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

by Fredrik Logevall

Despite the fact that the State Department saw no evidence of mass popular support for Communism within Vietnam, and further that it was not ideology but a desire for independence and a hatred of the French that drove the unrest, the principals in U.S. decision making proceeded on the basis of worst-case assumptions. Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state and a figure of growing influence at Foggy Bottom, said that while the Viet Minh had never acknowledged any connection to the Kremlin, neither had they explicitly denied such a tie. Other U.S. analysts noted Ho Chi Minh’s training in Moscow in the 1920s and speculated that the Soviet government was cleverly concealing its involvement in Southeast Asian nationalist movements. Here again the lack of evidence for such involvement did not seem to matter, as skeptics were given the impossible task of proving a negative, of proving Soviet noninvolvement.