Topic
Vietnam War
About: Vietnam War is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5584 publications have been published within this topic receiving 72244 citations. The topic is also known as: American War & Second Indochina War.
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Papers
Book•
1 Jan 1982
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present five case studies of major fiascoes resulting from poor decisions made during the administrations of five American presidents' Franklin D. Roosevelt (failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor), Harry S Truman (the invasion of North Korea), John F. Kennedy (the Bay of Pigs invasion), Lyndon B. Johnson (escalation of the Vietnam War), and Richard M. Nixon (the Watergate cover-up).
Abstract: PrefaceThe main theme of this book occurred to me while reading Arthur M. Schlesinger's chapters on the Bay of Pigs in A Thousand Days. At first, I was puzzled: How could bright, shrewd men like John F. Kennedy and his advisers be taken in by the CIA's stupid, pat ch work plan? I began to wonder whether some kind of psychological contagion, similar to social conformity phenomena observed in studies of small groups, had interfered with their mental alertness, I kept thinking about the implications of this notion until one day I found myself talking about it, in a seminar of mine on group psychology at Yale University. I suggested that the poor decision-making performance of the men at those White House meetings might be akin to the lapses in judgment of ordinary citizens who become more concerned with retaining the approval of the fellow members of their work group than with coming up with good solutions to the tasks at hand.Shortly after that, when I reread Schlesinger's account, I was struck by some observations that earlier had escaped my notice. These observations began to fit a specific pattern of concurrence-seeking behavior that had impressed me time and again in my research on other kinds of face-to-face groups, particularly when a qwe-feelingq of solidarity is running high. Additional accounts of the Bay of Pigs yielded more such observations, leading me to conclude that group processes had been subtly at work, preventing the members of Kennedy's team from debating the real issues posed by the CIA's plan and from carefully appraising its serious risks.Then in Joseph de Rivera's The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy, I found an impressive example of excluding a deviant from Truman's group of advisers during the period of the ill-fated Korean War decisions. De Rivera's comments about the group's behavior prompted me to look further into that series of decisions and soon I encountered evidence of other manifestations of group processes, like those apparently operating in the Bay of Pigs decision.By this time, I was sufficiently fascinated by what I began to call the groupthink hypothesis to start looking into a fairly large number of historical parallels. I selected for intensive analysis two additional United States foreign-policy decisions and again found consistent indications of the same kind of detrimental group processes. Later I added a case study of a president's criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, which I now regard as the most impressive example of groupthink.This book presents five case studies of major fiascoes, resulting from poor decisions made during the administrations of five American presidents' Franklin D. Roosevelt (failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor), Harry S Truman (the invasion of North Korea), John F. Kennedy (the Bay of Pigs invasion), Lyndon B. Johnson (escalation of the Vietnam War), and Richard M. Nixon (the Watergate cover-up). Each of these decisions was a group product, issuing from a series of meetings of a small body of government officials and advisers who constituted a cohesive group. And in each instance, the members of the policy-making group made incredibly gross miscalculations about both the practical and moral consequences of their decisions.The second section, for comparative purposes, presents two case studies of well worked out decisions made by similar groups whose members made realistic appraisals of the consequences. One of these is the course of action chosen by the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. This decision, made by almost the same cast of characters that had approved the Bay of Pigs invasion plan in 1961, was arrived at very carefully, in a group atmosphere conducive to independent critical thinking, unlike that which prevailed in the earlier decision. Similarly, the second counterpoint example deals with the hardheaded way that planning committees in the Truman administration evolved the Marshall Plan in 1948. These two case studies indicate that policy-making groups do not always suffer the adverse consequences of group processes, that the quality of the group's decisionmaking activities depends upon current conditions that influence the group atmosphere.n n n n n n n n n
3,025 citations
Book•
1 Jan 19901,642 citations
Book•
26 Jul 2009TL;DR: The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood makes a signal contribution to the genre of “the history of the present,” which uses the apparently unremarkable fact that victims of disasters as diverse as genocide, earthquakes, and industrial accidents are all brought together within the same framework of understanding centered on the diagnostic category of trauma as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood makes a signal contribution to the genre of “the history of the present.” It uses the apparently unremarkable fact that victims of disasters as diverse as genocide, earthquakes, and industrial accidents are all brought together within the same framework of understanding centered on the diagnostic category of trauma. It asks, What does it mean that we take the concept of trauma as a given in these circumstances? The first part of the book provides a systematic examination of the archives of psychology and psychiatry to delineate the double genealogy of the diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is followed by an examination of three specific cases that the authors see as emblematic of contemporary politics of trauma. These cases are emergency psychiatric counseling for victims of an industrial accident in Toulouse in September 2001, the boom in humanitarian psychiatry in France since the 1980s, and, the use of PTSD for evaluating and certifying the truth claims of asylum seekers in France. The detail and finesse with which theory and data are woven together for each case makes this book compelling. For reasons of space, though, I will content myself with discussing two major claims of the book The first claim concerns the emergence of PTSD in the post-Vietnam period in North America. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue that, faced with media revelations of brutalities committed by American troops on civilians in Vietnam, the U.S. government was confronted with an impossible choice—either punish its own soldiers for crimes in which the chain of responsibility was hard to disentangle or accept its own culpability for these “crimes.” The diagnosis of PTSD for Vietnam veterans came as a solution of sorts. It took any moral judgment out of the clinical encounter, since the main premise was that ordinary people when put in extraordinary circumstances were capable of committing atrocities by which they could be later traumatized. Thus it became possible to condemn the event without condemning the perpetrators. It also allowed the government to set in place policies of rehabilitation for the veterans. Outside the clinical space, anger at the veterans was still evident in public condemnation of soldiers or their portrayals in films or other media as brutal killers rather than heroes. That the Vietnam War continues to be treated as a spectral presence on questions of warfare and culpability in the United States shows how these issues still haunt the political culture of the country. The second major claim of the book is that the processes of person-
977 citations
Book•
1 Jan 2002
TL;DR: Nagl argues that organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from unanticipated conditions, a variable which explains why the British army successfully conducted counterinsurgency in Malaya but failed to do so in Vietnam, treating the war instead as a conventional conflict as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Invariably, armies are accused of preparing to fight the previous war. In "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife", Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl - a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the current conflict in Iraq - considers the now-crucial question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both engagements, Nagl compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 with what developed in the Vietnam War from 1950 to 1975. In examining these two events, Nagl - the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine cover story by Peter Maass - argues that organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from unanticipated conditions, a variable which explains why the British army successfully conducted counterinsurgency in Malaya but why the American army failed to do so in Vietnam, treating the war instead as a conventional conflict. Nagl concludes that the British army, because of its role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics created by its history and national culture, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of counterinsurgency during the course of the Malayan Emergency. With a new preface reflecting on the author's combat experience in Iraq, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" is a timely examination of the lessons of previous counterinsurgency campaigns that will be hailed by both military leaders and interested civilians.
870 citations
Book•
8 May 1986
TL;DR: Hallin this paper studied the media's role in the Vietnam War and found that the media were closely tied to official perspectives throughout the war, though divisions in the government itself and contradictions in its public relations policies caused every administration, at certain times, to lose its ability to "manage" the news effectively.
Abstract: Vietnam was America's most divisive and unsuccessful foreign war. It was also the first to be televised and the first of the modern era fought without military censorship. From the earliest days of the Kennedy-Johnson escalation right up to the American withdrawal, and even today, the media's role in Vietnam has continued to be intensely controversial. The "Uncensored War" gives a richly detailed account of what Americans read and watched about Vietnam. Hallin draws on the complete body of the New York Times coverage from 1961 to 1965, a sample of hundreds of television reports from 1965-73, including television coverage filmed by the Defense Department in the early years of the war, and interviews with many of the journalists who reported it, to give a powerful critique of the conventional wisdom, both conservative and liberal, about the media and Vietnam. Far from being a consistent adversary of government policy in Vietnam, Hallin shows, the media were closely tied to official perspectives throughout the war, though divisions in the government itself and contradictions in its public relations policies caused every administration, at certain times, to lose its ability to "manage" the news effectively. As for television, it neither showed the "literal horror of war," nor did it play a leading role in the collapse of support: it presented a highly idealized picture of the war in the early years, and shifted toward a more critical view only after public unhappiness and elite divisions over the war were well advanced. The "Uncensored War" is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Vietnam war or the role of the media in contemporary American politics. A groundbreaking study of the media's influence on the Vietnam War .Overturns the conventional notions about the media's role in the war .Draws directly on a huge body of newspaper and TV coverage"
756 citations
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| Year | Papers |
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| 2025 | 63 |
| 2024 | 135 |
| 2023 | 161 |
| 2022 | 238 |
| 2021 | 61 |
| 2020 | 83 |