While planning this review, I questioned my last year Politics students whether these people would be more, or less, very likely to get their trust in an official history of the Vietnam war. That was while talking about the decline of political trust in liberal democracies, in particular as evinced in American well-known tradition, in which the `X-Files', `JFK' and `Conspiracy Theory' hinge on the concept that the state will go to any lengths, including assassination, to avoid the emergence of the `truth'. Given the part that Vietnam played in this decline of trust, an official history might be seen to occupy a tortured position. It may cheer the official historian of Australia's Southeast Asian conflicts to know the students were evenly divided between those arguing an official story should be treated with scepticism, and those who thought that unlimited and privileged access to state records must make it more reliable.
Peter Edwards, in this volume of the official history series, avoids these dilemmas through a strategy of inclusiveness. This is not military history, nor even strictly speaking diplomatic history. The wording of the sub-title is indicative. This fluent volume is a detailed political history of Australian debate and conflict for the decade from 1965, when the first battalion was dispatched to Vietnam, to 1975, when the South Vietnamese regime finally collapsed. Edwards' decision to integrate the story of diplomacy and government policy with that of local dissent and protest is fully vindicated, and produces a finely nuanced account of how domestic politics interacted with foreign policy.
Three themes hold this impressive account together: the interrelation of different parts of foreign policy, the struggle of conservative governments to counter new forms of protest, and the dynamics within the anti-war movement. On the first, Edwards argues convincingly for the links between views of Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. At the time troops were committed to Vietnam, they were also stationed in Malaysia, as a counter to Indonesian expansion in Confrontation. By mid-1966, with the coup in Indonesia that brought Suharto to power, anxiety about Southeast Asia had abated, yet the government was unable to rethink whether the Vietnam commitment was still necessary. Edwards is similarly critical of the flat-footedness of the government's response to protest movements, providing insights into the early history of the fraught relationship between the state and social movements. Relying heavily on ASIO's analysis, based on the spies' eavesdropping at the movement's meetings, the government continued to believe its real enemy was communist infiltration. While Edwards cannot restrain his evident distaste for the romantic and militant currents of the movement, he also shows how poorly ministers understood the emergence of new political forms. Hence, Peter Howson's telling statement that the Moratorium had unhappily shown that `popular opinion can be mobilised to interfere with public policy'. Finally, Edwards also examines the contending forces within the anti-war movement, capturing nicely the balance between militants, the renewed Communist Party and the broader mass of middle-class supporters. It amounts to a nuanced and complex volume, solidly researched, confidently argued and providing a new model of the official story as pluralist political history.
A professional tour guide in South East Asia, especially in Halong bay, Vietnam. I am working as a pro-web-content builder for all travel sites recently. one of the site i am working with is http://vietnamwar.eu
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