How many readers remember Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam? First published in 1972, the book was a sensation. It scooped up numerous awards, including a Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Ecstatic reviewers competed for superlatives: “the best book on Vietnam,” crooned The New York Times. Waxing hortatory, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that “if Americans read only one book to understand what we have done to the Vietnamese and to ourselves, let it be this one.” Quoth Stanley Hoffmann in The New York Review of Books: “An extraordinary book.” Martin Bernal, writing in The New York Times Book Review, chimed in with “a magnificent achievement.”

There is a sense in which we agree with Mr. Bernal. Fire in the Lake really is a “magnificent achievement”—but ...

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