SOURCE: Draper, Theodore. “The Revised Version.” New Republic 186, no. 10 (10 March 1982): 30-4.

In the following review, Draper contends that Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam is flawed in both logic and background facts, noting that the author conveniently refuses to fully disclose his past affiliations and comments.

Norman Podhoretz likes to be the fugleman of the latest political revelation. For this reason, his reconsideration of the Vietnam War [in Why We Were in Vietnam] may be an awful portent. It could be the signal for a corrosive campaign to reopen the wounds of the war and envenom American political life once again. We may not even be spared an American stab-in-the-back legend of the kind that haunted the German Weimar Republic during the 1920s.

Podhoretz's research is almost exclusively research into books by other people. Paragraph after paragraph is constructed out of quotations and citations, fourteen of them from...