Published, September 7, 2012
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| Vietnamese soldiers during the battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1954. |
During the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Franklin Roosevelt
spoke bitterly to his son about European imperialism: “Don’t think for a
moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight
if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the
British and the Dutch.” Earlier, he had spoken openly to the White House
correspondents: “There has never been, there isn’t now and there never
will be, any race of people on earth fit to serve as masters over their
fellow men. We believe that any nationality, no matter how small,
has the inherent right to its own nationhood.” That was the core of the
Atlantic Charter in 1941, which both Churchill and Roosevelt signed. It
called on “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government
under which they will live.”
Four years later, with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the new
president entered office knowing little about how his predecessor saw
the future of the world. Harry Truman ignored the anticolonial passages
of the Atlantic Charter (just as Churchill did) and supported the
continuation of imperialism among the great powers — a decision that
helped the French government to restore its hold on the empire. That
included its lost colony: Vietnam. Over time, that decision led to what
George F. Kennan once called “the most disastrous of all America’s
undertakings over the whole 200 years of its history.”
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 — from the end
of World War II to the beginning of the second Vietnam War in 1959. 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.
Logevall begins with the efforts of Ho Chi Minh, who spent his life
trying to bring independence to his country. He fought alongside
Americans in the battle against Japan during World War II, and he hoped
to build an independent Vietnamese nation with American support. But
since Ho’s Viet Minh party was both nationalist and Communist, American
support in the deepening cold war was impossible. By 1946, Ho was
already planning for a war to drive the French out. But the weak and
frequently changing French governments had other ideas. They set out to
restore Vietnam as a colony of France, and they did so with the
financial help of the United States. The French insisted that without
Vietnam their economy would collapse. But they wanted more than money.
They wanted to secure what they considered the greatness of “eternal
France,” which included its colonial enterprises.
The French campaign was a long and ugly conflict that lasted almost a
decade. It reached its apex in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, a remote area
surrounded by hills in the North, where the French believed they could
“withstand any kind of attack the Viet Minh are capable of launching.”
The long siege of Dien Bien Phu could have gone either way, but the
French underestimated the power of the Viet Minh and lost. By the end,
110,000 French troops were dead — about twice the number of American
deaths in the second Vietnam War. Approximately 200,000 Viet Minh
soldiers were killed, along with 125,000 civilians. By 1955, the French
had left Vietnam for good, abandoning what they had once considered the
jewel of their empire.
Logevall is not only skilled at describing the war. He is also adept at
explaining the diplomacy of Vietnam during the 1950s. There was internal
disagreement during the Geneva Conference of 1954 about what role the
United States should play once the French left. Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles (who participated in the convention only briefly) believed
that America should take the place of the French and continue the war.
But Eisenhower, who understood what battle was like, refused to send
American troops into Vietnam. Instead, he agreed with others at the
Geneva Conference to partition the country — leaving the North under the
government of Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, and the South under Ngo
Dinh Diem, an aristocratic Catholic who hoped to create a Western regime
with strong ties to the United States. In 1956, there were to be
elections to reunite the country under a single government — elections
that never took place.
In the meantime, each side would withdraw its troops from the territory
of the other. But both sides could leave behind their supporters to work
(presumably peacefully) for victory in the coming elections. That meant
that while the Viet Minh had to remove its troops from the South, it
did not have to take out its “cadres,” its cells of political
supporters. They would soon become the guerrilla soldiers who began
attacks on the Diem regime.
Eisenhower has long been admired for his refusal to go to war in
Vietnam. But Logevall makes clear that he was far from a peacekeeper. He
did not want to send American troops into Vietnam, but he was also
determined not to allow South Vietnam to fall. For a time, Diem seemed a
powerful and successful leader, able to stop any efforts by the Viet
Minh to conquer the South. And for a time, Diem was a hero to Americans —
revered by leaders in Washington and by much of the American public.
But the more success he had, the more resolved Ho was to undermine him.
By 1959, Viet Minh soldiers were infiltrating the South and escalating
the violence in South Vietnam. When Eisenhower left office, there were
about 1,000 American “advisers” (almost all of them military men), with
many more to come.
North Vietnam’s goal of uniting the nation faced obstacles of its own.
It was hampered by Ho’s harsh and unpopular land reform, which he
ultimately abandoned. It was damaged by the many Northerners who fled —
among them Vietnamese Catholics — fearing they would be persecuted if
they stayed. Even so, the Viet Minh continued, slowly and cautiously, to
create a military in the South that would fight against the most
powerful nation in the world. As early as 1957, while Diem was still
popular, reporters discovered that 452 village officials had died in one
year, assassinated by Viet Minh leaders who took charge in their place.
It was only the beginning of the unraveling of the South.
Bernard Fall — a highly respected historian of the struggle over Vietnam
— once commented on the futility of the two wars. The Americans, he
said, were “dreaming different dreams than the French but walking in the
same footsteps.” In 1959, there weren’t many in Washington who imagined
they would make the same mistakes the French had made. For a time the
Americans believed they could stabilize the new South Vietnam. But only a
few years later, they slowly began to realize that they were entering
their own quagmire.
Times Topics: Vietnam War | Vietnam
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