Hindsight makes us brilliant. David Halberstam brought his experiences writing in Saigon for the New York Times in late 1962 into this book “The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era” in which he won a pulitzer prize for international reporting from Vietnam in 1964. In many ways its a perfect prequel to his wonderful book The Best and the Brightest.
There are terrible lessons from the long US involvement in Vietnam that echo today. Its fair to say we Americans like to repeat history. This book written almost thirty years ago yet tells much about our approach in Afghanistan and Iraq. The quick lesson is that America regardless of party backed Ngo Dinh Diem from 1955 until plotting his assassination in 1963. Diem was actually living in a catholic monastery in New Jersey for three years before returning to Vietnam to become South Vietnam’s first President.
Halberstam makes it clear early in the book that the war in Vietnam was lost during the Eisenhower Administration. The war against the North continued to fail throughout the coutnryside of South Vietnam during Kennedy’s short Presidency.
Halberstam shows how the war was not lost in Saigon or the Central Highlands. It was lost in the Mekong Delta between 1956-1959. But the US back Diem insisting on saving Vietnam from communism, tolerated a corrupt Diem family and fought a war for another 20 years before finally giving up. Halberstam does not spare America its sinking America’s loss as a world power. Again I find his writing to be powerful lessons for today.