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COPYRIGHT 2001 JAI Press, Inc.
American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. By David E. Kaiser. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. 576 pp. $29.95.)
Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. By Fredrik Logevall. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 443 pp. $35.00.)
Historical analysis, at its best, tries to answer two fundamental questions about the past: why did certain events happen, and what agent or agents, be they persons, institutions, or impersonal forces, caused them to happen? This may sound like an easy task, but given the complexity of social and political interactions, ever changing over time, it is nearly impossible. The assignment of causality is further complicated by the natural human desire for the past to make sense and have a deeper logic. Hence, historians are expected to speak with authority, impose order, and discover patterns among infinitely varied and seemingly random human experiences. Finally, consumers of history invariably demand value judgments about the agents of historical change. Was John F. Kennedy an inspirational leader or a capricious scoundrel? Was industrial capitalism exploitative and polluting or the greatest force for human advancement? Such moral demands on the historian are made in the (perhaps naive) belief that by understand ing the past we can avoid its mistakes in the future and find some sense of justice and reason where, at first glance, none exists.
Nowhere is this desire for understanding, order, and judgment stronger than when the origins of wars are at issue. Wars often seem to be entirely irrational acts. Innocent people are killed, wealth is destroyed, and rarely (in modern times) does any belligerent nation, even the winner, emerge better off than it was before the conflict. Why, then, do nations fight each other, and how can individual policymakers "choose" to risk or provoke war when to do so flies in the face of the national interest?
Consider the historiography on the origins of the First World War. Since no convenient culprit such as a Hitler, Napoleon, or Stalin could be blamed for that tragic conflict, scores of historians have focused instead on impersonal forces beyond the power of human agency to control. Shifts in the balance of power, misperceptions, arms races, imperial ideologies, simmering domestic political forces, and even military railroad schedules have all been blamed for World War I, implying that policymakers were helpless to stop them from pushing Europe toward an inevitable or inadvertent conflagration. It all seemed as if Sir Edward Grey, Tsar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, not to mention their dozens of advisers and the millions of citizens who cheered the declarations of war, did not want to fight, but were in no position to prevent war.
Many historians have likewise advanced structural explanations, broadly defined, to account for U.S. military policy in...
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