Out of Primordial Cultural Ooze: Inventing Political and Policy Legacies about the U.S. Exit from Vietnam
Journal: Diplomatic History
Year: 2010

Entrapping great powers and engulfing smaller ones, the convulsive thirty-year Vietnam War disturbed the flow of history, producing turbulent consequences and lasting legacies. Two of the most significant and persisting American political legacies of the conflict are the stab-in-the-back legend and the attendant Vietnam Syndrome critique. They surfaced in the wake of U.S. policy defeat in Vietnam and the shattering of the myth of American omnipotence, and they drew upon cultural tropes and tradi