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

by Fredrik Logevall

  41 See Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 1985), 278–82.

  42 Quoted in Spector, Advice and Support, 274.

  43 Ibid., 275–76.

  44 Defense Information Relating to the U.S. Aid Program in Vietnam, April 13, 1956, in FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:673. An insightful history of the ARVN is Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).

  45 Arnold, First Domino, 318–19.

  CHAPTER 27: Things Fall Apart

  1 Journal d’Extrême-Orient, quoted in NYT, May 5, 1957. The shooter, Ha Minh Tri (alias Phan Van Dien), later admitted being a member of a Cao Dai dissident group, but a DRV document asserts that he was acting on orders of southern Communist leaders under Le Duan. The document also says he had a female accomplice who escaped capture. Lich Su Bien Nien Xu Uy Nam Bo va Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam (1954–1975) [Historical Chronicle of the Cochin China Party Committee and the Central Office for South Vietnam, 1954–1975] (Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 2002), 134. Translated by Merle Pribbenow.

  2 NYT, May, 9, 1957.

  3 Quoted in Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 254.

  4 NYT, May 7, 1957; St. Petersburg Times, May 9, 1957; Washington Evening Star, May 9, 1957; Boston Globe, May 6, 1957, as quoted in Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963 (Lanham: Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 103; Washington Post, May 8, 1957. “Sharkskin suit” is quoted in James R. Arnold, The First Domino: Eisenhower, the Military, and America’s Intervention in Vietnam (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 328.

  5 Quoted in “Diem’s Success Story,” New Republic, May 6, 1957.

  6 “President’s Toast to Diem,” May 9, 1957, Box 2, International Meeting Series: Diem Visit, Ann Whitman File, Eisenhower Library.

  7 NYT, May 14, 1957.

  8 Diem’s dinner remarks quoted in Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 103.

  9 Joseph G. Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 51; Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam, 259–60.

  10 Arnold, First Domino, 324.

  11 John Osborne, “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,” Life, May 13, 1957.

  12 Durbrow to State, May 2, 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:787–88; Thomas L. Ahearn, Jr., CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954–63 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2000), chap. 8.

  13 Gregory A. Olson, Mansfield and Vietnam: A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 76; Chester L. Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), 153.

  14 John Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998); James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 3.

  15 Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 17; Graham Greene, Yours, Etc.: Letters to the Press, ed. Christopher Hawtree (New York: Viking, 1989), as quoted in Graham Greene, The Quiet American, Viking Critical Edition, ed. John Clark Pratt (New York: Penguin, 1996), 310–12.

  16 Lansdale letters to Diem, October 28, 1957, and to General John O’Daniel, October 28, 1957, quoted in Pratt, ed., Quiet American, 307–9.

  17 “Statement of General John W. O’Daniel, Chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam, in Regard to the World Premiere of the Motion Picture ‘The Quiet American,’ ” (n.d.), Douglas Pike Collection, Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Lubbock. See also Morgan, Vietnam Lobby, 52.

  18 Bernard B. Fall, “Danger Signs,” Nation, May 31, 1958.

  19 Robert Scheer, How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1965), 53.

  20 Philip E. Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 65.

  21 Robert L. Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 58; Robert Scigliano, South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 121–22. For the experience in one province in the Mekong Delta, see Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). On Ladejinsky, see David A. Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 158–61.

  22 Several attacks are described in Mien Dong Nam Bo Khang Chien (1945–1975), Tap II [The Resistance War in Eastern Cochin China (1945–1975), Volume 2] (Hanoi: People’s Army Publishing House, 1993), 60–63. Translated by Merle Pribbenow.

  23 A superb treatment of the origins of the insurgency, focusing in particular on My Tho province, is David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), chap. 6. See also Ta Xuan Linh, “How Armed Struggle Began in South Vietnam,” Vietnam Courier, no. 22 (March 1974). The discussions within the southern revolutionary leadership are described in Lich Su Bien Nien Xu Uy Nam Bo va Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam (1954–1975) [Historical Chronicle of the Cochin China Party Committee and the Central Office for South Vietnam (1954–1975)] (Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 2002), 129–39. Translated by Merle Pribbenow.

  24 Dorothy Fall, Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2006), 109.

  25 Fall described this 1957 visit, and his broader conclusion about the village chief assassinations, in an unpublished paper, “The Anatomy of Insurgency in Indochina, 1946–64,” delivered on March 20, 1964, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington, D.C. A copy is in Box P-1, Series 1.5, “Papers and Reports by Dr. Fall,” Bernard Fall Collection, JFKL.

  26 Ibid., 122.

  27 Durbrow to State, December 5, 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, I:869–84.

  28 Quoted in David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 185–86. On CIA misgivings, see Thomas L. Ahearn, Jr., CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2001), 21–22, 27.

  29 Mao quoted in Odd Arne Westad, Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 20.

  30 Eisenhower to Diem, May 23, 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, Vietnam, I:39–40.

  31 Quoted in Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 1985), 325.

  32 George McTurnan Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 101; Scigliano, South Vietnam, 158.

  33 Mari Olsen, Soviet-Vietnam Relations and the Role of China, 1949–1964: Changing Alliances (London: Routledge, 2006), chap. 5; Cuoc Khang Chien Chong My Cuu Nuoc 1954–1975 [The Anti-U.S. War of National Salvation, 1954–1975] (Hanoi: Quan doi Nhan den, 1980), 35; Paul Kattenburg interview, 1981, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 18, 2010).

  34 Mien Dong Nam Bo Khang Chien, 30–68.

  35 Carlyle A. Thayer, War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Viet-Nam, 1954–1960 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 92; A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 100. See also Christopher E. Goscha and Stein Tønnesson, “Le Duan and the Break with China,” in Priscilla Roberts, ed., Be
hind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World Beyond Asia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 455–57.

  36 Van Kien Dang, Toan Tap, 20, 1959 [Collected Party Documents, Volume 20, 1959] (Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 2002), 2–55, translated by Merle Pribbenow; Military History Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975, trans. Merle Pribbenow (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 49–50.

  37 William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 120–21; Cuoc Khang Chien Chong My Cuu Nuoc 1954–1975, 49–50; Lich Su Bien Nien Xu Uy Nam Bo va Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam, 179–84. There is confusion in the documentation about whether the decisions made at the Fifteenth Plenum were formalized then, in January 1959, or after another meeting in May, when another, similar “Resolution 15” was debated and adopted. Most likely the later meeting, which occurred after Ho Chi Minh traveled to the USSR and China to consult with Hanoi’s principal allies, ratified the earlier decision. Thayer, War by Other Means, 185.

  38 Military History Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam, 51–53.

  39 Elliott, Vietnamese War, 119.

  40 Cited in David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai, Vietnam: A Portrait of Its People at War (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), 151–53. See also William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 517–18.

  41 Cuoc Khang Chien Chong My Cuu Nuoc 1954–1975, 81; Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 81–91. On the founding of the NLF, a classic account is Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), chap. 4. And see Robert K. Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), chap. 1; Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966); and Joseph J. Zasloff, Political Motivation of the Viet Cong: The Vietminh Regroupees (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 1975).

  42 John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 71; William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), 44.

  43 Elliott, Vietnamese War, 102–3; Kahin, Intervention, 97–98; The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1:252; Pham Thanh Gion interview, 1981, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 2, 2010).

  44 Quoted in Elliott, Vietnamese War, 103.

  45 Pentagon Papers (Gravel) 1:312. On the agrovilles and their development, see, e.g., Catton, Diem’s Final Failure, chap. 3; and Biggs, Quagmire, 188–93. A more or less contemporaneous account is Joseph J. Zasloff, “Rural Resettlement in Vietnam: The Agroville Program,” Pacific Affairs 35 (1962–63).

  46 Elliott, Vietnamese War, 127, 103. See also FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 194–95; and David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), chap. 3.

  47 Nguyen Thi Dinh interview, 1981, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 22, 2010).

  48 Mrs. Nguyen Thi Dinh, No Other Road to Take, translated by Mai V. Elliott (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1976); Nguyen Thi Dinh interview, 1981, WGBH Vietnam Collection, openvault.​wgbh.​org/​catalog/​org.​wgbh.​mla:​Vietnam (last accessed on November 22, 2010).

  49 Dinh, No Other Road, 69–70.

  50 Arnold, First Domino, 342; NYT, July 7, 1959, as quoted in Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, 81.

  51 Bernard B. Fall, The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1964), 327–28.

  52 Operations Coordinating Board Report, January 7, 1959, Box 25, NSC 5809 Policy Paper Subseries, Eisenhower Library.

  53 Catton, Diem’s Final Failure, 48–50. On Diem’s conception of democracy, see also FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 109–11.

  54 Nhu quoted in Catton, Diem’s Final Failure, 29.

  55 Diem quoted in James Fisher, “ ‘A World Made Safe for Diversity’: The Vietnam Lobby and the Politics of Pluralism, 1945–1963,” in Christian Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 229.

  56 Ahearn, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, 31. The intelligence agent quoted in Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 280.

  57 Spector, Advice and Support, 371; William J. Duiker, U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 241. On Diem continuing to frame the problem in military terms, even as Williams finally appeared to concede that the political dimension also mattered, see Ahearn, CIA and the House of Ngo, 136.

  58 Time, July 20, 1959; Spector, Advice and Support, 329; Mien Dong Nam Bo Khang Chien, 70–71. See also Houston Post, July 8, 1984; and USA Today, July 8, 2009.

  59 People, July 9, 1984.

  60 Ibid.

  61 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), 10–11. Due to his name being misspelled as “Ovnard,” Ovnand’s name was later added to the Wall a second time, at Panel 7E, Row 46. A case for the first American to be killed in South Vietnam could also be made for Captain Harry Griffith Cramer, Jr., who died in an explosion of uncertain cause near Nha Trang in October 1957. His name was added to the Wall in 1983 and appears on panel 01E, Row 78. Another candidate is Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr., killed on June 8, 1956. His name, added in 1999, appears on Panel 52E, Row 21.

  62 Spector, Advice and Support, 329.

  63 Time, July 20, 1959; Karnow, Vietnam, 10–11.

  EPILOGUE: Different Dreams, Same Footsteps

  1 Quoted in Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 283. Paul Kattenburg, in 1961 a State Department specialist on Vietnam, would later write of this period: “Policy-planning exercises never defined vital interest positions themselves, but always assumed them.” Paul Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–75 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1980), 101–2.

  2 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 166–67; and The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1:72.

  3 Quoted in Christopher Matthews, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 118.

  4 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 505, 547.

  5 Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking, 2003), 66–67.

  6 NYT, February 25, 1962, reprinted in Reporting Vietnam, Part 1: American Journalism 1959–1975 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 11–17.

  7 Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–67 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009). The JCS memo is quoted in Seymour Topping, Journey Between Two Chinas (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 178.

  8 The literature on the 1961–65 period is very large. See, e.g., David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972); Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
, 2000); Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 2008); Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  9 White letter quoted in Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011), 136.

  10 Lansdale speech, “Soldiers and the People,” August 30, 1962, Box 7, #239, Lansdale Papers, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. On another occasion, Lansdale argued that the preferred way to get rid of the Viet Cong in one particular area was to use “human defoliation” in the hardwood forests: Instead of using chemical defoliants, officials should award a timber concession to a Taiwanese firm that would arm its workers. “They might very well have to fight to get to the trees so they would clean up the Viet Cong along the way,” Lansdale reasoned. The scheme was quietly filed. Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 66.

  11 Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989); Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media, and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1944–1960 (Leicester, U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1998); Michael Osborne, Strategic Hamlets in Vietnam (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965).

  12 David Halberstam, “The Americanization of Vietnam,” Playboy, January 1970, as quoted in Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War, 151.

  13 For counterfactual assessments regarding what a surviving Kennedy might have done in Vietnam, see, e.g., Logevall, Choosing War, 395–400; and James G. Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). For the argument (which I find unpersuasive) that Kennedy had initiated a withdrawal at the time of his death, see James Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,” Boston Review, January–February 2004, 29–34; and Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 165–79.