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

by Fredrik Logevall

One is struck in retrospect by the bond that seemed to develop between the two men, and by the extent to which Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues devoted their energies during these crucial days to Patti. At each encounter, Viet Minh officials pressed Patti regarding U.S. plans for Indochina. The list of tasks they faced as the leaders of a new government was as long as it was daunting—to build a legitimate army; to bring food to a populace still suffering from the effects of the famine; to neutralize competing Vietnamese nationalist groups—but none loomed as large as securing international help in thwarting French and perhaps Chinese designs on their country. By his own account Patti responded cautiously, promising merely to pass on messages to his higher-ups, and to refrain from revealing Ho’s whereabouts to either the French or the Chinese. But more than once he also referenced Franklin Roosevelt’s staunch commitment to Vietnamese self-determination, an assertion that surely raised Vietnamese hopes but oversimplified FDR’s thinking and in any event ignored the change under Truman.21