Writing five years ago in the Claremont Review of Books (“The Vietnam War Revisited,” Spring 2018), I criticized a ten-part PBS series, The Vietnam War (2017) by directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, arguing that, rather than an evenhanded examination of the war, the documentary merely offered “one more rendition of the antiwar case, made by those who didn’t even acknowledge the existence of counter-arguments.” Among the most important of those counter-arguments was military historian Mark Moyar’s 2006 book, Triumph Forsaken. Moyar’s revisionist history demonstrated, in the face of what was supposed to be settled conventional wisdom, that the United States was not destined to lose in Vietnam. Our defeat was instead the result of hesitancy and squeamishness about wartime tactics, which led to bad political and strategic decisions at all levels from Washington to Saigon.
