Abstract
“Ah, les statistisques!”a South Vietnamese general once exclaimed to an American friend.“Your Secretary of Defense loves statistics. We Vietnamese can give him all he wants. If you want them to go up, they will go up. If you want them to go down, they will go down.”1 Apart from fulfilling a long- standing authorial desire to begin an essay in French, the quotation (more significantly) suggests that economics, the grand name we give statistiques, was found in the fiber of the American and Vietnamese war. Economic analysis, properly done, can illustrate why the North won, and the United States lost, the Vietnam War.
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Notes
James William Gibson, The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 314.
William J. Duiker, Vietnam: Revolution in Transition (Boulder, CO: West-view, 1995), 135.
Bui Diem cited in Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: W Morrow, 1985), 161.
Jean Lacouture cited in G. Nguyen Tien Hung, Economic Development of Socialist Vietnam, 1955–1980 (New York: Praeger, 1977), 15.
Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87.
Robert L. Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 162.
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 175.
Sam Adams, War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1994), 30.
George C. Herring, LB] and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 2.
Vo Nguyen Giap, Peoples War Against U.S. Aero-Naval War (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1975), 113–114.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 251.
Anthony S. Campagna, The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War (New York: Praeger, 1991), 32–42.
Robert Warren Stevens, Vain Hopes, Grim Realities: The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 4–8.
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© 2002 Reserve Officers Association
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Rotter, A.J. (2002). The Role of Economic Culture in Victory and Defeat in Vietnam. In: Gilbert, M.J. (eds) Why the North Won the Vietnam War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230108240_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230108240_8
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