Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth

The Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth asserts that the United States' defeat in the Vietnam War was caused by Americans who opposed the war. Proponents of the myth, typically right-wing war hawks, blame the defeat on various American groups, such as civilian policymakers, the media, anti-war protestors, United States Congress, political liberals, and/or the Democratic Party.[1][2] The name "stab-in-the-back" is analogous to the German stab-in-the-back myth, which claims that internal forces caused the German defeat in World War I. Unlike the German myth, the American variant lacks an antisemitic undercurrent.[3] Jeffrey Kimball wrote that the United States' defeat "produced a powerful myth of betrayal that was analogous to the archetypal Dolchstoss legend of post-World War I Germany".[1]

Background

Similar accusations have been made throughout United States history. During the War of 1812, war hawks accused supporters of the Federalist Party in New England of "near-treasonous activity" for failing to conquer Canada. Right-wing commentators also claimed that Franklin D. Roosevelt "sold out" Poland and the Republic of China in the Yalta Agreement and blamed President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson for failures in the Korean War. Casualties mounted slowly in the Vietnam War after the 1965 deployment of combat troops, surpassing the Korean War in 1968.[1]

Development

During the war, hearings were held in the United States Senate regarding the progress of the war. At hearings of the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee (SPIS), generals testified that the failure of the war in 1967 was due to excessive civilian restraint on target selection during bombing of North Vietnam, which the subcommittee agreed with. Joseph A. Fry contends that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and SPIS, by blaming the media and anti-war protestors for misrepresenting the war, cultivated the stab-in-the-back myth.[4]

Despite the fact that much of the American public had never supported the war, General William Westmoreland blamed the United States media for turning the country against the war after the 1968 Tet Offensive. This narrative was followed by later writers such as Guenter Lewy and Norman Podhoretz. One study estimated that before Tet, the ratio of punditry supporting the United States' war policy were four-to-one in favor of the government, and after Tet switched to two-to-one against. Many history textbooks state that United States public opinion turned against the war after Tet, with media coverage being mentioned in some accounts.[5] Another element of the myth relates to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, in which stab-in-the-back is one of the interpretations, holding that obstruction in Congress prevented the United States from enforcing the accords. According to Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, this interpretation of the accords is "more or less been rejected by most scholars in the field", but alive in popular discorse.[6]

In 1982, Harry G. Summers Jr. wrote that the idea that internal forces caused the defeat in Vietnam to be "one of the more simplistic explanations for our failure... this evasion is rare among Army officers. A stab-in-the-back syndrome never developed after Vietnam."[7] However, according to Ben Buley, Summers' book actually is actually one of the most significant exponents of the myth, although Summers proposes a more subtle version, in which the military was criticized but the primary responsibility for the defeat lay with civilian policymakers.[7]

In his 2001 book The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, Wolfgang Schivelbusch denied the existence of a Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth comparable to the German one. Although he wrote that some United States rhetoric was "quite similar to that voiced by right-wing Germans during the Weimar Republic", he argued that the Vietnam War "did not entail national collapse, . . . was not followed by a humiliation like that of the Versailles Treaty, . . . [and] did not polarize the nation or lead to civil war". Jeffrey Kimball wrote that Schivelbusch "was incorrect on virtually every count".[1]

Kimball writes that the stab-in-the-back charge was resurrected in the 2004 United States presidential election as candidate John Kerry was criticized for his opposition to the war upon returning from Vietnam.[1] In 2004, Charles Krauthammer wrote in The New Republic that broadcaster Walter Cronkite had caused the United States defeat: "Once said to be lost, it was". In 2017, David Mikics wrote that "the Vietnam stab-in-the-back argument is now largely dead".[3]

See also

• Vietnam Syndrome

References

1. Kimball, Jeffrey (2008). "The Enduring Paradigm of the 'Lost Cause': Defeat in Vietnam, the Stab-in-the-Back Legend, and the Construction of a Myth". In Macleod, Jenny (ed.). Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 233–250. ISBN 978-0-230-51740-0.
2. Kimball, Jeffrey P. (April 1988). "The Stab-in-the-Back Legend and the Vietnam War". Armed Forces & Society. 14 (3): 433–458. doi:10.1177/0095327X8801400306.
3. Mikics, David (9 November 2017). "The Jews Who Stabbed Germany in the Back". Tablet Magazine. Retrieved 5 August 2020.
4. Fry, Joseph A. (2006). Debating Vietnam: Fulbright, Stennis, and Their Senate Hearings. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 14, 57, 74, 109. ISBN 978-0-7425-7642-1.
5. Leahey, Christopher (2015). Whitewashing War: Historical Myth, Corporate Textbooks, and Possibilities for Democratic Education. Teachers College Press. pp. 78–79. ISBN 978-0-8077-7168-6.
6. Nguyen, Lien-Hang T. (2008). "COLD WAR CONTRADICTIONSToward an International History of the Second Indochina War, 1969–1973". In Bradley, Mark Philip; Young, Marilyn B. (eds.). Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives. Oxford University Press, USA. pp. 222–223. ISBN 978-0-19-992416-5.
7. Buley, Ben (2007). The New American Way of War: Military Culture and the Political Utility of Force. Routledge. p. 100. ISBN 978-1-134-08641-2.