huuugebet Lewis Sorley, 90, Who Said the U.S. Won (but Then Lost) in Vietnam, Dies
Lewis Sorleyhuuugebet, a military historian and retired U.S. Army officer who argued that the United States won the war in Vietnam, only to later betray the Vietnamese and lose it, died on Sept. 25 at his home in Carlisle, Pa. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Susan Merritt.
Mr. Sorley’s revisionist book “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam,” published in 1999, enjoyed a vogue at the Pentagon in the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when officers were assigned to read it in the hope that it might offer a positive prognosis for those conflicts.
As it turned out, it didn’t. And outside the Pentagon, the book’s main thesis was largely rejected.
Mr. Sorley, who had been an officer in the Vietnam War, declared flatly in his central chapter that “there came a time when the war was won” — a period he dated to the end of 1970, when the “South Vietnamese countryside had been widely pacified.” It was only after 1972, when the U.S. “defaulted” on “repeated commitments to the South Vietnamese,” as Mr. Sorley put it in a later interview, that North Vietnam was able to overcome its adversaries.
Mr. Sorley, a third-generation graduate of West Point, gave particular credit to Gen. Creighton Abrams, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, under whom he served, whose taped meetings with staff were an essential research tool for the book. General Abrams jettisoned his predecessor William Westmoreland’s “war by attrition” strategy in favor of a policy of winning hearts and minds in the Vietnamese countryside, a strategy Mr. Sorley believed was successful. (In 2011, he would write a critical biography of General Westmoreland.)
To Mr. Sorely, the decisive factors in South Vietnam’s defeat were “the termination of political support, reduction of matériel support, and eventually even denial of fiscal support to the South Vietnamese by their sometime American ally,” as he wrote in the conclusion of “A Better War.”
Historians, journalists who covered the war and many veterans rejected Mr. Sorley’s perspective, both before and after his book appeared. In their view, it discounted the circumstances that made the Vietnam War “effectively unwinnable,” as the historian Kevin Boylan put it in a New York Times opinion essay in 2017.
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