Backfire; A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did

New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1985. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. Stephen Long (Author photograph). 393, [3] pages. Notes. Index. The DJ has wear, soiling and edge tears/chips. Explores how reactions to U.S. involvement in Vietnam changed the way Americans think about their country, its role in the world, and the veterans of the war and shaped subsequent political structure. Loren Baritz has served as chairman of the Department of History at the University of Rochester, provost and acting chancellor at the State University of New York, and provost at the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of The Servants of Power, City on a Hill, and The Culture of the Twenties. In a probing look at the myths of American culture that led us into the Vietnam quagmire, Loren Baritz exposes our national illusions: the conviction of our moral supremacy, our assumption that Americans are more idealistic than other people, and our faith in a technology that supposedly makes us invincible. He also reveals how Vietnam changed American culture today, from the successes and failures of the Washington bureaucracy to the destruction of the traditional military code of honor. Derived from a Kirkus review: Historian and academic administrator Baritz says that after reading "every major book and article" about the war in Vietnam he was disappointed. Other authors "did not explain the war, or why it happened, or why we waged it the way we did, or why we negotiated the way we did, or why it eventually became a disaster for us," so he sets out here to provide the answers by relating the war to "our American culture." Baritz's main theme is that the course and character of our involvement in Vietnam can be traced to the "myths" of America as a virtuous "city on a hill" and of technology as our particular pride and hope. We never understood Vietnam, he says, and points to such things as the widespread view among G.I.'s that the South Vietnamese soldiers were all homosexuals (because of the common practice in that part of the world for friends to hold hands) who didn't deserve American support. It's easy enough to document the instances of American disregard for Vietnamese lives, or the peer pressures upon young soldiers to show their manhood through rape, murder, and mutilation. In a narrative history of American policy toward Vietnam midway in this study, Baritz has little trouble finding examples of American idealism--the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were full of both. The commitment to technology is manifest in the body-counts, battlefield censors, and sexual delight in helicopters and jets, as well as in the failure of the counterinsurgency program to grip the Pentagon imagination. A correlate of technology for Baritz is bureaucratic organization; claiming expertise, he serves up familiar ideas about interservice rivalries and corporation-man soldiers to argue that we fought the war in accordance with our "culture" and were therefore doomed to failure. This is a synthesis presented as an original argument.