Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  Even as he made this comparison, however, Fall doubted it would make a decisive difference in the end. The unleashing of massive American firepower might make the war “militarily unlosable” in the short term, he wrote elsewhere that autumn, but at immense cost: the destruction of Vietnam. He quoted Tacitus: “They have made a desert, and called it peace.” Even then Ho’s Communists would not be vanquished, for in this conflict military prowess meant only so much—the war had to be won politically if it was to be won at all. This was the pivotal point about the French analogy, Fall maintained; this was the lesson that must be learned. But few in Washington seemed prepared to do so. Few seemed prepared to acknowledge the salient facts about counterinsurgency warfare that the French had learned the hard way: that results can be measured only over a period of many years; that success requires an effective host government that in the end can carry the burden on its own; and that notwithstanding counterinsurgency theory’s emphasis on nonmilitary measures, massive and brutal firepower will invariably be used, resulting in the widespread killing of civilians and increasing local resentments. Decades later, in a new century, Americans were still struggling to come to grips with these realities.23

  One wonders what Bernard Fall would have made of these later military interventions and the debates surrounding them: In 1967, he was killed while accompanying a U.S. Marine battalion in an operation near Hue. Certainly, this astonishingly prolific writer, had he lived, would have produced more important books and articles on the struggle for Vietnam, works that would have reached a wide audience and added enormously to Americans’ collective knowledge. Not least, I’m guessing, Fall would have reminded us early and often that any serious effort at understanding America’s Vietnam debacle must range beyond the period of heavy U.S. involvement, to the era that came before. For as Fall once said, Americans were “dreaming different dreams than the French but walking in the same footsteps.”24

  By the end of 1965, 180,000 U.S. troops were on the ground in South Vietnam. More were on the way.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK HAS MY NAME ON THE COVER, BUT IT’S VERY MUCH A collective enterprise. I am deeply grateful to the authors whose books and articles I read and reread over the past decade, and on whose shoulders I stand. The same goes for archivists at repositories in several countries, who patiently showed me how to navigate their collections and responded with alacrity when I emailed or phoned with this or that follow-up query. I’m also forever indebted to three dear friends who read the entire manuscript and set me right about facts or interpretations, who pushed me when I needed pushing, and who provided succor at just the right time: Chris Goscha, Jim Hershberg, and Ken Mouré. I can’t thank them enough. Other colleagues provided incisive critiques of individual chapters: Chen Jian, Will Hitchcock, Jack Langguth, Mark Lawrence, Tim Naftali, Andrew Preston, and John Thompson.

  Many friends have been generous in sharing documents, and in notifying me of collections I needed to consult. Here I thank, in particular, Chen Jian, Chris Goscha, Matthew Jones, Merle Pribbenow, Priscilla Roberts, and Kevin Ruane. Merle Pribbenow also made a tremendous contribution by making available to me his translations of Vietnamese military documents, and by providing new translations seemingly instantaneously. During one memorable two-week stretch, it seemed that every time I opened my email there was a new document from Merle, pertaining to this or that military campaign we had been discussing.

  George Herring and Ben Weber were delightful travel companions on a memorable visit to Dien Bien Phu, and I thank them for indulging my desire to traverse the area around Colonel de Castries’s battlefield headquarters and the nearby strongpoints. Nor will I soon forget George’s keen interest and superb input as he and I discussed my then-embryonic book project by the pool at the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, or our harrowing trip to Phat Diem, in which our driver seemed determined to set a new land speed record between the two points and thought nothing of using both sides of the road to make it happen.

  I owe a great debt to my many wonderful students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Cornell University, and in particular to a remarkable group of research assistants at the two institutions: George Fujii, Justin Granstein, Michael Mazza, and Kim Quinney. Samuel Hodges, at the time a Brown University junior, provided excellent help during a return visit to his hometown of Santa Barbara.

  For their willingness to help in various ways, large and small, I thank Joanna Ain, Richard Aldrich, Arthur Bergeron, James Blight, Robert Brigham, Jessica Chapman, Jessy Chiorino, Campbell Craig, Craig Daigle, Philippe Devillers, William Duiker, Daniel Ellsberg, Dorothy Fall, Susan Ferber, Dominique Franche, Warren Frazier, Marc Gilbert, Pierre Grosser, Robert Hanyok, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Pembroke Herbert, Will Hitchcock, Pierre Journoud, Audrey Kahin, Walter LaFeber, Janet Lang, John Lee, William Loomis, Erez Manela, Zachary Matusheski, Glenn May, Anne Mensior, Edwin Moïse, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Andrew Preston, Priscilla Roberts, Kevin Ruane, Jennifer See, Jack Talbott, Keith Taylor, Martin Thomas, Stein Tønnesson, Trinh Quang Thanh, Thuy Tranviet, Hannah Stamler, Kathryn Statler, Vu Tuong, James Waite, Geoffrey Warner, Kenneth Weisbrode, Odd Arne Westad, George Wickes, Mark Wilson, Emoretta Yang, John Young, and the late Luu Doan Huynh and Jon Persoff. For expert work on the maps I thank Don Larson and his team at Mapping Specialists.

  At a critical early point in the project, Mark Lawrence and I teamed up to organize an international conference on the Franco–Viet Minh War and to gather the papers from that meeting into an edited volume. Mark’s role in the success of both endeavors was enormous, and I’m grateful as well to Betty Sue Flowers, then director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, for agreeing to host the conference and for enthusiastically backing what we were trying to do.

  Much of this book was written during a marvelous sabbatical year in England. I thank the Leverhulme Trust for providing a generous fellowship, the University of Nottingham for giving me a perfect institutional home, and Matthew Jones for his key role in shepherding the Leverhulme nomination through. I’m also grateful to Tony Badger of Clare College, Cambridge, for securing a second affiliation for me that year, as a Mellon senior fellow at Cambridge.

  At Random House I thank my editor, David Ebershoff, for his steadfast support and superb editing, and Clare Swanson and Loren Noveck for their excellent labors. Special thanks to Jason Epstein, who had the idea for a book on the early years in Vietnam and encouraged me to give close attention to the Second World War, and to Scott Moyers, my original editor, who has been a keen and unstinting supporter throughout. My literary agent, John Hawkins, did not live to see this work published, but I am eternally grateful to him for betting on me early and for providing sound counsel throughout.

  I’m fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful colleagues at Cornell: in the History Department, the Southeast Asia Program, and at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Three Einaudi Center colleagues deserve to be singled out for their skillful and energetic support in the latter stages of this project: Nishi Dhupa, Elizabeth Edmondson, and Heike Michelsen. At Cornell I also received very helpful feedback from the History Department’s Comparative History Colloquium and from the brown-bag seminar of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Elsewhere, I benefited from trying out my ideas before learned audiences at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, the University of Nottingham, and the l’Institut d’études internationales de Montréal.

  My final and most important acknowledgments are to my family. My beloved parents have provided boundless support and encouragement for longer than I can remember and in more ways than I can convey. I’m also grateful to my sister and brother, who somehow knew when to ask how the book was going and when not to. As for my wife, Danyel, I am lost for words. All I will say is that she contributed to this book much more than she might modestly accept. Always patient, always wise, at just the right moments she summoned up, as if by magic, calm where before there was only storm. I dedicate this
book to her and to our two children, Emma and Joseph, who grew up with this book and tolerated the disruptions created by it with their usual good cheer. All three fueled my efforts more than they can ever know.

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1 Near the end of the trip, Kennedy would be rushed to an Okinawa hospital with a temperature of 106. The doctors initially doubted he would live, and he received his last rites.

  2 1951 travel journal, Box 11, Book 3, October–November 1951, pp.116ff, John F. Kennedy Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Library (hereafter JFKL). See also Geoffrey Perret, Jack: A Life Like No Other (New York: Random House, 2001), 170.

  3 1951 trips, Mid and Far East, travel diary, Box 24, Robert F. Kennedy Preadministration Personal Files, JFKL; Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic, 2001), 83.

  4 Seymour Topping, On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent’s Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 151–55; The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1:68.

  5 JFK travel journal, 1951, JFKL.

  6 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 166–67; Pentagon Papers (Gravel), 1:72.

  7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 1:96.

  8 Important works that cover parts of this story, and that are cited in the pages that follow, include those by Mark Bradley, Pierre Brocheux, Laurent Cesari, Jessica Chapman, Chen Jian, Chester Cooper, Philippe Devillers, William Duiker, David Elliott, Duong Van Mai Elliott, Bernard Fall, Lloyd Gardner, Christopher Goscha, Ellen Hammer, George Herring, Stanley Karnow, Jean Lacouture, A. J. Langguth, Mark Lawrence, David Marr, Edward Miller, Jonathan Nashel, John Prados, Pierre Rocolle, Alain Ruscio, Neil Sheehan, Martin Shipway, Ronald Spector, Kathryn Statler, Martin Thomas, Stein Tønnesson, Frédéric Turpin, Martin Windrow, and Marilyn Young. Also essential are the following reference works: Christopher E. Goscha, Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press/Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2011); Alain Ruscio, La guerre “française” d’Indochine (1945–1954), Les sources de la connaissance: Bibliographie, filmographie, documents divers (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2002); Michel Bodin, Dictionnaire de la guerre d’Indochine, 1945–1954 (Paris: Economica, 2004); Jean-Pierre Rioux, Dictionnaire de la France coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2007); and Edwin Moïse’s excellent online bibliography of the Vietnam Wars, which can be found at www.​clemson.​edu/​caah/​history/​facultypages/​EdMoise/​bibliography.​html. A fine atlas of the struggle is Hugues Tertrais, Atlas des guerres d’Indochine, 1940–1990: De l’Indochine française à l’ouverture internationale (Paris: Autrement, 2004). Special recognition needs to be extended to the quartet of Devillers, Fall, Goscha, and Lawrence, whose influence on this study has been especially great.

  9 Although a great many Vietnamese archival sources remain inaccessible to scholars, it’s possible to learn a lot about Vietnamese—Communist as well as non-Communist—decisions in this period from official histories and memoirs, and from French, American, and British archival collections. Nevertheless, this book is not a full history of the DRV in this period, much less of all of Vietnam. Important recent studies that are more Vietnam-centric include Christopher E. Goscha, Vietnam: Un état né de la guerre, 1945–54 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011); François Guillemot, Dai Viêt, indépendance et révolution au Viêt-Nam. L’échec de la troisième voie, 1938–1955 (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2011); David Marr, Vietnam 1945–1950: War, State, Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming); Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954, trans. Ly Lan Dill-Klein et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007); Shawn McHale, “Understanding the Fanatic Mind? The Viet Minh and Race Hatred in the First Indochina War (1945–1954),” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4 (Fall 2009); Jessica M. Chapman, “Debating the Will of Heaven: South Vietnamese Politics and Nationalism in International Perspective, 1953–56,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California–Santa Barbara, 2006; and Edward Miller, “Grand Designs: Vision, Power, and Nation Building in America’s Alliance with Ngô Dình Diêm, 1954–1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2004. A useful older work is Greg Lockhart, Nation in Arms: The Origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam (Wellington, N.Z.: Allen & Unwin, 1989). A major outlet for new research is the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

  10 Historians remain divided on what to call the conflict, referring to it variously as the French Indochina War, the First Indochina War, the First Vietnam War, the Franco–Viet Minh War, the Anti-French War, the First War of National Resistance, or simply the Indochina War. Here I most often use the French Indochina War and the Franco–Viet Minh War, recognizing that both have their limitations.

  11 Works that explore this intersection include Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, eds., The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann, eds., Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–1962 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009); Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat, eds., Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Hans Antlöv and Stein Tønnesson, Imperial Policy and South East Asian Nationalism (Surrey, U.K.: Curzon, 1995); and Marc Frey, Ronald W. Pruessen, and Tai Yong Tan, eds., The Transformation of Southeast Asia: International Perspectives on Decolonization (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2003).

  12 Though my emphasis in this volume is on high politics and military affairs, I am in full accord with David Elliott’s argument that we also need local histories of the Vietnam struggle, which can capture what macrohistories cannot. See David W. P. Elliott, “The Future of the Past: Some Questions about the Vietnam War for the Next Generation of Historians,” unpublished paper in the author’s possession. See also Elliott, Vietnamese War.

  13 See, e.g., A.J. Stockwell, “Southeast Asia in War and Peace: The End of European Empires,” in Nicholas Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, volume 4 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–32.

  14 Paul Mus, Destin de l’empire français: De l’Indochine à l’Afrique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1954), Part 1.

  15 Neil Sheehan, introduction to Jules Roy, The Battle of Dienbienphu, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Harper & Row, 1965; reprint New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984), xiv.

  16 Westmoreland quoted in David F. Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 69.

  17 On this point as applied to Kennedy and Johnson in 1961–65, see Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  18 Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 42–135.

  19 “Problem” comment quoted in Thomas A. Bass, The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangerous Game (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 71. “Embers” quote is in David Halberstam, keynote address, conference on “Vietnam and the Presidency,” JFKL, March 10, 2006, available at www.​jfklibrary.​org/​Events-​and-​Awards/​Forums.​aspx?​f=2006 (last accessed Feb. 25, 2012).

  20 Quoted in Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 46.

  21 On the American war as a colonial struggle, see, e.g., Michael Adas,
“A Colonial War in a Postcolonial Era: The United States’ Occupation of Vietnam,” in Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds., America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27–42.

  22 Former New York Times Saigon correspondent A. J. Langguth, in his fine history of the American war, refers to Ho Chi Minh’s “lifelong admiration for Americans.” Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 55.

  PROLOGUE: A Vietnamese in Paris

  1 The petition was cited in full in the socialist newspaper L’Humanité on June 18, 1919. See also Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years 1919–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11–28; Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11–14; and William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 54–63.