Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965

by Mark Moyar

Book Overview

Drawing on a wealth of new evidence from all sides, Triumph Forsaken, first published in 2007, overturns most of the historical orthodoxy on the Vietnam War. Through the analysis of international perceptions and power, it shows that South Vietnam was a vital interest of the United States. The book provides many insights into the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and demonstrates that the coup negated the South Vietnamese...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521869110
• ISBN13: 9780521869119
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 552 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.2" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-1965

Triumph Forsaken is the finest account published to date on the Vietnam War. The early histories of the War were produced by the journalists who covered the War. Their accounts reflect negative reporting, as well as the search for "Dirt" as Neil Sheehan called it. Thereafter followed histories of the War based on the negative journalism that characterized media coverage from the War Zone. In the years that followed primary sources have been produced that include biographical accounts -- first person accounts of the diplomats, intelligence operatives, and soldiers who experienced the War first hand. Particularly useful have been the official military histories produces long after the guns were silent that record the message traffic, major speeches of key leaders, and intelligence summaries of the campaigns waged by both Hanoi and America. Finally there are the biographical accounts of the North Vietnamese Generals, who directed the War from Hanoi and fought the War in South Vietnam. Their accounts add much to our understanding of the War and in many respects show a remarkable similarity to the accounts of Senior American Diplomats and General Officers of the battles they waged from opposite sides of the skirmish lines. It is these primary sources that Mark Moyar has used to write his fresh and very readable History of the Vietnam War. Such a work could not have been written twenty years ago, because the primary sources were still in production. Now that these sources have been published, it is possible for the first time to see the War as senior leaders on both sides saw the Conflict. Moyar's account is fascinating. It bring both new light to the events of the War, as well as it brings new analysis never before seen to evaluate the significance of the Vietnam experience and the meaning of the vast treasure, both human and military, that both sides poured into the War effort to shape our times. Serious students of the Vietnamese War, or the American War, as it in known in Hanoi, will not want to miss the seminal publication. Published by Cambridge University Press and 512 pages in length, Triumph Forsaken is the finest work yet to emerge from among the many works covering the War. Covering the years from 1954 to 1965, the History will be followed by a follow-on edition covering the years from 1965 to 1975 that will provide new light on the final decade of the War based upon recently published primary sources. The reader who brings an open mind and willingness to hear the words of those who led the War will be rewarded many times over for the time spent engrossed in a beautifully written account of the most important war fought since the end of the Second World War.

There, Where Horses Tread on the Corpses, Where the Land Is Painted in Blood

"If you do nothing enough, something's bound to happen" - Benjamin Daniel Katz In his new book, Triumph Forsaken, Mark Moyar refers to this interpretation of Vietnam as the "orthodox" school of thought. So entrenched is this orthodox interpretation that its proponents consider axiomatic their premise that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was at best a lapse in judgment, at worst a criminal enterprise, and in any case a tragic mistake. The "revisionist" school, a growing insurgency in military history that Moyar explicitly represents, sees Vietnam as "a worthy but improperly executed enterprise." Moyar's focus is on the formative years of the conflict, before the major commitment of U.S. combat forces in 1965. He considers the key assertions that undergird the orthodox interpretation of events, and shows their weaknesses, if not outright inaccuracies. The story focuses on Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam, who came to power (as prime minister) in 1954. The U.S.-backed 1963 coup that resulted in Diem's death was by most accounts the watershed event in the history of the war; it led inexorably to the large-scale commitment of U.S. ground forces two years later. The orthodox histories present Diem as a clueless tyrant who was losing control of the country -- as a Catholic aloofly ruling a land of Buddhists, influenced by the Marie Antoinette-like attitude of his sister-in-law Madame Nhu. Moyar convincingly argues that this depiction of Diem is false, the product of U.S. press bias and the cultural illiteracy of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. Diem was in no wise an ineffectual leader. Unlike those who followed him, he was able to make order. Diem neutralized the vast organized-crime empires that initially threatened his authority. He kept a lid on the militant Buddhist movement that was in league with the North. Moreover, with the help of U.S. advisers -- including former OSS operative Edward Lansdale and Lt. Gen. Samuel "Hanging Sam" Williams -- he was able to mount an effective campaign to diminish the influence of the Communists in the South. Internal Communist-party documents from the North show that the party suffered massive defections and defeats in the late 1950s, in some areas losing 90 percent of its cadres. Diem's success was no secret; in 1959 the New York Times dubbed his rule since 1954 "a five-year miracle." By then Diem was at his zenith. In 1960 Ho Chi Minh, frustrated at the failure of the party to foment an uprising in the South, declared a renewed armed struggle and began dispatching waves of soldiers and supplies southward. Diem's internal opponents were given new confidence. When Lodge arrived, he took an instant dislike to Diem, primarily because Lodge thought he knew better how to run South Vietnam, and Diem had the temerity to think otherwise. The U.S. pushed Diem to make conciliatory gestures to various protest groups, particularly the Buddhists, which played into the hand

A Star is Born

I read Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken with full admiration. As an avid reader of Vietnam war history --in both in Vietnamese and in English --it's delightful to see Mr. Moyar comes up with a fresh look at, among others, what we Sough Vietnamese consider the most turbulent times of the Republic of Vietnam . Aside from the book's main theme which advances the premise that triumphs achieved by South Vietnam's first republic were forsaken and the removal of President Ngo Dinh Diem was a mortal mistake, Triumph Forsaken also provides a detailed picture of a rather complex and chaotic times in South Vietnam . The immediate four years after the coup dR(tm)etat that brought down Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in 1963 were tumultuous ones. The situation during the period of 1964-1967 in Saigon had been discussed and written in many books before, but none provided as much details as Mr. Moyar's. What makes Mr. Moyar'book different from other books is that the author abundantly supplies readers with references from books published in Vietnamese from both sides of the war (North and South Vietnam ). This reader must admid that many times during reading Mr. MoyarR(tm)s book, he has gone to his bookshelves to checked out those Vietnamese sources cited by the author. And on every instance the references are relevant and concise; translations from the Vietnamese sources are splendid as they were rendered into English. Two chapters stands out from Triumph Forsaken: Chapter 16 (The Prize for Victory: January-May 1965), and Chapter 17 (Decision: June-July 1965). The periods described in those two chapters were the times when political and military situations in South Vietnam were at their worst: in the home front,infighting between South Vietnamese rival generals for political control reached its apex. In the battle front, North Vietnamese military commanders began to test to see if they could employ big unit operations. And with the capability to wage regimental-sized battles they could. It's from these vicious and big battles of Binh Gia, Dong Xoai and Ba Gia in 1965, where the South Vietnamese ilitary suffered bad beatings, that the United Stated decided to send in the ground (combat) troops to stem the tide. In addition to many recently declassified documents used to prove the author's point, for a better comparison, Mr. Moyar also provides plenty of sources and references from contemporary North and South Vietnamese military books and memoirs. And that makes the book interesting. Lastly, this may be aside from the focus of this review, but as a Vietnamese reader I can not fail to praise Mr. Moyar for his scholarship and his keen eyes for editing this Vietnamese-ladden book: of the 415 pages of text and 93 pages of references and index, sprinkled with Vietnamese names and Vietnamese titles, there were only five typos. Now, that's a remarkable achievement for a young Vietnam war historian. Triumph Forsaken is a must read for those who care to read Vietnam war lite

A Valuable Contribution to the Study of American Military History

It is certainly about time that a scholar trained in historical research takes a new look at the Vietnam War era and evaluates it on the basis of the wealth of new evidence which has become available. This new book by Dr. Mark Moyar, "Triumph Forsaken," offers a serious challenge to those of the so-called "orthodox school" of historians and commentators regarding the War itself, its justification, and its consequences. Self-described as a "revisionist" historian, Moyar provides a reassessment of the events from America's first intrusion into the Vietnam arena (mainly in the form of "advisors"), through the fateful assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, to the placement of U.S. ground forces into Vietnam by President Lyndon Johnson. For the record, I am not in either the "orthodox" or the "revisionist" camp of historians; I am solidly in the "let's find the truth" and the "objective evidence" camp. Furthermore, I am not a member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that the "Publishers Weekly" mentions in its review ("Revisionists will embrace the book; the orthodox will see it as more evidence of a vast, right-wing conspiracy"). The facts of the matter are that I remember well the Vietnam War, lost my closest childhood friend -- a Navy pilot -- when he was shot down over Vietnam (how well I remember the dreaded telephone call that night from my parents!), and can recall exactly where and when I received the news about Diem's assassination in November of 1963 (and remarked angrily to one of my colleagues, "Well, we have just lost South Vietnam to the Communists"). I was teaching an American history course at the time and, although I was lecturing on the American War for Independence, I followed on a daily basis all the events in Southeast Asia as they were unfolding. Moyar's book, therefore, has great meaning for me personally since I lived through the era he covers and had strong opinions about what was going on in the world at that time. Much of what Moyar discloses some forty or so years later, many of us suspected at the time (that is, those who didn't agree with our government's strategy vis-a-vis Vietnam, took seriously the matter of international Communism on the move, and didn't swallow everything the media and its correspondents were telling the American people). The merciless killing of President Diem was especially appalling to us and we "knew" that some members of the Kennedy administration had to be involved. Moyar provides much rich detail and background about this incident, which, in my view, was the most significant disaster of the period, and he furnishes evidence that shows, in my opinion, that all too frequently in American foreign policy "politics" trumps "good sense." It is interesting to note the following which is related by Moyar: "The Communists, unlike most of the Americans, were very quick to grasp the profound significance of the November 1963 coup. Upon hearing of Diem's assassination, Ho Chi M

An absolute must-read

Triumph Forsaken is more deeply researched and more perceptive than any other history of the Vietnam War that I have seen and, trust me, I've read a good chunk of them. So much has been written and re-written about the Vietnam War that it would seem impossible to produce a book that thoroughly discredits most of the conventional wisdom, but Triumph Forsaken does just that and does it splendidly. It is well-documented proof that the left has totally dominated the previous discussion on Vietnam and that it has grossly distorted reality for its own purposes. This is not to say that the book is a polemic. Far from it, as a matter of fact. As much as is possible with a book of such controversial nature, it takes a detached view of the participants on all sides and does not get bogged down in the emotional diatribes that so often mar true objectivity. Rather than focusing strictly on the Americans with occasional reference to the North Vietnamese, as so many books do, it gives great attention to the Vietnamese leaders on all sides, as well as to other foreign leaders whose views on Vietnam made the country an area of vital strategic importance. This book will go where it doubtlessly belongs: into the canon of our must-read history books.