The burgeoning literature on the Vietnam War testifies to its status as a defining event in American history. The early availability of a considerable body of documentation on U.S. policymaking in Washington and warmaking in Vietnam, together with the intensity of controversies stirred by the war, help to account for this extensive writing. The duration of the war and its antecedents – a thirty-year process between Ho Chi Minh's 1945 assertion of independence in the name of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh campaign of 1975 that reunified the country – make this a lengthy story and one being told more in fragments than in its entirety. Hence, while much early scholarship was devoted to American policy and actions in World War II and the early Cold War, the more recent focus has moved to subsequent developments, with considerable attention to the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson. Most scholarship has been devoted to the American side, but the emerging literature includes a number of important efforts to see the conflict from Vietnamese perspectives and to set it in an international context. This essay explores the development of the principal interpretive issues in an emerging Vietnam War historiography with a focus on the literature that has appeared in the last dozen years.

At one time, the Vietnam War seemed easily understandable. While it was being waged, the predominant (orthodox) interpretation saw the United States, driven by a mindless anticommunism and with disregard for Vietnamese politics and culture, being drawn into a conflict that it could not win.