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

by Fredrik Logevall

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.