No more Vietnams.

THE VIETNAM WAR has been finished for ten years now, a year less than Richard Nixon supposedly has been, yet a decade later both continue to haunt us: a double haunting, in this case, one ghost beckoning still again from an unlikely mansion in sun-blind California to raise the specter of the past, which, like time in a Faulkner novel, is inescapable--existent only within the dimensions of the threatful reiterant present.

No More Vietnams (Arbor House, $14.95) is a very good book, in my opinion Richard Nixon's best, saving only the remarkable Memoirs. Though frankly intended as a brief in defense of the five Administrations (and one in particular) that sustained an American presence in Southeast Asia, as a history of a quarter-century of bitter warfare it develops and sustains sufficient consistency to extend its reach far beyond the bounds of mere apologia. At once a concise recapitulation of, and a pointed meditation upon, a protracted episode that is likely to prove to have been pivotal in the second half of the twentieth century, it is going to have to be digested--one way or another--by anybody wishing to consider responsibly the flood of print released by the observance of this tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. "No event," Mr. Nixon writes, "in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic." And never have the "lessons" of history been more wrongly misconceived, or more disastrously applied.

For ten years opponents of the Vietnam War--and every war--have been hugging to their breasts what Mr. Nixon calls the "four articles of faith," which serve more or less as the abbreviated present-day equivalent of the "lessons" learned and formulated by another great American moralist in the Fourteen Points:

1. The war in Vietnam was immoral.

2. The war in Vietnam was unwinnable.

3. Diplomacy without force is the best answer to Communist "wars of national liberation."

4. We were on the wrong side of history in Vietnam.

These articles, so far from representing objective (or for that matter subjective) truths, are in fact myths, and hence not only bad history but the basis of disastrous policy, as Mr. Nixon proves quite effortlessly in a crisp 237 pages of text.

In comprehensive style, Nixon gives us the history of the Vietnam War, which began "when World War II ended" and finished when the United States as it emerged from World War II ended, in 1975. Deftly, he merges history with commentary, and at times polemicism, as he traces the uncertain trajectory of the war, to which the ambivalence of successive U.S. Governments imparted a decided wobble.

So far from having conducted hostilities "criminally," the United States was, rather, guilty of technical and political misunderstanding, infirmness of purpose, and lack of nerve. After reading how the Pentagon failed from the start to recognize that it was dealing not with insurgency but with invasion (a failure described in terms suggestive of criticisms of the U.S. military made by Edward N. Luttwak in The Pentagon and the Art of War), it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the author believes the suppression of the Tet Offensive in April 1968 almost, in one fell swoop, won the war for us; but Mr. Nixon's assertion that we did win the war miliary is further, and perhaps more satisfactorily, proved by his account of the famous (or infamous, if I recall its reception by the inmates of Columbia University). Cambodian "incursion" of 1970, which is both a moving defense of his actions at the time and a relatively understated, but devastatingly effective, answer to his mad-dog critics (most notably William Shawcross, whose namq goes unmentioned).

At any rate, Mr. Nixon's claim is an interesting one, and his narration of the U.S. Congress's "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" following the Paris Peace Accords is coruscating: the perfect object-lesson with which to introduce the concluding chapter ("Third World War"), in which the former President muses upon the risks inevitably run by a major nation-state whose foreign-policy establishment types have proven themselves more adept as students of international affairs than as participants in them.