Why We Were In Vietnam

Rating:
Summary: Great stuff
Review: I learned a lot. I found it particularly interesting inasmuch as this book was written in the early 80's after Podhoretz had a few years to mull over the events.

Rating:
Summary: This book gives great justifications for going to Vietnam.
Review: Like Guenter Lewy's "America in Vietnam" and "Stolen Valor" by B.G. Burkett, it is a definitive piece of work on the subject of Vietnam. Also, it gives great justifications as to exactly why we went there in the first place.

I don't have a whole lot to say other than the fact that the arguments are based on Sound Scholarship, and to refute Norman Podhoretz is nothing but self-refuting since it would come from anti-american bias.

I don't know how to emphasis the importance of reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: Podhoretz the armchair warrior
Review: The comment of the previous reviewer that to "refute Podhoretz is self-refuting" because it reveals an "anti-American bias" is quite indicative of the Nazi/Stalinist nature of the argument here as well as the intellectual totalitarianism of Poddy's followers and groupies. Even by his own exceptionally low standards of reason and intellect, this book amounts to pretty shoddy Poddy. It tells us nothing new or meaningful about the nature of the war, the issues involved or who fought in it (a hint: it wasn't Poddy's children or relatives or any of his his fellow literary parasites sunning in the Hamptons or holding literary soirees on the Upper East Side of Manhattan); rather it is another episode in his ongoing psychodrama combatting the"Anti-American Left", i.e those in the publishing and literary worlds who no longer invite him to their party's, seeing him as the tiresome self-centered blowhard that he so clearly is.