ABSTRACT
Mark Moyar has offered a bold and extensively documented defense of what historiographers of the Vietnam War have termed the "revisionist thesis." Indeed, the closing sentence of his volume is one of the most succinct statements of this thesis I have seen: it characterizes the conflict as "a wise war fought under foolish restraints." The majority of historians of the Vietnam War, usually termed "orthodox" because they represent the mainstream, would not choose the adjective "wise" to describe the origins and course of the American intervention into the politics and society of Vietnam.
