Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

HANOI'S WAR

An international history of the war for peace in Vietnam

444pp. University of North Carolina Press. 31.50 [pounds sterling] (US $34.95).

978 0 8078 3551 7

Historians of the Vietnam War have faced two major problems in attempting to write comprehensive and objective history. The first has been the limitations of sources, especially the lack of access to Vietnamese Communist Party and military archives, which are closed to Vietnamese as well as foreign researchers. The second has been a subjective problem: the widespread compulsion for many Western academic historians of Vietnam and of the war to romanticize the Vietnamese Communists.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, a young Vietnamese-American historian, claims to have partially addressed the first problem. Her book, she writes, is based on "unprecedented access to Vietnamese archival collections and texts.... In 2003 I managed to become the first scholar--Vietnamese citizen or otherwise --to gain access to the Archives of the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs". However, she makes an important qualification about Vietnamese sources: "To date, the collections that would reveal the most about high level communist decision making during the war in Vietnam--the Party, Military, and Foreign Ministry archives--remain closed not only to foreign researchers but also to domestic Vietnamese scholars". So the reader is initially left confused. Did she get access to key archival collections or not? A careful reading of her book and its footnotes, and a speech she gave at a book fair in Washington, DC, suggest that she was given physical access to the Foreign Ministry archives building, but not free access to its holdings. At the same time the Party and military archives remained off limits to her.

Yet Nguyen describes her book as "a path breaking study of the Vietnamese communist war effort as well as an international history of American withdrawal from Southeast Asia and the struggle for peace in Vietnam set against the backdrop of the global Cold War". In what ways might it be "path breaking"? In her years of visiting Vietnam she has been able to gather "a wealth of high level documents never before seen", and gain access to people who have provided her with "strictly confidential and limited circulation texts and interview transcripts". Nguyen admits that the sources she has used have been "heavily sanitized and edited". Such sources cannot compare to unrestricted archival access. They have been filtered by the Party. But they do amount to something new.

Given that Vietnam is still ruled by the Communist Party, she is to be admired for her enterprise in pursuing sources that others have not seen, either in Vietnamese or in translation. Nguyen has combined these new Vietnamese sources with US archival sources, translated Chinese documents, and the published work of other scholars in Russian and Eastern European archives. She has interweaved them into a complex historical narrative of one aspect of the history of the war. The result is not a book for the general reader, but rather a valuable...