu
www.vietnamlit.org
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 10:30:37 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] Buzzanco/Taylor
Parts/Attachments:
I was too tired last Sunday to read through past postings about Bob Buzzanco and Keith Taylor. The Music Maker Relief Foundation had a concert at the North Carolina Museum of Art the night before, a show with young Nashville star Tift Merritt. Tift is a local, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, one of "the best girls in the world" as their t-shirts say. She lives now on the beach in Wilmington, where Dana Sachs teaches.
Tift built her career singing on Friday nights at the General Store in Bynum, a dead mill town near Chapel Hill. The mill died in the 1950s, the new Interstate put its exit somewhere else, and the town emptied out. Jerry closed his store but opens it for music, part of the scene that is filling Bynum up again. Tift and Jerry meet when she was living there cheap, and using one of the post office boxes he maintains as a public service.
One of Tift's best songs so far is from what Jerry told her about growing up when the mill was open. "They built a Highway" is a moment in Carolina history, about de-industrialization. The industrial revolution itself, the building of the mills, is still a living memory and the closing of the plants has just now finished. Leaving the land, labor struggle, and now globalization are the themes of a rich musical heritage, what you might call folk music if you're not involved in it, a popular music that ranges from equals entertaining one another face-to-face to virtuosity to fully alienated corporate production.
When I went to see my friend the virtuoso Taj Mahal sing one year ago in Carrboro, the mill town right next to the University of North Carolina, where the mayor is gay and the town center is a food co-op started by some old hippies to make a decent income, Taj told us from the stage that the railroad tracks outside the club, the ones I walk over to the university, were the very same that Elizabeth Cotton wrote her great "Freight Train" about when she was a girl.
Then he sang it, a song I've known longer than I can know, and now I think of Taj and Elizabeth every time I cross the tracks on my way to school. Taj is a black man, of course, from an Atlantic diaspora community outside Springfield, Massachussets on the Connecticut River, not far from where I grew up. We both favor the cheap strong, good cigars they make in New Haven from the Connecticut wrapper leaves rejected for the world market. A musician of talent and power to overcome all obstacles, he named himself after the one of the wonders of the world he now tours, playing world music.
One place he comes is Carolina, Nawth Kakalaky, where his father came from, an Indian as well as an African. That night at the club I was there with a singer from the Tuscarora, one of the nations first smashed by the settlers, so long ago that many now doubt they are natives. Carolina has the most Indians of any state east of the Mississippi, and fifth in the nation. Pura Fe was named in Brooklyn by her Puerto Rican dad.
There is a lot going on down here, always has been, and people come and go, as they always do. The original Siamese twins, Eng and Cheng, retired from their show career to Stokes County, still remote. When they moved in there was no river, rail, or road connection from Stokes to the outside world. The twins married sisters and had a lot of kids, and their family remains big in the state.
Other Asians were already here, Jews and Lebanese of course since the Caribbean trading days, and now of course a lot more in the last few years. Transmigrant Hmong are the only textile workers left in the state, keeping the sock industry alive over in Hickory, in the Appalachians. Other hill people from mainland Southeast Asia cluster around their friends in the Special Warfare school at Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville in the southeast.
East Asians and Vietnamese center in Charlotte, the banking center, and South Asians over here where I am, in high-tech. The two groups have been getting together for the first time, over music of course, benefit shows for the tsunami victims in Southeast Asia. I went to one benefit at one of the three temples in Raleigh with my best student ever, who didn't get into Yale or Harvard or New York University law schools because he scored only in the 95th percentile on an entrance test carried out in the third language he learned working in the family store.
So he is going to Central, the black state college in Durham. It's the most serious law school I have ever heard of and I think he will be senator, with not only an Asian merchant family but in deep with the white elite at Carolina, the planter's school where I taught him, and also with the black elite and the Mexicans going to school there with him too. The only center of power he is missing is State, in Raleigh where John Balaban teaches, the white farmer's school, now strong in high-tech, where many South Asians are educating their children.
I will leave North Carolina only in a box. The music, the ancient character and the dynamic change in the flow of race and class and nation, the way that injustice litters the landscape and people have taken such positive action, make life real. Wilmington, where Dana teaches, was the site of the first race riot, the white putsch against the black middle class that marked the end of Reconstruction and the beginnings of Jim Crow. It is a still a white town, with black families in shocking rural poverty outside.
Greensboro, where my Vietnamese bookstores are, is of course where the black students sat down for lunch at Woolworth's. Of course, fifteen years later the Klan shot down the Communists there without a single prosecution. But the town now has not one but two competing truth and reconcilation committees trying to set things straight. One driving force in this movement is the need to rehabilitate the place, so people can make some money.
Durham, where my student Tin goes to school, is the only black middle-class city never to have a race riot. I go to society events in the auditorium of one of insurance companies there where I am not only almost the only white face, but the poorest man present. Central, one of the old Jim Crow schools, is still black and under-funded but is giving an excellent education to poor whites as well as to immigrant Asians and Mexicans. Chapel Hill and State are no longer white only.
At the concert in Raleigh which made me miss writing last Sunday, blonde rock-star Tift was singing with bluesmen John Dee Holman and Cool John Ferguson, who work with my brother Tim to benefit elderly musicians who made their careers in Jim Crow, without rights. Elizabeth Cotton is dead now and she never got a penny royalty for "Freight Train. "This is why we don't like the phrase "folk music." Even Cotton's grand-daughter didn't get a dime for the rock and roll standard "Sugaree", which she wrote when she was ten, in Durham. My brother and his friends are working practically to redress one hundred years of expropriation.
I get to sit in a booth and explain all this to the public, when I don't stand on my chair and shout about something the artists just did on stage. Such evenings are moments in my life when I don't do what no sane person who was alive and conscious in the United States from 1965-1975 wants to do, to talk or think about Viet Nam.
Anybody who remembers the sixties, we say, wasn't there, and I add from the perspective of a child at the time, anyone who is nostalgic for those times wasn't there either. "Hippy" among my students now is a style, a way of being, that involves an admirable gentleness among men, that has zip to do with a head shop on Broadway in 1970.
The freaks I knew were angry, dangerous people. The vibe was like what you might still feel from a biker today, one wearing what we call a "righteous", Old Testament, beard. Many of our historical images come from photos for middle-class newspapers, which tend to show the whole decade as a frolic among the privileged young. Well, no, much of the country badly needed medication.
There was a lot to be angry about, many apt targets. Anything to do with Viet Nam was a betrayal. The World War II generation denied veterans' benefit to their sons. The White House lied to everyone. The US let down Saigon. The US Army integrated blacks, into a madhouse. McNamara set out to recruit 100,000 soldiers who were known to be mentally incompetent. Inadvertent damage to Vietnamese civilians outran deliberate military destruction by orders of magnitude.
The successful campaigns in the war, mass assassination, were carried out without debate among the public who of course abhorred them. Strategic bombing had no apparent effect, except the civilian casualties, a reminder of far worse in Japan and Germany. Local police departments and the FBI had wired the whole country for sound and even video. I am not making historical arguments here, just noting the things that everyone noticed at the time, that contributed to the vibe.
I knew all these things when I was out in the sticks as a kid, in the woods in a rural town that was becoming a bedroom community with the advent of people like my parents, a lawyer and a teacher. We were immigrants, in the sense that mom was from a small town and dad from the land. A Jewish college gave them diversity scholarships, and the Marine Corps got dad into law school and mom payed for it by teaching.
He started a law firm, that is, a small business, worked nights and weekends while mom taught and we all kept our heads down making it in the mainstream. I knew what I knew from watching Huntley and Brinkley and reading the paper with my older brother. His teacher Mrs. Hubbel, from one of the farm families, who had started the town educational system in a one-room school, made him watch.
I was very struck by the box scores of the dead, ours and theirs, every night. Later, when we were in a bigger house, Paul somehow got one of Wilfred Burchett's books, and I remember the shock of the title on the spine, les majeste, "Viet Nam Will Win!" I was upset by the bombing, rolling on and on, and about one of my cousins going into the USMC from jail, and breaking with his father, a veteran who opposed the war. I was very struck once, out for an ice cream soda with dad, when I calculated that the war was about to exceed in length the Civil War.
Dad didn't say a word. Lots of people didn't say a word. Dad thought the war was a trivial distraction, as was the civil rights movement, from the business of gaining capital and forcing the people who run this country to take the rest of us seriously. If he thought that armed revolution would work we would have been doing that - the Marines in the 50s when he was in were openly teaching Maoist tactics.
Dad's was a respectable approach to a just life in the United States, expounded by Booker T. Washington, with which I basically agree. So do a lot of other people. We were all bent out of shape about the war, but that "silent majority" stuff was right on-target. Perhaps the most apt representation of the war I know in American fiction is in Willam Gaddis's encylopedic "JR", a compendium of our commercial culture, where the war appears a few moments on a radio program running in an empty apartment, while most everyone is out making money, except the hero, who is out trying to make a living while he makes art.
I have to go feed Jim's horses. He is at the beach. Of the other tenants, Heather is still down from getting kicked in the liver last month. BJ is taking the weekend off, as I plan to do soon. It may take me another month to finish what I have to say about Bob Buzzanco and Keith Taylor. Bob is my age and a fellow Americanist. Keith is one of the men I have listened to since before he went, and a colleague in the profession I joined after thirty, we in AAS who study Viet Nam.
It will all take a while to unpack, and to digest the list's suggestions. I only have early Sunday mornings to deal with anything besides writing my book, editing Vietnamese literature, raising money to promote it, and working outdoors. At least two more Sundays, which will take more than two weeks to get.
Dan
Dan Duffy
Viet Nam Literature Project
5600 Buck Quarter Road
Hillsborough, NC 27278
tel 919-383-7274, 11 AM - 3 PM Eastern
email dduffy@email.unc.edu
www.vietnamlit.org