Description
The book "A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975" by Robert Schulzinger covers the history of the Vietnam War from the end of World War II to the end of the Vietnam War. The book starts with the collapse of the Japanese and French empires and the creation of a political vacuum in Vietnam that the United States was able to fill. The book goes on to discuss the mistakes that were made by the United States in their attempt to take over Vietnam and how these mistakes led to the Vietnam War. The book is well written and easy to read, making it a good choice for students interested in the Vietnam War.
Taking a more extensive view of the American war in Indochina than have many other historians, Robert Schulzinger begins his well-crafted account at the end of World War II. The collapsing Japanese and French empires had created a political vacuum that could be filled only by a nationalist movement--one that, in Vietnam's case, was also communist. American involvement, he writes, was questionable from the start. He quotes Dean Rusk, an architect of Kennedy and Johnson administration war policies, as saying that his greatest mistake was overestimating the patience of the American people and underestimating that of the Vietnamese. That was but one in a long series of miscalculations over three decades, and Schulzinger's book admirably relates the sad history of that conflict.
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