Q&A with Professor Andrew J. Bacevich

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University. His books include The New American Militarism, Washington Rules, and The Limits of Power. A West Point graduate, he served in the U.S. Army for two decades, including in Vietnam, retiring with the rank of colonel.

Q: You write in The New American Militarism, "Vietnam provides the frame of reference within which I interpret much else." In the post-Vietnam era, how big a role do you think the Vietnam legacy played when U.S. leaders faced decisions about sending troops into battle?

A: Although an oversimplification, George H. W. Bush's claim that with the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome" is more right than wrong.  Before Desert Storm, expectations that intervention would almost necessarily result in a Vietnam-like quagmire hamstrung proponents of military action.  Desert Storm gave the interventionists a counterargument:  Look, the military knows how to win, quickly, decisively, and economically.  

Of course, that turned out to be a great misreading of events.  Bush's victory turned out to be far less conclusive than it appeared at the time.  The principal result of Desert Storm was to draw the United States military more deeply into a situation it did not understand and could not control.  "Victory" over Saddam Hussein in 1991 presaged more war.

Q: What impact did the Powell doctrine have on the development of the "new American militarism" that you describe?

A: General Powell intended his doctrine to reaffirm the terms of the Weinberger Doctrine, which had sought to prevent any recurrence of Vietnam.  Both Powell and Weinberger expressed concerns widely-held in the officer corps after Vietnam:  don't send us to fight unless it's really important and unless you're serious and mean to win.  

Whatever the merits of that view, it could not withstand the chest-thumping, world's-only-superpower mood to which Washington and much of the country succumbed in the 1990s.  Having "won" the Cold War and having "vanquished" Saddam Hussein, the United States pretty much reached the conclusion that the world was now marching to an American drumbeat.  Given such a mood, cautionary warnings were not welcome.  So the 1990s became a decade of unprecedented interventionism, with the Powell Doctrine swept aside.

Q: In Washington Rules, you describe the November 1963 overthrow of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem as "a historical turning point," adding, "Once Diem passed from the scene, the situation in South Vietnam quickly went from awful to far worse." Why was that such a significant event, and what other events during the war would you consider equally important as turning points? 

A: Complicity in Diem's overthrow made the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam all but irreversible. Recall that Washington knew of efforts by Diem's brother Nhu to cut a deal with the north. One purpose of the coup was to prevent any such Vietnamese solution to the problem posed by Vietnam.  

By deposing Diem, we made it "our" war.  But the ensuing political chaos meant that the only way to fight "our" war was with "our" troops.  So the Americanization of the war became all but inevitable.  I say "all but" because in theory President Johnson could have abandoned South Vietnam after he won election in 1964, but the political cost of doing so would have been very high indeed. 

There's no doubt that the Tet Offensive of 1968 marks a turning point of comparable significance.  That's when the full implications of Johnson's error in Americanizing the war came home to all.  

Q: While the Vietnam War "threatened to discredit" the national security consensus, the "Washington Rules" survived, you write. Why were they strong enough to withstand the negative consequences of the war?

A: As I have observed elsewhere, the Washington Rules may not serve the country's interests, but they certainly serve the interests of powerful institutions such as the national security apparatus and the military-industrial-congressional complex.  There's money to be made, ambitions to be pursued, campaign contributions to be collected, and constituents to be satisfied.  So satisfying narrow, immediate concerns trumps any concern for the overall well-being of the nation.  

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I've got a new book coming out in September.  It's called Breach of Trust:  How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.  It argues that the abandonment of the citizen-soldier tradition after Vietnam in favor of our professional army was a huge mistake, harmful to soldiers and harmful to the nation as a whole.  It argues for reinstituting the principle that contributing to the country's defense should be an obligation inherent in citizenship.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview is also posted at deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with writer David Abrams

David Abrams, by Lisa Wareham PhotographyDavid Abrams, who spent 20 years as an Army journalist, is the author of the acclaimed debut novel Fobbit. His blog can be found at The Quivering Pen, and he lives in Butte, Montana.

Q: Why did you decide to write a novel based on your experiences serving in Iraq? Did you ever consider writing a memoir instead?

A: From the start of my deployment to Iraq in 2005, I knew something creative would come out of my time in the combat zone.  This was my first time going to war, so it was a Significant Life Event which I figured would inevitably be turned into some sort of writing project.   

At the time, I didn’t know what form it would take—a short story, a play, maybe even a single poem—but I knew I needed to be open, creatively, to however it presented itself to me.  So I started taking notes and keeping a detailed journal into which I poured everything—what I had for dinner, how many miles I ran around Saddam Hussein’s man-made lake, the bats swooping to nip away insects in front of my face.  

I recorded some of the more unique and startling significant activity reports which came into our task force headquarters, I paid attention to the smells in the air, I eavesdropped on conversations while I sat in a bathroom stall.  Everything went into that journal.  When you write as much material as I did during that year, eventually you’re going to see a pattern and characters will emerge.  

I think it was near the end of my deployment, in the autumn of 2005, when I started writing little scenarios involving the people who would later turn into Captain Abe Shrinkle, Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad and Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr.  They grew organically out of my journal, and once they showed themselves, I liked who they were and the things they said and so I just kept throwing more and more things into their paths.   

Did I ever think about writing a straightforward memoir?  Sure.  For about two minutes, but then I rejected that idea because, I thought, I didn’t have enough to say about the war or my place in it—that is to say, if I stuck to the truth of my time over there.  I figured nobody would be interested in reading about the humdrum daily routine of an office cubicle jungle—even one that was in the middle of a combat zone.  Most of my days were pretty redundant—with only a few exceptions.  I came up with an interesting title—“The Diary of a Soft Soldier”—but that’s as far as I went with that idea.   

Besides, at the time there was a glut of war memoirs flooding into bookstores—some of them very good—and I knew I couldn’t compete.  I wanted to do something different, tell my experience from an obtuse angle.  If fiction was a wall socket, I wanted to plug my story into the outlet and turn up the voltage.

Q: You served in the U.S. military for 20 years as an Army journalist and the book focuses in part on the military-press relationship. How has that dynamic changed (or remained the same) over the years, especially looking at the period from the Vietnam era to today?  In your opinion, did the military learn lessons from the Vietnam War and apply them to later conflicts?

A: The Vietnam War left a lot of bruises on both the military and the press.  Mistakes were made, feelings were hurt, and the “Five O’Clock Follies” dented the military’s credibility for decades.  It took nearly a generation of soldiers to pass through the ranks—those senior officers who couldn’t let go of their distrust of the media—but gradually the military started seeing reporters not as adversaries but as potential allies.   

By the time I came in to the Army in 1988, the glaciers had started to thaw and the Grand Canyons of division had started to close.  There were still plenty of colonels and generals who had nothing by fear and disdain for the media at that time, but eventually they retired and attitudes started to shift.   

When I went to Iraq, the Army was still picking through lessons learned in Operation Desert Storm and earnestly applying them to how they’d work with the media in this new, wired Information Age.  I think, to a degree, the military has been pretty successful in at least trying to meet the press halfway with embedded media and more timely news releases.  They’re not all the way there yet—as the satire in Fobbit points out—but they’ve come a long way since Vietnam.

Q: Fobbit does indeed take a satirical look at the Iraq War, and has drawn comparisons to Catch-22, which in fact one of your characters is reading. In your acknowledgments, you thank writers Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller (author of Catch-22), Richard Hooker, Tim O'Brien, and Karl Marlantes "for paving the road and lighting the streetlamps." Can you describe how each of them served as an inspiration or influence for you?

A: I think collectively all five of those authors gave me courage to step outside the boundaries of what readers have come to expect from a “war novel.”  When I read The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22, M*A*S*H, The Things They Carried and Matterhorn, I was in awe not only of the wordcraft on the pages, but in how fearless each of those writers was in sticking to their vision of writing fiction which would test the limits of convention.  

This is kind of a personal thing and it’s hard to describe, but in a way I felt like each of those authors clapped a hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “It’s okay.  Go for it!”  And so I took a deep breath, shook off the worry, and wrote a comedy about explosions and severed limbs—as well as a tragedy about buffoons in bureaucracy.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now, I’m working on fine-tuning some short stories, with an eye toward someday putting out a collection centered around the Iraq War.  I’m taking a look at some of the material which was cut from Fobbit in the final revisions and seeing some possibilities for a second life as stand-alone stories.  

My most recent completed project, however, is a 180-degree departure from the war and gore of Fobbit.  It’s still a comedy, but it’s set in Hollywood in the 1940s and stars a short man who gets a job as a stuntman for a child actor.  It’s a dark screwball comedy about identity, loyalty and fame.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Normally this is the part of the interview where I’m asked what was the last great book I read, or what I’m currently listening to on my iPod, or what my current obsession is.  The answers are: I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro, the new Airborne Toxic Event album, and my wife.  Of course, “my wife” will always be the answer to Question No. 3.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with writer Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez is the author of six novels, including For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City, and a memoir, Sempre Susan. She has taught at a variety of schools, including Amherst College and Columbia University, and she lives in New York City.

Q: One of the main characters in your novel For Rouenna served as a nurse in Vietnam. Why did you focus your novel, at least in part, on the Vietnam War, and how much research did you do on nurses who served in Vietnam?

A: I did a great deal of research about the Vietnam War in general for this novel, including reading literature by and about women who had served as nurses. In fact, it was reading a book of interviews with some former nurses, which I happened to do sometime in the mid-eighties, that made me want to write a novel about one of them. 

It struck me as a truly extraordinary experience for a young woman to have had, and I had a powerful desire to imagine what it must have been like. However, I didn’t start writing For Rouenna until the mid-nineties. So it was an idea that I carried with me for a very long time.

Q: You said in an interview that For Rouenna was your favorite of your books. Why is that?

A: I think mostly because I believe it’s my best book, by which I mean the one that came closest to what I’d hoped to achieve when I set out to write it. Also, nothing has meant more to me than hearing from readers (all men, I have to say) who served in Vietnam and who have been generous in their appreciation of my attempt to understand what their experience was like.

Q: Another of your novels, The Last of Her Kind, also focuses on the Vietnam War period and its aftermath. What about that era interests you?

A: It’s the era in which I came of age. Although The Last of Her Kind is not an autobiographical novel, it begins on the Barnard College campus in the year 1968, which is where and when I began my own college career. It was famously a time of great tumult and radical change, and a very big part of what was happening then was the war in Vietnam. Many of the boys I grew up with ended up in Vietnam. My high school boyfriend, my college boyfriend—both of them fought in the war. So did an uncle of mine, an Army lifer, who married a Vietnamese woman he met during his first tour of duty.

So for me it’s always been something much more than just an interest in the period. I wrote both For Rouenna and The Last of Her Kind partly because I was haunted by the strangeness and the intensity of that time we’ve come to refer to as the Sixties. I wanted to get down what it was like to live through those years, to be young in the midst of the so-called youthquake. 

Also, as a college professor I’d hear students say things like “I hate hippies,” and I had to wonder whether they really knew what a hippie was, or what that period in American history was actually like. My strong impression was that they did not. It also became clear to me that their parents did not talk much about what that time—the era of their own youth—was like, at least not to them.

Q: Your most recent book, Sempre Susan, is a memoir about your friendship with Susan Sontag. Why did you decide to write about Sontag, and how did the writing of a memoir compare with that of a novel for you?

A: Several years ago I was asked to contribute an essay to an anthology about mentors and I decided to write about Sontag. I had shared a household with her and her son when I was in my twenties, and she turned out to be a profound influence on how I think and write. The essay appeared first in Tin House magazine, where it was read by the publisher James Atlas, who got in touch with me and asked if I’d be interested in expanding the essay into a short book.

Sempre Susan was much easier for me to write than any of my novels. For one thing, it’s quite short. Also, I didn’t have to do all the hard labor of making up characters or an engaging story, and I didn’t have to do any research. Getting the sentences down was challenging, as it always is, but not having to invent anything certainly made the writing easier.

Q: In your most recent novel, Salvation City, your main character is a boy who is orphaned after a flu pandemic. What do you see as the role of religion in this novel?

A: The parents of Cole, the novel’s 13-year-old main character, lived and died as atheists. The couple who take him in are an evangelical pastor and his wife who are preparing for the end times. For the first time in his life, Cole is exposed to the Bible, and he finds a lot there that’s meaningful to him. He also develops great affection and respect for Pastor Wyatt. 

At the same time, he’s confused and troubled by many Christian beliefs, above all the doctrine that says that no matter how good your life might have been, unless you accept Christ as your savior your inescapable fate is consignment to Hell for all eternity. And he’s deeply skeptical about the notion of the Rapture as well.

What I was trying to do in Salvation City was to create a space where a serious exploration of faith and individual moral responsibility could take place. I have a problem with those who respond to the question “Why do you believe what you believe?” with a flat “Because it’s how I was raised.” My novel is about a young person who comes to understand that the answers to the big questions can’t be handed down to you; you have to figure them out for yourself, and the process can be very painful.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m in the middle of a seventh novel but I’ve also been working quite a bit on shorter work, including very short fiction, in some cases pieces that are only a paragraph or so long. I’ve published several stories since my last book came out and I’m beginning to think about the possibility of a collection.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. A version of this interview also appears on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with author David Maraniss

David Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and associate editor of The Washington Post. His books include First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, They Marched Into Sunlight, and Barack Obama: The Story.

Q: You've written biographies of both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. What do you see as the main similarities and differences between the two?

A: The backgrounds of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have several commonalities. They both came from provincial places far from the centers of power - Clinton from southwest Arkansas, Obama from Hawaii. Neither boy knew his father; Clinton's was killed in an auto accident before he was born; Obama never lived with his father, and saw him only once for a few weeks when he was ten.

In their childhoods, both Clinton and Obama had to deal with family dysfunction. Clinton's stepfather was an abusive alcoholic; Obama's mother, though loving, was often gone, leaving him with his grandparents, who were also devoted to him, but suffered from alcoholism themselves. Both Clinton and Obama invented themselves in the sense that they their strong male role models were few or none.

Yet they dealt with their situations in completely different ways. Clinton plowed forward, relentlessly, never trying to resolve the contradictions life threw his way but just getting up every day and forgiving himself and the world and moving forward. He became the ultimate survivor with incredible instincts about the people around him. Those traits helped get him to the White House, and into trouble in the White House, and then out of trouble, in an endless cycle.

Obama spent much of his young adulthood intensely, introspectively trying to resolve life's contradictions, and to find his own identity, racially, culturally, politically. He emerged from that process with a self-confidence and self-reliance that also helped get him to the White House and then at times got him in trouble in the White House. He didn't need people the way Clinton did.

Q: As you did your research for Barack Obama: The Story, were there particular things you uncovered that surprised you or changed your previous impression of the president's younger life?

A: As I studied Obama and his forebears, I could see certain patterns emerge that helped me understand him today. But I try to start fresh, with as few assumptions or prejudgments as possible, so that everything seems a surprise to some extent. I was struck by a few things.

First, that as much as he missed not having a father, and based his memoir Dreams From My Father around that hole in his life, he was in fact lucky that he never lived with his father, who was not just an alcoholic but physically and mentally abusive.

Second, that his mother was the conscience of his life, and always there in that sense, but that he carried a larger measure of anger toward her than I thought, and it came out later as a rejection of what he saw as her naive idealism. He carried that but also rebelled against it at various times.

Third, as my previous answer indicates, I was struck by the length and breadth of his effort from age 17 to 28 to figure himself out.

Q: Your book They Marched Into Sunlight dealt with the Vietnam War in October 1967--on the battlefield, on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, and at the White House. Why did you decide to structure the book the way you did, and why did you pick that particular time period on which to focus?

A: As I was researching and writing my first books, First In His Class, the biography of Bill Clinton, and When Pride Still Mattered, the life of Vince Lombardi, I noticed that I slowed down and became almost obsessed as their lives moved through the 1960s. That was the formative decade for me and millions of other postwar baby boomers, and I wanted to understand it.

I decided that the best way to do that was to write a book about Vietnam. I knew there was great literature about the war itself, and not such great literature about the antiwar movement, and that I hadn't seen a book that took those two very different worlds that were nonetheless about the same thing and tried to weave them into a single interconnected narrative. I started with the protest at Wisconsin because I was a freshman there that year, and it had stuck with me. I did not want to be a character in the book, but 1967 seemed perfect because everything was still up in the air, no one knew how the war would go, or what the antiwar movement would accomplish; life seemed to be changing week by week.

I went to the morgue at the Washington Post, where I work, and looked at newspapers from that 48-hour period and discovered the battle of my book, and just started reporting from there, finding connections that I never could have imagined. I consider They Marched into Sunlight my best and most creative book.

Q: In First in His Class, your Clinton biography, you describe Clinton's tortured relationship with the military draft. Do you think his lack of military service affected the decisions he made as president? Why or why not?

A: I think Clinton was deeply and unavoidably affected by Vietnam and his dealings with the draft. All the people of his generation were in one way or another, whether it be Clinton or John Kerry or John McCain or George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. Either they wanted to absorb the lessons of Vietnam or try to erase them, for better and worse.

Because he did not serve, and actively opposed the war, and because he was president at a time when Democrats were still losing the public relations or rhetorical ground on what defined loyalty and patriotism and strength, every action he took was either affected or interpreted in the context of his past, going back to Vietnam. It made it harder for him to develop a strong relationship with the military.

Obama, by contrast, came of age after Vietnam, and did not carry that baggage, and felt no pressures to either absorb or reject the lessons of Vietnam, but could approach military issues free from all of that, for better and worse.

Q: What are you working on now? Are you planning another Obama biography to pick up where you left off in the story of his life?

A: I have enough books on the horizon to keep me busy into the foreseeable future. I intend to do second volumes on both Clinton and Obama, but first I am doing a book on Detroit. Not its collapse, which will be the shadow of the book, but on what Detroit gave this country before its collapse. The book will take place in 1963 and focus on automobiles (the Big 3 sold more cars that year than any other year) music (Motown was starting to boom), labor (the UAW was at its peak) and race.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview also appears on deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com.

Q&A with Professor Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall is the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies in Cornell University's Department of History, and the director of Cornell's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. His most recent book is Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam.

Q: You begin Embers of War with a description of a 1951 visit by John F. Kennedy to Vietnam. Why did you start with that early Kennedy visit?

A: I find it an extraordinary episode on several levels. Here is the young JFK (age 34), visiting Indochina to burnish his foreign policy credentials in anticipation of a Senate run the following year, seeing through the French professions of optimism to ask large and prescient questions about what France—and by extension any outside power—will be able to do against Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary forces.  It’s also a key point in the war: in 1951 the war is becoming more and more internationalized, with the United States and China taking on increased roles, even as French fighting morale is sagging. 

Moreover, a decade later this same man will dramatically increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam as president, even as he privately retains some of his earlier skepticism.  Finally, I was drawn to this episode as a starting point in the book because Kennedy keeps a diary on the trip that is a fascinating historical document in its own right.  

Q: You write of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem that his "prospects after 1954...were never as hopeless as most early histories claimed," and that "it was Diem, not the United States, who possessed the dominant voice in South Vietnamese politics. Washington never had as much influence over Vietnamese affairs after 1954 as France had had before." Why, in your opinion, was that the case?

A: As historians we’ve too often failed to give Diem his due. He had important limitations as a leader, to be sure, limitations that would ultimately be his undoing. But he also brought important attributes to the table, including strong credentials as a nationalist and his own vision for his country’s future.  He was personally courageous, and intelligent. 

Ultimately, it’s hard to see the “Diem experiment” succeeding over the long term, but as recent work by Philip Catton, Ed Miller, and Jessica Chapman has also shown, we need to take his leadership and his years in power in Saigon seriously. And we also need to see that U.S. leverage over Diem, never great to begin with—he knew that America needed him at least as much as he needed America—dissipated over time, despite his regime’s utter dependence on U.S. aid.

Q: Ho Chi Minh, you write, "would lead his people into total war against not one but two Western powers, first France and then the United States, in a struggle lasting three decades and costing millions of lives." How would you compare Ho's attitude toward France with his view of the United States?

A: He had complicated views of both Western powers.  It’s clear he possessed deep affection for the French language, for example, and for the city of Paris, and for French poetry and literature.  But at the same time he hated France as colonial overlord, and he determined from an early age that he would do all in his power to liberate his country from French imperial control. 

With respect to the United States, it seems clear that, as A.J. Langguth has put it, Ho had a lifelong admiration for Americans.  He believed until well into 1947 that the U.S. could be his ally in his quest for independence, and he retained faith in the principles of the Atlantic Charter—to a naïve degree, arguably. Yet one should not take this argument too far.  Ho Chi Minh always saw himself as a loyal member of the Socialist camp, and it would be hard to imagine him ever siding with the United States and the West in the broader Cold War.  But he might have been a Titoist figure, loosely tied to Moscow but treading an independent line.

Q: Much of your book deals with the time period when Harry Truman and then Dwight Eisenhower served as president. How would you characterize the similarities and differences between the two presidents' Vietnam policies?

A: Neither of them took the kind of personal interest in Vietnam’s future that FDR had taken before them. But both came to believe that the strategic stakes in Indochina were large, and Eisenhower in particular thought it imperative to keep the area from falling into Communist hands. (In 1952-53 he insisted that Indochina was more important strategically than Korea.)   

And so both presidents opted to back the French war effort, and to steadily expand America’s involvement.  After the French defeat, Eisenhower made the critical decision to try to succeed where Paris had failed, and to build up and sustain a non-Communist bastion in the southern part of Vietnam.  

For both Truman and Eisenhower (as for their successors), moreover, the perceived domestic political stakes in Indochina loomed ominous on the horizon.  Both men feared being tagged with the “Who lost Vietnam?” label should they fail to persevere.  For both of them—again, as for the presidents who came after them—Vietnam mattered in part because of the danger that it represented to their political fortunes at home.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m casting about for the next “big” project, and have not settled on anything. Suggestions welcome! In the short term, I’m going to write a short, interpretive history of the entire 1945-75 period in Vietnam, from the end of the Pacific War to the fall of Saigon.   

Having taught classes on the struggle for two decades now, and have authored or edited four books on the subject, I have some broad analytical points that I really want to make in print—about why the war lasted as long as it did; about whether it could have been avoided in the context of the time; and about why first France and then the United States failed to achieve their objectives, despite being far more powerful militarily than their adversary.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I find real power in Bernard Fall’s assertion that Americans dreamed different dreams in Indochina than the French “but walked in the same footsteps.” It captures a key theme in my book. Far more than U.S. officials ever admitted (at least publicly), France’s experience had a great deal to teach them.   

Colonialism, after all, is often in the eyes of the beholder—to large numbers of Vietnamese after 1954, the United States was just another big white Western power, as responsible as France for the death and destruction of the first war and now there to impose its will on them, to tell them how to conduct their affairs, with weapons loaded.  U.S. officials for a long time didn’t fathom this reality; after they did, they generally refused to acknowledge it. The result was disastrous for all concerned.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb