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

by Fredrik Logevall

Pale and thin, and suffering from a secret illness—Addison’s disease—that will almost kill him later in the trip, he is on a seven-week, twenty-five-thousand-mile tour of Asia and the Middle East designed to burnish his foreign-policy credentials in advance of a Senate run the following

Kennedy views this stop on the journey with special anticipation. Indochina, he knows, is in the midst of a violent struggle, pitting colonial France and her Indochinese allies, supported by the United States, against the Ho Chi Minh–led Viet Minh, who have the backing of China and the Soviet Union.

The three siblings soon realize that the bustling facade that Saigon (the “Paris of the Orient,” in the hoary cliché of travel writers) always presents to the visitor is a thin disguise for tension and insecurity.

But the restaurants have antigrenade netting over their terraces, and palpable nervousness hangs in the air.

The Viet Minh have base areas less than twenty-five miles away, and they conduct frequent—and often brazen—attacks on villages right next to the

The French are losing and likely can’t recover, Topping tells him, for the simple reason that Ho Chi Minh has captured the leadership of the Vietnamese nationalist movement and has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of recruits for his army.

But that was then. Now the United States is resented and even hated by many Vietnamese for her vigorous backing of the French colonial war effort.

The Frenchman, a blazingly charismatic figure who earlier in the year demonstrated his strategic and tactical sagacity in turning back three major Viet Minh offensives, has just returned from a triumphant visit to the United States, where journalists lauded him as the “French MacArthur”

He vows to take the fight to the enemy now that the rainy season is drawing to a close, and he assures Kennedy that France will see the struggle through to the end.

The United States should avoid the path trod by the declining British and French empires and instead show that the enemy is not merely Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality,” all of which are the daily lot of millions of Asians and Arabs.

The Eisenhower administration, by then far more committed to the war effort than were the French themselves, actively considered intervening with military force—perhaps with tactical nuclear weapons,

Diem gradually solidified his authority in South Vietnam and, with Washington’s staunch support, bypassed the elections.

It is the story of one Western power’s demise in Indochina and the arrival of another, of a revolutionary army’s stunning victory in 1954 in the face of immense challenges, and of the failure of that victory to bring lasting peace to Vietnam.

In this way, the Franco–Viet Minh War was simultaneously an East-West and North-South conflict, pitting European imperialism in its autumn phase against the two main competitors that gained momentum by midcentury—Communist-inspired revolutionary nationalism and U.S.-backed liberal internationalism.

Throughout, the focus is on the political and diplomatic dimensions of the struggle, but I also devote considerable space to the military campaigns that, I maintain, were crucial to the outcome.12 Laos and Cambodia enter the narrative at various points, but I give pride of place to developments in Vietnam, far more populous and politically important than her Indochinese neighbors.

In retrospect, given the broader historical context, there is an air of inevitability about the flow of events in this story, as there is about a great river. A prostrate France, having been overrun by Nazi Germany in a mere six weeks in 1940 and further humiliated in meekly ceding Indochina to the advancing Japanese, sought after 1945 to reestablish colonial control, at a time when the whole edifice of the European imperial system was crumbling; how could she possibly hope to succeed? Add to this the ruthless discipline, tenacity, and fighting skill of the Viet Minh, and the comparative weakness of non-Communist Vietnamese nationalists—before and after 1954—and it becomes seemingly all but impossible to imagine a different result than the one that occurred.

If the decolonization of Indochina was bound to occur, the process could have played out in a variety of ways, as the experience of European colonies in other parts of South and Southeast Asia shows.13 Moreover, difficult though it may be to remember now, in the early going the odds were against the Viet Minh. They were weak and vulnerable in military and diplomatic terms, a reality not lost on Ho Chi Minh, a political pragmatist who labored diligently and in vain both to head off war with France and to get official American backing for his cause.

What if the South Vietnamese government—with a leader, Diem, whose nationalist credentials were almost as sterling as his own—could strengthen its authority to the point that it could doom forever his dream of a unified Vietnam under Viet Minh control? These were live possibilities, much discussed and debated in the Viet Minh inner councils and among informed analysts elsewhere.

This is the advantage that hindsight affords. Though many senior French officials understood that in Vietnamese nationalism they faced a very potent entity, one made immeasurably stronger by the nature and outcome of the Pacific War, they could never bring themselves to grant the concessions necessary to have a hope of mollifying this force. An independent Vietnamese nation-state wholly or even mostly free of French control remained outside their imaginations; they could not make the mental leap

As for Diem’s prospects after 1954, these were never as hopeless as most early histories claimed or as rosy as some later authors asserted.

An intelligent and courageous patriot, Diem was the only major non-Communist political figure to emerge in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975 even remotely able to think disinterestedly of his country’s future, of constructing a political framework, or of challenging the Communist leadership in the north on something approaching competitive grounds. Given the indifference among the great powers—including North Vietnam’s allies China and the Soviet Union—about following through with the elections for reunification called for at Geneva, it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Diem’s South Vietnam survives, South Korea–style, into the indefinite future. But neither is it easy to imagine such an outcome. Over time, Diem’s shortcomings as a leader—his rigidity, his limited conception of leadership, his easy resort to political repression—became more and more obvious. U.S. officials, well aware of these weaknesses but seeing no viable alternative leader on the horizon, stayed with him, their leverage declining with each passing year despite the regime’s utter dependence on American aid. Contrary to common wisdom, it was Diem, not the United States, who possessed the dominant voice in South Vietnamese politics.

The Saigon regime faced difficult odds for another reason too. Many thousands of Vietnamese who might otherwise have wanted no part of Communism joined the Viet Minh against the French, motivated by a deep desire to achieve national independence. Among them were many of the most able and dedicated patriots in the country. Other nationalist groups, meanwhile, had either withered because they refused to choose sides or had thrown in their lot with the French against the Communists, hoping to achieve independence through incremental political reform, but instead losing all credibility with their compatriots for partnering with the hated colonial overlord.

As a result, the human resources available to build a viable state in southern Vietnam after 1954 constituted, in author Neil Sheehan’s words, “a mere residue,” diminished by years of vacillation, compromise, and collaboration, riven by dissension and intrigue.15

Readers familiar with the American war in Vietnam—and with the debates surrounding more recent U.S. military interventions—may experience feelings of déjà vu at points in this book. The soldierly complaints about the difficulty of telling friend from foe, and about the poor fighting spirit among “our” as compared to “their” indigenous troops; the gripes by commanders about timorous and meddling politicians back...

With each passing year after 1949, the struggle for senior French policy makers became less about the future of Indochina, less about grand geopolitical concerns, and more about domestic political strategizing, careerism, and satiating powerful interest groups at home.

Sophistry and vapid argumentation became the order of the day, as leaders sought to save face—or, as they would put it, to achieve an “honorable peace”—while treasure and lives were being lost. That the general public was for a long time apathetic about the war—most French voters, like most Americans later, were too preoccupied with their own lives to become interested in a small Asian country thousands of miles away—did not lessen this imperative, even if in theory it should have; it merely made it easier for officials to offer rote affirmations in favor of the status quo.

For another, France’s war was also America’s war—Washington footed much of the bill, supplied most of the weaponry, and pressed Paris leaders to hang tough when their will faltered. Well before the climax at Dien Bien Phu, Viet Minh leaders considered the United States, not France, their principal foe. Furthermore, what Dulles and other U.S. officials for a long time didn’t fathom, and then refused to acknowledge after they did, was that colonialism is often in the eyes of the beholder:

Ironically, Ho Chi Minh had been among those who for a long time resisted drawing this conclusion about America and her role. For thirty years, from the 1910s until 1948–49, he clung to the hope that the United States was different—a new kind of world power that had been born out of an anticolonial reaction and was an advocate of self-determination for all nations, large and small. Like many deeply held beliefs, this one had taken root early, when the twenty-something Ho visited Boston and New York in 1912–13 and a few years later read Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The United States, he came fervently to believe, could be the champion of his cause. (In the French nightmare, he was right.)22 In 1919, at the end of the Great War, with Wilson due in Paris to negotiate a peace “to end all wars,” the unknown young nationalist set out to make his case. It’s here that our story begins.

To better his chances of winning an audience with Wilson, Quoc had rented a morning coat for the occasion. But he never got anywhere near the American president—or any of the other principal players. Thin and frail, with gaunt facial features and piercing black eyes, his unimposing figure was lost among the other nationalist representatives from Asia and Africa who also clamored to meet the American president. Wilson probably never even saw the petition; he certainly did not reply to it.2 Throughout the war, he had framed his principles in sweeping, universal terms, but it’s clear that when he spoke of self-determination he had Europeans primarily in mind—in particular the peoples dominated by the defeated Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. If he did not explicitly exclude non-European peoples from the right to self-rule, neither did he expect the peace conference to grapple with colonial questions beyond those arising from the war itself. Colonial peoples might achieve independence, Wilson evidently believed, but not right away and not without the tutelage of a “civilized” power that would prepare them for self-government.

Little did anyone know that this wraithlike and penniless scribe would in time become one of the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century, his face more recognizable to more people than those of the great statesmen who snubbed him in 1919. He would lead his people into total war against not one but two Western powers, first France and then the United States, in a struggle lasting three decades and costing millions of lives.

Equally portentous for the future was the division of Vietnam into three separate regions: Cochin China in the south (Nam Bo), a formal colony, along with the “protectorates” of Annam in the center (Trung Bo) and Tonkin in the north (Bac Bo). This division generated a welter of administrative arrangements that were in reality less complex than they seemed, for Annam and Tonkin were really colonies too.

Early governors-general devoted much energy to economic development, using various forms of direct and indirect taxation to finance much of the work. These taxes placed a heavy burden on the majority-peasant populace, arousing widespread resentment, but the achievements were considerable:

By 1907, alarmed colonial military officials could report the existence of “revolutionary and subversive theories” among indigenous troops, and in the succeeding years exiled leaders, many of them in Japan, flooded their homeland with anti-French pamphlets and poems. In colonial prisons, meanwhile, squalid conditions and overcrowding in common rooms fueled nationalist agitation. For a time, French authorities kept a lid on the agitation, and by the outbreak of World War I in 1914 they felt sufficiently secure to leave only 2,500 European military personnel in Indochina.11

Scarcely did they realize that the war, a global struggle with an important colonial dimension, would be a major catalyst for nationalist movements throughout Asia and Africa.

A new generation of Vietnamese expected something in return for this massive sacrifice and were not impressed by the sentimental imperialism that extolled the participation of people of all colors and religions in saving “eternal France.” In particular, these Vietnamese counted on French authorities to adopt a reformist policy in Indochina, greatly increasing local autonomy, and they were emboldened by several powerful forces emerging at the same global conjuncture:

FOR HO CHI MINH, CERTAINLY, THE GREAT WAR WOULD HAVE THIS kind of transformative impact, even if his nationalist agitation predated the outbreak of hostilities.

These left a deep impression, and when Ho enrolled at the prestigious National Academy in Hue in 1907, he had already committed himself to the great task of reclaiming Vietnam for the Vietnamese people. The following year he was expelled for lending support to peasants protesting high agricultural taxes and corvée labor. Pursued by the French secret police, Ho made his way south, taking jobs where he could.

France, he realized, was not exclusively a nation of policemen and colonial officials, and he hardly came off as radical in his first communication with the authorities, an application for admission to a government school training bureaucrats for service in the colonies.

Like many colonial subjects, Ho then still believed, in that prewar moment, that the “modernization” of his country might be best achieved working with the colonizers, not against them, and that Republican France would in fact live up to the ideals she professed to hold dear.

It dismayed him that America could espouse such idealistic principles yet subject blacks to segregation, to blatant discrimination in all areas of public life, to lynching.

Here again, as in New York, Ho witnessed the disconnect between theory and practice, saw the willingness of even liberal democracies to tolerate discrimination and colonialism.

As Ho himself perhaps understood, his appearance at the Peace Conference marked the start of a new chapter of his life, and it would have done so irrespective of how the Allied statesmen reacted to his modest plea. In the months thereafter, he became more radicalized, more certain that his cause must be the full independence of peoples subjected to colonialism of any sort.

Only he offered a cogent explanation for colonialist rule and a viable blueprint for national liberation and for modernizing a poor agricultural society such as Vietnam’s.

“What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me,” he recalled, years later, of reading Lenin’s pamphlet. “I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds:

He wrote and staged a play, Le Dragon de bambou, a scathing portrayal of an imaginary Asian king; the audience response was apparently underwhelming, and the play closed after a brief run. He found time to attend art exhibitions and concerts, to read Hugo and Voltaire and Shakespeare, and to hang out in the cafés of Montmartre, where everyone debated everything.

In these years, as he would all his life, Ho made a deep and winning impression on those he encountered. Many remarked on his humor, sensitivity, and sentimentality, on his extraordinary ability to charm.

I was instantly struck by his piercing dark eyes. He posed a provocative question; it eludes me now. I encouraged him to return. He did, and I grew more and more affectionate toward him.

He was très sympathique—reserved but not shy, intense but not fanatical, and extremely clever. I especially liked his ironic way of deprecating everyone while, at the same time, deprecating himself.23

Later many of these traits would appear also in his public utterances and his diplomatic negotiations, which some interpreted as posturing intended merely to mislead his interlocutors and enemies. Perhaps, but if Ho was always a tacticia...

THE CHARM AND THE CLEVER DEBATING POINTS WENT ONLY SO far. Over the course of 1922 and the first part of 1923, Ho Chi Minh came to the depressing realization—and not for the last time—that the French Communist Party attached barely more priority to the colonial question than had the Socialists. For both parties, European issues were what truly mattered.