#1630 The Vietnam War: An Interview with Historian Geoffrey Wawro

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Clay welcomes University of North Texas historian Geoffrey Wawro for a discussion of the War in Vietnam (1961–1975), which cost more than 58,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of deaths in North and South Vietnam. Wawro, the author of seven books on the history of war, explains how a superpower got into a quagmire in a small Asian country. Why did Lyndon Johnson escalate the war between 1964 and 1968, when President John F. Kennedy made it clear that he would wind down America’s involvement after he was re-elected in 1964? As the British essayist Christopher Hitchens insisted, is Henry Kissinger a war criminal? What was Richard Nixon’s role in prolonging the agony? How should we assess Secretary of War Robert McNamara? Absent politics, could the war theoretically have been won by the United States and its reluctant allies?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of listening to America.
0:08.0	I'm talking with one of my favorite historians, Jeffrey Warrow, who is the American Professor of Military History at the University of North Texas, which is in Dallas, and the director of the UNT Military History Center, the author of a large number of books, several of which I just love.
0:23.8	I haven't read the rest. The Franco-Prussian War 2003. My favorite quicksand, America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East, that was 2010.
0:33.3	The Vietnam War most recently, that's the one we're going to talk about today.
0:36.4	And another that I really love, a mad catastrophe of the outbreak of World War I
0:41.4	and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.
0:44.1	So welcome, Jeff.
0:45.5	Hi, glad. Good to see you again.
0:47.0	You've come to North Dakota a number of times.
0:49.3	The last time you did was for a symposium I hosted on the 1960s, and I asked you to talk about Vietnam because it was the
0:55.8	1960s, and you did. I won't claim credit for your writing this massive tome on Vietnam, but the
1:02.5	idea has been in your mind for a while. That was a great sort of multidisciplinary conference,
1:06.7	where you had the politics, the culture, the art, the counterculture, the music, and then I did the war, you know?
1:14.0	I always get the dirty jobs.
1:16.5	And it's so interesting, you know, Robert Caro, I'm sure you're aware of his work, writing the massive, definitive, authoritative biography of LBJ.
1:25.4	And the most recent one, the ascent of Power, I believe, talking about Johnson's
1:30.8	frustration during his time as vice president. And then suddenly there's November 2nd,
1:35.7	1963. Johnson takes charge, in my view, the hundred pages that Robert Carroll writes about
1:43.0	the first week of the Johnson administration
1:45.4	are some of the best writing I have seen in my time. But, you know, he's ancient now. He's an old
1:50.5	man. And Vietnam, the great society, how will he finish this book? Because Vietnam, you have
1:57.5	found to your own satisfaction, can't be written in 200 pages no no and he'll
	...

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