Essay: Why Are We in Vietnam?

Overview and Context
Published in 1967, Norman Mailer's "Why Are We in Vietnam?" is a forceful, polemical interrogation of American policy and culture at the height of the Vietnam War. Mailer, already established as a novelist and public intellectual, frames the conflict not simply as a foreign policy mistake but as an expression of deeper national impulses. The essay situates the war within the Cold War mentality, domestic politics, and a wider cultural appetite for power and certainty.
Mailer treats the question as existential rather than tactical. He refuses easy explanations about communism or geopolitics and presses readers to see the war as symptomatic of a set of attitudes, moral complacency, political rhetoric, and a penchant for violence, that shape American life and decision making.

Core Argument
At the heart of Mailer's case is the claim that U.S. involvement in Vietnam is driven by psychological and cultural factors as much as strategic ones. He argues that the language of containment and national honor masks a desire for domination and a fear of appearing weak. The war, for Mailer, reveals how political elites and ordinary citizens alike collude with myths of mission and manhood, converting complex realities into moral certainties that justify escalation.
Mailer also indicts institutions and personalities, politicians, military leaders, and the media, that sustain the war through routine decision making and rhetorical repetition. He contends that bureaucratic logic and the deferential culture around authority make it easy to perpetuate violence while evading moral responsibility. Rather than portraying the conflict as an aberration, Mailer sees it as an outgrowth of tendencies within American democracy that valorize force and obscure the human costs of intervention.

Rhetoric and Style
The essay's power comes from its urgent, confrontational voice and its mix of literary invention with journalistic critique. Mailer uses irony, provocation, and moral indignation to unsettle complacency, often addressing the reader directly and challenging conventional narratives. His prose moves between stark accusation and metaphor, exploiting the resources of fiction and polemic to dramatize the stakes of the national conversation.
This stylistic approach is deliberate: by refusing neutral, technical language, Mailer forces moral attention onto questions normally delegated to experts. The result is a piece that reads less like detached analysis and more like a moral summons, one that insists on uncomfortable self-examination rather than soothing explanations.

Impact and Legacy
Mailer's essay became a notable contribution to the antiwar discourse of the 1960s, amplifying debates about domestic responsibility and the cultural underpinnings of foreign policy. Reactions were mixed: some praised its moral clarity and rhetorical force, while others criticized its broad brush and rhetorical excess. Regardless, the piece helped popularize the idea that opposition to the war could be grounded in a critique of American character and institutions rather than only in geopolitical calculations.
Decades later, the essay remains a vivid example of moral and literary engagement with public life. It continues to provoke readers to consider how national narratives, cultural anxieties, and political habits can combine to produce costly and morally fraught policies.