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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
Written with the style of a great novelist and the intrigue of a Cold War thriller, Embers of War is a landmark work that will forever change your understanding of how and why America went to war in Vietnam. Tapping newly accessible diplomatic archives in several nations, Fredrik Logevall traces the path that led two Western nations to tragically lose their way in the jungles of Southeast Asia. He brings to life the bloodiest battles of France’s final years in Indochina—and shows how, from an early point, a succession of American leaders made disastrous policy choices that put America on its own collision course with history. An epic story of wasted opportunities and deadly miscalculations, Embers of War delves deep into the historical record to provide hard answers to the unanswered questions surrounding the demise of one Western power in Vietnam and the arrival of another. Eye-opening and compulsively readable, Embers of War is a gripping, heralded work that illuminates the hidden history of the French and American experiences in Vietnam.
ONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED WORKS OF HISTORY IN RECENT YEARS
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians • Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • Finalist for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post • The Christian Science Monitor • The Globe and Mail
“A balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war.”—Pulitzer Prize citation
“This extraordinary work of modern history combines powerful narrative thrust, deep scholarly authority, and quiet interpretive confidence.”—Francis Parkman Prize citation
“A monumental history . . . a widely researched and eloquently written account of how the U.S. came to be involved in Vietnam . . . certainly the most comprehensive review of this period to date.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Superb . . . a product of formidable international research.”—The Washington Post
“Lucid and vivid . . . [a] definitive history.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“An essential work for those seeking to understand the worst foreign-policy adventure in American history . . . Even though readers know how the story ends—as with The Iliad—they will be as riveted by the tale as if they were hearing it for the first time.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“A remarkable new history . . . Logevall skillfully explains everything that led up to Vietnam’s fatal partition in 1954 [and] peppers the grand sweep of his book with vignettes of remarkable characters, wise and foolish.”—The Economist
“Fascinating, beautifully written . . . Logevall’s account provides much new detail and important new insights. . . . It is impossible to read the book without being struck by contemporary parallels.”—Foreign Policy
“[A] brilliant history of how the French colonial war to hang on to its colonies in Indochina became what the Vietnamese now call ‘the American war.’”—Esquire
“An excellent, valuable book.”—The Dallas Morning News
- Sales Rank: #47048 in Books
- Published on: 2014-01-14
- Released on: 2014-01-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.17" h x 1.43" w x 6.12" l, 2.42 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 864 pages
Review
“This extraordinary work of modern history combines powerful narrative thrust, deep scholarly authority, and quiet interpretive confidence.”—Francis Parkman Prize citation
“A balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war.”—Pulitzer Prize citation
“Fredrik Logevall’s excellent book Choosing War (1999) chronicled the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. With Embers of War, he has written an even more impressive book about the French conflict in Vietnam and the beginning of the American one. . . . It is the most comprehensive history of that time. Logevall, a professor of history at Cornell University, has drawn from many years of previous scholarship as well as his own. And he has produced a powerful portrait of the terrible and futile French war from which Americans learned little as they moved toward their own engagement in Vietnam.”—Alan Brinkley, The New York Times Book Review *Editor's Choice*
“Superb . . . penetrating . . . Embers of War is a product of formidable international research. It is lucidly and comprehensively composed. And it leverages a consistently potent analytical perspective. . . . Outstanding.”—Gordon Goldstein, The Washington Post
“A monumental history . . . a widely researched and eloquently written account of how the U.S. came to be involved in Vietnam . . . certainly the most comprehensive review of this period to date.”—Wall Street Journal
“The most comprehensive account available of the French Vietnamese war, America’s involvement, and the beginning of the US-directed struggle. . . . [Embers of War tells] the deeply immoral story of the Vietnam wars convincingly and more fully than any others. Since many of the others, some written over fifty years ago, are excellent, this is a considerable achievement.”—Jonathan Mirsky, New York Review of Books
“Magisterial.”—Foreign Affairs
“The definitive history of the critical formative period from 1940 to 1960 [in Vietnam]. . . . lucid and vivid . . . As American involvement escalated, Bernard Fall, the highly respected scholar-journalist of Vietnam’s wars, wrote that Americans were ‘dreaming different dreams than the French but walking in the same footsteps.’ Fredrik Logevall brilliantly explains that legacy.”—Gary R. Hess, San Francisco Chronicle
“Embers of War is simply an essential work for those seeking to understand the worst foreign-policy adventure in American history. . . . Even though readers know how the story ends—as with “The Iliad”—they will be as riveted by the tale as if they were hearing it for the first time.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“A remarkable new history . . . Logevall skillfully explains everything that led up to Vietnam’s fatal partition in 1954 . . . [and] peppers the grand sweep of his book with vignettes of remarkable characters, wise and foolish.”—The Economist
“Fascinating, beautifully-written . . . Logevall’s account provides much new detail and important new insights. . . . It is impossible not to read the book without being struck by contemporary parallels.”—Foreign Policy
“[A] brilliant history of how the French colonial war to hang onto its colonies in Indochina became what the Vietnamese now call ‘the American war.’”—Charles Pierce, Esquire
“Huge and engrossing . . . [Logevall] writes with an ambitious sweep and an instinct for pertinent detail. . . . If Logevall’s earlier work stood up well in a crowded field, Embers of War stands alone. . . . What if [Embers] had been mandatory reading for Kennedy and his policy makers?”—The National Interest
“Very much worth the read, both for the story and the writing. . . . Embers of War has the balance and heft to hold hindsight's swift verdicts at bay. . . An excellent, valuable book.”—The Dallas Morning News
“An encompassing, lucid account of the 40-year arc in which America’s Southeast Asian adventure became inevitable . . . Logevall’s prose is clean, his logic relentless, his tone unsparing, his vision broad and deep, his empathy expansive.”—Vietnam Magazine
“How easy it is to forget how it all started. The events pile on one another, new battles begin each day, demands for decisions encroach—and soon enough everything is incremental. Cornell historian Fredrik Logevall steps back from the edge and—parting from most Vietnam War studies that focus on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—reaches back to World War II to give a fresh picture of America imagining itself into the Vietnam War. . . . [Embers of War puts] flesh on barebones assertions that occupy a few sentences or paragraphs in many Vietnam accounts. . . . startling.”—The VVA Veteran
“A superbly written and well-argued reinterpretation of our tragic experience in Vietnam.”—Booklist
“[Logevall] masterfully presents the war’s roots in the U.S. reaction to the French colonial experience.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Fredrik Logevall has gleaned from American, French, and Vietnamese sources a splendid account of France’s nine-year war in Indochina and the story of how the American statesmen of the period allowed this country to be drawn into the quagmire.”—Neil Sheehan, author of A Bright Shining Lie, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
“Fredrik Logevall is a wonderful writer and historian. In his new book on the origins of the American war in Vietnam, he gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the French war and its aftermath, from the perspectives of the French, the Vietnamese, and the Americans. Using previously untapped sources and a deep knowledge of diplomatic history, Logevall shows to devastating effect how America found itself on the road to Vietnam.”—Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
“In a world full of nascent, potentially protracted wars, Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War is manifestly an important book, illuminating the long, small-step path we followed into the quagmire of Vietnam. But I was also struck by the quality of Logevall’s writing. He has the eye of a novelist, the cadence of a splendid prose stylist, and a filmmaker’s instinct for story. Embers of War is not just an important book of history, it is an utterly compelling read.”—Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“Embers of War is a truly monumental achievement. With elegant prose, deft portraits of the many fascinating characters, and remarkable sensitivity to the aspirations and strategies of the various nations involved, Logevall skillfully guides us through the complexities of the First Indochina War and demonstrates how that conflict laid the basis for America's war in Vietnam.”—George C. Herring, author of America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975
“In this vividly written, richly textured history, Fredrik Logevall demolishes the fiction, too long indulged by too many Americans, that the Vietnam War appeared out of nowhere to besmirch the 1960s. Here we have the full backstory—the uneasy collaboration between France and the United States that paved the way for epic tragedy. Embers of War is a magisterial achievement.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War and Professor of International Relations and History, Boston University
“For too long, Americans have debated the Vietnam War as though it started in the 1960s. As Fredrik Logevall masterfully demonstrates in Embers of War, the American imbroglio has deep roots in the 1940s and 1950s. This is a deeply researched, elegantly written account that will instantly become the standard book on a poorly understood and decisively important event in world history.”—Mark Lawrence, author of The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and Associate Professor of History and Senior Fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin
About the Author
Fredrik Logevall is John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and professor of history at Cornell University, where he serves as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
chapter 1
“The Empire Is with Us!”
In the late afternoon of june 18, 1940, the tall, stiff-backed Frenchman walked into the BBC studios in London. His country stood on the brink of defeat. German columns were sweeping through France and had entered Paris. The French government under Marshal Philippe Pétain had fled for Bordeaux and had asked the Germans to state their terms for an armistice. These were the darkest days in the country’s history, but General Charles de Gaulle, who had arrived in London the day before, was convinced that France could rise again—provided that her people did not lose heart. De Gaulle had met earlier in the day with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and had secured permission to make a broadcast to France.
He was pale, recalled one of those present, with a brown forelock stuck to his forehead. “He stared at the microphone as though it were France and as though he wanted to hypnotize it. His voice was clear, firm, and rather loud, the voice of a man speaking to his troops before battle. He did not seem nervous but extremely tense, as though he were concentrating all his power in one single moment.”
De Gaulle’s thoughts that day were on the French Empire, whose resources, he sensed, could keep France in the war and fighting. And they were with Britain and the United States, great powers with whom he could ally. “Believe what I tell you,” de Gaulle intoned into the microphone, “for I know of what I speak, and I say that nothing is lost for France.” Then, like a cleric chanting a litany, he declared: “For France is not alone. She is not alone. She is not alone. She has a vast Empire behind her. She can unite with the British Empire that rules the seas and is continuing the fight. Like Britain, she can make unlimited use of the immense industrial resources of the United States.”
The broadcast, which lasted barely four minutes, has gone down in French history as L’Appel du 18 Juin. At the time, however, few heard it and few knew who de Gaulle was. Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary at the British Foreign Office, knew only that de Gaulle had a “head like a pineapple and hips like a woman’s.” Robert Murphy, the counselor at the U.S. embassy in Paris, could not recall ever having heard of him before that day. The same was true of most of de Gaulle’s compatriots. Although he was notorious within French military circles for his advocacy of the mechanization of the army and the offensive deployment of tanks, few outside that select group would have recognized his name, much less known the essentials of his biography: the birth in Lille in 1890; the diploma from the military academy at Saint-Cyr; the five failed (in part because of his conspicuous height) escape attempts from German prison camps in World War I; the postwar military career initially under the wing of Pétain.
De Gaulle had been promoted to the rank of brigadier general only a few weeks before, in the midst of the Battle of France (thus making him, at forty-nine, the youngest general in the army). He then joined Premier Paul Reynaud’s government on June 5 as undersecretary of state for war. Reynaud sought to carry on the fight, but twelve days later, with the French war effort collapsing wholesale, as German armies were well south of Dijon and pressing down the Atlantic coast, he resigned. De Gaulle, certain that Pétain would seek an armistice, escaped to London, determined to continue the resistance from there.
The basis for de Gaulle’s speech that fateful day was his conviction that the conflict was not limited to Europe. It was a “world war,” he declared, one “not bound by the Battle of France.” He would be proven correct. Likewise, Britain and the United States would become critical to the ultimate victory of de Gaulle’s “Free French” organization, though not in the way he imagined. Even his deep faith in the empire’s importance to his cause would in time find a certain degree of vindication.
A vast empire it was. In 1940, it ranked in size second only to the British, extending some six million square miles and with an overseas population of eighty million. The island of Madagascar alone was bigger than metropolitan France. The colonies of Equatorial and West Africa together were as large as the United States. In the Middle East, the French were a major presence, and they had holdings as well in the Caribbean and the Pacific. And of course, there was Indochina, the Pearl of the Empire, rich in rubber plantations and rice fields. As the farthest-flung of the key French possessions, it along with Algeria (administered as part of France proper) conferred great power status on France and, it was thought, gave her an important voice in global affairs. As a whole, the empire took more than a third of all French trade in the 1930s (a figure inflated by the fact that the Depression caused business leaders to fall back on colonial markets); colonial troops made up 11 percent of mobilized men in 1939.
In his memoirs of the war, de Gaulle recalled his feelings as he sat in London in 1940 and watched the deterioration of the French position in the Far East, at the expense of the encroaching Japanese. “To me, steering a very small boat on the ocean of war, Indochina seemed like a great ship out of control, to which I could give no aid until I had slowly got together the means of rescue,” he wrote. “As I saw her move away into the mist, I swore to myself that I would one day bring her back.”
It was an immense task, de Gaulle knew. The journey would be as long as it was treacherous. It would take time to win French loyalty and French territory and so to establish his legitimacy as the authentic representative of the French nation. In those early days, hardly anyone answered his call. Not only did few people come from France to join him, but most leading French figures already in London decided to return home to support the Pétain government, which negotiated an armistice with Germany on June 22 and set up a collaborationist regime in Vichy, a damp, gloomy spa town best known for its foul-smelling waters. Even many of those who wanted to go on fighting rejected de Gaulle’s call. Some went instead to the United States, while others, including the imperial proconsuls in North Africa and other territories (under the terms of the armistice, the empire was left in French hands), were unprepared to reject the authority of the eighty-four-year-old Pétain, savior of France at Verdun in 1916. The only exceptions in the early months were French Equatorial Africa (Chad, French Congo, and Oubangui-Chari, but not Gabon) and the Cameroons, which declared for de Gaulle in August 1940. That same month a French military court sentenced de Gaulle to death in absentia, for treason against the Vichy regime.
“You are alone,” Churchill told de Gaulle, “I shall recognize you alone.” On June 28, the British government voiced its backing of de Gaulle as “leader of all the Free French, wherever they are to be found, who rally to him in support of the Allied cause.”
The phrasing was important: The British were endorsing de Gaulle the man rather than his organization. Whereas the general saw his outfit as a proto-government rivaling that in Vichy, most London officials hoped Free France could be restricted to the role of a légion combattante, a group of French citizens fighting as a unit within the Allied armies. For them, the only French government was that headed by Marshal Pétain. Still, limited though it was, the British pronouncement was a critical early endorsement of de Gaulle, arguably as important as any he would ever receive. His bold action on June 18 made an impression on Churchill, one that would never quite dissipate even during the tensest moments—and there would be many in the years to come—in their relationship. The romantic in Churchill admired de Gaulle’s epic adventure, his self-importance, his claim to speak for la France éternelle. He saw a certain nobility in the Frenchman’s bravado and shared with him a love of drama and a deep sense of history. When in September the two men joined together in a scheme to try to win French West Africa away from Vichy with an operation against Dakar, de Gaulle rose in Churchill’s esteem despite the fact that the plan ended in humiliating failure. To the House of Commons, the prime minister extolled de Gaulle’s calm and authoritative bearing throughout the engagement and said he had more confidence in the general than ever.
“I had continuous difficulties and many sharp antagonisms with him,” Churchill would write of his relationship with de Gaulle. “I knew he was no friend of England. But I always recognized in him the spirit and conception which, across the pages of history, the word ‘France’ would ever proclaim. I understood and admired, while I resented, his arrogant demeanor. Here he was—a refugee, an exile from his country under sentence of death, in a position entirely dependent upon the good will of Britain, and now of the United States. The Germans had conquered his country. He had no real foothold anywhere. Never mind; he defied all.”
A very different attitude prevailed in Washington, where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his advisers from the start kept their distance from de Gaulle and his cause. Shocked and appalled by France’s swift collapse against the Germans, despite having what on paper was arguably Europe’s strongest army, Roosevelt concluded that France had essentially ceased to exist. Thenceforth, during moments of pessimism (and not infrequently in happier times as well), he believed the worst about France and concluded she would never again regain her status as a leading power. Investing military might and diplomatic aid in trying to defend her was therefore pointless. Following the armistice, Washington chose a policy of expedience, maintaining diplomatic relations with Vichy in the hope that the French fleet and the Pétain government would not be driven totally into the arms of the Nazis. As for de Gaulle, he was as yet largely a nonentity for Roosevelt. In time, as we shall see, the American president would adopt toward the general an attitude of unremitting hostility.
II
in indochina, word of the french defeat hit like a bolt from the blue. Already in 1939, after Germany’s attack on Poland, there had been murmurings in Saigon and Hanoi, among colons as well as literate Vietnamese, about whether Hitler could be stopped, and if he couldn’t, what it would mean for them. A 1938 French film shown on local screens asked Are We Defended? and left the answer disconcertingly open. Still, no one had imagined that the defeat of la belle France could ever occur so swiftly, so completely. The turn of events may have seemed especially dizzying in Indochina and elsewhere in the empire, for certain key details—that French forces fought hard and suffered huge losses at Sedan and elsewhere along the river Meuse, for example, or that the greater part of the French army was taken prisoner—emerged only slowly in the colonies.
“Overnight, our world had changed,” recalled Bui Diem, a young French-educated Vietnamese in Hanoi who had breathlessly followed news accounts of the fighting. “Mine was the third generation for whom the universe had been bounded by France, her language, her culture, and her stultifying colonial apparatus. Now, in a moment, the larger world had intruded itself on our perceptions. Our ears were opened wide, straining to pick up signals from the outside that would give us some hint as to what this might mean.”
In the governor-general’s residence in Hanoi, speculation was rife. General Georges Catroux, only a year into the job, was devoted to the empire and to keeping France in the fight against Hitler; for both reasons he was drawn immediately to de Gaulle’s cause. The two men went way back, having been prisoners of war together in a high-security camp in Ingolstadt, Germany, in World War I, and they maintained deep mutual respect. But Catroux, an intelligent and highly literate five-star general who as a young man had been an aide-de-camp in Hanoi but whose recent postings had been in North Africa, was powerless; his Indochina, isolated from the metropole by thousands of miles of ocean, faced growing pressure from Japan. For Tokyo authorities, the fall of France represented a perfect opportunity to remove several obstacles to their New Order in East Asia. Three years into a war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Republican China, the Japanese had long been bothered about American weapons and other Western supplies reaching beleaguered Chinese armies via the railway that ran from Haiphong to Kunming. The amounts were significant: An estimated 48 percent of all supplies came by this route. Catroux succumbed to Japanese pressure to sharply limit shipments of weapons, but food and other supplies continued to arrive, and the Japanese began to think that only by seizing Indochina could they stop the flow. Moreover, Indochina could provide imperial Japan with significant supplies of rubber, tin, coal, and rice—all important in ending her dependence upon foreign sources of vital strategic raw materials. Geostrategically, meanwhile, Indochina could serve as an advanced base for operations against the Far Eastern possessions of the other Western colonial powers. For senior Japanese leaders, in short, the events in Europe opened up glorious new possibilities. Hitler’s victories, American ambassador to Tokyo Joseph Grew noted, “like strong wine, have gone to their heads.”
In Hanoi, Catroux moved cautiously, aware that he had few cards to play. In previous months, as Japanese gains in China brought them ever closer to Indochina, he realized how inadequate Indochina’s defenses were. He had only about 50,000 troops at his disposal, of which some 38,000 were native forces of suspect loyalty. The air force had only twenty-five modern aircraft in all of Indochina, while the navy possessed only a light cruiser, two gunboats, two sloops, and two auxiliary patrol craft. Munitions and other military supplies were negligently low. The Paris government, reeling under the Nazi onslaught, could offer no tangible assistance, he knew, and neither could Britain, focused as she was on the German menace and the defense of Singapore and Malaya. In April and again in May and June, British officials cautioned Catroux against taking any action that might risk war with Japan. Even if His Majesty’s government wanted to provide military assistance, Sir Percy Noble, commander of the British Far Eastern Fleet, told Catroux in late April, it could not; it had no resources to give. The same message was reiterated repeatedly in the weeks thereafter.
The United States was Catroux’s last hope. On June 19, the day after de Gaulle’s speech, René de Saint-Quentin, the French ambassador in Washington, put two questions to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. What would the United States do if Indochina came under Japanese attack? And in the meantime, would Washington provide immediate military assistance to Indochina, in the form of 120 aircraft as well as antiaircraft guns? Welles’s reply echoed that of the British. The United States, he said, would do nothing that might provoke the outbreak of hostilities with Japan and therefore would not act to thwart an attack on Indochina. She would provide no planes or weapons. In that case, asked Saint-Quentin, what choice did Saigon have but to accept the Japanese demands? “I will not answer you officially,” Welles said, “but that is what I would do in your place.”
Saint-Quentin and Welles didn’t know it, but hours earlier Japan had issued an ultimatum to Catroux. The Tokyo government demanded an end to the shipment through Tonkin of trucks, gasoline, or other goods of military use to China, as well as the establishment of a Japanese control commission in Indochina to supervise the implementation of the agreement. Catroux ordered Saint-Quentin to make one more appeal to the Americans; when that too failed, he decided to accept the Japanese terms, hoping to forestall a Japanese invasion and preserve French control over Indochina. Already by June 29, Japanese checkpoints had been established in Tonkin at Haiphong, Ha Giang, Lao Cai, Cao Bang, and Lang Son. Perhaps, Catroux reasoned, Tokyo leaders hoped to avoid a costly—in yen and men—occupation of Indochina; perhaps he could temporize and hold on, waiting for a more favorable turn in the war. He cabled his government on June 26: “When one is beaten, when one has few planes and little anti-aircraft defense, no submarines, one tries to keep one’s property without having to fight and one negotiates. That is what I have done.”
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122 of 128 people found the following review helpful.
Superb history of the first Indochina War (that segued into America's Vietnam War)
By A. T. Lawrence
The twilight of colonialism -- during which the French really did very little to improve the lot of the Vietnamese other than educate a small percentage of the indigenous population to assist them in their exploitation of that Asian country. Under the Truman Administration, when colonialism was on the wane in India, the United States did not want to alienate the French, whose help was needed to confront the Soviet threat in Europe. It was also believed by U.S. officials that even if the Vietnamese were to obtain independence from France, they would be susceptible to Chinese and Soviet communist influence. Hence the United States, under President Truman, lost an opportunity to adopt a softer tack in its dealings with Vietnam at the end of WW II. Fredrik Logevall thoroughly and extensively covers these issues in a masterly style. In the days of the French, there was as yet no North or South Vietnam. The country would only be split in half, as a result of the Geneva Conference of 1954, following the battle of Dien Bien Phu, when the defeated French were striving to extricate themselves from their debacle, while saving what little face remained to them; each half contained 16 million people, and each half was slightly smaller than the State of Florida. In essence the French were still striving to hold on to some small pseudo-colonial bastion in the south while vacating Hanoi in the north, which had become untenable, primarily because the Vietminh in the north, around Hanoi, were less than a hundred and fifty miles from the Chinese border, and thus they could more easily obtain their supplies, as well as seek sanctuary in China, not to mention the Soviet Union, both of which were supporting their cause. The French were able to count on American fear of communism to elicit U.S. support for splitting Vietnam in two. Ironically, both the Chinese and the Soviets also supported the resolution to divide Vietnam. So, even though the French had been defeated and the Vietnamese had prevailed against the French, the world's three major powers of China, the Soviet Union and the United States ultimately determined that the country of Vietnam should be "provisionally" divided until countrywide elections, as sanctioned by the Geneva Accords, could be conducted inside of the next two years [anticipated during 1956] to determine the political fate of the Vietnamese people. The Accords also prohibited foreign powers from having any military presence in the area. The Vietnamese were reluctantly compelled to acquiesce to this superpower pressure in order to diffuse tensions between the Cold War adversaries who were still licking their wounds from the Korean War that had ended in a stalemate just the year before, though the inconclusive ending to the war in Korea no doubt boosted the confidence of the Vietnamese communists in pursuance of their goals. Here again Logevall thoroughly covers these issues. By 1954 the United States, which was already taking over from the French, endorsed Ngo Dinh Diem (who had spent the previous three years at a Catholic seminary in New Jersey) to lead southern Vietnam, initially as Prime Minister until he won election to the newly created office of President in 1955, after which he hastily proclaimed southern Vietnam the "Republic of Vietnam," and refused to participate in any all-Vietnam elections as prescribed by the Geneva Accords. Diem received American support primarily because he was an anti-communist, although he was also a Catholic, which stigmatized him as a product of French colonialism in the eyes of most of his countrymen, who were Buddhists. Consequently, Diem was compelled to apply draconian measures against his fellow Vietnamese in the south in order to remain in power.
I tend to be open to a new slant provided by Lien-Hang Nguyen, Ph.D. from Yale, who writes [in August 2012], "One of the greatest misconceptions of the Vietnam War is that Ho Chi Minh was the uncontested leader of North Vietnam. In reality, Ho was a figurehead while Le Duan, a man who resides in the marginalia of history, was the architect, main strategist and commander in chief of North Vietnam's war effort. The quiet, stern Mr. Duan shunned the spotlight but he possessed the iron will, focus and administrative skill necessary to dominate the Communist Party. . . Mr. Duan constructed a sturdy militarist empire that still looms over Hanoi today. Their hawkish policies led North Vietnam to war against Saigon and then Washington, and ensured that a negotiated peace would never take the place of total victory. Mr. Duan ruled the party with an iron fist and saw Ho and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, renowned for defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu, as the greatest threats to his authority. He sidelined Ho, General Giap and their supporters when making nearly all key decisions." However Eisenhower and his hard-line Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles were convinced that Ho Chi Minh was aligned with Moscow and Red China, and thus represented a burgeoning communist expansionism that posed a threat to the Free World. This view has been shown in later years to not be entirely true. Eisenhower had pledged, during his campaign, to adopt a more aggressive anti-communist policy, and thus move beyond the passive containment policy of the Truman Administration, which many conservatives alleged had resulted in the loss of China to the communists in 1949, which in turn had encouraged the North Korean communists to invade South Korea in 1950. During 1954, Eisenhower's second year in office, the United States commissioned the world's first nuclear-powered submarine in order to confront the Soviet nuclear threat while also funding nearly 80% of France's total military costs in Indochina. It was during April of 1954, while the battle of Dien Bien Phu was still raging, that President Eisenhower made use of a powerful metaphor, referred to as the domino theory, to effectively convey his belief that if Vietnam were to fall to the communists, it would set off a domino effect, whereupon the other countries of Southeast Asia would also fall to the communists -- like "a row of dominos." After the spilling of so much American blood in Korea, Eisenhower came to the conclusion that the United States should avoid the expenditure of American manpower to fight any more land wars in Asia, while alternatively emphasizing the strategic nuclear deterrent. Nevertheless, in 1955 Eisenhower approved the dispatch of U.S. military advisors to Vietnam to assist the South Vietnamese Army in its fight against the communists. Ironically, when Eisenhower briefed Kennedy during January 1961, just before leaving office, he was more concerned about communist Pathet Lao expansionism in Laos than anything going on in Vietnam. For Laos, which had been granted full independence in 1954 as a result of the Geneva Conference, was in the midst of civil conflict between the Royal Laotian Army and the communist Pathet Lao that had broken out in 1959 and would continue into 1962, ending with the formation of a coalition government and the declared neutrality of that country. Now that there was a U.S. military presence in neighboring South Vietnam, President Kennedy felt obliged to increase military aid to South Vietnam during 1961. There is no denying that Kennedy was a World War II military veteran and a true-blue Cold War warrior who viewed communism as a global threat, against which he was prepared to use military force. Years later McNamara claimed that President Kennedy had begun to have doubts about U.S. involvement in Vietnam and was determined to pull the military advisors out just as soon as he was elected for his second term, which would have commenced during January 1965. Unfortunately we will never know about this potential turn of history, because Kennedy was assassinated during his first term after less than three years in office. In one sense, we were not truly at war until after Kennedy was gone, and Johnson had been elected in his own right and began sending combat troops, in large numbers, to Vietnam during the spring and summer of 1965.
Logevall has written a superb book that illuminates a sizable slice of history that begins with the Japanese occupation of Indochina during 1940 and proceeds through the liberation, the commencement of hostilities between the Vietminh and the French in 1946, up through the culminating Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which essentially ended the first Indochina war during which French Union Forces (made up of Frenchmen, French Foreign Legionnaires, and French Colonial troops from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) suffered more than 74,000 deaths, of which 20,685 were Frenchmen, the best soldiers that France could put in the field, and they were beaten soundly. Logevall goes on to detail American involvement up through 1959, ending with an epilogue that extends to 1965. And through it all, there is Ho Chi Minh, who Logevall brings to life, while fleshing out this complex and mystifying character. A remarkable historical achievement of a subject that is of continuing interest to those who are still striving to better understand America's involvement in Southeast Asia. The book is extremely well written and can be enjoyed by academics and by the casual reader who wishes to have a broader understanding of actions that led up to America's Vietnam War.
A. T. Lawrence, author of Crucible Vietnam
64 of 65 people found the following review helpful.
Outstanding Book
By Marcus Bird
This is a phenomenal book, both in the scope of its scholarship and the ease of its reading. One of the strong points of the book is the balanced and respectful approach to all of the participants in the story. Works of History which demonize the players have a cartoon quality. This book respects the richness of human existence and its complex, multivalent quality.
Individual players are given brief introductions that give us a feel for who they were. There are no caricatures. All of the players are seen as human beings, with strengths and weaknesses. Particular events of importance, such as the battle of Dien Bien Phu, are given careful attention, letting the events unfold with novelistic power.
The book is immensely readable; the prose flows and carries the reader along. The story described in the book is obviously important, both in terms of (1) understanding American history after World War II and (2) for the lessons that can be gleaned from the collapse of colonialism and America's expansion of its power. The book does not preach, but lets the reader reach his or her own conclusions from the rich, complex history that unfolds in its pages.
This is an outstanding work of history that is exceptionally well written. The story itself is powerful. Like a Greek tragedy, we see each step that leads to the ultimate tragedy. Anyone interested in how America came to be entangled in Vietnam should read this book. Anyone interested in understanding the pitfalls of a foreign policy that ignores complex, multifaceted local realities, would benefit as well.
109 of 126 people found the following review helpful.
A very, very deep perspective on our most controversial war
By Frank A. Lewes
Americans tend to approach the Vietnam War with simplistic sound bites. Those who opposed the war use words like "futility, quagmire, credibility gap." Those believe the war should have been fought decisively are prone to saying, "The politicians didn't let us win." Of course our involvement in Vietnam was infinitely more complex than either set of sound bites.
Henry Kissinger, in his book ENDING THE VIETNAM WAR, pointed out that every American president from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon made an effort to keep Vietnam from falling to the Communists, but that the effort always fell just short of being decisive. Whereas Kissinger's book gives just a hint of the myriads of complex issues that brought the United States to war in Vietnam, this book unwinds the complexity in all its details.
The primary question author Fredrik Logevall seeks to answer is whether a broader vision during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations could have settled the fate of Vietnam without U.S. intervention. The book pivots around that glorious time in late 1945 when the U.S. defeated the Japanese and became the only power that mattered in Southeast Asia. It celebrates the alliance between U.S. intelligence officers and Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh who collaborated to defeat the Japanese occupiers. It argues that Ho saw the United States as the great anti-colonial power that would guarantee Vietnam from re-conquest by its former French colonial masters.
It argues that if FDR and Harry Truman had focused as much on Southeast Asia as they did on Europe and the Middle East, that with U.S. support Vietnam would have emerged as a sort of Asian Yugoslavia, nominally Communist, but actually more friendly toward the United States and the West than to the great Communist powers of China and the Soviet Union. Instead the United States took the opposite tack of allying itself with France's futile war to reestablish itself as the colonial occupier. The seeds of the later American war in Vietnam were sown from that disastrous assistance to France's bull-headed war.
Although I was absorbed in every detail of this fantastically interesting book, I began to have objections during the early reading. The first is its portrayal of Ho Chi Minh as a saintly freedom fighter, inspired by American ideals. The countervailing view, held by President Nixon among others, is that Ho was an opportunistic Communist thug, like Joseph Stalin, who purged rivals and mass-murdered hundreds of thousands of "bourgeoisie" landowners and shopkeepers. Their view is that millions of Vietnamese had good reason to hate and fear his Communist reign of terror. Later on the book does mention Ho's use of terror, but downplays it more as a show of force than mass murder. The book also opens by portraying Congressman John F. Kennedy as being vehemently opposed to American involvement in Vietnam as early as 1951, whereas the reality is that as President in 1963 Kennedy led the charge of the Green Beret followed by thousands of armed "advisors" into Vietnam. In the Epilogue Logevall finally does adequately explain President Kennedy's decision to commit the U.S. to defend South Vietnam.
Even though Ho Chi Minh's role as a Communist terrorist may be white-washed, I was fascinated by his biography. He lived and worked in New York and Boston in his early 20's when he visited the U.S. in 1912 and 1913. The FIRST American President who influenced Ho was Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points Declaration after World War I fired Ho Chi Minh with hope of throwing off the French Colonialists. Ho spoke fluent English as well as French, Russian, and Chinese. He travelled in Europe, Asia, the U.S., and South America, then became a Communist while staying in the Soviet Union during the Bolshevik Revolution.
Logevall also describes Vietnam as being more sophisticated than Americans generally believe. Although eighty percent of its people lived in primitive peasant villages, the French colonialists had created a high degree of commerce, education, and culture in the cities. Logevall explains that in some ways Vietnamese cities like Saigon and Hanoi were even more elegant than Paris. Most Vietnamese admired French culture even while detesting the French government for suppressing the people's yearning for independence. Being part of France's global colonial empire, the Vietnamese were widely travelled. The French drafted as many as one million Vietnamese to fight and die by their side in the trenches of World War I.
The book explains how Vietnam itself has been a crossroads where rival empires have struggled for dominance against the wishes of the Vietnamese people to be independent. At the beginning of World War II the Japanese conquered Indochina but established a cozy relationship with the French colonialists, the joint objective of both occupiers being to keep the Vietnamese down. When Japanese authority collapsed at the end of World War II, the Japanese occupiers factionalized and went to war with each other --- some fighting with the Vietnamese Communists for independence and some fighting for the Vietnamese who were loyal to the French Empire.
Logevall has made this massive book interesting on every page. I think the only limitation in his viewpoint may be his arguably favorable bias toward Ho Chi Minh. It downplays what others have described as Ho's relentless war of terror against opponents, including the murder of hundreds of thousands in North Vietnam and the driving out of the country of perhaps a million who resettled in the south. It makes the point that the French Colonialists were the primary villain and the United States became their accomplices due to an intransigent hostility to Communism. But was Ho also not somewhat to blame for the bloody war? Instead of taking the tack of India's Gandhi or South Africa's Nelson Mandela, perhaps he over relied on a Communist reign of terror. Perhaps it was Ho as much as Presidents Truman and Eisenhower who let the opportunity for peaceful relations between the United States and Vietnam go by.
This book is worthy reading for all who are interested in the events leading up to our military involvement. However, due to its sympathetic portrayal of Ho Chi Minh it may not be the complete story. I would recommend balancing the views of this book by reading Richard Nixon's NO MORE VIETNAMS, Henry Kissinger's ENDING THE VIETNAM WAR, and Guenter Lewy's AMERICA IN VIETNAM.
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