America's Longest War

The Vietnam War was a journalists' war. It produced much excellent reporting, and from the time of David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan in the early 1960s, correspondents became participants. The role of journalism and especially television in the outcome has been one of the most contentious issues from a war filled with controversy, and lessons drawn from Vietnam have significantly influenced the United States government's muzzling of the media in subsequent wars and military interventions.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that journalists have also written many of the best books about the war. Even before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Halberstam's "Best and the Brightest" and Frances FitzGerald's "Fire in the Lake" set the standard for the first generation of Vietnam histories. Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History" and Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" were among the finest accounts produced in the 1980s.

A.J. Langguth's "Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975" should take its place with these classics. Now a professor of journalism at USC, Langguth did three tours in Vietnam as a New York Times correspondent. He has been collecting materials for this book for years and has written a magisterial narrative history. The book does not develop new arguments or explicitly address the many war issues that still divide Americans. Its strengths, rather, are in its skillful retelling of a well-known story, and in the way it captures the many dimensions of the war and re-creates the emotions and ambience of a turbulent era.

The research is impressive. Langguth has thoroughly mined the voluminous published materials on the war, coming up with interesting and important new information, telling quotes and revealing anecdotes. He has talked with numerous participants, and his interviews with North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front leaders as well as ordinary Vietnamese are especially valuable in filling in that essential, but for Americans, often-neglected side of the war. He also uses important scholarly work based on newly opened Chinese and Soviet archives to show in all its complexity the intricate and constantly shifting relationship between Hanoi, Moscow and Beijing during 25 years of war.