Based on over forty years' consideration of Vietnam's history, the author aims (a) to put the Vietnam War within the context of Vietnam's overall history; (b) to examine the historical interaction of the United States and Vietnam in war and peace; (c) to understand U.S. and Vietnamese policies and perceptions and their implications; (d) to encourage the reader to appreciate Vietnamese points of reference, purposes, goals, and tactical/strategic means to achieve its goals; and (e) to understand the limits of American power and influence and the means to maximize foreign policy achievements by understanding the goals and intentions of it adversaries.
This book is a memoire of the author's more than forty-year personal involvement with Vietnam. It implants the Vietnam War in the context of Vietnam's long, tortured history, its historic struggle for independence from China, its political radicalization in the twenties, its wars with France and the United States, and its political and economic evolution up to the contemporary time. The book is based on summer seminars the author conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam, for Princeton University, entitled "The Origins, Consequences, and Implications of America's War with Vietnam." Within this context, the author explores U.S. policy toward Vietnam in six assignments from 1964 in and about Vietnam, culminating in opening the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi 1995-1997. Against this background, the Princeton seminars in Hanoi 2007-2009 immersed the author in extensive research and intensive, direct contact with a wide variety of ordinary and professional Vietnamese, as well as distinguished historic Vietnamese figures. This seminar and those contacts permitted a radical reexamination of U.S. and Vietnamese policies, perceptions, and aspirations, as spelled out in this book.