ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to identify the publicly and politically salient lessons drawn from America's involvement in Southeast Asia, the lessons that appear to have an ongoing impact on United State foreign and defense policy. It explores some popular interpretations of the Vietnam experience, most recently evidenced in the media response to the publication of Robert McNamara's In Retrospect. Albert Wohlstetter, for example, noted that the way policy-makers employed Korean War analogies had a deleterious impact on America's prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Exactly who is learning what from Vietnam is politically more important to future United States policy than the vast storehouse of knowledge contained in the entire body of Vietnam scholarship. It also would be interesting to see if Huntington's concern about the lessons and "unlessons" of Vietnam is justified. The idea that some ill-defined conspiracy was responsible for the debacle in Vietnam, however, is a frightening lesson to draw from America's experience in Southeast Asia.