14 LBJ-Bundy telcon, September 8, 1964, in Michael Beschloss, ed., Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 35–36; LBJ-Russell telcon, March 6, 1965, ibid., 210–13.
15 On Kennedy and Johnson’s options in 1963–65, see Logevall, Choosing War.
16 On this vulnerability and its influence on foreign policy in the Cold War as a whole, see Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2009).
17 Ho is quoted in William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 535.
18 O.A. Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tønnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung, and James G. Hershberg, eds., “77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Vietnam,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper, 1998, pp. 83–84.
19 Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 548.
20 David Schoenbrun, As France Goes (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 232–35.
21 Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle: La France reprend sa place dans la monde (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 501; Paris to State, May 5, 1965, Box 171, National Security File, Country File, France, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. On French policy in this period, see Pierre Journoud, De Gaulle et le Vietnam, 1945–1969 (Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 2011), chap. 4.
22 Bernard B. Fall, “The War in Vietnam,” Current (December 1965), 9–10. Emphasis in original. See also Christopher E. Goscha, “ ‘Sorry About That …’: Bernard Fall, the Vietnam War, and the Impact of a French Intellectual in the U.S.,” in Christopher E. Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse, eds., La Guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe (1963–1973) (Paris: LGDJ, 2003), 363–82.
23 The literature on counterinsurgency has grown enormously in the years since 9/11 and the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. See, e.g., David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); John A. Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (New York: Praeger, 2002); Gian P. Gentile, “A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and Its Defects,” World Affairs (Summer 2008); Edward Luttwak, “Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice,” Harper’s (February 2007); and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Jeffrey Record, Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007); and Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan, 2010), chap. 5.
24 Quoted in David Halberstam, Ho (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 106. On Fall and his experience, see Dorothy Fall, Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2006). In early 1966, the Harvard historian John K. Fairbank would put it slightly differently: “On the long thin coast of Vietnam, we are sleeping in the same bed the French slept in even though we dream different dreams.” New York Review of Books, February 17, 1966.
FURTHER READING
Although the literature on the period covered in this book pales in size next to that detailing the years of heavy U.S. military involvement (1961–73), interested readers can find numerous studies that shed light on key parts of the story—and that were exceptionally helpful to me. Here follows a selected list of English-language works I utilized. For additional published sources, please see the endnotes.
Ahearn, Thomas L., 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.
Allen, George W. None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001.
Anderson, David L. Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Appy, Christian G. Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. New York: Viking, 2003.
Arnold, James R. The First Domino: Eisenhower, the Military, and America’s Intervention in Vietnam. New York: William Morrow, 1991.
Asselin, Pierre. “The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the 1954 Geneva Conference: A Revisionist Critique.” Cold War History 11:2 (May 2011).
Bartholomew-Feis, Dixee R. The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War Against Japan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
Berman, Larry. Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An. New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007.
Bidault, Georges. Resistance: The Political Autobiography of Georges Bidault. Translated by Marianne Sinclair. New York: Praeger, 1968.
Billings-Yun, Melanie. Decision Against War: Eisenhower and Dienbienphu, 1954. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Bodard, Lucien. The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
Bradley, Mark Philip. Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Brocheux, Pierre. Ho Chi Minh: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
——— and Daniel Hémery. Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954. Translated by Ly Lan Dill-Klein et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Bui Diem with David Chanoff. In the Jaws of History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Bui Tin. Following Ho Chi Minh: The Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.
Buttinger, Joseph. Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled. 2 vols. New York: Praeger, 1967.
Cable, James. The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina. London: Macmillan, 1986.
Catton, Philip E. Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.
Chen Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Cooper, Chester L. In the Shadows of History: Fifty Years Behind the Scenes of Cold War Diplomacy. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2005.
———. The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970.
Currey, Cecil B. Victory at Any Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam’s Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. Dulles, Va.: Potomac, 2005.
Dalloz, Jacques. The War in Indo-China, 1945–1954. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1990.
Davidson, Phillip B. Vietnam at War: The History, 1946–1975. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Devillers, Philippe and Jean Lacouture. End of a War: Indochina, 1954. New York: Praeger, 1969.
Dreifort, John E. Myopic Grandeur: The Ambivalence of French Foreign Policy toward the Far East, 1919–1945. Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1991.
Duiker, William J. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion, 2000.
———. U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Eden, Anthony. Full Circle: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Elliott, David W. P. The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.
Elliott, Duong Van Mai. The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Fall, Bernard B. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.
———, ed. Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings 1920–1966. New York: Praeger, 1967.
———. Street Without Joy: Indochina at War 1946–1954. Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1961.
———. The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis. New York: Praeger, 1964.
Fall, Dorothy. Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar. Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2006.
FitzGerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.
Gaiduk, Ilya V. Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963. Stanf
ord, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Gardner, Lloyd C. Approaching Vietnam: From World War II Through Dienbienphu. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.
Goscha, Christopher E. “Courting Diplomatic Disaster? The Difficult Integration of Vietnam into the Internationalist Communist Movement (1945–1950).” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1 (February 2006).
Goscha, Christopher E. 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.
Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Viking, 1956.
———. Ways of Escape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House, 1972.
Hammer, Ellen J. The Struggle for Indochina, 1940–1955. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955.
Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
——— and Richard H. Immerman. “Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dienbienphu: ‘The Day We Didn’t Go to War’ Revisited.” Journal of American History 71 (September 1984).
Herzstein, Robert E. Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Hess, Gary. The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, 1940–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Immerman, Richard. “Between the Unattainable and the Unacceptable: Eisenhower and Dienbienphu.” In Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy in the 1950s, edited by Richard A. Melanson and David Mayers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Jacobs, Seth. 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.
Jennings, Eric. Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Kahin, George McTurnan. Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Kaplan, Lawrence S., Denise Artaud, and Mark Rubin, eds. Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-American Relations, 1954–1955. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1990.
Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History, 2nd ed. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Kattenburg, Paul. The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–75. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1980.
Kimball, Warren F. The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Lacouture, Jean. Pierre Mendès France. Translated by George Holock. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984.
LaFeber, Walter. “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina: 1942–1945.” American Historical Review 80 (December 1975).
Langguth, A.J. Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Lawrence, Mark Atwood. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
——— and Fredrik Logevall, eds. The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Mann, Robert. A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam. New York: Basic, 2001.
Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
———. Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
McAlister, John T., Jr., and Paul Mus. The Vietnamese and Their Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Miller, Edward. “Vision, Power and Agency: The Ascent of Ngô Dình Diêm, 1945–54.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35 (October 2004).
Morgan, Ted. Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War. New York: Random House, 2010.
Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Nashel, Jonathan. Edward Lansdale’s Cold War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.
O’Ballance, Edgar. The Indo-China War, 1945–1954. London: Faber & Faber, 1964.
Oberdorfer, Don. Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman and Diplomat. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2003.
Patti, Archimedes L. A. Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America’s Albatross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Porch, Douglas. The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Prados, John. Operation Vulture. New York: ibooks, 2002.
Quinn-Judge, Sophie. Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years 1919–1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Rotter, Andrew J. The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Roy, Jules. The Battle of Dienbienphu. Translated by Robert Baldick. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Ruane, Kevin. “Anthony Eden, British Diplomacy, and the Origins of the Geneva Conference of 1954.” Historical Journal 37 (1994).
Sainteny, Jean. Ho Chi Minh and His Vietnam: A Personal Memoir. Chicago: Cowles, 1972.
Schoenbrun, David. As France Goes. New York: Atheneum, 1968.
Shaplen, Robert. The Lost Revolution: The U.S. in Vietnam, 1946–1966. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1988.
Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 2: 1939–1955. New York: Viking, 1995.
Shipway, Martin. The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944–1947. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1996.
Shuckburgh, Evelyn. Descent to Suez: Diaries, 1951–1956. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
Simpson, Howard R. Dien Bien Phu: The Epic Battle America Forgot. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1994.
———. Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952–1991. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1992.
Spector, Ronald H. Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960. Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 1985.
———. In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia. New York: Random House, 2007.
Statler, Kathryn C. Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
Thayer, Carlyle. War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Viet Nam, 1954–1960. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989.
Thomas, Martin. The French Empire at War, 1940–1945. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007.
Thorne, Christopher G. Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978.
Tønnesson, Stein. The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War. London: Sage, 1991.
———. Vietnam 1946: How the War Began. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Vo Nguyen Giap. Dien Bien Phu: Rendezvous with History. Hanoi: Gioi, 2004.
———. Memoirs of War: The Road to Dien Bien Phu. Hanoi: Gioi, 2004.
———. Unforgettable Days. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1975.
Windrow, Martin. The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2004.
Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Zinoman, Peter. The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
&
nbsp; PHOTO CREDITS
prl.1: Library of Congress;
1.1: AP/Wide World Photos;
2.1: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum;
2.2: AP/Wide World Photos;
3.1: AP/Wide World Photos;
3.2: Archimedes L. A. Patti Research Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Central Florida;
3.3: private collection;
4.1: Archimedes L. A. Patti Research Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Central Florida;
4.2: Archimedes L. A. Patti Research Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Central Florida;
4.3: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images;
5.1: Service historique de la defense, Vincennes;
5.2: Archives d’histoire contemporaire, Paris;
5.3: ECPAD;
6.1: Archives d’histoire contemporaire, Paris;
7.1: Agence France Presse;
8.1: Bettmann/Corbis;
9.1: U.S. Air Force;
10.1: private collection;
10.2: The Vietnam Archive/Douglas Pike Photographic Collection;
11.1: Service historique de la defense, Vincennes;
11.2: ECPAD;
12.1: ECPAD;
13.1: AP/Wide World Photos;
14.1: AP Photos/Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum;
14.2: AP/Wide World Photos;
15.1: Courtesy of Dorothy Fall from Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar;
15.2: Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum;
16.1: AP/Wide World Photos;
16.2: Fox Photos/Getty Images;
17.1: ECPAD;
17.2: AFP PHOTO/VNA/FILES;
18.1: Thomas D. Mcavoy/Tim Life Pictures/Getty Images;
18.2: ECPAD;
19.1: Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum;
20.1: AP/Wide World Photos;
21.1: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images;
21.2: AP/Wide World Photos;
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