Bibliographic Essay

Let me first describe in more detail my own work on Vietnam. I began studying the subject in the mid-1960s and have never stopped. At first focusing on the French colonial period and the Franco-Vietnamese war, I also gained knowledge on the American war, accumulating clipping files and whatever books were available. At Columbia University, where I attended both Columbia College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and was physically present from 1969 to 1980, that research burgeoned using both the university’s extensive libraries and the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. I also traveled to Cornell University and the University of California–Berkeley and used their Southeast Asia resources. My collection of Vietnamese biographies began in about 1970. I created a card index where I noted information on various figures whenever I encountered it. That collection was powerfully enhanced in about 1973 when Gareth Porter gave me copies of a similar card file that David Marr, a Marine intelligence officer in Vietnam, had compiled on South Vietnamese generals. Later I succeeded in getting declassified a series of Defense Intelligence Agency biographies of ARVN officers down to middle rank. I have added much to the card files since and have continued to mine all available source material on Southeast Asia.

As is apparent from various comments in the narrative, I was a historian member of the American delegation to the 1997 conference “Missed Opportunities in the Vietnam War,” sponsored in Hanoi by the Watson Institute of Brown University and the Institute of Military History of Vietnam. I compiled the documentary briefing book for that conference and initiated and served as rapporteur at a series of “military lunches” between American officers and their Hanoi counterparts. Later I participated at several other Watson Institute “directed oral history” conferences.

My first writing on Vietnam appeared in 1972, in the conflict-simulation magazine Strategy & Tactics and the VVAW newspaper First Casualty. I used my biographical files to assemble a paper, published in 1973 by the Indochina Resource Center, profiling the social origins of South Vietnamese generals. Through the 1970s I contributed various articles on Vietnam, mostly related to the French war, as well as on Algeria, which appeared primarily in the conflict-simulation literature. My first book-length study was of U.S. diplomacy and the battle of Dien Bien Phu (The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina, 1954 [New York: Dial Press, 1983]). A revised edition of that book with considerable additional material, especially on U.S. military activity based on my interviews with veterans, appeared in paperback in 2002 (Operation Vulture [New York: iBooks, 2002]). Presidential decision making and White House advice were major themes in my study of the National Security Council published in 1991 (Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush [New York: William Morrow, 1991]). Actual tape-recorded conversations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were featured in my book-CD collection White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the Presidents (New York: New Press, 2003). Together with Margaret Pratt-Porter I wrote and edited a book including recollections, taped presidential conversation transcripts, and analyses of content and legal proceedings on the Pentagon Papers (Inside the Pentagon Papers [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004]). Various aspects of Vietnam intelligence were themes in my works on CIA covert operations (Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006] and Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through Iranscam [New York: William Morrow, 1988]) and my biography of William E. Colby (Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003]). A multilevel analysis of decision making, international history, North and South Vietnamese accounts, and military operations was at the heart of my reframing of the story through the lens of the Ho Chi Minh Trail (The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War [New York: John Wiley, 1999]). Vietnam battle actions were the primary focus in my books The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995) and, with coauthor Ray W. Stubbe, a Navy chaplain and veteran of this battle, Valley of Decision: The Siege of Khe Sanh (most recently available in a paperback edition from the U.S. Naval Institute in 2004).

At the National Security Archive, among other things I direct our Vietnam Documentation Project and am responsible for two microfiche document collections on Vietnam, as well as a number of Electronic Briefing Books, including ones on Kissinger and Nixon, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Diem assassination, the Pentagon Papers, and State Department intelligence during the war. Since 1987 I have contributed feature articles (forty, at last count) on the war to VVA Veteran, a publication of the Vietnam Veterans of America. Some are referenced in the notes. My Vietnam articles have also appeared in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Diplomatic History, New Republic Online, and Against the Odds. In addition, my academic papers or articles on the war appear in fourteen edited books, and I supplied entries on Vietnam in three reference works. I have also published three board games on Vietnam and designed several others.

What follows is my tabulation of good basic sources on aspects of the Vietnam war. A number of excellent works that belong in a general bibliography on the war are not included to avoid redundancy with the endnotes.

Pride of place as a general history, because it has figured so prominently, has to go to Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983). Contemporary with that, and also based primarily on interviews, is Michael Maclear’s The Ten Thousand Day War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981). A more recent account incorporating a good deal of presidential audiotape evidence is by the former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon, A. J. (Jack) Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War 1954–1975 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). A somewhat more rigorous historical treatment is Marilyn Young’s The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Another important survey history is Robert D. Schulzinger’s A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). A standard now in its third edition is George C. Herring’s America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996). Whereas Herring’s vision is more oriented toward Washington, one more oriented toward the South Vietnamese perspective is Anthony J. Joes’s The War for South Vietnam, 1954–1975 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). A period account that was influential in its time and is still worth reading is George McT. Kahin and John Lewis, The United States in Vietnam: An Analysis in Depth of the History of America’s Involvement in Vietnam (New York: Delta, 1967). A magnificent history, especially good on the French colonial period but truncated by its appearance at the same time as Kahin and Lewis’s work, is Joseph Buttinger’s two-volume Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled (New York: Praeger, 1967). Complementing Buttinger is a standard on the French colonialization of Vietnam, John Cady’s The Roots of French Imperialism in Indochina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954).

There is no good English-language history of the Franco-Vietnamese war. Strong on the British handover to the French in the south is Peter M. Dunn’s The First Vietnam War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985). Stein Tonnesson illuminates the opening moments of the war in The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and DeGaulle in a World at War (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991). Most accounts either are episodic, skipping through events, or focus overwhelmingly on either the military or the political side. Examples of the former include Edgar O’Balance, The Indochina War, 1945–1954: A Study in Guerrilla Warfare (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), and Lucien Bodard, The Quicksand War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). Bodard’s book appears in three volumes in the French edition, which is much better than that in English. Bernard Fall’s classic Street Without Joy (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1961) is also episodic; much of its material is drawn from the Expeditionary Corps’ monthly magazine Indochine Sudest Asiatique. Ellen J. Hammer’s book The Struggle for Indochina, 1945–1955 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), long regarded as the standard political and diplomatic account, neglects military aspects and could have done more on the political development of the South Vietnamese state. Two classics that do better are Denis J. Ducanson’s Government and Revolution in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) and Donald Lancaster’s The Emancipation of French Indochina (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). As might be expected, French-language sources are richer for this period. What may now be the French standard is General Yves Gras’s Histoire de la guerre d’Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1979). The best work on the developing American interest in Indochina is Lloyd Gardner’s Approaching Vietnam: From World War II Through Dien Bien Phu, 1941–1954 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). The handful of earlier works that existed were surpassed by Gardner’s opus.

Dien Bien Phu is a subject of special importance and has a literature all its own. Bernard Fall is an important contributor here too, and his book Hell in a Very Small Place (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1966) remains an important account, along with Jules Roy’s The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Roy’s work, though rendered very nicely into English by translator Robert Baldick, is significantly better in French; that edition also contains a documentary appendix that is entirely absent from the English version. An account from an American eyewitness is Howard R. Simpson’s Dien Bien Phu: The Epic Battle America Forgot (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1994). General Vo Nguyen Giap, who wrote a history of this battle in 1962, has far surpassed his earlier work with his rewritten (with Huu Mai) Dien Bien Phu: Rendezvous with History: A Memoir (Hanoi: Gioi Publishers, 2004). A new English-language account that will become a classic history is Martin Windrow’s The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (New York: Da Capo, 2004). Unfortunately, the most authoritative history has never appeared in English. That is Pierre Rocolle’s Pourquoi Dien Bien Phu? (Paris: Flammarion, 1968). The Geneva negotiations are covered by Jean Lacouture and Philippe Devillers in The End of a War, 1954 (New York: Praeger, 1969); again, the French edition is superior to the English. Lacouture also provides insights into this negotiation in his biographies of Pierre Mendes-France and Ho Chi Minh. A book that focuses on a textual analysis of the diplomatic documents is Robert Randle’s Geneva, 1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). Many of those documents are available in Allan W. Cameron, ed., Viet-Nam Crisis: A Documentary History, vol. 1, 1940–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971).

Knowledge of South Vietnam is presently evolving, impelled by a new generation of historians who are working with the Vietnamese sources that are starting to open up in Ho Chi Minh City. This skein of writing, so far devoted primarily to Ngo Dinh Diem, is discussed in the text and cited in the notes and is mentioned only briefly here. Older but still useful treatments of Diem include Denis Warner’s The Last Confucian (New York: Macmillan, 1963) and Anthony T. Bouscaren’s The Last of the Mandarins: Diem of Vietnam (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965). The main English book-length treatments of Diem’s consolidation of power are David Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Edward G. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); and Anthony Arnold, The First Domino: Eisenhower, the Military, and America’s Intervention in Vietnam (New York: William Morrow, 1991). I expect that historian Kathryn Statler will presently overturn these older interpretations. Bernard Fall’s articles written in the mid-1950s on the political-religious sects are seminal; they are reprinted in his book Vietnam Witness, 1953–1966 (New York: Praeger, 1966). A nuanced view of the sects is in Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). For the Michigan State University vision of Vietnam, see Richard W. Lindholm, Vietnam: The First Five Years (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1959); Wesley R. Fishel, Problems of Freedom: South Vietnam Since Independence (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1961); and Roy Jumper and Nguyen The Hue, Notes on the Political and Administrative History of Vietnam, 1802–1962 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Group, 1962). Political development in general, plus a similar treatment of North Vietnam, is offered by Bernard Fall in The Two Vietnams: A Political and Military Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1967). This second edition, published the year he died, climaxed Fall’s work. Another important treatment, from a conservative perspective, is Robert Scigliano’s South Vietnam: Nation under Stress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964). Journalist Robert Shaplen was an acute observer of the Saigon scene. His articles from New Yorker magazine are collected in The Lost Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) and The Road from War, Vietnam 1965–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Another acute observer was Frankie FitzGerald, and her Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972) was very influential. Key studies of Saigon electoral politics are Allen E. Goodman’s Politics in War: The Bases of Political Community in South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) and John C. Donnell and Charles Joiner’s Electoral Politics in South Vietnam (New York: Lexington, 1974). Also interesting are Richard Critchfield’s conspiracy theories in The Long Charade: Political Subversion in the Vietnam War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968) and Zalin Grant’s Flight of the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). Interesting observations about life in Saigon, related in the course of telling a spy story, are in Larry Berman’s Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007).

There are no English-language memoirs or biographies of Duong Van Minh, Nguyen Khanh, or Nguyen Van Thieu. Thieu’s aides Nguyen Tien Hung and Nguyen Phu Duc wrote books (cited in the notes) on aspects of the peace negotiations or Thieu’s relationship with Richard Nixon. The magazine Vietnam Bulletin, published by the South Vietnamese embassy in the United States during the Thieu period, is also a useful source. Nguyen Cao Ky produced two memoirs: Twenty Years and Twenty Days (New York: Stein & Day, 1977) and, with Marvin J. Wolf, Buddha’s Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002). The second is more reflective, and I have cited it in the notes in preference to the first. Ambassador Bui Diem also produced an important reflection that I quote in this narrative. Significant as well is Tran Van Don’s Our Endless War: Inside Vietnam (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1978).

On the military side, General Lam Quang Thi’s memoir is cited in the notes. One of the few sources on Saigon’s air force, from the perspective of a boy (who grew up to be an American fighter pilot) watching his father, is Quang X. Pham’s A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine, 2005). There is a substantial Vietnamese-language literature, but not much in English. Exceptions range from wartime tomes such as General Vinh Loc’s Why Pleime? (Pleiku, Vietnam: privately published, 1966) to Tin Nguyen’s General Hieu, ARVN: A Hidden Military Gem (New York: Writer’s Club Press, 2003). One historical publication was issued by the Joint General Staff during the war: Pham Van Son and Le Van Duong, eds., The Viet Cong Tet Offensive (Saigon: Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces, 1969). A collection of comments by ARVN officers after the war is contained in Stephen T. Hosmer et al., The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders (New York: Crane Russak, 1980). General Cao Van Vien reflected on the war in The Final Collapse (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983). Vien and other ARVN generals contributed what is the most important compendium of material on the South Vietnamese army, given that its records were lost in the fall of Saigon. That led to the series of a dozen or so studies commissioned by the U.S. Army Center of Military History and called the Indochina Monographs. Several are cited in the notes. Another U.S. official publication of note is General James L. Collins Jr.’s Vietnam Studies: The Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, 1950–1972 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1975). An important recent account is Robert K. Brigham’s ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).

The countryside was crucial in the war, but virtually the only direct Vietnamese accounts of life in the villages are Le Ly Haislip with Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (New York: Penguin, 1993), and Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Also see Don Luce and John Sommer’s Vietnam: Unheard Voices (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). James Trullinger’s Village at War: An Account of Conflict in Vietnam (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) is based on extensive interviews with villagers near Hue. For provinces in the Mekong delta, see Eric Bergerud, Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991); William R. Andrews, The Village War: Vietnamese Communist Revolutionary Activities in Dinh Tuong Province, 1960–1964 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973); Jeffrey Race, The War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Robert L. Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); and David Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). Sansom is especially instructive on aspects of “rice warfare,” a subject largely ignored in analyses of pacification, and the Race book has been highly influential. Elliott’s work may become the new standard; he was a Rand analyst at the time and an admirer of Vietnamese culture. For the central part of South Vietnam, see any of the writings of anthropologist Gerald Hickey, in particular his Village in Vietnam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), and Michael E. Petersen, The Combined Action Platoons: The U.S. Marines’Other War in Vietnam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989). The long-recognized standard has been Alexander Woodside’s Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). A typical wartime view is Samuel Popkin’s The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). For a history of pacification that ties much of this material together, see Richard A. Hunt’s Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). For a related subject, see Douglas Valentine’s The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990), Mark Moyar’s Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA’s Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997), and Dale Andrade’s Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1990). Two of the Indochina Monographs, one on pacification and the other on territorial forces, as well as one of the U.S. Army’s “Vietnam Studies” series, also bear on this issue. The CIA’s official history on pacification, recently declassified, is referenced in the notes. Most readers know this subject courtesy of Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988).

North Vietnamese documents and records are only gradually becoming available in published collections and official histories. There is still little available in archives. I am indebted to Merle Pribbenow for supplying translations of the North Vietnamese sources cited in the notes as well as others that informed the analysis but were not actually quoted. Pribbenow also translated the Vietnam Institute for Military History official history volume cited in the notes. During and after the war I made considerable use of the primary (but not “official”) texts offered by the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS; subsequently the Joint Publications Research Service [JPRS]) and the BBC World Digest of Reporting. I also studied the North Vietnamese journals Vietnam Studies and Hop Tac (as translated by the FBIS), the periodicals Nhan Dan and Quan Doi Nhan Dan (again in FBIS translation), Vietnam Courier, South Vietnam in Struggle, the press releases of the Khmer Rouge “GRUNK” government, and others. Chronological but of general relevance is Cuoc Chien Chong, Chong My, and Cuu Nuoc, The Anti-U.S. Resistance War for National Salvation, 1954–1975: Military Events (JPRS translation 80968, June 3, 1982). Early decisions are officially revealed in published proceedings: Third National Congress of the Vietnam Workers Party (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961).

Writings from the DRV side include Vo Nguyen Giap’s classic People’s War, People’s Army (New York: Praeger, 1967) and his Big Victory, Great Task (New York: Praeger, 1968). Truong Chinh’s work was collected in the West in Primer for Revolt (New York: Praeger, 1963). A volume of his selected works appeared in Hanoi from the Foreign Languages Publishing House in 1977. The inside view of a communist who went over to Diem is Hoang Van Chi’s From Colonialism to Communism (New York: Praeger, 1966). A defector to the Chinese, former senior diplomat and Politburo member Hoang Van Hoan, published A Drop in the Ocean: Hoang Van Hoan’s Revolutionary Reminiscences (Beijing: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1988). Ho Chi Minh’s writings have been collected and issued in multiple volumes by Vietnam, but in the West at the time they were reflected in a book edited by Bernard Fall: Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–1966 (New York: Signet Books, 1967). Le Duan’s collected works and his Letters to the South exist in various editions in Vietnamese and French. On the military side, General Hoang Van Thai wrote The Decisive Years: The Memoirs of Senior General Hoang Van Thai (JPRS translation 346718, June 23, 1987). Probably the best-known military memoir is that of General Tran Van Tra: History of the Bulwark B2 Theater, vol. 5, Concluding the 30 Years War (JPRS translation 82783, February 2, 1983). There is also a Vietnamese history of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which I used in Spanish (but an English edition exists): General Dong Sy Nguyen with Duy Truong and Ky Van, La ruta de Truong Son (Hanoi: Gioi Publishers, 2007). Several other Vietnamese generals, including Nguyen Don, Cao Pha, and Nguyen Huu An, have memoirs as yet unavailable in English. For the interesting perspective of a figure who moved in and out of the military, edited the newspaper Nhan Dan, and finally became disillusioned with the entire Hanoi enterprise, see Bui Tinh’s Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995).

The fall of Saigon and end of the war are favorite subjects for the North Vietnamese participants. This is reflected in the Tra memoir cited above. Widely known in the West is Van Tien Dung’s Our Great Spring Victory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), collected from a series of articles that first appeared in Vietnam Courier. Giap published his own pamphlet on these events, How We Won the War (New York: Reconstruction Press, 1976), and more recently wrote an important work from a high-level perspective, The General Headquarters in the Spring of Brilliant Victory (Hanoi: Gioi Publishers, 2005). Hoang Van Thai also contributed his own account in How South Vietnam Was Liberated (reprint; Hanoi: Gioi Publishers, 2007). Other memoirs still available only in Vietnamese include those of generals Hoang Cam and Dang Vu Hiep. One secondary work worth including, because it is a virtual oral history from Hanoi’s side, is Wilfred Burchett’s Grasshoppers to Elephants: The Viet Cong Account of the Last 55 Days of the War (New York: Urizen, 1977). Burchett, an Australian journalist, enjoyed special access to Hanoi officials throughout the war and wrote a number of other books that are also worth a look.

General histories include Nguyen Khac Vien’s The Long Resistance, 1858–1975 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1975) and, of course, the official Outline History of the Vietnam Workers Party, 1930–1975 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1975). Key sources on the development of the party include Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1975); P. J. Honey, Communism in North Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962); and William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981). Not to be missed is David G. Marr’s definitive trilogy on the origins of the Vietnamese revolution: Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1895–1925; Vietnamese Tradition on Trial; and Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, 1981, 1995). For a biography of Ho Chi Minh, I like William J. Duiker’s Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), although it is notably short on the period after about 1960. Period biographies include Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography (New York: Vintage, 1968), and Nguyen Khac Huyen, Ho Chi Minh: Vision Accomplished? (New York: Collier, 1971). A private reflection by Jean Sainteny is in his Ho Chi Minh and His Vietnam: A Personal Memoir (Chicago: Cowles, 1972). Life in North Vietnam is exhaustively studied by Edwin Moise in Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). Also see Gerard Chailland’s The Peasants of North Vietnam (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969). For the role of women, there are two major sources: Sandra Taylor, Vietnamese Woman at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), and Karen G. Turner and Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998). On the Vietnamese military and the National Liberation Front, see Douglas Pike’s books PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1986) and Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966). On Hanoi’s impressive foreign relations, see Donald Zagoria’s The Vietnam Triangle: Moscow/Peking/Hanoi (New York: Pegasus Books, 1968). Hanoi’s side in the negotiations is presented by Lu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu in Le Duc Tho–Kissinger Negotiations in Paris (Hanoi: Gioi Publishers, 1996). Loi, who participated as a translator, makes use of Hanoi documents and records not available elsewhere.

The origins of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam are elucidated by Carlyle A. Thayer in War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Vietnam, 1954–1960 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989). The official version is Tran Van Giau and Le Van Chat’s The South Viet Nam Liberation National Front (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962). At this writing we are near the publication of an official history from the Council for the History of the Southern Resistance. For a U.S. view, see Michael C. Conley, The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam: A Study of Organization and Strategy (Washington, DC: Department of the Army Pamphlet 550–106, March 1967). Two important memoirs are Truong Nhu Tang with David Chanoff, A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (New York: Vintage, 1985), and Nguyen Thi Binh, No Other Road to Take: Memoir of Mrs. Nguyen Thi Binh (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Studies Program, 1976). On NLF foreign relations, the standard is Robert K. Brigham’s Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

On Hanoi’s allies I must salute the Cold War International History Project of the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which has spearheaded the effort to make documentary sources available for China, Russia, and the Eastern European nations. A key exemplar here is Working Paper no. 22, the most significant primary source on the subject: Odd Arne Westad et al., eds., 77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964–1977 (Cold War International History Project, May 1998). The key book is Qiang Zhai’s China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). A broader Chinese policy study is Chen Jian’s Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). The most important account of Nixon’s opening to China, containing a perspective on its importance for Vietnam, is Margaret Macmillan’s Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2007). On the Soviet side, see Ilya V. Gaiduk’s The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). The only primary account is the memoir of Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Times Books, 1995). The memoirs of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko are frustratingly thin on Vietnam. Material on both countries appears in journal articles and in the proceedings of a conference at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library edited by Lloyd Gardner and Ted Gittinger, International Perspectives on Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000). This volume also contains material on Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India. There is a specific monograph on Japan and the war: Thomas R. H. Haven, Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975 (reprint; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). The German Historical Institute (a German Marshal Fund entity in the United States) has made a special effort to advance European perspectives on Vietnam through its conferences and proceedings. One example is Andreas Daum, Lloyd Gardner, and Wilfrid Mausbach, eds., America, the Vietnam War, and the World: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On 1968 specifically, see Ronald Fraser, ed., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt: An International Oral History (New York, Pantheon, 1988). I also studied French and German sources on the events of 1968 in those countries. On the American allies in South Vietnam, see Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994). On Australia, see Jeff Doyle et al., eds., Australia’s Vietnam War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). I also used three of the seven volumes of the Australian history, The Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts, 1948–1975. The best source on the Australian antiwar movement is one of these works: Peter Edwards, A Nation at War: Australian Politics, Society and Diplomacy During the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin with the Australian War Memorial, 1997). It is a commentary on their government and people that the Australians chose to devote an official history volume to a movement to stop a war, and that they produced one that treated the Movement evenhandedly.

In the course of my research I interviewed, talked to, conferenced with, or met White House and Pentagon officials; South and North Vietnamese negotiators; military people from generals to frontline soldiers of the U.S., South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and French armies; veterans, antiwar protesters, and politicians; analysts of the CIA, DIA, and South Vietnamese intelligence services; and other participants. I also utilized dozens of oral history interviews conducted by the presidential libraries, Stanley Karnow, Brian VanDeMark, Columbia University, the U.S. Naval Institute, the U.S. Army War College, and the State Department.

On the U.S. side, the importance of documentary sources cannot be overstated. Among the collections of papers I used were those of presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford. These include the files of their subordinates such as Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, and others, including the NSC staff; secretaries of defense Thomas Gates, Robert S. McNamara, and Clark M. Clifford; officials Robert C. Cutler, Dillon Anderson, Gordon Gray, Robert F. Kennedy, John McCone, William E. Colby, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Roger Hilsman, Donald Ropa, James C. Thomson, Robert Komer, William K. Leonhart, John T. McNaughton, Paul C. Warnke, George M. Elsey, Morton H. Halperin, Douglas Pike, and Maxwell Taylor; generals Creighton V. Abrams, Earle Wheeler, Edward G. Lansdale, J. Lawton Collins, and William C. Westmoreland; Admiral Arthur W. Radford; and individuals John Newman, William C. Gibbons, Daniel Ellsberg, Larry Berman, Douglas Valentine, and a number of GIs who served in Vietnam. Other collections I consulted were the papers held by the National Security Archive, including donations from Robert McNamara, Gareth Porter, Mark Perry, and others; papers of the U.S. Supreme Court; record groups at the National Archives pertaining to the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the CIA; separate collections of CIA records held by the Vietnam Center of Texas Tech University; electronic reading rooms of the Department of Defense, FBI, and CIA; records of the Combined Documents Exploitation Center Vietnam held by the Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and by Texas Tech; papers of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War held by the Wisconsin State Historical Society; papers of VVAW members held by the Wisconsin Veterans Museum; documents from Electronic Briefing Books prepared by the National Security Archive; and many documents directly obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other official declassification mechanisms.

I have used audiotapes of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, which provide some of the most recent and interesting evidence. I gathered a few of these and showcased them in my collection The White House Tapes, but I consulted many more. And I benefited from the work of others, including Philip Zelikow, Ernest May, et al., The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: The Great Crises, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Michael R. Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), and Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997); Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); William Doyle, Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton (New York: Kodansha International, 1999); and the Watergate Special Prosecution Force.

Important official collections (aside from the Foreign Relations series and the FBIS/JPRS materials) include the series Vietnam Documents and Research Notes issued by the U.S. embassy in Saigon, as well as State Department public information releases. U.S. military field manuals are a key source of doctrinal and other information. Among those I consulted were ones covering pacification and stabilization operations; maneuver; civil affairs operations; airmobile operations; air cavalry troop tactics; logistics; supply and service reference data; intelligence and interrogation; training lesson materials on the Geneva Convention; country manuals on South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and Laos; and ethnography manuals for minorities in the Republic of Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Three decades after the end of the Vietnam war, only the Marine Corps and Air Force have completed their official histories of the war. The Marine Corps history includes a volume on the early years, annual volumes for 1964 through 1968, one volume for 1969–1970, one for 1971–1973, and a bibliography volume. The Air Force history includes a thematic series and a topical one; the first covers types of aircraft (such as air engagements and aces, air transport, or gunships), and the second focuses on campaigns (one on Rolling Thunder, two on the air war in South Vietnam, two on interdiction in Laos, one on base defense and services). The Air Force also produced a separate set of monographs on specific topics, plus a book-length study on base defense; during the war, the so-called CHECO reports were an early cut at the same ground. The Navy history has a volume for 1945–1959 and one for 1960–1965. Its volume covering Rolling Thunder operations from Yankee Station has been written but not issued. The Navy also published two separate overview volumes—one general, and one with an important focus on riverine operations. No other Navy materials are available. The Army compiled an early set of “Vietnam Studies,” individual monographs on subjects including everything from Free World Forces to systems analysis, communications, intelligence, engineering and combat support, combat arms (such as mounted operations, air mobility, artillery, riverine operations), and some studies on campaigns such as Cedar Falls–Junction City or the war in the northern provinces. There are roughly a dozen of these monographs. The Army’s official history, like that of the Air Force, consists of both thematic and operational volumes. For the most part, the thematic ones were done first, with two volumes on advice and support to the ARVN, two on the military and the media, one on communications, one on combat photography, and so on. One volume on MACV has been released, and the second one is close. A volume on SOG has been written and is in process. So far, two volumes of combat history have taken the story only as far as October 1967. The volume for the year of Tet is being written. The Joint Chiefs of Staff history, in multiple volumes consisting of multiple parts, is complete. I have inserted a full set of the JCS histories in the National Security Archive’s Vietnam microfiche collections. Official historians, however, are now rewriting the JCS histories to incorporate the plethora of other material that has become available since they were written, nearly contemporaneous with events in Vietnam. I used all this official history in this book.

The CIA histories remain classified except for the volume on pacification, which was released in October 2006. The agency has published a separate monograph on several Vietnam episodes, a collection of its Vietnam National Intelligence Estimates, and a number of articles from its journal Studies in Intelligence (including one, by Army general Bruce Palmer, that consumed an entire issue evaluating the agency’s intelligence production), and it has declassified the notorious “Family Jewels” collection of documents on domestic activities. But there is no overall CIA Vietnam history currently available. I am informed that additional volumes of CIA history will be released about the time this book appears. Some CIA memoirs exist, and certain books on Laos deal with the agency in some detail. The National Security Agency has monographs on Southeast Asia that it prepared contemporaneously and in the years soon after the war. Some progress has been made under the Freedom of Information Act in getting these declassified, primarily by myself and cryptography scholar Matthew Aid. The NSA’s release of Gulf of Tonkin materials constituted its first major opening of Vietnam records. In terms of publications, the NSA’s official Vietnam history appeared in 2007 (it is cited in the notes). Another NSA account—quite good—is a study of North Vietnamese cryptography.

Analyses of this war have focused to a great degree on presidents and their decisions. I will not endeavor to list all this literature or all the sources I consulted. David Halberstam takes top billing with The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972). For the Kennedy period, see John Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner, 1992); William J. Rust et al., Kennedy in Vietnam: American Vietnam Policy, 1960–1963 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985); David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: Politics and Policymaking in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); and the Kennedy biographies by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen. A neglected but important work is Paul Kattenburg’s The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–1975 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1980); Kattenburg had a front-row seat on these events. Views from the Saigon embassy during this period include John Mecklin’s Mission in Torment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965) and Frederick Nolting Jr.’s From Trust to Tragedy (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988). A commentary on an ambassador is Anne Blair’s Lodge in Vietnam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). For the Diem assassination, see Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ellen J. Hammer, A Death in November (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and my own Lost Crusader. A transitional account that moves from the end of the Kennedy period through the failure of neutralization schemes is Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Many of the officials and military officers of this period have produced memoirs. They include Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Robert McNamara, Clark Clifford, Melvin Laird, Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, George Ball, Victor Krulak, Maxwell Taylor, William Westmoreland, Bruce Palmer, U. S. Grant Sharp, Arthur Radford, Matthew Ridgway, Lewis Walt, Walt Rostow, William Bundy, John Kenneth Galbraith, U. Alexis Johnson, Paul Nitze, Chester Cooper, William Colby, Alexander Haig, Elmo Zumwalt, Jack Valenti, Joe Califano, Harry McPherson, Richard Goodwin, Horace Busby, George Christian, Phillip Goulding, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, William Safire, Ray Price, Charles Colson, and more. McGeorge Bundy was at work on a reflection at the time of his death, and efforts are being made to complete it, most recently by Francis M. Bator. Some figures, such as Kissinger, Haldeman, Cooper, Valenti, and Colby, have produced multiple volumes of memoir materials. Biographies exist for many of these individuals and others as well. On Johnson I prefer Robert Dallek’s Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Randall Wood’s more recent LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006). Robert Caro’s multivolume LBJ biography, at three volumes so far, has not even touched Vietnam. In fact, it is puzzling that such an in-depth study never engages Johnson’s role at Dien Bien Phu.

For obvious reasons, Johnson’s decision to commit U.S. ground troops to South Vietnam has attracted a very great deal of historical attention. General accounts of the process include Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966 (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1967), and Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1979). Among the more notable specific treatments of the troop decision are George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986); Ralph Stavins, Richard J. Barnett, and Marcus G. Raskin, Washington Plans an Aggressive War (New York: Vintage, 1971); Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); David Barrett, Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); and Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). A wider-ranging analysis of LBJ on Vietnam is Frank E. Vandiver’s Shadows of Vietnam: Lyndon Johnson’s Wars (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997). It is interesting that this reflective study is the work of a scholar of the American Civil War. The H. R. McMasters study of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed in the text and cited in the notes, also focuses on this period, beginning with the Tonkin Gulf incident.

On the Tonkin Gulf, the best source is Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Anthony Austin’s The President’s War: The Story of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and How the Nation Was Trapped in Vietnam (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971) is of continuing importance. Both were published before certain NSA communications intercepts sent to the White House were declassified (at my request). I posted a National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book on the fortieth anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf that presented the new evidence. During the following year the NSA declassified and released its entire set of Tonkin Gulf intercepts, along with official history monographs, interview records, chronologies, and certain documents bearing on the incident or its investigation. These added much to our knowledge. The Tonkin Gulf awaits an intrepid researcher’s new comprehensive account.

That incident, along with the OPLAN 34-A operations, involved what was then called “coercive diplomacy.” That concept was formalized by Alexander L. George, David Hall, and William E. Simons in The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: Laos, Cuba, Vietnam (Boston: Little Brown, 1971). That concept also lay at the heart of U.S. bombing strategy. This is elucidated in some detail in Wallace J. Thies’s When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) and Robert L. Galucci’s Neither Peace nor Honor: The Politics of American Military Policy in Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). On bombing policy directly, see the work of Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Airpower: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1989). Another interesting policy analysis is James C. Thompson’s Rolling Thunder: Understanding Policy and Program Failure (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). A participant’s view is Earl H. Tilford Jr.’s Crosswinds: The Air Force Setup in Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1993). Critics who believe airpower was never allowed to do its thing are best represented by operational commander Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp in his memoir. Critics on the other side are Raphael Littauer, Norman Uphoff, and the Air War Study Group of Cornell University in their The Air War in Indochina, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). A handy compendium of air war data is in Ronald B. Frankum’s Like Rolling Thunder: The Air War in Vietnam, 1964–1975 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Sources on the Christmas Bombing are cited in that section of the narrative.

The Tet offensive is another special subject. The standard there remains Don Oberdorfer’s Tet! (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). A recent addition of note is James H. Willbanks’s The Tet Offensive: A Concise History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). A policy overview is Larry Berman’s Lyndon Johnson’s War: The Road to Stalemate in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). A campaign history of the year 1968 can be found in Ronald Spector’s After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1993). The dean of battle histories here is probably Keith W. Nolan, who has written on the fighting at Hue and in Saigon and the second-wave battle of Saigon. There are at least two other book-length accounts of the battle of Hue. The standard on Khe Sanh remains Stubbe’s and my Valley of Decision. Through the Khe Sanh veterans’ association, Stubbe has also produced a collection of Marine veterans’ reminiscences and a compendium excerpting North Vietnamese official histories in translation. Earlier visions of Khe Sanh include Robert Pisor’s The End of the Line: The Siege of Khe Sanh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982) and Eric Hammel’s Khe Sanh: Siege Above the Clouds: An Oral History (New York: Crown, 1989). Captain Moyers Shore also produced a monograph on Khe Sanh in the Marine Corps’ official history program, and Air Force historian Barnard Nalty produced a similar one in the Air Force’s program.

Negotiations have a literature of their own, richer for the Nixon period than for LBJ’s. A key starting point is the (expurgated) Pentagon Papers negotiating volumes edited by George C. Herring: The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). This text contains deletions and confusions resulting from the fact that it was melded from two different copies with different redactions. A full set of the negotiating volumes has been declassified to the National Security Archive and forms part of our Vietnam (II) microfiche set. Lloyd Gardner and Ted Gittinger’s edited work The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964–1968 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), which resulted from a conference held at the Johnson Library, marked an important advance in our knowledge, especially of the third-country peace feelers. A book that Johnson administration officials privately cooperated on and then complained about is David Kraslow and Stuart H. Loory, The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1968). Hungarian defector Janos Radvanyi provides insight into a few of the third-country peace feelers in his Delusion and Reality: Gambits, Hoaxes and Diplomatic One-upmanship in Vietnam (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1978). An important document collection on the Nixon era is Jeffrey Kimball’s The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). Kimball also provides a narrative account in his Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). Larry Berman has a different view in his No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 2001).

Mr. Nixon’s war has barely begun to be documented, save for the preemptive bids to structure the history by the president himself, Kissinger, and Haig. In great part this reflects the late emergence of archival records, both paper and audiotape. A period piece with continuing utility is Tad Szulc’s The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1976). Szulc is also the author of two important articles in Foreign Policy that were the first to delve into the Kissinger–Le Duc Tho secret negotiations. A second-generation account by a well-placed observer is William P. Bundy’s A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998). There are many works on Kissinger written during those years and several biographies of him, most notably by Marvin and Bernard Kalb and by Walter Isaacson. For a second-generation view, see Jussi Hanhimaaki’s The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Kissinger’s telephone transcripts have been declassified and are available at the National Security Archive. They have been featured in a few Electronic Briefing Books, and I believe William Burr intends to edit a collection of them, similar to his earlier work reproducing the transcripts of conversations from the Kissinger-Nixon visits to China. Kissinger aide Peter W. Rodman has a useful Vietnam chapter in his wider-ranging book More Precious Than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World (New York: Charles Scribners’, 1994). Melvin Small’s nicely done biography of Richard Nixon is The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). Anthony Summers presents a more colorful vision in The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001).

Congress is critical to understanding the history of the war. The authority on this aspect is William Conrad Gibbons, whose five-volume U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships spans the period from the onset of the war to 1968. This work began as an internal history by the Congressional Research Service for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but was republished by Princeton University Press from 1986 to 1995. Unfortunately, Gibbons was never able to extend his study through the Nixon administration. One who did is Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic, 2001). There are several biographies of J. William Fulbright. The best is Randall Woods, Fulbright: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Don Oberdorfer supplies an excellent biography of Mike Mansfield in Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman and Diplomat (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003). For the legal and constitutional issues raised by the war, see John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). There have been many discussions of war powers during and since the passage of the War Powers Act. See the writings of legal scholar Richard Falk, an authority on both war powers issues and international law as it applied to the war in Vietnam; read John Norton Moore for the opposing viewpoint.

A key source on the war and the media disputing the Peter Braestrup thesis (cited later) is Clarence R. Wyatt’s Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993). More in the media’s own style of presenting the facts is Daniel C. Hallin’s The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), which demonstrates censorship in operation. Also quite important is the condensation of the U.S. Army’s two-volume official history of dealings with the media, William M. Hammond’s Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). For a reporter’s commentaries on the government’s efforts against him, see Jack Anderson with Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1999). Neil Sheehan’s life of John Paul Vann, already cited, contains material on the government’s war on reporters during the Kennedy years, and that is the subject of William Prochnau’s Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles (New York: Random House, 1995). Profiles of women journalists are in Virginia Elwood-Akers, Women War Correspondents in the Vietnam War, 1961–1975 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988). Journalists’ memoirs include ones by David Halberstam, Keyes Beech, Richard Tragaskis, Margueritte Higgins, Malcolm Browne (he has two), Morley Safer, Peter Arnett, Michael Herr, John Laurence, Richard Dudman, Gloria Emerson, Peter Boyle, and David Butler. Also worth attention is Donald Kirk’s Tell It to the Dead: Memories of a War (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1975).

Naturally, there is a huge array of sources on the battle history of the war. These range from accounts of campaigns and battles, such as the siege of Khe Sanh, Tet offensive, invasion of Laos, and Easter offensive, to individual fights. For a general one-volume history, I still prefer William S. Turley’s The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986). Phillip Davidson’s Vietnam at War (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1990) suffers from being a participant’s defense of strategy; he manages to get through the entire account of the French war without identifying a unit. Robert Asprey devotes little space to Vietnam in his massive compendium on guerrilla warfare (War in the Shadows, 2 vols. [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973]), but he does as well as or better than Davidson’s lengthy history. A campaign history that focuses on the U.S. Marines is Edward F. Murphy’s Semper Fi: Vietnam: From Da Nang to the DMZ, Marine Corps Campaigns, 1965–1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1997). He is also the author of a fine battle history of the 1967 actions around Dak To. An overview of the last phase of the war appears in Lewis B. Sorley’s A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1999). Equally impressive is James H. Willbanks’s Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). A campaign history in statistics is Thomas C. Thayer’s War without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985).

An early representative of the school I term the neo-orthodox was Peter Braestrup, whose book Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977) argued for a strategic victory thrown away. Following him came Guenther Lewy’s America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), influential in its time. More recent works on this theme include C. Dale Walton, The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam (London: Frank Cass, 2002), and Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999). Other proponents of this school focus on the protest movement (Adam Garfinkle) and the media (Peter Rollins). A contrary view that centers on the military is James W. Gibson’s The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose, and How We Did (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986). A broader perspective is presented by Gabriel Kolko in his Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

There are two biographies of William C. Westmoreland. The better one is Samuel Zaffiri, Westmoreland (New York: William Morrow, 1994). Zaffiri is also the author of the only history of the 1969 battle of Hamburger Hill. The only biography of Creighton V. Abrams is Lewis B. Sorley’s Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Sorley is also author of the campaign history referenced earlier and the transcriber of the Abrams tapes, which appear in Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968–1972 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2004). In addition, he wrote a biography of Army chief of staff Harold K. Johnson: Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992). Maxwell D. Taylor is profiled by his son in John Taylor’s General Maxwell D. Taylor: The Sword and the Pen (New York: Doubleday, 1989). On the Joint Chiefs of Staff, read Mark Perry’s Four Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989) and Robert Buzzanco’s Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Shelby Stanton deserves special mention for his work on Vietnam. Author of a standard reference work, Vietnam Order of Battle (Washington, DC: News Books, 1981), Stanton has also contributed The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965–1973 (New York: Ballantine, 2003); Green Berets at War: US Army Special Forces in Southeast Asia, 1956–1975 (New York: Dell Books, 1991); and Anatomy of a Division: The 1st Cav in Vietnam (New York: Warner, 1989). The Cav has been a favorite subject, at least for publishers. There are a good half dozen accounts of its Ia Drang battles, including two by battalion commanders, as well as works by helicopter pilots, grunts, and recon men. See, for example, Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk (New York: Viking, 1983). Probably the best known is General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). On Cambodia, read J. D. Coleman’s Incursion (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); Coleman also produced a fine book on Ia Drang. See also John M. Shaw’s The Cambodian Campaign: The 1970 Offensive and America’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). For a grunt’s view, there is Keith Nolan’s Into Cambodia: Spring Campaign, Summer Offensive, 1970 (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1990). A most influential book soon after the war was William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979). For an important work produced in the heat of the moment, see Donald Kirk’s Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos (New York: Praeger, 1971). The only campaign history for Cambodia, aside from one of the Army’s Indochina Monographs, is Wilfred P. Deac’s Road to the Killing Fields: The Cambodian War of 1970–1975 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997). Sources for the Easter offensive are cited in the chapters that deal with it.

There is a huge array of other Vietnam battle histories, accounts from the perspective of MACSOG, GI and airman memoirs, and CIA stories, plus a vast quantity of articles on the same themes. Some of these I consulted at various points, and all of them I read. I apologize to all those whose works have not been mentioned here.

The U.S. military conducting all these operations changed over the course of the war from a professional force to one consisting primarily of draftees. GI resistance rose in tandem with antiwar protest. On the forces themselves, see Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). James E. Westheider covers blacks in Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War (New York: NYU Press, 1997). Tom Holm discusses consequences for Indians in Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). For Mexican Americans, see George Mariscal’s Aztlan and Vietnam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

GI resistance is represented mostly in data on military discipline. Decades later, few studies exist. Most recent is the fine book by Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). The origin of the species is David Cortright’s Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975). Also see Robert S. Rivkin’s GI Rights and Army Justice: The Draftee’s Guide to Military Life and Law (New York: Grove Press, 1970), a GI guide similar to the Quakers’ draft guides. For some relevant data, see William T. Allison’s Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

On the consequence of war experiences, see Murray Polner, No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971); Paul Starr et al., The Discarded Army: Veterans After Vietnam (New York: Charterhouse, 1973); John Helmer, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After (New York: Free Press, 1974); Bob Greene, Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned from Vietnam (New York: Ballantine, 1990); Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: NYU Press, 1998); Ellen Frey-Wouters and Robert S. Laufer, Legacy of a War: The American Soldier in Vietnam (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986); Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Joel O. Brende and Erwin R. Parson, Vietnam Veterans: The Road to Recovery (New York: New American Library, 1985); Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims Nor Executioners (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973); and Arthur Egendorf, Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation After Vietnam (Boston: Shambhala Publishers, 1985). The last two cover the efforts of Vietnam Veterans Against the War to establish techniques for treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

Best on the draft in general remains Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss’s Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Knopf, 1978). I used the specialist studies on reauthorizing the draft in 1967, the proceedings of the Benjamin Spock trial, the study on the all-volunteer Army in 1969, the Army monograph on its Fort Ord experiment, and my old draft counseling handbooks but do not cite them here. On draft policy in general, see George Q. Flynn’s Lewis B. Hershey, Mr. Selective Service (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). There is no general history of draft resistance, but a start in that direction was made by Michael S. Foley in Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Resisters and conscientious objectors figure in many of the oral history collections from Vietnam, but they are center stage in two books: Sherry G. Gottlieb’s Hell No We Won’t Go: Resisting the Draft During the Vietnam War (New York: Viking, 1991) and James W. Tonelson’s The Strength Not to Fight: An Oral History of Conscientious Objectors of the Vietnam War (Boston: Little Brown, 1993). There is, however, an excellent monograph on fleeing to Canada: David S. Surrey’s Choice of Conscience: Vietnam Era Military and Draft Resisters in Canada (South Hadley, MA: J. F. Bergin/Praeger, 1982).

Primary sources on Vietnam Veterans Against the War are its newspaper First Casualty and its later newspaper Winter Soldier. The proceedings of its Detroit action were published as The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes (Boston: Beacon, 1972), and its account of the Dewey Canyon III march on Washington is in John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The New Soldier, ed. David Thorne and George Butler (New York: Collier Books, 1971). Some VVAW poetry collections are cited in the text and notes. There are several more. An excellent oral history is Richard Stacewicz’s Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans against the War (New York: Twayne, 1997). Among nonfiction writing by VVAWers, Donald Duncan’s The New Legions (New York: Random House, 1967) was influential in the formation of the antiwar movement. Postwar writing includes John Ketwig’s And a Hard Rain Fell (New York: Macmillan, 1985), W. D. Ehrhart’s Marking Time (New York: Avon Books, 1986) and his revised Passing Time (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989), plus Robert McLane’s Stop War America (n.p.: Corps Productions, 2005). Kenneth J. Campbell contrasts his Vietnam experience with Iraq in A Tale of Two Quagmires: Iraq, Vietnam, and the Hard Lessons of War (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). Scott Camil recounts his travails in “Undercover Agents’ War on Vietnam Veterans,” in It Did Happen Here, ed. Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Bill Crandell tells of Operation Rapid American Withdrawal and Dewey Canyon in “They Moved the Town,” in Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, ed., Melvin Small and William D. Hoover (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992). My favorite history is Andrew E. Hunt’s The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: NYU Press, 1999). Also noteworthy is Gerald Nicosia’s Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001). Richard Moser’s book on GI resistance also tries to cover VVAW. Biographies of John Kerry include Michael Kranish et al., John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2004), and Douglas Brinkley, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (New York: William Morrow, 2004).

Most Americans lacked the veterans’ experience of war. We had to learn secondhand and depended on witnesses who could describe events or analysts who could interpret them. There are a host of such sources. Representative of the anti-imperialist genre is Noam Chomsky’s At War with Asia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Approaches that center on human rights are typified by Telford Taylor’s Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1970). The rise and impact of the Movement are chronicled in Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan’s Who Spoke Up? The American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984), and Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield’s An American Ordeal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). The contrary view is espoused by Adam Garfinkle in Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995) and by Kenneth J. Heineman’s Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001). Shifts in public opinion are ably explored—and compared to Korea and World War II—by John E. Mueller in War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973). An account that goes into the Johnson and Nixon administration responses as well is Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). An earlier effort to cover this same ground is Melvin Small’s Johnson, Nixon and the Doves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones segments his account by interest groups, such as women, labor, and so on, in Peace Now: American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Broader treatments of the Movement as a whole include Terry H. Anderson’s The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Edward P. Morgan’s The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons About Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Many studies focus on the decade of trauma, such as Milton Viorst’s Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960’s (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979) or Kim Mc-Quaid’s The Anxious Years: America in the Vietnam-Watergate Era (New York: Basic Books, 1989). Political reporter Jules Witcover takes on 1968 in The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (New York: Warner Books, 1997). So does David Caute, whose The Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), covers Europe, Japan, and Mexico in addition to the United States. Also international in scope is Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlev Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a survey of culture and society in the 1960s, read Arthur Marwick’s exhaustive The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Journals, pamphlets, leaflets, speeches, and books of all kinds fueled the Movement. In addition to the massive literature on aspects of the Movement and many oral history collections, there is a wide array of studies on everything from methods to specific groups. On drama, see Henry Lesnick, ed., Guerrilla Street Theater (New York: Avon Books, 1973). The origins of marches on Washington are the subject of Lucy G. Barber’s Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), which centers in part on VVAW and the 1971 peace offensive. Grassroots outreach is covered in Wini Breines’s Community Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (South Hadley, MA: J. F. Bergin/Praeger, 1982). For the mobilization of women, see Jo Freeman’s The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: Longman, 1975). On labor, Philip Foner’s treatise is cited in the notes. For the role of intellectuals, see Robert F. Tomes’s Apocalypse Then: American Intellectuals and the Vietnam War, 1954–1975 (New York: NYU Press, 1998). On academics, see David L. Schalk’s War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), which has the important virtue of directly comparing the cross-cultural responses of American and French society to specific cases of military involvement in operationally similar combat environments. On religious groups, DeBenedetti is very useful, but Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter zero in on the subject in Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), based on extensive survey data. For the transition from civil rights and antinuclear efforts to the war, see Irwin Unger’s The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959–1972 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), or Maurice Isserman’s If I Had a Hammer . . . The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987). There are important memoirs by, among others, David Dellinger, Fred Halsted, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Angela Davis, David Harris, Daniel Ellsberg, James Carroll, and Howard Zinn. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s diary has just been published, posthumously. For the aftermath, read A. D. Horne, ed., The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981).

The Students for a Democratic Society have a literature all their own. Their premier observer is Kirkpatrick Sale, author of SDS (New York: Random House, 1973); he must have done an even better job of collecting SDS leaflets than did the FBI. A key recollection—part theory, part memoir—is James Miller’s “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). Tom Hayden’s memoir is cited in the notes. Hayden stopped short of joining the Weather Underground, capping his activism with the Indochina Peace Campaign. The official theoretical tract of the Weathermen is Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism: Political Statement of the Weather Underground (n.p.: Communications Company, 1974). Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones retrospectively compiled Sing a Battle Song: Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006). Bill Ayers published his recollections in Fugitive Days: A Memoir (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). Cathy Wilkerson also has a memoir, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007). Mark Rudd has an autobiography forthcoming. The Weathermen are studied by Dan Berger in his Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006). They are compared with German radicals who emerged from 1968 in Jeremy Varon’s Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

A huge surge in government surveillance activities preceded and accompanied the rise of the Movement. The Church Committee investigation, cited in the notes, inquired deeply into these efforts and became the bedrock source for a number of significant texts. In my view, the best are James K. Davis, Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978); and Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Vintage Books, 1981). The most recent addition to this literature is David Cunningham’s There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Also significant are Alexander Charns, Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), which has resonance with Bush administration surveillance efforts today, and Richard E. Morgan, Domestic Intelligence: Monitoring Dissent in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980). The FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts are the specific subject of Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall’s The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 2002). Collections that focus on COINTELPRO against the Socialist Workers’ Party, civil rights groups, and Native Americans also exist. Some material on the FBI’s programs against dissent appears in Mark Riebling’s Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA (New York: Knopf, 1994). A recent reminiscence on the White House Plumbers is E. Howard Hunt with Greg Aunapu, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2007). For a broader perspective, read Michael Linfield’s Freedom Under Fire: U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

A special category is Secret Service protection for U.S. presidents. Remarkably, there is no standard source on the subject. The information presented in this narrative was pieced together from the periodical literature and individual memoirs. Philip H. Melanson and Peter F. Stevens, in The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency (New York: Carol & Graf, 2002), cover the Kennedy assassination and the attempted murders of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, but they are very thin on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. For Secret Service memoirs, see V. E. Baughman and Leonard W. Robinson, Secret Service Chief (New York: Popular Library, 1962); Rufus W. Youngblood, 20 Years in the Secret Service: My Life with Five Presidents (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973); Denis V. N. McCarthy with Philip W. Smith, Protecting the President: The Inside Story of a Secret Service Agent (New York: Dell Books, 1985); Joseph Petro with Jeffrey Robinson, Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life in the Secret Service (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005); and George Rush, Confessions of an Ex–Secret Service Agent: The Marty Venker Story (New York: Donald F. Fine, 1988).