The Enduring Paradigm of the ‘Lost Cause’: Defeat in Vietnam, the Stab-in-the-Back Legend, and the Construction of a Myth

Abstract

In his influential tour de force, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (2001), Wolfgang Schivelbusch observed that ‘the absence of a stab-in-the-back legend in the United States after the Vietnam War shows that accusations of betrayal can grow only if the political and historical soil in which they are planted is fertile’.1 In an endnote to this sentence, Schivelbusch incongruously cited an article I had published 13 years earlier entitled The Stab-in-the-Back Legend and the Vietnam War’, in which I had arrived at conclusions incompatible with his. I had argued that American policy defeat in the Vietnam War had indeed produced a powerful myth of betrayal that was analogous to the archetypal Dolchstoss legend of post-World War I Germany.2 Originating during the Vietnam War in the bitter debate between Americans over US policy and strategy — I had written — the stab-in-the-back myth developed into a full-fledged explanation for American defeat after the war ended and as a related debate unfolded over the causes of failure and the future of policy. The myth, or legend, blamed leftists, liberals, the press, the antiwar movement, civilian policymakers, Democratic Party presidents, and the Congress of the United States — and particularly the ‘dovish’ representatives within it — for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It included the circumstances of defeat in war, consequent national humiliation, and the scapegoating of others by war hawks on the Right. Soon, it evolved into a larger myth of the Lost Cause of the Vietnam War.