This Project has organized and cosponsored seven international conferences – in Vietnam, Europe, and the United States – aimed at answering two fundamental questions: why did the conflict in southeast Asia escalate in the 1960s into an American war against the Vietnamese communists; and why was the war not brought to an end during the Johnson administration before the 1968 presidential election?
The conferences have been carried out in collaboration with the National Security Archive, the Institute for International Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hanoi, Vietnam, and the Office of the President, Vassar College. The first principal publication of the project, Argument Without End (PublicAffairs, 1999), marked the first time that senior Vietnamese officials from the war appeared in dialogue with their former U.S. adversaries. The Japanese edition of the book was released this past summer. In addition, Professors Blight and Robert Brigham of Vassar College are currently writing a book about the missed opportunities to terminate the fighting before October 1967 and the significance of those events for conflict resolution in the twenty-first century.
Project Team: Thomas J. Biersteker and P. Terrence Hopmann, Watson Institute; Ralph Begleiter '71, University of Delaware; Thomas S. Blanton and Peter Kornbluh, National Security Archive, George Washington University; Robert Brigham, Vassar College; Kathy Le '98, Boston, MA; Robert S. McNamara, Washington, D.C.; Charles Neu, Brown University; David Welch, University of Toronto; and Pieter Biersteker '05, Marcella Bombardieri '99, Boston Globe, and Peter Kaval '02, currently serving on Congressman Richard Gephardt's presidential campaign staff.