SOURCE: Morris, Stephen J. “Second Thoughts on the Vietnam War.” Policy Review, no. 23 (winter 1983): 176-85.

In the following review, Morris refutes Theodore Draper's scathing criticism of Why We Were in Vietnam—from the March 10, 1982, edition of New Republic—and presents a positive assessment of the work, comparing it to Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff's Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam and Denis Warner's Certain Victory: How Hanoi Won the War.

By the late 1960s the view that American intervention in Vietnam was morally wrong had become the received wisdom amongst American intellectuals and America's opinion-making elites. This situation did not emerge overnight. It developed gradually throughout the period 1965 to 1968, first in the universities and the liberal-left journals of opinion. Eventually it percolated down through the mass media and schools to the general population and became expressed in the Congress in the early 1970s.

The political attitude...