What path led Americans to Vietnam? Why and how did the United States become involved in this conflict? Drawing on materials from published and unpublished sources in America and Great Britain, historian Andrew Rotter uncovers and analyzes the surprisingly complex reasons for America's fateful decision to provide economic and military aid to the nations of Southeast Asia in May 1950.

"Using new and largely inaccessible Vietnamese sources as well as French, British, Canadian and American archives, Pierre Asselin sheds valuable light on Hanoi's path to war. Step by step the narrative makes Hanoi's revolutionary strategy from the end of the French Indochina War to the start of the Anti-American Resistance Struggle for Reunification and National Salvation (the Vietnam War) transparent. The book reveals how North Vietnamese leaders moved from a cautious policy emphasizing nonviolent political and diplomatic struggle to a far riskier pursuit of military victory"--

"Why did Vietnam invade and occupy Cambodia in 1978? And why did it eventually change its approach, shifting from military confrontation to economic reform and reconciliation with China in the late 1980s? Drawing on rarely accessed archival documents, Kosal Path explores this major change in Vietnamese leaders' objectives and strategies. Unlike most studies, which attribute the invasion to political elites' paranoia and imperial ambition over Indochina, Path argues that Hanoi's move was rational and strategic, intended to resolve its economic crisis and counter imminent threats posed by the Sino-Cambodian alliance by cementing its own alliance with the Soviet Union. As these costly efforts failed in the 1980s, Vietnamese thinking shifted from the doctrinal Marxist-Leninist ideology that had prevailed during the last decade of the Cold War to the approach that would come to characterize the post-Cold War era. Path traces the moving target of Vietnam's changing priorities: first from military victory to Socialist economic reconstruction in 1975-76; then to military confrontation in 1978-1984; and finally, in 1985-86, to the broad reforms dubbed Doi Moi ("renovation"), meant to create a peaceful regional environment for Vietnam's integration into the global economy. Path's sources include internally circulated reports from provincial authorities, ministries, and ad hoc Party committees--materials that have been largely masked by the Vietnamese nationalist history of Vietnam's selfless assistance to Cambodia's revolution and glossed over by the Cambodian nationalist narrative of Vietnam's longstanding imperial ambition in Cambodia"--

Index and bibliography included.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Based on the celebrated PBS television series, the complete text of an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict, “a significant milestone [that] will no doubt do much to determine how the war is understood for years to come.” —The Washington Post More than forty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, but its memory continues to loom large in the national psyche. In this intimate history, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns have crafted a fresh and insightful account of the long and brutal conflict that reunited Vietnam while dividing the United States as nothing else had since the Civil War. From the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet Offensive to Hamburger Hill and the fall of Saigon, Ward and Burns trace the conflict that dogged three American presidents and their advisers. But most of the voices that echo from these pages belong to less exalted men and women—those who fought in the war as well as those who fought against it, both victims and victors—willing for the first time to share their memories of Vietnam as it really was. A magisterial tour de force, The Vietnam War is an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (Biography) A New York Times bestseller, this “epic and elegant” biography (Wall Street Journal) profoundly recasts our understanding of the Vietnam War. Praised as a “superb scholarly achievement” (Foreign Policy), The Road Not Taken confirms Max Boot’s role as a “master chronicler” (Washington Times) of American military affairs. Through dozens of interviews and never-before-seen documents, Boot rescues Edward Lansdale (1908–1987) from historical ignominy to “restore a sense of proportion” to this “political Svengali, or ‘Lawrence of Asia’ ”(The New Yorker). Boot demonstrates how Lansdale, the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, pioneered a “hearts and minds” diplomacy, first in the Philippines and then in Vietnam. Bringing a tragic complexity to Lansdale and a nuanced analysis to his visionary foreign policy, Boot suggests Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With contemporary reverberations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, The Road Not Taken is a “judicious and absorbing” (New York Times Book Review) biography of lasting historical consequence.