Volume 50, Number 15 · October 9, 2003
Wartime Lies
By Jonathan Mirsky
The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975
by David W.P. Elliott
M.E. Sharpe, 2 volumes, 1,547 pp., $140.00
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
by Daniel Ellsberg
Viking, 498 pp., $29.95
David Elliott's The Vietnamese War is, in my view, the most comprehensive and enlightening book on that war since June 1971, when The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers. Of course the papers were not a book in the conventional sense but a collection of documents and analyses commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was beginning to doubt whether plunging deeper into the war that was destroying Vietnam was sound policy. If it wasn't, had it ever been?
Review, 5015 words
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